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Europe's Border Crisis explores current dynamics in EU border security and migration management. It argues that a crisis point has emerged because 'irregular' migrants are seen as both a security threat to the EU and also as a life threatened and in need of protection. This leads to paradoxical situations whereby humanitarian policies and practices expose 'irregular' migrants to often dehumanizing and sometimes lethal border security mechanisms. The dominant way of understanding these dynamics -- one that blames a gap between policy and practice -- fails to address the deeper issues at stake and ends up perpetuating the terms of the crisis. Drawing on conceptual resources in biopolitical theory the book offers an alternative diagnosis and sets out a new research agenda for the interdisciplinary field of critical border and migration studies.
List of contents
- Part 1 Borders, crises, critique
- 1.: Europes border crisis
- 2.: European border security and the crisis of humanitarian critique
- 3.: Conceptual crises in critical border and migration studies
- 4.: Key themes and a map of the study
- Part 2. Biopolitical borders
- 5.: Introduction
- 6.: European border security and migration management: from Schengen to the Arab Spring
- 7.: Foucault and the biopolitical paradigm
- 8.: Biopolitical border security in Europe
- Part 3. Thanatopolitical borders
- 9.: Introduction
- 10.: The sovereign ban and thanatopolitical spaces
- 11.: Reassessing Agamben in critical border and migration studies
- 12.: Push-backs and abandonment in the European borderscape
- Part 4. Zoopolitical borders
- 13.: Introduction
- 14.: Borderwork and contemporary spaces of detention in Europe
- 15.: Critical infrastructure, dehumanization, animalization
- 16.: Derridas zoopolitics and the bestial potential of border security
- Part 5. Immunitary borders
- 17.: Introduction
- 18.: Life, politics, and immunity in Esposito
- 19.: The immunitary paradigm
- 20.: Reconceptualizing the border as an immune system
- Part 6. Affirmative borders
- 21.: Introduction
- 22.: Affirmative biopolitics
- 23.: Towards an affirmative biopolitical border imaginary
- 24.: Affirmative headings for European border security and migration management
About the author
Nick Vaughan-Williams is Professor of International Security and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. From 2016 to 2019 he holds the Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding research in Politics and International Relations. His programme of research, supported with grants from the British Academy, UK Economic and Social Research Council, and Leverhulme Trust, focuses on the relationship between sovereignty, subjectivity, and the spatial dimensions of security particularly the changing nature of borders and bordering practices in global politics. His book Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (2009, 2012) was Gold Winner of the Association for Borderlands Studies Book Award. He is co-author of Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (2010, 2014) and Everyday Security Threats: Perceptions, Experiences, Consequences (2016).
Summary
Europe's Border Crisis explores current dynamics in EU border security and migration management.
Additional text
Nick Vaughan-Williams' book offers an intellectually stimulating and conceptually challenging and rich discussion of what he terms 'Europe's border crisis.' In view of tragic deaths and human suffering at European/ EU external borders, this book makes a timely intervention in academic and non-academic debates on the controversial politics and paradoxical effects of EU border and migration policies and practices at diverse scales and spaces.
Report
Europe's Border Crisis is a work of great interest, which integrates socio-political and philosophical analysis. Drawing on biopolitical paradigms in contemporary political philosophy, it finds keys for interpreting current dynamics within immigration policies and their antinomic consequences. It is a useful and original book that progresses research in this field of study. Roberto Esposito, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
