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- Convenors:
-
Agnieszka Radziwinowiczówna
(University of Warsaw)
ioana vrabiescu (VU Amsterdam)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Location:
- Biologicum, 0.72
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2026, -Paper short abstract
There is a rapidly progressing intertwining of migration management and militarisation at the EU’s Eastern border, which we call “militarigration”. Given current developments, especially in Poland, we aim to present this concept and outline how it differs from securitisation.
Paper long abstract
The Eastern border of the European Union has emerged as a critical site of both migration management and regional security. Following a series of geopolitical crises—including the Belarusian instrumentalisation of migration in 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022—EU member states bordering Russia and Belarus have implemented a range of measures to assert control over migration flows while reinforcing national and regional collective security. All of the above led to the rapidly progressing intertwining of migration management and militarisation at the EU’s Eastern border, which we call “militarigration”. The term refers to the deployment of military forces, armed personnel, and militarised infrastructure to regulate migration flows, effectively merging border security and defence objectives. It encompasses both material measures—such as fences, barriers, and checkpoints—and operational strategies, including surveillance, Frontex deployments, and military patrolling. The concept highlights how the militarisation of border controls transforms migration governance into a security-oriented, state-centric practice, in which the management of human mobility is inseparable from responding to existential threats to the nation. We argue that militarigration is the next step in the long-time observed securitisation of both migration and people on the move. The paper aims to present the concept of militarigration and how it differs from securitisation. The example will be the EU Eastern Border with a special focus on Poland.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the national security discourse with 'hybrid war' as one of its key concepts has shaped the approach and response to irregular migration in Latvia.
Paper long abstract
Since summer 2021, when people on the move started arriving at the border between Belarus and the EU countries - Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland - the discourse of national security with the concept of 'hybrid war' as its core element has shaped Latvian policies and actions concerning irregular migration.
This has resulted not only in extraordinary policy and legal measures such as prolonged state of emergency and denial of access to asylum, but also in an increasing dehumanisation of people on the move as ‘instruments’ or ‘weapons’ of the war to be disposed of for the sake of national security.
In view of the war in Ukraine and the ensuing processes of securitisation and militarisation, the continuous arrival of people at the Latvia/EU-Belarus border has been treated as ‘hybrid war’ waged by the Belarussian and Russian regimes. Moreover, it has been conflated with a potential military aggression by the neighbouring countries. Thus, people on the move are seen as a direct threat to the state, often labelled as probable terrorists, ‘invaders,’ and criminals. By discursive reversal, potential asylum seekers exposed to state violence are posited as perpetrators of violence themselves.
The paper also tries to show the conceptual and material effects of the dominant national security discourse limit dissenting perspectives, alternative voices, and actions.
Paper short abstract
This paper theorises wartime deportations, showing how war and hybrid conflict can legitimise state-organised expulsions. Drawing on deportations and pushbacks from Poland to Ukraine and Belarus, it highlights the importance of the discoursive weaponisation of migrants by the deporting state.
Paper long abstract
War is often analysed as a driver of displacement and asylum, underpinning the principle of non-refoulement. This paper shifts focus to a less-examined dynamic: how war and hybrid conflict can justify deportation. I develop the concept of wartime deportations, understood as state-organised expulsions occurring in the context of conflict. Rather than suspending removal practices, war transforms the political and moral landscape, making deportation thinkable and legitimate.
Drawing on contemporary deportations to Ukraine and pushbacks to Belarus, I show that conflict can reconfigure the legitimacy of removal. Central to wartime deportations is the narrative of the weaponisation of migrants and asylum seekers. When mobility is framed as a hostile act orchestrated by foreign states – such as cross-border arrivals at the EU-Belarus frontier – people are discursively constructed as instruments of geopolitical aggression. A similar logic informed Polish proposals to deport Ukrainian men of conscription age, reframing removal as a contribution to national defence rather than a violation of protection norms. These shifts allow governments to embed deportation within the logic of national survival. Security narratives, appeals to sovereignty, and claims about the “instrumentalisation of migration” create political and discursive conditions under which coercive return is framed as necessary, defensive, and protective of the state.
By theorising deportation through the lens of war, the paper contributes to debates on migration control, sovereignty, and security. It shows that contemporary deportation regimes cannot be understood without considering how geopolitical conflict reshapes humanitarian protection and normalises coercive return as a tool of statecraft.