Search

The temporal structuring of migrant gig workers' work and lives has been insufficiently addressed in research. Drawing on multi-sited onlineoffline methodologies, including interviews with migrants working via location-based work platforms (cleaning, food delivery) in Finland, we propose the term platform assemblage to analyse the temporal entanglements of living labour, work platforms and the border regime. We argue that migrant gig workers' entanglement in the platform assemblage engenders experiences of constraint, not only via formally weak labour market positions but also through the specific temporalities arising in the complex entwinement of algorithms, the varying digital platforms used, ratings, urban interferences, migratory status and the personal resources required to navigate these constraints. Discerning the relationship between migrants' encounters with the temporal border regime, the temporal organisation of platform work, and migrants' contestations over the dynamics of work, the article contributes to the emerging literature on migrant gig workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how the pandemic caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted international migration. In particular, we compare the mobility and economic repercussions faced by Bolivian and Venezuelan migrants. We conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with migrants who requested legal and social support and advice provided by the Open Assembly of Migrants and Pro-Migrants of Tarapacá, Chile (AMPRO), an organisation dedicated to defending migrant rights. The Bolivian interviewees worked in Chile before the pandemic in the city of Iquique (close to the Bolivian border). The Venezuelan interviewees are undocumented people in transit who entered Chile during the pandemic. Through this comparison, we describe the economic repercussions on the everyday life, mobility, and survival strategies of people in transit, transboundary workers, and migrants with transnational families, and reveal a realignment of Chile's border regime that benefits post-pandemic capitalism. Furthermore, we clarify how the health restrictions implemented due to the pandemic have favoured the reconfiguration of the border regime imposed in Chile, through a racist immigration policy based on the control and management of migration, leading to a greater irregularization of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history of crossing the Sino-ChosÅn borders in various contexts. The evolution of border crossing can be traced from its origins as a political mission that was part of the diplomatic ritual to its later development as an economic circuit where individuals vied for profits, and finally to its status as a public program that carried significant weight in high-level politics. Throughout its history, border crossing was characterized by its dual nature, encompassing both ritual and mundane, exotic and domestic, national and international elements. It was emblematic of the ongoing interactions between China/Chinese and Korea/Koreans, and the flows of people and goods between them. These individuals and items were re-identified and re-categorized following their crossing of the borders, and the processes of identification and categorization shed light on the political dynamics of both countries.

Copyright of Croatian Journal of Ethnology & Folklore Research / Narodna Umjetnost is the property of Institute of Ethnology & Folklore Research 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.)

Abstract This paper analyzes the role of border fortifications for migration control and access to asylum based on two case studies: the Hungarian–Serbian and U.S. American–Mexican borders. The research is based on qualitative interviews on both sides of the borders. It shows that despite other options for border control, fortifications still play an important role, especially for asylum seekers. Fences fulfill a material, a symbolic and a filtering function here. The three functions contribute in different ways to preventing asylum seekers from crossing the border, thus depriving refugees of the opportunity to apply for asylum. The paper shoes that fences fulfill functions that other forms of border control (such as shifting or smart borders) cannot accomplish in the same way and it thereby contributes to understanding the ‘puzzle’ of contemporary border fencing.

