PUBLICATIONS
Claudia Aradau, Emmanuel Blanchard, Filippo Furri, Martina Tazzioli and Claire Rodier
Data et nouvelles technologies, la face cachée du contrôle des mobilités (2020) Migreurop |
In a July 2020 report, the European Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-Lisa) presented artificial intelligence as a “priority technology”. The report underlines the advantages of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of migration and borders thanks, amongst other things, to facial recognition technology. AI is increasingly privileged by public actors, EU institutions and private actors, but also by the UNHCR and IOM. EU agencies like Frontex and eu-Lisa are particularly active in experimenting with new technologies, increasingly scrambling the distinction between development and implementation. Besides traditional surveillance tools, a panoply of technologies is now deployed at the borders of Europe and beyond: the addition of new databases, innovative financial technologies, or simply the gathering by ‘Big Tech’ of data given voluntarily – or not – by migrants and refugees during their journeys.The COVID-19 pandemic has arrived at the right time to give new impetus to an established course of action, making it possible to test or to generalise technologies used for the control of mobility without taking into account the rights of exiles.
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Sarah Bradshaw, Ksenia Chmutina, Jessica Field, Maureen Fordham, Virginie Le Masson, Hanna A Ruszczyk and Olivia Walmsley (alphabetical order)
(2022) Gender in DRR – Mainstreamed Into Invisibility, Blog GRRiPP, 26 May 2022 https://www.grripp.net/post/gender-in-drr-mainstreamed-into-invisibility |
Gender mainstreaming has now become standard and accepted practice in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and development. However, mainstreaming may actually make it more difficult to ensure women’s concerns are addressed since, once mainstreamed, gender becomes the responsibility of all, or the responsibility of no one, to ensure it is carried out. Mainstreaming gender can also take a very tick box approach – as long as (some) women are mentioned, then ‘gender’ issues are seen to have been addressed, and it is assumed no more needs to be done. This, we contend, is the case for the Global Platform, the main global forum to assess and discuss progress on the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Action (SFA). Gender inequality must be at the top of the agenda, and a number of principles must be (re)affirmed including: Challenging/Deconstructing/Reconstructing Gender Mainstreaming, understanding root causes of inequality, wording matters, what is measured matters and lastly, amplifying gender voices. If we are to ‘mainstream’ gender in our efforts for disaster risk reduction, such mainstreaming needs less invisibilising, more solidarity and amplification of everyone’s responsibility for positive action.
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Kate Coddington, Deirdre Conlon and Lauren Martin
Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, and Migration Control (2020) Annals of the American Association of Geographers, (5) doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1715196 |
In this article, we argue that destitution economies of migration control are specific circuits of exchange and value constituted by migration control practices that produce migrant and refugee destitution. Comparative analysis of three case studies, including border encampment in Thailand, deprivation in U.S. immigration detention centers, and deterrence through destitution in the United Kingdom, demonstrate that circuits of value depend on the detachment of workers from citizenship and simultaneously produce both migrant destitution and new forms of value production. Within destitution economies, migration and asylum’s particular juridico-political position as domestic, foreign, and securitized allows legal regimes to produce migrants and asylum seekers as distinct economic subjects: forsaken recipients of aid. Although they might also work for pay, we argue that destitute migrants and asylum seekers have value for others through the grinding labor of living in poverty. That is, in their categorization as migrants and asylum seekers, they occupy a particular position in relation to economic circuits. These economic circuits of migration control, in turn, rely on the destitution of mobile people. Our approach advances political geographies of migration, bordering, and exclusion as well as economic geographies of marketization and value, arguing that the predominance of political analysis and critique of immigration and asylum regimes obscures how those regimes produce circuits of value in and through law, state practices, and exclusion. Furthermore, law, state power, and forced mobility constitute circuits of value and marketization. Conceptualizing these migration control practices as destitution economies illuminates novel transformations of the political and economic geographies of migration, borders, and inequality. Key Words: borders, circuits, destitution, migration, poverty, value.
