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The European Union's external border regime is a manifestation of continuing imperialism. It reinforces particular imaginaries of Europe's wealth as somehow innate (rather than plundered and extorted) and of Europeanness itself as whiteness—euphemistically packaged as a “European Way of Life” to be protected. This exposes international law's structural limitations—if not designs—as bound up with racial borders in the global context. In the wake of COVID-19 and with a climate apocalypse already underway, these realities need to be urgently ruptured and reimagined.

The aim of this contribution is twofold. First, it seeks to identify the main elements of the European policies of offshoring and outsourcing migration control and to describe the threats that these policies pose to the guarantees inherent to the Rule of Law. Second, given the serious risk of evasion of democratic controls that these policies entail, it attemptsto find in the case law of European courts, specially the European Court of Human Rights, the elements that would make it possible to rebuild the eluded system of checks and balances.

This article argues that the French overseas territories of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, which are also European ‘outermost regions,’ make up the first borders of ‘Fortress Europe,’ geographical...

November 9, 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the physical and geopolitical barrier that divided Berlin and the East from the West. This event symbolically inaugurated the period of post-Cold War globalization. The birth of the World Wide Web that same year spurred on globalization and led many observers to believe that (national) borders had become passé. The zeitgeist seemed to promise a borderless world in which capitalism and democracy would flourish. However, instead, the last three decades have paradoxically borne witness to the proliferation, rescaling, and reinforcement of territorial and other types of borders – linguistic, religious, ethnic, class, racial, urban, cultural, digital, temporal etc. The contemporary preoccupation with borders and walls is the result of the “deglobalization” that is also, ironically, a global phenomenon – Brexit, Trump’s border wall, Israel’s concrete wall in the West Bank, xenophobia from South Africa to India to “Fortress Europe,” and the growing power of right wing authoritarian leaders in several nations. The resurgence of (ethno)nationalism, racism, white supremacy, isolationism, populism, protectionism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and religious fundamentalism are all dialectical consequences of this global backlash. This is the subject of this special issue.

Thirty years after the fall the Berlin wall, political walls in Europe, Israel and the United States safeguard divisions that are based on the defensive projection and protection of besieged “whiteness.” These new barriers take the shape of impassable fences, brick walls, barbed wire barricades, and precarious crossings, negotiating physical and imaginary boundaries. Reworking colonial power structures, contemporary walls are tethered to imperial fantasies that produce whiteness as the insidious marker of religious, economic and racial hierarchies. Notably, these walls sustain an intricate dynamic between visibility and invisibility, ensuring the proliferation of the borderless civilized West (so long as the other remains excluded and hidden from view). At the same time, political walls circumscribe the affective and expansive force-field of whiteness, revealing its enduring efficacy. In this article I look at the recent fortification of fortress Europe, Israel’s escalating security fence and Donald Trump’s promised wall in the US in order to discuss the ways in which the material and ideological walls reappearing around the world are animated by myriad defenses of toxic vulnerability and white affect.

For several decades now, the European Union (EU) has been promoting the strengthening of enforcement measures of intellectual property rights (IPRs). The reinforcement of border measures aimed at blocking the importation of infringing goods has been under particular scrutiny in this respect. Since the adoption of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement, the EU has adopted numerous customs regulations specifically designed to curtail the flow of counterfeits entering the European market. In this paper, we argue this regulatory inflation is problematic considering the ambiguous construction of European border measures against counterfeiting. We suggest that EU law has imperfectly transplanted the American customs regulation reformed in the 70s which has allowed customs authorities to seize imported goods which were infringing IPRs in the United States. To fulfill their new mission, American customs was granted with the ability to assess such infringement at the border. Although required to fulfill the same mission, European member states' customs authorities have not been granted with such a quasijudicial competence. As a result, the action of European customs authorities regarding infringing goods is based on an ambiguous ?conditional prohibition? which can easily lead to abuses as the international dispute regarding in-transit generic medicines has shown.

