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Discourse played a crucial role in upholding the "Border Spectacle" throughout the "refugee crisis". This essay seeks to explore the discursive components of migration governance throughout the "refugee crisis" in Italy by drawing on Sayad's observation that the state thinks about itself when it talks about migration. The analysis shows that the national categories through which states think about immigration are significantly influenced by the colonial legacy. I rely on discourse analysis approaches to explore the speeches of the two Ministers of the Interior who oversaw migration governance between 2013 and 2018. I argue that the "crisis" offered Italy a key opportunity to showcase its national community as a good-natured and selfless one, while also emphasizing its unique performance within the Mediterranean space. As the Italian case demonstrates, unpacking the national categories through which states conceive migration can contribute to exposing and challenging the historical sanitization of migration governance discourse throughout the "refugee crisis". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical analysis of the current literature on visa studies, particularly with regard to its methodological limitations and how they impact our understanding of worldwide migration patterns with the fortress Europe conception. The first half of the manuscript is a critical review of studies that study visas. Although, numerous studies initially relied on the insights of authors such as John Torpey and Marc B. Salter, who examined the rise of passports and visas to regulate global flows of people, later studies chose to use a dyadic methodology, which is a reflection of a reductionist understanding of global flows and networks. The second half uses the Demig Visa database to show that the EU, which has been hailed as creating an area for free movement of,‘people, goods and services’, proved to be an obstacle for many countries in Asia and Africa, including neighbouring Mediterranean countries, which had enjoyed visa-free travel until the EU ‘Europeanized’ its immigration policy with the Schengen agreement in the mid-1980s. In summary, the subsequent EU ‘Great Shutdown’ does not stop population flows, but rather attempts to direct the flows at will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the EU adapt its policies in response to current global changes? Extant scholarship has shed light on the EU’s geopolitical turn by analysing it as either a shift away from neoliberalism or a reshuffling of EU–US relations. This article makes the case for studying how these two dynamics interact. To do so, I draw on the economic patriotism framework, which focuses on the links between types and spaces of economic interventionism. Economic patriotism instruments can take various forms depending on their type (liberal/protectionist instruments) and space of reference (national/EU/transatlantic/international). From this perspective, the EU has responded to global changes by shifting from liberal to protectionist instruments of economic patriotism. However, the design of these policy instruments reflects compromises between the preferences of policymakers who adopt liberal/protectionist and Europeanist/Atlanticist positions. As policy instruments can create room for compromise because they allow various positions to converge, EU protectionist economic instruments cater to Atlanticist and liberal preferences too. This article illustrates this argument by means of EU armament policy. Using official documents and interviews, I analyse changes in EU economic patriotism by looking at the two major policy instruments: the 2009 Defence Procurement Directive and the 2021 European Defence Fund. Whereas the 2009 Directive reflected liberal economic patriotism anchored in the transatlantic space, the European Defence Fund illustrates tensions between types and spaces of economic interventionism in the EU’s geopolitical turn: Some clauses protect the EU from foreign interference, but its political-economic space of reference remains strongly transatlantic.

