Paper short abstract:

The uses of "emergency" in mobility relate to a fabric of the real that graduates the value of human lives, letting some of them to die at the European external and internal borders. What are the traces in actors' daily routines of a form of governing that shifts the intolerable into the tolerable?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I take on the term "emergency" in mobility to reflect on how its use relates to a fabric of the real that graduates the value of human lives, letting some of them to die at the external and internal borders of Europe. In doing so, I ask how can we write about abandonment and death showing its regularities while, at the same time, clamoring the urgent singularity of experiences with border regimes' violence. What are the traces in actors' daily routines of a form of governing that shifts the intolerable into the tolerable?

I draw on interviews, observations and travels through internal and external borders of Spain to reflect on how the use of "emergency" activates discourses and practices that, in fabricating the real as contingent or structural, allows for a graduation on the value of lives. These fabrications are particular. For example, land around and within the fence that separates Melilla (Spain) from Nador (Morocco) is no mans land, historically contingent, subject to reevaluation, where the territorial sovereignty of the state blurs. At the same time, migrants trying to cross that land are an emergent threat to state's sovereignty and to its citizens' security, an enduring and structural problem. Migrants' attempts to enter irregularly into European territory are systematically monitored in statistics and report. Their deaths while trying to reach Europe are not. What do these presences and absences tell us about border regimes, and their historical deployment through narratives of emergency?