This essay examines representations of migrants and asylum seekers in some recent documentaries, largely made by white Europeans. I pay particular attention to questions of agency, voice and individuation, and the mediation, distribution, or evacuation of these elements of subjectivity. In contrast to the indifference or outright hostility with which migrants and refugees have often been treated, a well-intentioned but Eurocentric trope, evident in Ode to Lesvos, is the attempt made by ‘ordinary’ citizens to offer hospitality to those arriving at the continent’s borders. On the other hand, Les Sauteurs (Those Who Jump) presents migrants’ own actions as in part a form of political resistance. Finally, I consider how Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) and Thomas Østbye’s Imagining Emanuel interrogate the scrutiny, discipline and control endured by asylum seekers and migrants, processes that form part of the unmarked and unremarked upon Žižekian ‘objective violence’ that sustains the European system. These documentaries also offer reminders of the common technologies and routine procedures shared by filmmakers and the modern state’s legal apparatus, as both test veracity and attempt to produce the human subject as knowable.

The geopolitical upheavals affecting the Middle East and North Africa at the beginning of the 21st century have created an arc of instability around the Balkan Peninsula, causing serious consequences for all the countries in the area as regards migration flows. Due to its peculiar geographical position, Greece has thus found itself at the forefront of the so-called migratory emergency, which has involved the European Union (UE) in the last few years. The Dublin Regulation first and then the closure of the borders, following the agreement on migrants between the UE and Turkey in March 2016, have made Greece a sort of first reception hotspot for the whole Eastern Mediterranean, giving rise at the same time to new Balkan migration routes managed by human traffickers. Historically a hinge between East and West, today’s Greece constitutes the ideal starting point to interpret in a multi-scalar perspective both the weaknesses of the paradigm on which the so-called ‘Fortress Europe’ is based, and the geographical variety of problematic ‘living spaces’ that recent migratory phenomena have contributed to build over time.

Chapter 3 moves to the other end of the sonic and acoustic spectrum through a close listening to two well-known tracks from the group, Asian Dub Foundation (ADF). This group has been at the forefront of sampling as a decolonizing musico-cultural practice for some decades. Their music making, and how they deploy the full repertoire of sampling techniques, draw on the Club/DJ cultures of the 1990s on the one hand and, on the other, Jamaican Reggae and Dub, musicalities that played a formative role in the emergence of Rap and Hip-Hop (Chapter 6). ADF made their mark as part of the “Asian Underground” generation of British Asian musicians. Their sampling practices straddle classical Indian music, “Bollywood” soundtracks, Rap vocals, Reggae rhythms, and Dub bass lines for tracks that are not only danceable but also explicitly political, in ways that go beyond the lyrics. ADF’s collaborative, and technologically mediated “crossover” compositions decolonize Western pop music idioms as their musicking evokes contemporary and historical narratives of social injustice and racism, in the UK and around the world.

Beyond discussions about secularization, immigrant societies are still religious, and religious players are crucial in managing migrations in the numerous societal domains of migrants. These organizations support local administrations in welcoming, aiding insertion, organizing language and training courses, and helping families and children in their inclusion paths. The chapter discusses the role of faith-based organizations and their strategic role in the current refugee crisis.

This paper considers borders as ubiquitous and pervasive social relations and as sites of struggles, which are shaped through and transformed by social antagonisms and contestations. While much discussion of border struggles focuses on migrants’ resistance and various forms of activism, this paper provides insights on the micro-resistance of those who, instead of overtly opposing and contesting the biopolitical power of border regimes, are integral to their operation: asylum caseworkers who filter and select border-crossers. The paper presents data from interviews with self-identified leftist asylum caseworkers in Greece who, through their work, seek to create cracks in the so-called ‘Fortress Europe’. By exploring the somewhat unexplored occupational culture of leftist asylum caseworkers, we show how, while trying to resist bordering regimes, leftist asylum caseworkers both critique and reproduce the power relations they seek to subvert. Essentially, we provide valuable insights on the limits of resistance due to the workings of powerful technologies of government – informed by neoliberal managerialism – that are operational in day-to-day life of the asylum process. The paper thus provides a novel exploration of the complex and entangled relation between technologies of power and micro-resistances within border regimes in the significant context of Greece.

