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Paper short abstract:

This contribution reflects upon policy and law within ongoing reconfigurations of governance, by taking as empirical case the Schengen-area. Specifically, this paper “studies through” a core symbol of Schengen, namely the absence of border control at internal Schengen borders.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution reflects upon policy and law within ongoing reconfigurations of governance, by taking as empirical case the Schengen-area, today’s EU Area of Freedom, Security. Specifically, this paper “studies through” a core symbol of Schengen, namely the absence of border control at internal Schengen borders.

The absence of border control at internal Schengen borders figures as core symbol of the European integration process. It is at the core of Schengen policy and regulated in law by the Schengen Borders Code. At the same time, recent years have not only seen a more frequent introduction of border control measures by member states, but also a call for an enhancement of ‘alternative measures’ in policy, reflected also in ongoing legislative reforms. In my presentation I argue for the fruitful entanglement of the methodological approach of “studying through” in policy research (Wright and Reinhold 2011) and of anthropological approaches to legal pluralism, which provide an analytical lens attentive to temporality and space, law-as-text and law-as-practice (e.g. Benda-Beckmann, Benda-Beckmann). While EU law (Graziadei 2022) and state-sanctioned law enforcement have been less frequent objects of study in legal anthropology, both fields of inquiry and their entanglement provide valuable insights into an anthropology of Europe and beyond.