The ongoing military operations in Ukraine and the unfolding events have displayed the potential of this conflict to extend conventionally to Europe and placing great powers including the United States of America (US) and China in strategic and tactical confrontation. Tracing the dynamics that contributed to the crisis and confrontations between North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), European Union (EU), the US and Russia; this article presents an analysis regarding the likely transformation in the US, NATO and EU alliance. The enduring military operation appears to have divided the European states in pursuit of their diplomatic, strategic and economic interests. Based on their economic interests, a few have struck clandestine deals with Russia; while others have criticised the Russian offensive, but have merely offered token diplomatic support to Ukraine. While the conduct of military operations has raised strategic concerns overall for European states, the global military industrial complex has certainly benefitted by selling conventional weapons and technologies to both conflicting parties. It is likely that in case this conflict extends beyond Ukraine; it shall serve the US’ grand strategic interests through the direct and indirect employment of its war industry and military means. This is also likely to reinvigorate and strengthen US stagnant alliance with Europe and the related moribund military entrepreneurial structures. These strategies are likely to support the long-term designs of re-structuring the international order to US’s own strategic and economic advantage against the emerging powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interdisciplinary dialogue draws on climatology and cultural studies to explore the phenomenon of "Saharan dust" that passes through and beyond the Spanish Mediterranean Basin. The dialogic process seeks to unearth the power relations within which weather stories and the authors are always already entangled, with a view to re-imagining weather writing and climatic storytelling in decolonial terms. Our parallel inquiries trace how origin stories, material mobilities, atmospheres, and environmental regulation work to codify the aeolian dust as an intrusion across borders. Drawing on critical theory, we argue that this weather "from" the Sahara Desert is othered in Eurocentric weather narratives, mapping onto geopolitical logic of "Fortress Europe". Our research is instructed by postcolonial thought, political ecology, and the speculative feminist position of weathering. Through critical engagement with science in context, we dwell lastly on African air quality and experiences of weathering atmospheric dust further upwind. Our concluding comments speculatively drift with Mediterranean winds to animate a positionality of middleness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the repercussions of the 2015 European migrant/refugee crisis, which culminated with the 2018 dispute between Italy and France. It is concerned with the Dublin Regulation and the New Pact on Asylum and Migration, which are critical to the division and consequent polarizations across the EU. The Member States' failure to show solidarity and agree to share the burden in relation to the distribution of immigrants and asylum seekers has brought the European integrationist project into question. In addition to considering the general theoretical explanations, the paper also looks into the African-origin migration/displacement as a proper trigger of widespread disagreements among European governments. The deliberate and systematic impoverishment of the local inhabitants - largely through the use of the French Treasury-tied Communaute Financiere Africaine (CFA) franc - exposes the neo-colonial nature of the current practices and thus jeopardizes all those discourses and policy initiatives focused on the provision of peace and stability.

How does the EU adapt its policies in response to current global changes? Extant scholarship has shed light on the EU's geopolitical turn by analysing it as either a shift away from neoliberalism or a reshuffling of EU-US relations. This article makes the case for studying how these two dynamics interact. To do so, I draw on the economic patriotism framework, which focuses on the links between types and spaces of economic interventionism. Economic patriotism instruments can take various forms depending on their type (liberal/protectionist instruments) and space of reference (national/EU/transatlantic/international). From this perspective, the EU has responded to global changes by shifting from liberal to protectionist instruments of economic patriotism. However, the design of these policy instruments reflects compromises between the preferences of policymakers who adopt liberal/protectionist and Europeanist/Atlanticist positions. As policy instruments can create room for compromise because they allow various positions to converge, EU protectionist economic instruments cater to Atlanticist and liberal preferences too. This article illustrates this argument by means of EU armament policy. Using official documents and interviews, I analyse changes in EU economic patriotism by looking at the two major policy instruments: the 2009 Defence Procurement Directive and the 2021 European Defence Fund. Whereas the 2009 Directive reflected liberal economic patriotism anchored in the transatlantic space, the European Defence Fund illustrates tensions between types and spaces of economic interventionism in the EU's geopolitical turn: Some clauses protect the EU from foreign interference, but its political-economic space of reference remains strongly transatlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe's treatment of