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Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli
Migration and ‘pull factor’ traps (2020) Migration Studies doi: 10.1093/migration/mnaa027 |
This article engages with the centrality that the push–pull theory regained in the context of border deaths in the Mediterranean Sea and particularly as part of the debate against the criminalization of nongovernment organizations (NGOs’) rescue missions at sea. The article opens by illustrating the context in which the push–pull theory re-emerged—after having been part of migration studies’ history books for over a decade—as part of an effort to defend non-state actors engaged in rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea against an aggressive campaign of illegalilzation conducted by European states. We then take a step back to trace the history of the push–pull theory and its role as a foil for critical migration studies in the past 20 years. Building on this history, the article then turns to interrogating the epistemic and political outcomes that result from bringing evidence against the NGOs’ role as pull factors for migrants. The article closes by advocating for a transformative, rather than evidencing, role of critical knowledge in the current political context where migrants and actors who fight against border deaths are increasingly criminalized.
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Kirsi Pauliina Kallio, Marcelo Lopes de Sousa, Katharyne Mitchell, Jouni Häkli, Simone Tulumello, Isabel Meier, Anna Carastathis, Aila Spathopoulou, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Gemma Bird, Amanda Russell Beattie, Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Patrycja Rozbicka and James Riding
Covid-19 discloses unequal geographies (2020) Fennia - International Journal of Geography, (1-2) doi: 10.11143/fennia.99514 |
The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. Through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic.
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Maheen Khan, Hanna Ruszczyk, Feisal Rahman and Saleem Huq
Epistemological freedom: activating co-learning and co-production to decolonise knowledge production (2021) Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 31 (3) pp 182-192 doi: 10.1108/dpm-03-2021-0070 |
The purpose of the paper is to challenge and address the limitations of the traditional system of knowledge production that is embedded in disaster and climate change research studies. It argues that knowledge production in research processes conforms to colonialist thinking or west-inspired approaches. Such a system often results in the omission of crucial information due to a lack of participation, inclusion and diversity in knowledge production. The paper proposes practices and recommendations to decolonise knowledge production in disaster and climate change research studies. It provides a brief literature review on the concepts of decolonisation of knowledge and epistemological freedom, and its origins; assesses the need for knowledge decolonisation, emphasising on the integration of local knowledge from grassroots women-led initiatives in instances where disasters and crises are being investigated in vulnerable communities, especially in the Global South; and finally the paper proposes to decolonise knowledge production through activating co-learning and co-production.
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Lauren Martin
Carceral economies of migration control (2020) Progress in Human Geography doi: 10.1177/0309132520940006 |
This article conceptualizes carceral economies of migration control. First, I argue that ‘privatization’ signals a reorganization of authority, rather than a relocation of ownership from public to private domains. Second, I argue for greater attention to the socio-technical practices of valuation specific to migration control through which commodification becomes possible. Third, this reorganization of authority has produced (1) status value, a form of value specific to immigration policing’s juridico-political position; and (2) valuation practices that translate, commensurate and circulate migrant life as a marketizable entity.
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Claudio Minca, Alexandra Rijke, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Martina Tazzioli, Darshan Vigneswaran, Henk van Houtum and Annelies van Uden
Rethinking the biopolitical: Borders, refugees, mobilities…. (2021) Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space doi: 10.1177/2399654420981389 |
This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but also as a pervasive strategy and governmental tool in Western societies. Through an analysis of several empirical cases – most notably hotspots on the Greek Aegean Island, refugee’s forced hyper mobility in Europe, speech acts connected to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the ‘voluntary return’ policies in Europe, and the paper borders created by visa systems – the authors indicate new possible fields of enquiry related to the biopolitical critically inspired by the work of authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Jasbir Puar, while also clearly restating the fundamental importance of Foucault’s original contribution to any biopolitical analytical framework today.
