1,721,025 research outputs found
Counter-mapping, refugees and asylum borders
No full textThe aim of this article is to mobilise a counter-mapping approach with respect to the normative geographies of the asylum system, and to explore firstly what “counter” means in the context of a critical cartography of migration, and then to unpack the main theoretical and political tenets such a methodological perspective mobilizes against. Our take on counter-mapping relies on what we would call a reflexive cartography, meaning by that an analysis that does not consist only in a cartographic practice, but that, rather, interrogates the predicaments and the implications of mapping migration. More precisely, counter-mapping is for us a “reflexive practice” (Foucault,
1968), that is a methodological approach that unsettles and unpacks the spatial assumptions upon which migration maps are crafted. Moreover we also refer to cartographic experimentations that trouble the spatial and temporal fixes of a state-based gaze on migration. In sum, counter-mapping as a method and counter-mapping as a cartographic experimentation intertwine as part of our critical account of the visualisations of migration and refugee issues
The Humanitarian War Against Migrant Smugglers at Sea
Full text linkThis paper deals with the military-humanitarian technology of migration management, focusing on the EUNAVFOR MED “Operation Sophia”, the naval and air force intervention deployed by the EU in the Central Southern Mediterranean to disrupt “the business model of human smuggling and trafficking” while “protecting life at sea." The essay takes into account military-humanitarian mode of migration management that EUNVAFOR MED operation performs from three vantage points: logistics, with a focus on the infrastructure of migrant travels; subjectivity, looking at the migrant profiles this operation works through; and epistemology, building on the mission’s first stage of intelligence and data gathering. Through this multi-focal approach, the paper illuminates the productivity of this military-humanitarian approach to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean
Containment beyond detention: The hotspot system and disrupted migration movements across Europe
Full text linkThis article focuses on the ways in which migrants are controlled, contained and selected after landing in Italy and in Greece, drawing attention to strategies of containment that are put into place for disciplining mobility and that are not narrowed to detention infrastructures. The paper suggests that the notion of containment remains under-theorised in geography and in migration literature, and rethinks it beyond spatial confinement and detention. It traces a genealogy of the use of the term “hotspot” in policy documents suggesting that the multiplication of hotspots-like designated spaces is related to a reconceptualisation of the border as a critical site requiring prompt enforcement intervention. The article proceeds by analysing the mechanisms of partitioning, identification and preventive illegalisation that are at stake in the hotspots of Lampedusa and Lesvos. Hotspots are not analysed here as as sites of detention per se: rather, the essay turns the attention to the channels of forced mobility that are connected to the Hotspot System, focusing on the forced internal transfers of migrants from the Northern Italian cities of Ventimiglia and Como to the hotspot of Taranto, located in Southern Italy.In the final section, the article takes into account the channels of forced mobility in the light of the fight against “secondary movements” that is at the core of the current EU’s political agenda, suggesting that further academic research could engage in a genealogy of practices of migration containment
The biopolitical warfare on migrants: EU Naval Force and NATO operations of migration government in the Mediterranean
Full text linkThis paper deals with the recent transformations of the military-humanitarian technology for managing migration in the Mediterranean Sea, focusing on two naval operations, i.e. the European Union Operation Sophia deployed in the central Mediterranean and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) operation in the Aegean Sea, both deployed between 2015 and 2016 and still underway. Building on archival research on both missions and interviews with officials of Operation Sophia, we propose the notion of ‘biopolitical warfare’ to discuss these military-humanitarian interventions in the field of migration. These operations, we argue, stage a move to the offensive in the military-humanitarian government of migration by enlisting warfare against the logistics of migrant journeys. We then situate this argument within both the activist and the International Relations (IR) discourses on migration in the Mediterranean context: we differentiate the framework of ‘warfare’ from the ‘war on migrants’ argument deployed since the 1990s as part of activist discourse; we discuss the migration and warfare nexus in relation to the deployment of ‘migrants as a human bomb’ which has characterized the international relations discourse in Mediterranean countries since the early 2000s, including the recent Turkish–Greek context that led to the NATO intervention. Subsequently, the paper focuses on the targets and operations of the EU and NATO interventions and mobilizes the concept of ‘hybrid war’ to discuss how military and humanitarian techniques and rationales work when deployed as instruments of migration containment
Challenging the discipline of migration: militant research in migration studies, an introduction
No full textIn the last two decades, we have witnessed a proliferation of studies on migrations that, taking human mobility as their focus, contributed to the profiling of migrations as an object of research and to the institutionalization of its stakes. While, on the one hand, this has coincided with the becoming a discipline of migrations (i.e. their acquiring the status of a specific field of scholarly knowledge), it has, on the other hand, coincided with a disciplinarization of migrations themselves, a sort of disciplining effect of migrations' contested politics at the very moment of their academic heyday. This contribution interrogates the discipline of migrations as an academic domain of knowledge, as the governmental conduct of mobility, and as the governmentality at the intersection of these two layers. © 2013 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
Il "carattere di passato dell'arte" come "presenza del passato". Gadamer interprete dell'estetica hegeliana
No full textArab Springs making space: territoriality and moral geographies for asylum seekers in Italy
No full textThis paper engages the instabilities of the category of ‘asylum’ looking at Arab Uprisings' mobility to Italy and highlighting the contested encounter between governmental practices in managing asylum seekers and the embodied experiences of mobility from Libya and Tunisia to Italy in 2011–12. Focusing on asylum application processing, our analysis tackles its sorting rationalities (asylum seekers versus irregular migrants, country of birth versus country of refuge), its produced spatialities (processing centers and ‘humanitarian emergency zones’), and its moral predicaments (how vulnerability and protection are put to work). Our aim is to contribute to a political epistemology of asylum whereby asylum's normative instabilities are mobilized to trouble its exclusionary boundaries and the profiling of the refugee as the alter ego figure of the citizen. The paper revolves around four episodes: it opens attending to an epistemological challenge; it stages a critical engagement with the Italian ‘North Africa Emergency’ in the second and third section; finally, it puts this analysis to work on the terrain of a political struggle to demand a right to presence for Libyan war evacuees
Mediterranean Struggles for Movement and the European Government of Bodies: An Interview with Étienne Balibar and Nicholas De Genova
No full textThe conversation between Étienne Balibar and Nicholas De Genova engages with the Mediterranean of migration as a multifaceted, productive, and contested space, which can represent a counterpoint to a deep-rooted Eurocentric imaginary. Looking at the Mediterranean as a space produced by the mobility of the bodies crossing it and by the combination of different struggles, Balibar and De Genova comment on some of the political movements that have taken center stage in the Mediterranean region in the past few years and suggest that the most important challenge today is to mobilize a “Mediterranean point of view” whereby the political borders of Europe and its self-centered referentiality can be challenged
Introduction: Mediterranean Movements and the Reconfiguration of the Military-Humanitarian Border in 2015: Symposium: Mediterranean Movements: Mobility Struggles, Border Restructuring, and the Humanitarian Frontier Organisers: Glenda Garelli, Alessandra Sciurba and Martina Tazzioli
No full textIntroduction to journal special issue "Mediterranean movements: mobility, struggles, border restructuring and humanitarian frontiers
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