The increase in migratory flows through the corridor between North Africa and Europe triggered the so-called 'Mediterranean refugee crisis'. Precarious boats carrying migrants in transit and with them, the news that thousands were dying at sea, fleeing war and famine, in their attempt to reach 'Fortress Europe'. The European Union's response has been fluctuating between control and rights as part of its approach to migration management, translated into legal and discursive frameworks where both views appear: on the one hand, it declares war on people smugglers, and on the other, it imposes security and control practices and regimes that use fear as a pretext to stigmatize migrants, Once again, it forgets that these migrations - a consequence of the great existing inequalities, largely caused by its own policies - are a European problem. In this paper we will argue that the migration crisis is a European problem for: a) historical reasons: European countries were a source of massive emigration to America, Africa, Asia and Oceania as they conquered and colonized; b) political-social reasons: migration, as a 'disposable labor' force, is intertwined with colonial and imperial histories between regions where racial, gender and class categories were established and are still in place; and c) legal: starting with the three pillars of the European Union in the post-Maastricht era, through the intermediate phase of the post-Amsterdam era and also through the use of international agreements, such as the Schengen Convention of 1985 and the Dublin Treaty of 1990.

The debate on the implementation of a common migratory policy vis-a-vis third country nationals in the EU is a thriving one and one that does not seem to be easy to resolve. Much of the discussion focuses on the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’, defined in the literature as an area that enjoys internal mobility while erecting barriers to entry and stay with respect to non-EU citizens (Geddes, The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe, Sage, 2003).

This article explores the experience of migrants at Europe’s borders and beyond building upon the notion of human security—or rather its antithesis insecurity—and looking at it afresh through the lenses of border studies. It introduces the concept of ‘human insecurity trap’ as a tool to grasp the insecurities and vulnerabilities of people-on-the-move and the different border(ing)s, barriers and confinements they stem from. The article argues that smuggling to and across Europe, as well as EU and MS policy apparatus, entraps migrants into a spiral of human insecurity which unfolds at different levels and borders: at sea, in the ongoing struggle between smugglers and EU counter-smuggling operations; at the state border, where bureaucratic limbo and the (mis)management of shipwrecked migrants and asylum-seekers variously contend and combine with populist anti-migrant discourse; and across the EU, as practices of ‘re-smuggling’ and ‘secondary movement’ compete with practices of mobility limits, returns and border closures.

Following a discussion on what happens at the Greek-Albanian border, the author examines issues of transnational mobility in the seminal Roadblocks/Kleistoi Dromoi (2000) considering the routes of migration that the film’s Kurdish refugees tread on their way to Greece and Italy. The author here is interested in the notion of mobility impeded by borders that transform a journey of hope into nightmare and how this is actualized through the director’s original blend of documentary, fiction, conventional and experimental filmmaking. In order to further comprehend the contours of the migrant journey in Roadblocks, one needs to examine the push and pull factors of Kurdish migration. We take under consideration then the concept of the migrant imagination and how it fuels the journey and figures in the tragedy of hope turned dystopia. It is finally argued that, despite an original depiction of migration and refugee lives in limbo, Roadblocks screens explosive violence and imminent tragedy maintaining refugee lives in a perpetual state of crisis.

The establishment of the Schengen area has had a considerable impact on migratory flows to Europe, in particular due to the strengthening of the external borders of this area, which has led to it sometimes being labelled “Fortress Europe”. Conversely, internal border controls were abolished under Article 22 of the Schengen Borders Code, which states that: “Internal borders may be crossed at any point without a border check on persons, irrespective of their nationality, being carried out”. As ...