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Hanna A Ruszczyk
From a focus on humanity to care Blog GRRiPP, 24 August 2021 www.grripp.net/post/from-a-focus-on-humanity-to-care |
In this blog, I reflect on Professor Dorothea Hilhorst’s keynote presentation at UCL’s Humanitarian Summit held on 16 June 2021. Thea Hilhorst has been researching with empathy and wisdom for over two decades disasters, humanitarian issues and the implications for people. Thea’s keynote focuses on four key points related to current interpretations of who is the humanitarian subject and who is eligible for shrinking forms of care. The four points include:
Exceptionalism, Promotion of resilience and celebration of self-care, Nexus of development and humanitarian action and lastly Localisation. The question of who “is the local” needs signposting as well. Is the local the state authorities, host country nationals of the international NGOs, national NGOs, or even more unlikely is it the people who have been displaced? In reality, what is occurring is that support (in its multiplicity of forms) is already being provided by the host country, civil society, national NGOs and individual members of society. The political will and capabilities of the “host” country should be acknowledged and lauded. |
Hanna A Ruszczyk
Newly Urban Nepal (2021) Urban Geography, 42 (2) 218-225, doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2020.1756683 |
Urban planning guidelines and land use plans exist in Nepal, the difficulties lie in implementation. Specifically, who must follow the law and in which parts of the city must urban planning be implemented. This is being actively negotiated between newly elected local government officials and residents in rural areas of the city. This Urban Pulse essay presents an incremental logic of urban planning from the perspective of the local government as a negotiated practice in the aftermath of administratively created urbanization, municipalization and decentralization efforts. While Nepal is situated ‘out of sight’ in global urban debates, Nepal matters because similar processes are occurring in other ordinary, academically overlooked places throughout the world. The essay questions how urban planning incorporates urbanizing peripheries into its regulatory fold when the local government has not governed certain spaces in the past and residents do not understand what is expected of them.
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Hanna A Ruszczyk, M Feisal Rahman, Louise J Bracken, and Sumaiya Sudha
Contextualising COVID-19 pandemic's impact on food security in two small cities of Bangladesh (2021) Environment and Urbanization, 33(1) 239-254 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956247820965156 |
COVID-19 pandemic is an evolving urban crisis. This research assesses impacts of the lockdown on food security and associated coping mechanisms in two small cities of Bangladesh (Mongla and Noapara). Data was collected during April-July 2020 supported by interdisciplinary data collected between September-November 2019. Due to restricted economic activities during the prolonged lockdown, residents, in particular low-income groups had limited access to livelihood opportunities and experienced income loss. This affected both quantity and quality of food consumed. Coping strategies reported by affected households include curtailing consumption, storing food, relying on inexpensive starchy staples, increasing share of total expenditure allocated to food, taking loans and accessing food relief. Residents with guaranteed income and adequate savings did not suffer significantly during lockdown. The majority of low-income households in the two cities lack savings and access to social safety nets. The pandemic has exacerbated precariousness of their existing food and nutrition security.
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Hanna A Ruszczyk, Vanesa Castán Broto and Colin McFarlane
Urban Health Challenges: Lessons from COVID-19 Responses (2022) Geoforum 131, 105-115, doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.03.003 |
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a re-examination of our societies and in particular urban health. We argue that urban health needs to address three inter-related challenge areas – the unequal impacts of climate change, changing patterns of urbanization, and the changing role of the local government – across multiple spatial scales: from individual, households to neighbourhoods, cities, and urban hinterlands. Urban health calls for nimble institutions to provide a range of responses while adapting to crisis situations, and which operate beyond any one spatial scale. We illustrate our argument by drawing on South and SouthEast Asian examples where responses to the pandemic have confronted these challenges across scales. A multiscalar definition of urban health offers an opportunity to challenge dominant approaches to urban health in research, policy, and practice.
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Hanna A Ruszczyk
‘It’s the right thing to do’: specificities of the Polish response to the Ukrainian crisis (2022) Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 200 (1), 1-3 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/125368/75895 |
Overwhelmingly, the Polish response to the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has been based on the moral imperative of ‘It is the right thing to do’. Within three months, Poland was hosting 3.3 million Ukrainian refugees. This is equivalent to 8.7% of Poland’s population of 38 million. The numbers are difficult to grasp. I have identified four specificities in the Polish response. Firstly, a collective intergenerational trauma and fear that Russia may not stop at Ukraine. Secondly, the attitude of the Polish state towards refugees is generally restrictive and hostile with the exception of Ukrainians. Thirdly, there were pre-existing Polish-Ukrainian relationships upon which Polish society’s response has been layered upon. Lastly, there has been sustained collective and grassroots response for over nine months. For how much longer can the humanitarian response be driven by local authorities, local organisations and civil society “to do the right thing”?