This paper analyzes the role of border fortifications for migration control and access to asylum based on two case studies: the Hungarian–Serbian and U.S. American–Mexican borders. The research is based on qualitative interviews on both sides of the borders. It shows that despite other options for border control, fortifications still play an important role, especially for asylum seekers. Fences fulfill a material, a symbolic and a filtering function here. The three functions contribute in different ways to preventing asylum seekers from crossing the border, thus depriving refugees of the opportunity to apply for asylum. The paper shoes that fences fulfill functions that other forms of border control (such as shifting or smart borders) cannot accomplish in the same way and it thereby contributes to understanding the 'puzzle' of contemporary border fencing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the role of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the global migration regime against the backdrop of the European Union (EU) border externalisation process in Niger. Over the last few years, UN agencies have been considered an essential component of the EU strategy to prevent irregular migrants from reaching Europe. Drawing on qualitative research and ethnographic fieldwork, combining empirical observation with critical analysis, we explore the 'humanitarian–security nexus' by focusing on the IOM's 'humanitarian borderwork' under the financial umbrella of the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (ETFA). While the results of purely securitarian measures in Niger may have been 'disappointing', the outsourcing of migration management through IOM balances the interests of the Nigerien government and the EU. By focusing on IOM humanitarian operations and assisted voluntary returns and reintegration (AVRR) programmes, the article shows the further expansion of European humanitarian borders into the heart of the Sahel, highlighting new interdiction practices, hidden forms of deportation, side effects and contestation from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration and border studies have reconceptualized and examined borders as sites of contestation, stressing the productive effects of (illegalized) migration control on established notions of citizenship. These accounts have predominantly focused on illegalized migration and on contemporary contestations around these mobilities. This article expands these efforts by suggesting that migration control and contestations (and the limits thereof) can be understood only by considering the dynamic yet historically and geographically specific modes of any given border, which I aim to capture through the concept of regime of bordering. This concept refers to the fact that contemporary borders against illegalized migration are founded on pre-existing regimes of citizenship, bilateral relations, and migration. My historically informed ethnographic research on both sides of the Greek–Turkish border in Thrace demonstrates the continuing impact of unresolved bilateral disputes and centralized state power in a highly militarized region to align state and nonstate actors with migration control at an "external border" of the EU. Studying politics of migration control from a long durée perspective and as part of a composite regime of bordering takes us beyond a "presentist" view on recent contestations around illegalized migration, deepening our understanding of (the lack of) local acts of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the idea of (“immigrant”) “integration” from its roots in classical political philosophy and the birth of the modern nation-state, to its current relevance in the European political agenda and, relatedly, its centrality in the newly consolidated field of Migration Studies. I examine the ontological (i.e., philosophical and sociological) and political rationales behind the idea that migrants need to “integrate into society”, and the different varieties of political solutions that are offered in this sense. The paper asks: How did the migrant come at the center of the idea of an integrated society? And how did integrationism become consolidated as the hegemonic idea of governing diverse societies in post-migration contexts in Europe? Employing an extensive list of secondary literature, documentary data, policy analysis of the EU-level Framework on migrant integration, and discourse analysis of integration-related research publications, I attempt a genealogy of the idea of “integration” as it traveled across the North Atlantic West and between academia and government. The paper shows how the production of the subject of integration—the misfit “immigrant” figure—is historically marked by a consensus across the learned and the governing elites that identifies the preservation of a homogenous national social order as a societal goal. I argue that the scientification of integration governance via the “evidence-based policy” paradigm (most notably promoted by EU institutions) normalizes, naturalizes and aims to depoliticize the otherwise highly normative and contested question of migrant integration.

Contemporary research on migration and border regimes highlights that migration produces effects beyond border control, as migrants act autonomously (at least partially) as individual or collective agents. On the discursive level, many representations tend to foster imaginaries of refugees as autonomous political fighters which overlooks their frequently peaceful aims and thereby ignores non-violent (micro)politics. Providing an example from Laura Otto’s fieldwork with young migrants on Malta, we claim first, that it is important for critical migration theory not to subsume diverse forms of agency and concrete actions of migrants too easily under the umbrella of the autonomy of migration, as autonomy is to be regarded as a highly ambivalent concept and not as an aim in itself. Second, we propose to clearly distinguish between belligerent and peaceful forms of political agency. Beyond an understanding of autonomy as combative by principle, a post-autonomous viewpoint takes interdependencies into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the fundamental relationship between migrants’ existential waiting in Athens and the polysemic EUropean border regime after the closure of the so called Balkan Route. A conception of the border as a regime, operating not just at physical borders or within mechanisms of European border externalization but unfolding its existential impact also within cities, allows to outline its practices of classification which deprive migrants of their possibility to act, to live and to move on. To think this regime as embedded in complex relations of a specific territorial assemblage makes it possible to connect these dynamic power relations of the EUropean border regime and the existential waiting of migrants with networks of resistance in Athens, whereas the latter are focusing on collective practices, ranging from a refusal of the long-term wait to concrete exit strategies, enabling migrants to speak and to act together on an equal level. Thus, these networks are an important factor of local changes and collective mutations of the dominance of the border regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction builds on recent debates, e.g. in the Berlin Migration Lab, that claim to connect, rather than separate the regimes governing borders and mobilities in joint, rather than separated research fields. We argue that this combined view allows us to investigate the power relations between the privileged freedom of movement of the Few (classified as global Northern, white travelers, tourists, expatriates) and the interdependent, entangled, stigmatized movements of the Many (declassified as global Southern, non-white migrants and refugees). We propose to focus on overlapping, intersecting mobilities_regimes to arrive at a broader understanding of dynamic assemblages of practices of mobilities and politics of de/regulation: assemblages in which also the category “migration” is positioned and negotiated in relation to other projects of mobility. The introduction invites to read the contributions to this volume of Movements from this conceptual angle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the exemplary case of the borders in the central Sahara that separate the Sahel states from the Maghreb states, this analysis shows the reinforcement of a security conception of the border that is now being generalized to these peripheral regions, which are often considered as ‘grey zones’ with porous borders. By shedding light on a phenomenon that has been little or not at all documented and is now revealed by satellite imagery – the construction of sand walls at the borders – we will show that the largest desert in the world is not or is no longer the smooth and boundless space of the Western imagination. More broadly, based on a long-term geohistorical approach, the interweaving and evolution of three successive border regimes are highlighted: a pre-colonial regime under the domination of Tuareg caravan nomadism and structured on the basis of border wells; a colonial and post-colonial regime imposing a Westphalian conception of the border; and the contemporary security regime which participates in the partitioning of the Sahara by sand walls.