This chapter introduces the philosophical, political and technologically mediated foundations of Fortress Europe in an attempt to understand the complexity of a landscape where technologies of surveillance and technologies of solidarity play out in often ambiguous ways. The analysis provides the necessary contextual framework where today’s ‘techno-mediatised’ architecture of security and surveillance can be re-imagined as the result of a complex system that comprises infrastructures, discourses, tactics of resistance and strategies of power. This chapter provides a preliminary theoretical grounding for a more advanced discussion on technologies and borders as institutions of power, as mechanisms of identity formation and as performances. By breaking down the concept of Fortress Europe to its fundamental underpinnings, we shall reveal its historical and violent nature. Crucial to an understanding of this is the notion of ‘crisis’ as a narrative and discursive framework within which the exodus of refugees to Europe has been so far explained.

This chapter brings together the different fields investigated in the study and reflects on why an examination of the techno-mediated responses to the so-called refugee crisis is still to this day important. Towards the end of this chapter, I go back to one of the key questions that inspired this book: Can tech for social good—and the mediation of solidarity across borders—create a way out of Fortress Europe? In critically thinking about this question, the chapter closes with a note on why the notion of solidarity needs more attention, and what solidarity can tell us about citizenship and rights.

This chapter observes how technologies and more generally digital connectivity have affected the mobility of refugees during their journey to Europe. The findings presented in this chapter draw on a series of semi-structured interviews I conducted with Syrian refugees living in London in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The analysis will discuss the devices and applications that refugees use and for what purposes and how; the effective potential that social media and mobile devices hold for refugees; and the ways in which the refugees’ digitally mediated practices can be observed as acts of counterpower against the dominant and power-infused discourses of Fortress Europe.

This chapter investigates how the words journalists and media outlets use contribute to inaccurate or harmful narratives around migration; and how these narratives can construct narrative fences around assumed ideas of powerlessness. It also explores how every party involved in the migration field can engage in more ethical linguistic practices. As Europe faces the biggest migration of people since World War II it has often been referred to as a fortress in the methods it has taken to secure its borders. This has in turn been reflected in narratives around swarms and perceived threats to the so-called European way of life. The lexicon used by everyone from journalists to aid-workers and academics can influence the perception of a need to protect European boundaries. This chapter will examine how we can contribute to honest and fair narratives, which bring down the fences built to encourage ideas of us and them.

The borders of Europe are erected and guarded through cultural practices as much as through border control and security technologies. Cultural Studies have been crucial in revealing how everyday, particularly media-oriented practices, make and unmake this ‘Fortress’. Yet, until now, the focus has been mostly on how migrants use or are represented through media discourses and technologies. This introduction essay argues that the signifier ‘Fortress Europe’—and its central premise of restraining mobility for some in order to enable freedom for others—also gains meaning in and through socio-cultural practices that we may not (as) immediately associate with the physical crossing of European borders. Particular practices that are discussed in this introduction and examined in the seven original articles of the special issue are: public opinion research, the public mobilization of emotions, negotiating identity in an ‘ancestral homeland’, the consumption of (sports) media, the production of a radio talk show and film archives, as well as the activist use of social media. Broadening scholarly attention to these kinds of sociocultural practices provides an important addition to understanding how power operates across social spheres and discursive orders. In addition, their identification also offers valuable opportunities to understand how and why some practices are particularly pertinent or effective in cementing or destabilizing Fortress Europe. This line of inquiry is visible throughout this special issue, despite the diversity of theoretical frameworks and empirical sites used in the contributing articles.

In Part One, I give some background of the situation of refugees coming to Europe, especially to Greece. I give a brief outline of the EU policy of Fortress Europe and externalisation of borders. The contribution of Ireland is also discussed. In Part Two, I discuss the challenges and joys of my work in the small refugee camp Pikpa on Lesbos, run by Lesvos Solidarity where I worked for four months in 2017/2018. Other projects, such as the Mosaik Centre are also described. In view of the overall refugee population in the world of 68 million, my contribution seems just a drop in the ocean. The independent camp where I worked has around 120 residents while elsewhere on the island in the notorious “hot spot” camp Moria, 8,000 refugees are confined in a cramped space. Greece has to manage about 60,000 refugees. Still Europe’s numbers of refugees with about 0.5 % of the total population of 508 million taken in are small compared to refugees fleeing to countries neighbouring conflict and war zones.

