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- Convenors:
-
Sebastian Cobarrubias Baglietto
(ARAIDUniversidad de Zaragoza)
Maribel Casas-Cortés (Universidad de Zaragoza)
Paolo Cuttitta (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord)
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- Discussants:
-
Ruben Andersson
(University of Oxford)
Sabine Hess (University of Heidelberg)
Sabine Hess (Institute for Cultural AnthropologyEuropean Ethnology)
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel will assess existing research on Border Externalization, from Anthropology and beyond, positing theoretical and methodological directions for future research. We encourage work that unpacks the concepts of "border" & "externalization", with particular regard to migration control
Long Abstract:
Border externalization has become a prominent subset of Migration and Border Studies. The externalization of migration controls has been a fruitful avenue as a way of interrogating the validity of political borders and how they are implemented and experienced. In the European context, border displacement responded to processes that accompanied the 'Big Bang' enlargement and what seemed like the 'expansion' of EU borders and policy imperatives. Far from being a field limited to EU enlargement, border externalization has now become a central way in which the EU and its members interact with spaces understood as "outside", while at the same time dissolving clear distinction between an in/out. In the intervening two decades, the border has become a disciplinary crossroads between Anthropology, Human Geography, Political Science, Sociology and Law to name a few. Anthropologists and ethnographers in general have advanced key contributions such as how is an externalized border lived, and in what ways such institutional cultures normalize a restrictive understanding of human mobility.
This panel seeks to critically assess how researchers have understood externalization and posit potential theoretical and methodological tools for new research. This panel deepens the study of border externalization by engaging:
• Ethnographies of externalized migration control practices
• Historical analysis, including the colonial past, of border externalization
• Geo-political analysis beyond state- and Euro-centric approaches toward border externalization
• Discourses of exclusion/inclusion in externalized spaces
• Border thinking and border ontologies
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The text explores the perspectives of German foreign missions on the control of marriage migration. The ethnography of the study reveals the multilayered space of border control and specifies strategies and practices of transformation of female migrants into securitized subjects.
Paper long abstract:
Marriage migration is interesting in two regards. Firstly, it has its own dimension of securitization of borders in a form of prevention of commercial marriage trafficking ("mail-order brides") and sex trafficking. Mainly female migrants, thus, become subjectivized into security threats. Secondly, in case of marriage migration, consulate personnel have to deal with intimate, yet culturally shaped notions of love and marriage. This presupposes the involvement of local staff with their social and cultural expertise into the decision-making process. They accept documents, do initial interviewing, make remarks on the cases. On the whole, they bring a new layer of discourses, processes of subjectivation and techniques of inspection into the topography of border control.
This paper takes a closer look at the strategies, practices, and notions of marriage migration management at external border control agencies of Germany. It incorporates (auto-)ethnography at embassies, consulates and cultural centers of Germany in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Findings suggest that "doing policy" at these relocated borders with their cultural and social daily negotiations is an intertwined part of a transnational system of vigilance, preshaped by German politics and European right.
This project is a part of a bigger research project "Sonderforschungsbereich 1369" at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich dedicated to the Cultures of Vigilance (Transformation, Spaces, Techniques).
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnography of reception centres for asylum seekers in central Italy, the paper broadens the analytical gaze on externalisation to account for the wider range of border management policies and interventions that are inextricably related to the so-called European migration crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Recent academic debates on externalisation tend to focus on the activation of border controls away from border lines for the purposes of migration management. They correctly emphasise the extent to which borders have become mobile in the attempt to tame human movement, operating away from and across national territories.
Yet, by framing the conceptualisation of externalisation and internalisation exclusively by reference to the border-migrant dialectic, these debates fail to account for a wider range of border management policies and interventions that seem instead inextricably related to such dialectic.
The paper addresses this inadequacy engaging with the themes of this panel through the prism of development, one of the most neglected processes in studies concerned with the so-called European migration crisis. Through an ethnography of Extraordinary Reception Centres in a central Italian province, it traces three trajectories of uneven development: a global one, explaining the structural context in which migration to Europe takes place; a regional one, emphasising the uneven process of integration of European peripheral states; a national one, underscoring the significance of uneven incorporation of Italian regions into the national space. Linking these three trajectories to border management policies and practices, the paper offers a spatially nuanced and historically informed conceptualisation of externalisation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the effects of EU border externalization on Moroccan internal categories of belonging. I argue that European racial anxieties animate anti-black racism against sub-Saharan migrants and Black Moroccans to control black mobility while facilitating non-black mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Studies on the externalization of European borders theorize how sovereignty stretches beyond nation-state territorial boundaries (Casas-Cortés, et al. 2010; Mountz 2011); analyzed how transnational border regimes are structured according to profit imperatives and in line with business models (Andersson 2014; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013); and have problematized humanitarian discourses as reinforcing rather than disrupting securitarian agendas (Walters 2010). Less explored is the relationship between European racial imaginaries, externalized bordering, and shifts in racial-social categories of belonging in third countries. While NGO, media and migrant accounts have documented pervasive racial profiling in border policing in third states such as Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, the process of racialization remains undertheorized (see Silverstein 2005 on immigrant racialization in Europe). This paper draws on eleven months of multi-sited ethnography among West and Central African migrant communities in Morocco to interrogate how European anxieties undergirding border externalization are producing racialized subjects across Moroccan social space. Engaging with transnational theorizations of race, this paper proceeds in three parts. Part one demonstrates how border externalization animates anti-black racism in the Maghreb as a means of restricting West and Central African migrants' mobility. Second, as blackness becomes synonymous with illegality, anti-blackness is a resource for other "Others" to claim European affinity as non-black. Finally, expanded meanings of blackness impact Moroccan society, hardening notions of racial otherness among citizens. By putting racial dynamics at the center of geopolitical analyses, this paper situates the externalized border in relation to longer histories of colonial knowledge-making and within trajectories of decolonial struggle.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the dismantling of SASEMAR, Spain's public SAR agency, over the last 5 years, and its gradual replacement by the European Coast Border Gard (EBCG-Frontex) and the Moroccan Royal Navy in the Western Mediterranean.
Paper long abstract:
Search-and-Rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean region have been under scrutiny over the last decade. In their determination to halt and deter unwanted migration, EU member states have sought to limit life-saving maritime operations and avoid their international commitment in three main ways: by limiting their own SAR capacities, by criminalising private and civil society actors conducting SAR operations, and by externalising SAR responsibilities to origin and transit countries such as Libya or Morocco. These actions are a clear contravention of international, EU, and domestic regulations; the supposed threat that sea migrants pose to national and EU security and identity serve to justify this "letting die" approach at sea. This paper focuses on the dismantling of SASEMAR, Spain's public SAR agency, over the last 5 years, and its gradual replacement by the European Coast Border Gard (EBCG-Frontex) and the Moroccan Royal Navy in the Western Mediterranean. Using qualitative interviews, non-participant observation, statistical information (both publicly available and obtained through FOAI requests), and spatial data, I demonstrate how the weakening of SASEMAR is key to the transformation and territorial re-definition of the Spanish-EU border, allowing Spain and the EU to avoid their duties to protect human life at sea and increasing the vulnerability of migrants.