Subjected to what has been called a 'global mobility regime', refugees will often find that their destination countries have a limited number of pre-cut identities ready for them and allow them little leeway beyond these. In this paper, we will discuss representations of refugees in European popular culture following the so-called 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. We will analyse the narratives in these representations, and how these negotiate both what refugees are and should be, as well as what Europe, and more specifically the EU, is and should be. Through pathos, humour and shock, these works – two pop songs, a concert film, a comic and a cartoon – do not only convey narratives about the plight of refugees, but also work through how Europe experienced the 2015 crisis, and the ensuing, often conflicting, attitudes towards irregular migration that were expressed in European public discourse. We will discuss how this experience can be conceptualised as a 'boundary experience' that creates a before and after, as well as the possibility of new forms of identity – a possibility that may be ultimately rejected. As they take up the topic of irregular migration, we find producers of popular culture looking for words, sounds and images to express and address these attitudes, and to remember – or forget – the 2015 refugee crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses responses to the typhus epidemic in German-occupied Poland during the First World War. The German conquest of the Kingdom of Poland in 1915 not only instated a new political regime, but also brought about social misery on an unprecedented scale. Especially in larger cities, the poor segments of the population were made homeless or cramped into tiny apartments and suffered from hunger and disease. From 1915 outbreaks of typhus occurred in major cities, often found amongst the Jewish population. The German occupiers forcefully responded by fumigating houses, quarantining suspected cases, and forcing thousands of families into delousing facilities. These measures particularly targeted Jews as German medical officials identified them as the carriers and spreaders of the disease – some of them characterized typhus itself as a 'Jewish disease'. In an effort to prevent the spread of the disease to Germany and to protect the German Volkskörper, Polish Jews – for the fact that they were Jews – were from 1918 onwards barred from crossing the border and thousands of Jewish migrant workers in German industry were arrested and deported. The article examines both the political and the medical context in which these policies were employed and analyses Jewish responses to both the spreading of the disease and the German anti-Jewish policies. It shows the close connection between health policy and antisemitic and nationalist ideological narratives and projects, and identifies this racialization of disease as a key moment in the development of German antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Political Science Review / Przegląd Politologiczny is the property of Faculty of Political Science & Journalism, Adam Mickiewicz University 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.)

This article scrutinizes the trajectories of African men whose cross-border movements intersect two types of mobility routes: mining and migration routes. Drawing on field research in Mali and Guinea, as well as phone interviews with male miners/migrants in North Africa and Europe, this article provides a case to empirically question some of the premises in the approach to migration decision-making by giving a voice to African men moving across borders who do not necessarily identify as (prospective) ‘migrants.’ Building upon International Organization for Migration data and secondary sources, this article starts by sketching where migration and mining routes overlap. It then examines, in detail, the mobility trajectories of men who were sometimes considered migrants and other times miners in order to identify how these different routes relate to one another. While overseas migration is certainly not a common project for itinerant miners, the gold mines constitute a transnational space that fosters the expansion of movements across the continent, including outside the field of mining. Rather than encouraging overseas migration, gold mines appear to be more of a safety net, not only for seasonal farmers or young people in search of money and adventure, but also, increasingly, for people who are confronted with Europe’s intra-African deportation regime.