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Aila Spathopoulou and Anna Carastathis
Hotspots of resistance in a bordered reality (2020) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, (6) doi: 10.1177/0263775820906167 |
In this paper, we examine how bordered reality is being imposed and resisted in the context of where we are placed right now, ‘Greece’. Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. We approach this process methodologically from the situated angle of the embodiment of resistance in the concrete experiences of people (including the researchers ourselves), whose narratives reveal the distracted spatial coordinates of the ‘hotspot regime’, which becomes a traveling control device. Rather than approaching the hotspots on the five Greek border islands as geographically fixed entities we introduce the concept of the mobile hotspot to show how the logic of the hotspot suffuses the uneven geographies of a bordered reality. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to critically explore the density, tensions, and conflict-ridden nature of movements within, around, and against the hotspots.
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Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathia, and Myrto Tsilimpounidi
‘Vulnerable Refugees’ and ‘Voluntary Deportations’: Performing the Hotspot, Embodying Its Violence (2020) Geopolitics doi: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1772237 |
In this paper, we intervene in naturalised distinctions based on problematic assumptions about agency and choice that underpin the global regime of migration management: namely, that categories of human mobility can be ontologically and juridically distinguished from one another in terms of the degrees or forms of freedom they embody, and that different rights legitimately adhere to each. Focussing on the ‘hotspots’ instituted on 5 islands in the Aegean Sea to manage ‘mixed migration flows’ during the declared ‘refugee crisis,’ we show that the ideological justification for the process of differentiation involves variable attributions of agency, choice, and freedom, or their lack thereof, all of which silence the actual subjects transformed into objects of ‘migration management.’ We argue that the figure of the refugee is divested of agency through the ascription of vulnerability, while the migrant is invested with economic rationality. However, the forms of vulnerability that internment within the camp produces are excluded by design from vulnerability assessments. By tracing the various paths out of the hotspot – including the IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Programme – we show that the hotspot is, in essence, a deportation mechanism. This analysis is based on an ethnographic encounter, which illustrates the psychic and physical violence through which the will is bent and shaped, leading some illegalised subjects to ‘self-deportation.’
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Aila Spathopoulou, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio K and Jouni Hakli
Outsourcing Hotspot Governance within the EU: Cultural Mediators as Humanitarian–Border Workers in Greece (2021) International Political Sociology, (3) doi: 10.1093/ips/olab017 |
Responding to the self-declared “Mediterranean migration crisis” in 2015, the European Commission launched a Hotspot Approach to speed up the handling of incoming migrants in the “frontline states” of Greece and Italy. A key element in this operation is the identification of those eligible for asylum, which requires effective communication across cultural and linguistic difference between the asylum system and the migrants, facilitated by officially designated “cultural mediators.” We assess the hotspot governance as a form of outsourcing border control within the EU territory. Beyond sorting out and separating migrants into the categories of deservingness and undeservingness, we propose that the hotspot mechanism represents “governing by communication,” with cultural mediators as key players in this humanitarian–bordering strategy. A focus on how cultural mediators provide the precarious human labor for this governance, offers, we argue, a productive inroad into the ways in which the hotspot economies of deterrence, containment, and care sustain inequalities embedded in race, socioeconomic status, and citizenship.
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Martina Tazzioli
Extract, Datafy and Disrupt: Refugees’ Subjectivities between Data Abundance and Data Disregard (2020) Geopolitics, (1) doi: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1822332 |
This paper deals with data extraction and data circulation that are at stake in refugee governmentality with a focus on the Cash Assistance Programme in Greece. It focuses on the data extraction activities which are part of the cash Assistance Programme and on the ways in which data is shared and not shared among the actors involved. It starts by critically engaging with debates on techno-humanitarianism in refugee governmentality, and it moves on by drawing attention to the constitutive dynamics between data abundance and data disregard. Then, it analyses the extent to which different actors can access and act upon the data. The second part of the article centres on the peculiar modes of subjectivation that asylum seekers are shaped by, as cards beneficiaries and techno-users. It shows that asylum seekers are both passive surfaces of data extraction and, at the same time, are object of a request to speak and to produce data and feedback about their use of the card. The paper concludes with a section about the injunction imposed on asylum seekers to act as autonomous and responsible techno-users and, at the same time, to comply with multiple spatial restrictions.