El articulo explora como la migracion y las recientes llegadas de miles de refugiados en Europa han provocado una gran crisis politica dentro de los miembros de la Union, en un momento de crisis economica e insurgencia populista. Las dificultades para producir una politica europea comun frente a la migracion son el resultado de la misma construccion de la UE (Tratado de Schengen), que se basa en dos pilares: libre circulacion dentro del espacio de la UE y control estricto de la frontera exterior (especialmente en el Sur Mediterraneo), limitando la migracion non-EU (Fortress Europe). Este enfoque ha penalizado a los paises del sur de Europa, ubicados geograficamente en la frontera, obligados por la legislacion europea a recibir a la mayoria de los solicitantes de asilo. Los intentos de organizar una redistribucion han fracasado. La unica respuesta que la UE ha podido ofrecer a la crisis migratoria ha sido la "externalizacion de la migracion", pagando a los paises fronterizos no pertenecientes a la UE (Turquia, Marruecos, Libia) para detener los flujos. La crisis europea frente a la migracion y la cuestion de los refugiados se ha visto impulsada por la "insurgencia populista", el fenomeno global de la revuelta contra los partidos politicos establecidos y las elites en general, combinado con el aumento de los sentimientos nacionalistas. Sin embargo, el aumento del populismo es el resultado del abandono de las clases desfavorecidas (los perdedores de la globalizacion) por los partidos tradicionales de izquierda. Solo una nueva propuesta politica que ponga en su centro los derechos sociales que han sido robados a las clases mas bajas de Europa durante la crisis, puede construir un enfoque de solidaridad con los migrantes y los refugiados, compartido por toda la sociedad. Palabras clave Migracion; refugiados; Union Europea; populismo; globalizacion. Abstract The article explores how migration and the recent arrivals of thousand of refugees in Europe have provoked a mayor political crisis inside the Union membrers, in a time of economic crisis and populist insurgency. The difficulties to produce a common European policy in front of migration is embedded in the construction of the EU, which is based on two pillars: free movement inside the EU space; strict control of the external border and of the non-EU migration (Fortress Europe). This approach has penalized Southern European countries, geographically placed at the border, forced by the European legislation to receive the asylum seekers. Attempts to organize some share of the burden have failed. The only answer that the EU has been able to offer to the migratory crisi has been the “externalization of migration”, paying the non –EU border countries (Turkey, Morocco, Libia) to stop the flows. The European crisis in front of the migration and refugee issue has been fuelled by the ‘populist insurgency’ – the global phenomenon of revolt against established political parties and elites in general, combined with the rise of nationalist sentiments. The rise of populism is, however, a result of the abandon of the disadvantaged classes (the losers of globalization) by the traditional left-wing parties. Only a new political proposal that puts at its center the social rights that have been stolen to the lower European classes during the crisis, can build a solidarity approach to migrants and refugees, sgared by the all society. Keywords Migration; refugees; European Union; crisis; populism; globalization.

Migrant deaths in border-zones have become a major social and political issue, especially in the context of the Euro-Mediterranean refugee/migrant crisis. While media, activists, and policy makers often mention precise figures regarding the number of deaths, little is known about the production of statistical data on this topic. This article explores the politics of counting migrant deaths in Europe. This statistical activity was initiated in the 1990s by civil society organizations with the purpose of shedding light on the deadly consequences of “Fortress Europe” and of challenging states’ control-oriented political strategies. In 2013, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) started to count migrants’ deaths: while this intergovernmental organization seems to follow up on civil society initiatives, it actually works with different political objectives. Rather than criticizing states, IOM aims at conciliating the control of irregular migration with the prevention of deaths. IOM’s statistics on border deaths illustrate the humanitarianization of the border, as denunciation of migrants’ deaths and life-saving activities become integrated in border management and border control. In producing statistics on border deaths, IOM depoliticizes this data and challenges the critical framework that was central to earlier civil society initiatives. Finally, the article explores ways in which statistics on border deaths are being repoliticized to challenge European states’ immigration policies.

