Paper short abstract:

While "the “refugee crisis”" is challenging the EU image of - and balance between - unity, prosperity, security and fundamental rights, this paper shifts the focus to internal border-management policy and control practices and explores an anthropological theorisation of these (in)security spaces.

Paper long abstract:

It has been argued that the construction of Europe as a space of "“Freedom, Security and Justice"” moved border-control from internal to external EU borders, operating within a governmental rationality of freedom of circulation. However, as emerges from the (im)mobility of refugees defined as “"irregular secondary movements”" inside the EU, bordering-practices have not been abolished, but reformulated in order to control – - at times with the objective to “confine” - certain people's mobility. Beside the eventful possibility of reintroducing temporarily systematic border-controls (art. 23 of the Schengen Borders Code), bordering practices are an ordinary and less eventful routine, carried out through a variety of (cross-border) "“compensatory measurements”". Controls have not been immobilized but acquired themselves mobility. Within the context of 2014-2015, the problem and possible solution was located not so much inside the EU asylum-and migration system, but within spaces and agencies of (in)security.

This paper draws on Foucault's reflection regarding the "“sifting the good and the bad“ when allowing circulations to take place and controlling them", and discusses the genealogy of policy concerning cross-border-police-cooperation and recent practices aimed at controlling "the “refugee crisis”". Drawing out some "“border/power struggles”", ultimately the paper aims to explore anthropological contributions on theoretical ground to security/crime/border-studies, thereby shifting the focus from the “"refugee crisis"” to control and crisis of governability within (in)security spaces.