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Martina Tazzioli
Confine to Protect: Greek Hotspots and the Hygienic-Sanitary Borders of Covid-19 (2020) Oxford, Oxford University website |
In this post, I investigate how in the context of the pandemic, the politics of containment has been inflected by a hygienic-sanitary logic and justified in the name of both migrants and citizens’ protection. In so doing, I draw attention to a shift in the humanitarian-security discourse on migration: that is, migrants are not seen (only) as subjects ‘at risk’ nor as ‘risky subjects’; rather, they are spatially confined and hampered from getting access to asylum in the name of safety. This is what I call hygienic-sanitary borders, the bordering mechanisms which enact forms of racialised containment predicated upon health and safety. More than enforcing a state of exception, the pandemic has worked as an accelerator of an ongoing escalating politics of containment.
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Martina Tazzioli
“Choking without killing”: Opacity and the grey area of migration governmentality (2021) Political Geography doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102412 |
This paper focuses on the “grey area of migration governmentality” by dealing with modes of border violence which are opaque and remain under the threshold of political visibility and that, however, highly disrupt and hamper migrants' lives and movements. It starts by conceptualising the notion of “grey area” by building on scholarship that questions the biopolitical formula “making live/letting die” highlighting modes of governing migration through choking and injuring. Building on that, the paper shows that the grey area consists of heterogenous political technologies that choke migrants and disrupt their infrastructures of liveability. In light of that, it moves on by analysing how migrants across Europe are contained and governed by being choked and cramped, with a specific focus on Calais and Ventimiglia. The third section shows that to be disrupted are not only migrants’ but also their infrastructures of liveability: migrants are hampered from building collective spaces of life. In the last part, the article comes to grips with opacity as a constitutive feature of the grey area of governmentality, analysing how this is played out both in local decrees and through police tactics.
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Martina Tazzioli
The technological obstructions of asylum: Asylum seekers as forced techno-users and governing through disorientation (2021)Security Dialogue, doi: 10.1177/09670106211026080 |
This article deals with the technologies and apps that asylum seekers need to navigate as forced hindered techno-users in order to get access to asylum and financial support. With a focus on the Greek refugee system, it discusses the multiple technological intermediations that asylum seekers face when dealing with the cash assistance programme and how asylum seekers are obstructed in accessing asylum and financial support. It explores the widespread disorientation that asylum seekers experience as they navigate un-legible techno-scripts that change over time. The article critically engages with the literature on the securitization and victimization of refugees, and it argues that asylum seekers are not treated exclusively as potential threats or as victims, but also as forced hindered subjects; that is, they are kept in a condition of protracted uncertainty during which they must find out the multiple technological and bureaucratic steps they are requested to comply with. In the final section, the article illustrates how forced technological mediations actually reinforce asylum seekers’ dependence on humanitarian actors and enhance socio-legal precarity.
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Martina Tazzoli
Excavating the genealogies of struggles and of the migrant mob (2021) Dialogues in Human Geography doi: 10.1177/2043820621989596 |
This paper presents the author’s response to comments given on the book Martina wrote titled The Making of Migration. She thanks her interlocutors Kate Coddington, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Anne McNevin and Stephan Scheel for their generous comments and for their attentive reading of The Making of Migration. Their critical insights and questions touch upon the main epistemic and political stakes that the book grapple with. Their suggestions, questions and remarks are an incitement to push forward some research pathways that The Making of Migration only partially addresses, and to open up new avenues. Maribel Casas-Cortes has nicely captured the main stake of the book speaking about the ‘amplification and problematizing of migration as a potential condition and struggle of and for anyone under any induced vulnerability’. She engages here with the comments that her interlocutors raised by focusing my response along three conceptual threads: choked subjects; genealogy of struggles; migrants’ irreducibility to population.
