Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyse emerging bordering practices in two European settings: Catalonia and Denmark. The main purpose of this comparison is to shed light upon the tendency amongst EU member states to openly criminalise marginal social activities to deter and detain certain migrant groups.

Paper long abstract:

European politics is at a turning point. Faced with increasing migration, extremism, transnational crimes, and a variety of other ostensible external security threats, most European countries have recently taken new and alternative steps to police and secure internal borders.

Criminal law and justice are increasingly replacing border checks as a primary present-day technology of inclusion/exclusion. A vivid yet under-researched example of this appears in new laws passed around Europe, where nation-states are openly criminalising various marginal social activities to deter and detain certain migrant groups. These both constitute situational and particular practices of control and social ordering of the 'unknown' or 'undesired' subjects which operate at different local scales, be that in the form of unauthorised urban vendors, homeless or others who live on and off the streets.

Such new, petty, yet very consequent bordering practices - i.e. measures taken by state institutions to attain social order and gain legitimacy by demarcating categories of people to incorporate some and exclude others - have social and political consequences that go far beyond the intended ones.

More concretely, in this paper aims to understand how social boundaries are being constituted and enforced through the socio-cultural and political use of crime and criminalisation in two European metropolises: Barcelona (Spain) and Copenhagen (Denmark). Cities which now are at the avant-garde in terms of bordering practices, and yet have crucially different traditions of State-citizen relations and social policies.