1,720,963 research outputs found
Migrant agency: negotiating borders and migration controls
Get PDFPolicy, media, activist and academic discourses often portray migrants and refugees in the extreme, as victims or villains. This portrayal obscures the agency demonstrated by migrants and refugees and evidenced in their own accounts of their journeys. It also reifies the power of the state to ‘secure’ borders and control migration, and conceals the contested politics of mobility and security visible in negotiations between migrants, borders guards, smugglers, fishermen, and other actors. In this article, I take an ethnographic approach and conceptualize the border from the bottom up as a contested site of negotiation. The analysis reveals the ways in which migrants negotiate with their smugglers, amongst themselves, and with border guards in order to circumvent state controls when entering the state clandestinely. In doing so, it questions traditional conceptualizations of sovereignty, security and citizenship. The article then analyses how migrants continue to demonstrate agency after arrival within state territories and how this agency can have an impact not only on micro, everyday encounters, but also on the macro level: my research demonstrates how migrant agency can have causal and constitutive effects on state relations and power. The article draws on participant observation and over 130 interviews I conducted with migrants, refugees, fishermen, NGO representations, and policymakers between 2007 and 2015 in Malta and Cyprus
Transnational migration and control: immigration detention on the edge of Europe
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Fortifying the European Union? Immigration detention in Malta and Cyprus
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Transgressive solidarity: from Europe’s cities to the Mediterranean
Get PDFIn the wake of increasing migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, non-governmental organizations took to the seas to conduct search and rescue operations in 2014. In 2016, this humanitarian fleet rescued 50,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea. In the meantime, local solidarity initiatives emerged across Europe, motivated by the arrival of many people in their cities and by deaths and border spectacles in the Mediterranean. Juxtaposing solidarity work in the Mediterranean Sea with solidarity work within the European Union’s borders, we examine how the spaces they operate in shape the possibilities and limits of solidarity activism. Despite identifying important differences, we ultimately demonstrate how the solidarity work within Europe and in the Mediterranean Sea fold into each other in complex ways. Moreover, we show how across Europe, people engage in transgressive solidarity work that challenges EU border practices and concomitant categories to reimagine a more welcoming Europe
Islands of solidarity? Migration and activism in Malta
Get PDFHow does geography shape possibilities for migration-related activism and advocacy? In this article, we investigate this question through a case study of the Maltese Islands. Though located on the edge of the European Union, Malta has long considered itself at the centre of a ‘migration crisis’ in the Mediterranean. Maltese politicians have denounced what they perceive as a lack of solidarity from ‘EUrope’ and argued that they carry a disproportionate ‘migration burden’. In response, they have adopted systematic practices of maritime abandonment and non-assistance of migrant boats in distress. While Maltese activist and advocacy groups and organisations voice criticism of Malta’s non-engagement at sea, their work largely focuses on the treatment of migrants within the island-nation. Investigating this limited engagement with the Mediterranean border and search and rescue activities, we explore how actors in Malta navigate the politically contentious issue of migration. Through this empirical focus, and by bringing social movements and island studies scholarship into conversation, we show how Malta’s specific island geography, its socio-political environment, as well as dominant maritime imaginaries condition forms of advocacy and activism. We argue that Malta’s islandness and its geographic location within the central Mediterranean borderzone are, perhaps counterintuitively, key factors in constraining Maltese engagement with maritime rescue.</p
Matryoshka journeys: im/mobility during migration
Get PDFActs of mobility require corresponding acts of immobility (or suspended mobility). Migrant journeys are not only about movement. Indeed, in the present policy context, this is ever more true. Whether a migrant is contained within a hidden compartment, detained by migration authorities, waiting for remittances to continue, or marooned within a drifting boat at sea, these moments of immobility have become an inherent part of migrant journeys especially as states have increased controls at and beyond their borders. Migrants themselves view this fragmentation – the stopping, waiting and containment – as part of the journey to be endured. Drawing on the authors’ fieldwork in Central America and Southern Europe, this paper destabilises the boundary between transit and settlement, speaking to a larger policy discourse that justifies detentions and deportations from the United States and countries on the periphery of Europe. We argue that migrants’ nested experiences of these ‘matryoshka journeys’ reveal how increased migration controls encourage them not only to take greater risks during the journey, but also to forfeit their agency at opportune moments. In turn, states exploit images of such im/mobility during the journey in order to emphasise the irrational risks migrants take in order to traverse seas and deserts and to cloak their own border policies in a humanitarian discourse of rescue
Criminalizing solidarity: search and rescue in a neo-colonial sea
Get PDFNon-governmental organizations (NGOs) rescued over 110,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2015 and 2017. From 2017, EU member states and agencies increasingly criminalized these organizations, accusing them of ‘colluding with smugglers’ and acting as a pull factor. In this climate, as Italy, Malta and the EU increased cooperation with Libya to stop people from taking to the seas, many suspended their operations. This article explores the search and rescue efforts of NGOs in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2014 and 2018. We examine the criminalization of this NGO activity and argue that it is made possible through an oscillating neo-colonial imagination of the sea as mare nostrum and mare nullius, our sea and nobody’s sea, respectively. We build on the work of other scholars who have pointed to the activation of the Mediterranean as ‘empty’ in response to migration flows, erasing the historical connections of colonialism, empire, trade, and exchange in the Mediterranean as well as the contemporary legal geographies that govern the space. Here, we go further to develop the idea of a neo-colonial sea, which is alternately imagined as empty and ‘European’. We explore how NGOs disrupt these depictions, as well as the disappearing figures of the migrant and refugee amidst the contestations between NGOs and states
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