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Martina Tazzioli and Maurice Stierl
Europe’s unsafe environment: migrant confinement under Covid-19 (2021) Critical Studies on Security, (1) doi: 10.1080/21624887.2021.1904365 |
In this short article, we examine border closures and forms of migrant confinement in the EUropean context that have been carried out in the name of safety and protection – of both citizens and migrant travellers – from the Covid-19 virus.1 While, at the outbreak of the pandemic, cosmopolitan travellers and international tourists were asked by ‘their’ national governments to return home, those already displaced and precariously on the move were meant to be kept ‘else- where’ and prevented from crossing borders for their own sake. The rationale of EUropean authorities that the well-being of migrants could not be protected given the lack of resources and overwhelmed health systems, indicate, we argue in this essay, a shift from a EUropean policy of hostile environment that has predominated over the past five years since 2015’s ‘migration crisis’ towards a paradigm of an unsafe and risky environment where the Covid-19 conditions justify, in the name of protection and safety, migrant deterrence and confinement practices.
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Martina Tazzioli and Maurice Stierl
“We Closed the Ports to Protect Refugees.” Hygienic Borders and Deterrence Humanitarianism during Covid-19 (2021) International Political Sociology, (4) doi: 10.1093/ips/olab023 |
This article investigates how the security-humanitarian rationale that underpins migration governmentality has been restructured by and inflected in light of hygienic-sanitary borders which enforce racialised confinement in the name of both migrants' and citizens' safety from infection by Covid-19. Focusing on the politics of migration containment along EUrope's frontiers, examining in particular border reinforcements carried out by Italy, Malta and Greece, we interrogate how the pandemic has been exploited to enact deterrence through hygienic-sanitary border enforcements. These enforcements are underpinned by an ambivalent security-humanitarian narrative that crafts migrants as subjects who cannot be protected by EU member states from the pandemic if allowed inside, and, at once, as potential vehicles of contagion - ‘Corona spreaders’ - and thus as dangers on a bacterial-hygienic level. Our article demonstrates that these EUropean border measures are more than temporary responses to an unprecedented health crisis. Rather, the pandemic has been seized as an opportunity to strengthen existing deterrence measures and hamper migrants' access to asylum through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime. While emphasising the historical trajectories and continuities underwriting these current developments, we contend that the pandemic functions as an accelerator of dynamics of migrant incarceration and containment.
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Martina Tazzioli and Lucrezia Canzutti
"Undoing the Migration Digital Black Box" (2022) Border Criminologies, Faculty of Law Blogs / University of Oxford, 28 September 2022 Website |
In this post, we shift away from the alleged secrecy of the database: rather than attempting to open the migration digital black box, we sidestep it and shed light around it. We do this by developing a methodology that looks at databases in light of the paper-based documents that migrants are given after identification procedures and of the different border practices that are enforced along migrants’ routes. That is, we study the use of databases by drawing attention to the imbrication of border practices, digital data and non-digital documents that surround it. In fact, databases and digital infrastructures cannot be abstracted from the materiality of practices and papers that form the “EU border work”. Importantly, our methodology also allows us to situate digital infrastructures of migration control within a contested politics of mobility formed by migrants’ struggles, technological glitches and political frictions among states.
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Yaffa Truelove and Hanna Ruszczyk
Bodies as urban infrastructure: Gender, intimate infrastructures and slow infrastructural violence (2022) Political Geography doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102492 |
Drawing from deep longitudinal and ethnographic work, this article interrogates a set of key relationships between bodies, gender and infrastructure in the context of understanding cities such as Bharatpur and Dhangadhi in Nepal as well as Delhi, India. This article seeks to make two contributions. First, utilizing feminist political geography approaches, we examine bodies as infrastructure, referring to how the social and material work of the body helps to build, develop and maintain cities through gendered infrastructures in the everyday. We show conceptualizing bodies as infrastructure reveals important and intimate dimensions of the everyday politics and social and material forms that enable critical resources to flow and integral networks be built in cities. Second, we demonstrate from our comparative case studies the ways that gendered “slow infrastructural violence” accrues through patterns of infrastructural invisibility. Particular bodies act as urban infrastructure in everyday and unremarkable ways, shaping the uneven social and political consequences of embodied infrastructural configurations. We specifically examine slow violence and informal financial infrastructure in Bharatpur and the provisioning of health in Dhangadhi followed by the exploration of slow violence and fragmented water in Delhi. This article thus raises a simultaneous call for theoretical engagement with the socio-materiality of infrastructure and the body, an increased regard for the multiplicity of urban infrastructures, and an interrogation of gender and infrastructural politics in cities where more people will be living in the future and where politics and infrastructure are being actively created.
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