A series of 3 Webinars
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General Objectives, Research Questions and Scientific Relevance
Externalization of border management by the European Union has been largely studied (Frelick, Kysel, Podkul, 2016; Hyndman, Mountz, 2008; Rodier, 2008). Building up on studies looking at borders ‘beyond a line in the sand’ (Parker, Vaughan-Williams 2005, Agier, 2008) that offer a critical perspective to borderlands as such, this webinar aims to construct a comparison reshaping the usual eurocentric approach when it comes to migration (Thiollet, 2020), border and public policy studies.
By deconstructing the scientific and common division between the ‘global North’ and ‘global South’, we want to come up with a scientific approach that aims to study border practices by looking at different implementing actors (street-level bureaucrats, security actors, humanitarian workers) including the migrants themselves and the population living within these spaces. Furthermore, we would analyse how both encampment and the destruction of the informal camps or squats contribute to the same policy of control and management of the migrants’ population.
Also building up both on geography of borderlands and public policies and practices happening within these spaces, we aim to go further than studies looking at “the global South” as rentier countries satisfying the EU’s agenda of border control. Indeed, we want to build a fine study and analysis, using tools from different disciplines – political science, geography, ethnography, to compare case studies in the Middle-East, North Africa, Europe, and the Horn of Africa.
How are public policies made by these countries both using and playing within the EU and international community’s vocabularies to implement border thickness when it comes to displaced people? To what extent these encampments or non-encampments are part of the migration policy of these countries? Are they simply an extension of the global phenomena of rebordering (Rosière)?
A series of webinars will be organized between February and May 2021, and may converge towards a common article and/or the submission of a special issue, depending on participants’ interest.
Bibliography
Agier, Michel. Gérer les indésirables, 2008
Frelick, Bill, Ian M Kysel, et Jennifer Podkul. « The Impact of Externalization of Migration Controls on the Rights of Asylum Seekers and Other Migrants ». Journal on Migration and Human Security, s. d., 31, 2016
Hyndman, Jennifer, et Alison Mountz. « Another Brick in the Wall? Neo-Refoulement and the Externalization of Asylum by Australia and Europe 1 ». Government and Opposition 43, no 2, 2008
Parker, Noel, et Nick Vaughan-Williams. « Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the Sand’ Agenda ». Geopolitics 17, no 4, 2012, pp. 727‑33
Rodier, Claire. « Externalisation du contrôle des flux migratoires : comment et avec qui l’Europe repousse ses frontières ». Migrations Société, N° 116, 2008, pp. 105‑22
Rosière, Stéphane. Frontières de fer, le cloisonnement du monde, 2020
Thiollet, Hélène. « Déconfiner les politiques migratoires: lacunes et biais des débats scientifiques ». Cogito, 2020.
Session 1 – Comparing the EU and the Middle East
11th of February, 2021, via Zoom at 3:30 (CET)
Registration : https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcoduitqjwrGtam_TK8W7WVIILfQrdYc-Ap
Discussant: Synnøve Kristine Nepstad Bendixsen – CMI Bergen, Norway
From a transit camp to detention in Rukban, the thickness of the Syrian-Jordanian borderland
Emma Empociello, CED-Sciences Po Bordeaux / Ifpo
Jordan has long been described as a state welcoming Syrian refugees. Indeed, even though the country is not signatory of the Geneva Convention, more than half a million of Syrians have found refuge there. In this communication, I will question how the Jordanian authorities ended up in refusing the entry to Syrians at their border, reducing their mobility to none in the so-called no man’s land between the two countries.
I will analyse three stages of the form of encampment at the border and elements of change associated. These stages are first, after the formal western parts of the border have been closed, Rukban became a transit camp, from which Syrians could enter. After the terrorist attack that happened at the border in 2016, the second stage of this space has been a camp of refoulement, influenced both by the military and humanitarian action. Third, it has been transformed into a de facto detention camp, in which displaced persons were trapped, unable to go beyond the Jordanian border nor to come back to Syria.
While analysing these three stages, the comparison I draw in my PhD dissertation between Jordan, Greece and Hungary aims to analyse how these changes happened. Here, I will include different variables, such as the process of decision making and rhetoric used to justify it. More than a top-down decision, I will also point out how the implementation has been crucial and made possible by a nexus between humanitarian and military action.
The Hungarian border spectacle: constructing a crisis and redrafting the nation
Céline Cantat, CERI-Sciences Po
In this presentation, I reflect on the bordering processes at work in Hungary since 2015. I examine the active efforts invested by the authorities in the production of a ‘migration crisis’ and the way in which what I call the Hungarian border spectacle has been mobilized towards the biopolitical redrafting of a (particularly exclusionary) vision of the Hungarian ‘national community’. First, I look at mechanisms of crisis-making deployed by the Hungarian government and notably at how different discourses about the protection of national and European integrity are mobilized in order to justify the adoption of securitarian measures in the country. Second, I analyze how those participate in a process of national redefinition and I suggest that this needs to be contextualized in longer term dynamics connected to the country’s transition to European capitalism and the production of various Others in post-socialist Hungary. Third, I reflect on modes of resistance to bordering processes and on the way migrant solidarity has been connected to the struggles of other groups marginalized in the moral economy of contemporary Hungary. Ultimately, this presentation develops an analysis of the making of a migration crisis in Hungary in order to complexify understandings of the EU border regime that see it merely as a rule-exporting process: rather, by looking at how migration is politicized and governed in a semi-peripheral EU country, I propose to reflect on the multi-scalar entanglement of political rationalities that participate in the production of local modes and politics of migration governance.