Turkey is the only European Union candidate country whose citizens are obliged to obtain a Schengen visa. The difficult visa procedures, often seen as unjust and discriminatory, are a longstanding source of frustration and humiliation among Turkish citizens, as they reproduce both symbolic and physical borders between the EU and Turkey and seem to reiterate the ‘Fortress Europe’ thesis. These perceptions of the visa process and the consequent feeling of ‘otherness/non-Europeanness’ hinder the process of Turkish integration into the EU. Bordering no longer occurs merely in the border areas separating two states, but rather through a wide range of practices in multiple locations within and beyond the state's territory. This complexity has recently been augmented by the introduction of intermediary companies. The offices of these intermediaries have become an example of bordering sites located away from the border area. Moreover, in these offices border work is carried out by non-traditional actors: in other words, not by border guards or immigration officers of the EU but by Turkish employees. Treating those offices as significant nodes where border work is done, this paper draws on material collected at visa offices in Ankara to understand the multifaceted construction of borders between the EU and Turkey. Using a situated intersectional framework, this paper elucidates not only perceptions from both sides of the border –Turkish nationals applying for visas and Turkish nationals doing border work – but also how the differentiated social positionings and purposes of travel shape these interactions.

This essay offers a Deleuzian reading of Drift (2014), a multilingual project by the cross-disciplinary artist Caroline Bergvall. It argues that the text- and performance-project promotes forms of deterritorialization that give radical witness to the contemporary humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean where thousands of people drown each year as they try to reach Europe. In breaking down barriers between languages, the artistic work employs non-representational modes of address to reflect on what it means to lack citizenship and recognition in the context of the crisis. Close readings challenge postcolonial accusations that the writings of Deleuze and Guattari are at best utopian and at worst politically naive and without purchase on the real-life catastrophes of Fortress Europe. Instead, Deleuzian strategies are shown to enable Bergvall to actualize a multilingual politics of speech and performance that points towards the historical and contemporary imbrications of the West in mass-drownings of recent years

The diagnosis of a migration crisis has prompted multiple processes of rebordering in Europe and beyond. These include the build-up of physical barriers like walls and fences, the tightening of asylum regimes, the expansion of biometric databases and the enrolment of authoritarian regimes in controlling Europe’s borders. These developments have prompted a revival of the image of the ‘fortress’ in critical accounts of the European border regime. Building on existing criticisms of the metaphor Fortress Europe, this article proposes an alternative political imaginary of the European border regime. Starting from a version of the autonomy of migration approach that is based on the notion of appropriation, it proposes to apprehend the European border regime as a parasitic and precarious apparatus of capture. This apparatus of capture tries to recuperate migrants’ practices of appropriation in order to turn the knowledge and creativity of these practices into a driving force for its own development. Important aspects of this dynamic are illustrated through two examples: the refinement of control mechanisms of the European visa regime and the repeated tightening of Germany’s asylum regime since the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015. Taken together, these examples illustrate three aspects of processes of recuperation: first, that legal changes often only formalise previously informal practices of recuperation, secondly, that the framing of migration in terms of crisis functions as a vehicle for processes of recuperation which open up, thirdly, new opportunities for practices of appropriation as they are incoherent. In sum, the reading of the European border regime as an apparatus of capture paves the way for more assertive antiracist politics as it invites us to apprehend increasingly violent forms of border control not as signs of strengths of the European border regime, but as indicators of its increasingly desperate fight for survival.

„Fortess Europe” czy „Open Door Policy” – proby rozwiązania kryzysu uchodźczego i migracyjnego w Unii Europejskiej w latach 2011–2017