Paper short abstract:

Driving on anthropology debates on humanitarian borders and asylum, this proposal aims to explore the construction of a humanitarian border in the urban space of the Community of Madrid, Spain and its operating logics, composed of multiple institutional borders and managerial humanitarianism.

Paper long abstract:

Driving on anthropology debates on humanitarian borders and asylum, this proposal aims to explore the construction of a humanitarian border in the urban space of the Community of Madrid, Spain. Since the “refugee crisis” of 2015 and the increase in the number of asylum applications in Spain, Madrid has become a gateway for many people mainly coming from Latin and Central America, like Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, and Nicaragua, who are candidates to apply for asylum. In this framework, this capital has been reconfigured as a reference both in the work of securitized management of asylum applications, operated by the Ministry of the Interior, and in the field of reception and humanitarian care for asylum seekers managed by national and international NGOs contracted by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration of Spain. Based on this context, this proposal wants to analyze the production of a humanitarian border in Madrid from the intersection of these dimensions. Specifically, it focuses on how its operating logics, composed of multiple institutional borders and managerial management of the humanitarian reception carried out by these selected NGOs, creates a limbo in which people live in a prolonged, if not permanent state of emergency and reduce their possibilities to access to their right to request asylum. The work is based on a ethnographic teamwork research (2022-ongoing) in which we realized both in-depth interviews with NGOs, public institutions, and refugees, as well as observation at meetings carried out by and with these same actors.