- Convenors:
-
Agnieszka Radziwinowiczówna
(University of Warsaw)
ioana vrabiescu (VU Amsterdam)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how hybrid wars and open military conflicts legitimise immigration enforcement, asking how conflict logics and affects are mobilised to justify border violence, deportations, and the mobility governance.
Long Abstract
The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its ongoing hybrid warfare against neighbouring states have reconfigured European regimes of mobility and control. Since 2021, “Russia-inspired” crossings on the EU’s eastern borders have been construed as hostile acts, allowing states to invoke security rationalities to suspend asylum rights and expand enforcement infrastructures. War here exceeds its military domain, operating as a discursive and affective technology of legitimacy through which deportations, pushbacks, and the criminalisation of solidarity become thinkable and permissible.
These dynamics extend beyond wartime emergencies, transforming everyday mobility in border regions long shaped by cross-border work, trade, and kinship. This happens, as border crossings with Belarus and Russia close in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. Paradoxically, even the open military conflict does not impede deportations to insecure countries, as Ukrainians remain among the most deported nationalities in Poland.
While scholarship often treats warfare as producing displacement that leads to protection, this panel asks how war itself authorises immigration control. How are the idioms, affects, and infrastructures of warfare mobilised to legitimise enforcement? How does the invocation of conflict recast the moral and legal boundaries of refuge, deportation, and belonging?
In line with the EASA 2026 theme, this panel explores how the invocation of war reinforces political and moral polarisation between citizens and foreigners as well as documented and illegalised migrants. The panel aims to advance debates in the anthropology of mobility, political anthropology, and border studies by exploring how warfare operates as a framework of justification within contemporary migration regimes.