refugees provides growing evidence that the continent is losing its moral compass, and that Europe is increasingly callous – so-called Fortress Europe. Brute force, deterrence, including pushbacks and barbed wire fences have become the instruments with which European governments have responded to irregular migration and refugees. This article seeks to bring to the fore the contradiction between the EU's self-proclaimed values — human dignity and human rights — and the callous policies of nation states and the EU's migration regime. My main focus lies on the calamitous conditions of refugees and the thousands of deaths that have occurred in the Mediterranean Sea since 2015, the year that refugees fleeing Syria's civil war started making their way to Europe. Importantly, the Mediterranean is the deadliest border in the world; it is the veritable global epicenter of lethal border crossings. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, I undertake a humanist critique of the European status quo. The EU, as a force for a better, more livable world, is on its way to becoming irrelevant, something that was evident well before the Covid-19 pandemic. This is what is principally at stake today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the repercussions of the 2015 European migrant/refugee crisis, which culminated with the 2018 dispute between Italy and France. It is concerned with the Dublin Regulation and the New Pact on Asylum and Migration, which are critical to the division and consequent polarizations across the EU. The Member States' failure to show solidarity and agree to share the burden in relation to the distribution of immigrants and asylum seekers has brought the European integrationist project into question. In addition to considering the general theoretical explanations, the paper also looks into the African-origin migration/displacement as a proper trigger of widespread disagreements among European governments. The deliberate and systematic impoverishment of the local inhabitants - largely through the use of the French Treasurytied Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) franc - exposes the neo-colonial nature of the current practices and thus jeopardizes all those discourses and policy initiatives focused on the provision of peace and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tom Lanoye's 'theatre novella' Fort Europa: Hooglied van Versplintering (Fortress Europe: A Canticle of Fragmentation) (2005) features a range of characters who probe Europe's possible future by turning to its past. The Eurocentric heritage narratives on which they draw perpetuate an idea of Europe as a civilization founded on Christianity and on the Enlightenment and racially defined as White. The way in which Lanoye stages these conservative narratives and the way in which he employs irony, however, invites critical reflection, thus calling for a postcolonial perspective on Europe and on European heritage. We approach Fortress Europe as a literary text that reflects on and intervenes in dominant heritage discourses. Through close reading, we investigate how this work stages and engages with European heritage and how it thereby explores specific ideas about European culture and identity. Our focus is on the literary means by which Lanoye reflects on the place of heritage in narratives of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2020 5(3), 1143-1170 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction: border closures as a source of symbolic capital. - II. Reintroduction and termination of internal border controls. - II.1. Legality of the initial suspension of border-free travel. - II.2. Alternatives to systematic internal border controls. - II.3. Return to normality: intergovernmental cooperation. - II.4. Institutional implications: limited sway of legal supranationalism. - III. "A Europe that protects": closure of the external Schengen border. - III.1. "Fortress Europe" as an affirmative narrative. - III.2. Individualised assessment and proportionality. - III.3. Exemption of travellers with an "essential function or need". - IV. Restricting the free movement of Union citizens. - IV.1. The principle of proportionality: between individual cases and abstract considerations. - IV.2. Distinguishing different categories of free movement. - IV.3. Graded approaches towards quarantine and other alternatives. - IV.4. Practical implications of travel restrictions. - IV.5. Coherence of domestic and border restrictions. - V. Conclusion. | (Abstract) Initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic capitalised on symbolism of national belonging. Against this background, borders soon took centre stage in the effort to tackle the spread of the virus during the spring of 2020 with Member States enforcing drastic restrictions to inter-state mobility, both at internal and external Schengen borders. As the second wave rolled in, restrictions gained momentum again, even though Member States by and large, did not revert to symbolically relevant border controls and travel bans. This Article revisits the measures taken by the Member States and EU institutions at the internal and external borders of the Schengen area until late-October 2020 and draws lessons regarding the interaction of symbolism, law and politics in times of crisis. It focuses on shifts in the perception of borders and the role of different actors in the closure and the subsequent re-opening thereof. We illustrate that the supranational institutions struggled to support the rule of law without the political support of the Member States, even though the rich case law of the Court of Justice on the internal market provides critical doctrinal arguments that can be employed in times of crises.