The article aims to conceptualize the relational dimension of the border regime and its function in reinforcing and reproducing global inequalities. It does so by analyzing the social connections that shaped my fieldwork on The Gambia's “backway,” the illegalized trip to Europe. In particular, the article focuses on what I define as moments of ethical entrapment that my main Gambian interlocutor and I faced while interacting with people in Serekunda. In interrogating those entrapments as simultaneously provoked by and exposing the border regime, the analysis highlights how borderwork and the potentiality of border violence constantly haunt social connections at/in/across borders. At the same time, the article looks at the emergence of such entrapments as a product of the shifting and ambiguous positionalities subjects hold in the different nodes of borders’ temporally and spatially scattered assemblages. I argue that the analysis of such social connections and ethical entrapments discloses the implications of doing anthropology of the border regime through the border regime itself. On the one hand, borders’ capacity to act on and through subjects—even beyond their conscious will—reinforce the principle of dissimilarity on which they rely and reproduce. On the other hand, the ethical entrapments emerging from the connections that the border regime creates between people illuminate its socially productive, counterintuitive, and fragmented dimensions, potentially opening space for what Povinelli defined as the otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time of the Covid-19 pandemic was particularly hard for the communities living in border areas, who are used to cross the border on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day. When borders were closed due to the pandemic, their lives changed dramatically. One of the communities particularly affected by the pandemic was the Slovene community in Croatia, namely its members living along the Slovene-Croatian border. The article aims to present the situation of this community during the pandemic, with a particular emphasis on the measures related to border crossing and the feeling of (dis)connectedness with the kin state. The data is drawn from a survey conducted in 2021 through 15 semi-structured interviews with active female members of the Slovene community in Croatia. The responses show that, instead of receiving assistance from the Republic of Slovenia, in a time of uncertainty and fear members of the Slovene minority experienced a closed border and numerous challenges. Due to the rapidly changing border crossing measures, they were unable to organise their lives properly and faced frustration and fear. The inability to cross the border, be it for medical and professional reasons (visiting doctors, regular employment) or private reasons (which are less relevant for survival, but still extremely important for private life: e.g. visiting parents and grandparents), made them feel insecure, frustrated and in doubt about their relationship with the Republic of Slovenia. All that brought them further away from their kin state, making them feel as second-class citiz ens in either one or the other country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the violent consequences of the post-2015 EU border regime for people from the Global South lingering through the Balkans. I intend to show that securing EU’s external borders through asylum and border management in Balkans is based on coercion and force, despite the efforts of the people on the move to transgress these borders and achieve decent lives. The efforts of people on the move to cross borders - which are officially closed for them - could be understood as force as well. Regardless of the legal status and ‘motives’ of displacement, people waiting and moving on the ‘Balkan route’ experience situations characterized by structural, direct, and cultural violence and respond to these situations in different ways. Pointing out to more or less hidden patterns of violence occurring at the EU’s external borders in the Balkans may challenge popular categorizations that at the same time oppress and protect people on the move. These patterns of violence are justified - but not justifiable - by the securitization of EU and national borders. By displacing violence as the so-called “push” factor from the countries of initial displacement (i.e. countries of the Global South), I aim to acknowledge that it continues to be perpetrated en route. Patterns of violence in the Balkans further produce forced mobilities and forced immobilities. People on the move cope with these forced (im)mobilities in different ways.