Europe has recently become closely associated with LGBTQ rights. It remains unclear, however, what is the role of this association in everyday European imaginations and identifications. Empirical research on European identity hardly ever discusses the role of LGBTQ rights. Nor do we know much about European identifications of LGBTQ people themselves. In this article, I address those gaps from the perspective of Polish LGBTQs in the UK. Drawing on 30 interviews from a recent two-year research project, I discuss my participants' European imaginations and identifications by developing the concepts of 'uncanny Europe' and 'protective Europeanness'. I show how my participants tend to view Europe as 'diverse', 'open' and 'tolerant', while attributing those characteristics exclusively to Western Europe. I also demonstrate that they tend to readily identify as European in the context of increasingly hostile national identities, with the increasing anti-Polish xenophobia in the UK and growing anti-LGBTQ discrimination in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyzed the Turkish and Libyan refugee deals. We argued that these deals proved to be unsustainable policy frameworks by focusing on their practical outcomes regarding humanitarian objectives. We utilized the “Fortress Europe” concept to demonstrate how the European Union’s security concerns shaped the framework of these deals. Our study elaborated on two main arguments: First, these deals have undermined both Turkey and Libya’s migration management capacities. Second, these deals failed to provide adequate mechanisms supervising the enforcement of humanitarian objectives. We focus on two dynamics leading to the failure of these deals. First, the EU’s prioritization of security concerns has resulted in overlooking the irregular migration’s humanitarian and societal costs to the third countries. Second, the EU’s securitarian strategy contributed to further politicization and securitization of cooperation on migration. In conclusion, we argue that the EU should revise its securitarian strategy on irregular migration to include a more effective multi-lateral and multi-dimensional framework that focuses more on humanitarian issues while ensuring that the responsibilities will be fairly shared between the EU and third countries based on their capacities.

This article critically analyzed the Turkish and Libyan refugee deals. We argued that these deals proved to be unsustainable policy frameworks by focusing on their practical outcomes regarding humanitarian objectives. We utilized the "Fortress Europe" concept to demonstrate how the European Union's security concerns shaped the framework of these deals. Our study elaborated on two main arguments: First, these deals have undermined both Turkey and Libya's migration management capacities. Second, these deals failed to provide adequate mechanisms supervising the enforcement of humanitarian objectives. We focus on two dynamics leading to the failure of these deals. First, the EU's prioritization of security concerns has resulted in overlooking the irregular migration's humanitarian and societal costs to the third countries. Second, the EU's securitarian strategy contributed to further politicization and securitization of cooperation on migration. In conclusion, we argue that the EU should revise its securitarian strategy on irregular migration to include a more effective multi-lateral and multi-dimensional framework that focuses more on humanitarian issues while ensuring that the responsibilities will be fairly shared between the EU and third countries based on their capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bursa Uludağ Journal of Economy & Society / Bursa Uludağ Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Uludag Universitesi Iktisadi ve Idari Bilimler Fakultesi Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The authors deal with selected aspects of past and present border shaping processes in Croatia, regarding its sociological and historical perspective. Some circumstances under which the boundaries between countries are established, maintained and changed are discussed. As socially constructed phenomena, the boundaries change their meaning over time, aiming to exclude the Others and/or Strangers and to determine the belonging. They are under ambivalent pressure of limitations, divisions, conflicts and exclusions on ethnic or national level on one hand and under impact of the enlarging processes, inclusions and political interests on local, regional, national and supranational levels, on the other hand. Such a comparative interdisciplinary approach reveals liminal character and importance of Croatian borders which, positioned at almost same places as today, were in the Early Modern Period perceived as the civilization edge (e.g. Antemurale Christianitatis) and confessional barrier towards the Other. The analisys showed that the role of Croatian borders is apparently, among the others, to strengthen the defence of the Fortress Europe (Schengen area) from the irregular migrants and migrants as the Others. On selected cases the paper examined how do political elites manage to shape the borders and make it (non) permeable for the movement of goods, services and people, depending on their interests. While the certain policies were imposed from above, everyday practices of local population were usually opposed and still happen to oppose proclaimed limitation, turning the boundary from the barrier to the place of exchange and cooperation. Simultaneously, the fragmentation of European space and strengthening of national interests leads to stronger “Europe of borders” instead of the proclaimed ideal of “Europe without borders”.

Copyright of Journal of Middle Eastern Studies / Ortadoğu Etütleri is the property of Turkmen Cooperation & Cultural Foundation Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies (ORSAM) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I deconstruct the distinctive facets of mediated framing of integration through a textual analysis of Flemish newspapers. Using Entman's framing theory, I identified four primary integration frames: Fortress Europe, Streamlined Labour, Solipsistic Representation, and Competing Integration Frames. Specifically, I describe the ambivalence of media framing, which intertextually borrows from dominant representation of (im)migrants. The papers simultaneously frame integration as an assimilative social contract to be agreed to by (im)migrants and as a responsibility of the host society to integrate (im)migrants. Counter-framing, present in all four media frames, is critical to both dismantling systemic marginalization and ameliorating processes of integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Davide Enia’s 2017 Appunti per un naufragio makes generous use of Sicilian dialect, both attributed to characters (including Enia’s alter ego) and within the narrative voice. The ethical importance of this and other forms of Sicilian specificity is not lost on his translators into English and French (Antony Shugaar and Françoise Brun, respectively), both of whom have translated Enia’s work before. Appunti per un naufragio, however, occasions a less transparent strategy than in the past for both translators, who have opted to maintain the Sicilian dialect sociolect in significant ways in their TTs (Notes on a Shipwreck and La Loi de la mer). Enia’s deployment of dialect and his translators’ maintenance of that dialect in translation function in parallel fashion as gestures of resistance against national frameworks such as Standard Italian language and the logic of nationally sovereign borders [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic values of EU (European Union) like respect of human rights, freedom, democracy and rule of law are perceived by irregular migrants as a guarantee that will provide them a better life. For this reason, the EU countries are the most important destination country for the people who decided to migrate because of the reasons like instability, unemployment, natural disasters and economic destructions in their country of origin. As a result of the implementation of EU's migration policies focused on security, irregular migrants has become either a subject to loss of lives in the sea or the victims of smugglers and human trafficking gangs. This situation, caused EU to be perceived as "falling internal borders with Schengen Agreement but rising fortress with walls". Despite all critics, EU preferred to continue "Fortress Europe approach with using the methods of fighting against irregular migration like promoting border security, voluntary return policies and signing readmission agreements with important origin and transit countries like Turkey. In addition to that; the EU targeted to enhance and strengthen the precautions that were taken in the July-December 2018 term presidency of Austria known for the firm approach towards irregular migration. This study firstly handles the concept of irregular migration, and then analyses fortress Europe approach in EU migration policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Geoadria is the property of Geoadria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The events that took place during the 2015-16 refugee crisis in the southeastern EU region boosted unprecedented bordering processes. Borders were reinforced and extended and a costly and difficult deal with Turkey was undertaken; the western Balkans were turned into a vast buffer zone made up of multiple buffer states with fences of all types and sizes; while Greece was ring-fenced and to this day struggles to manage thousands of refugees stranded in camps all over its territory. By seeking to contain the refugee flows, the EU turned its southeastern region into a fortified EU borderland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Al Jazeera's August 2015 editorial decision to substitute 'refugee' for 'economic migrant' in its coverage of 'the Mediterranean Migration Crisis' provides an opportunity to re-frame the relationship between the politics of race, immigration and media representations of refugees. Situating the broadcaster's publicly announced rationale for the decision within a critique of the migrant-refugee dichotomy enforced by European public policy, this article, first, demonstrates that the policy couplet mobilizes oppositional yet interdependent identities. The discursive distancing of 'migrant' from 'refugee' in news content does not dislodge their mutually reinforcing power to define the parameters of 'inclusion'. Second, the article examines how the policy onus placed on refugees to justify their claim as 'victims' reproduces racialized codes of belonging that perpetuate the denial of autonomy. Persons seeking refuge in Europe must sustain an identity of 'non-threatening victim' if they are to gain recognition in a securitized culture of (mis)trust. Al Jazeera's intervention strengthens the media representation of refugees as human beings without choice; yet, the broadcaster's decision to 'give voice' by 'challenging racism' does not break the European political consensus on immigration and asylum that positions 'non-Western' peoples as victim/pariah, to be 'saved' and 'suspected'. The media-policy-migration nexus ensures that refugee exclusion is always possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination & New Anthropology / Časopis za Kritko Znanosti, Domišljijo in Novo Antropologijo is the property of Institute for the Critique of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)