The events of November 23–26, 2018, in the Black Sea near the entrance to the Kerch Strait, resulted in Russia's detention of Ukrainian Navy ships and sailors. This crisis confronted the community of experts of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and third countries with a host of thorny questions. How legitimate were Russia's actions in terms of international law? Did it overstep its authority? Was there a planned provocation by Ukraine? Who bears the greater responsibility for the incident? What political and legal consequences could come out of it? The article explores answers to these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central aim of the paper is to analyze the ceasefire line in eastern Ukraine, widely referred to as the "Contact Line," as an evolving border and a potential social and political boundary. We conceptualize the ceasefire line both as a special type of border that divides conflicting parties and a formerly integrated population and as a border regime managing different forms of mobility. Our mixed method approach combines ethnographic and survey data. The analysis of the formal border regime regulating the access to the divided territories is broadened by a perspective that foregrounds the local residents' practices and perceptions. The article highlights different mobilities and the informal variations in the border practices along and across the ceasefire line as well as the social and political identities accompanying these practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis of statehood in many countries has resulted in the emergence of non-recognized states that have become an intrinsic feature of the world geopolitical order. Using the concept of bordering, we study a specific type of border that was shaped in the course of state-building processes and conflicts with parent states. Some "de-facto borders" are not stable; in addition, non-recognized states often do not control all their declared territory. Looking in detail at the situation in six nonrecognized republics in the post-Soviet space, we show the asymmetry of their borders with the parent state and with the external patron. Comparing the basic socio-economic indicators by regions, we conclude that non-recognized states still lag far behind both their parent and their patron state. Citizens of non-recognized republics regularly visit border areas of the patron and parent states and spend a considerable part of their income there. This can contribute to the normalization of relations between adversaries, but at the same time can perpetuate the separation between them. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the barrier functions of the borders with parent states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how states design their border infrastructures. We attempt to link the characteristics of borders to specific socio-political contexts, with a particular focus on borders as material and physical structures that states set up in order to demarcate, control, and seal off their territory. For this purpose, we introduce the "border infrastructure data" that seeks to capture the infrastructure at the border line. Our empirical investigation of all land borders worldwide (N=630) classifies border architecture into five categories - from relatively open to completely closed - that we describe respectively as "noman's-land" borders, landmark borders, checkpoint borders, barrier borders, and fortified borders. While we find that checkpoint borders are by far the most common type of design, we also observe that barriers and fortified borders are frequently used, particularly on the Asian and European continents. Fortified borders are often put in place by relatively affluent states when there is a significant wealth gap with their neighboring countries. Barrier borders typically are erected by states to separate different political systems. Landmark borders are maintained among a community of equally democratic and affluent states. Lastly, "no-man's-land" borders are found between poor states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Treaties & Documents / Razprave in Gradivo is the property of Institut za Narodnostna Vprasanja 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.)

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Historia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 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.)

Contemporary Saxon immigration statistics noted a vast “floating population” in the multilocal and transregional border society of Upper Lusatia but did not consider them immigrants. Indeed, agricultural and factory workers – the majority of them women – showed a high level of mobility, some of them even on a daily basis. On the one hand, national authorities on both sides of the border struggled to categorize and control these short-distance and temporary, but widespread mobilities. Customs checks, on the other hand, gave rise to a personalised border control. These checks not only targeted the small-scale mobility that was highly common in the border region, but also promoted the establishment of sedentariness and border regulations as the normal scenario in local society. But it was not until the late 19th century that there was migration control with cultural and racist undertones.

This article analyses practices of transnational care and the lives of male asylum seekers and refugee families in the context of increasingly restrictive border and migration regimes. Research on transnationalism, transnational families, and care among forced migrants has emphasised the importance of the institutional context in transnational care and family relations across borders. This article contributes to the extant literature by examining how bureaucratic bordering – within nation states and beyond – restricts the possibilities of refugees in providing care to their family members and reuniting. The article also examines the struggles experienced by male refugees at bureaucratic borders. These struggles reveal a central dimension to transnational care that relates to the bureaucracy of visas and residence permits. The article highlights the importance of temporality and examines how the lives of refugee families are affected by extended and bureaucratically induced waiting. The article is based on ethnographic research conducted on Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers in Finland in 2017–2019 and focuses on three asylum seekers in particular – namely, Amal, Sajed, and Yasin.

Against the background of our recent ethnographic research project on the European border regime in South-East Europe in 2016, the article calls for a re-visiting of established paradigms and approaches in border studies. The article assesses established theoretical conceptualisations of border studies, such as securitisation, externalisation, digitalisation, but also internal mobility regimes and humanitarian rationales. Focussing especially on the vast encampment within Europe, the inner-European buffer zoning, shifting legal foundations as well as new infrastructures of migration control, the authors argue for an extension of theoretical and methodological perspectives of border studies by drawing on insights from legal anthropology and camp and infrastructural studies.

In this article, I trace struggles regarding EU internal mobility and migrant labour as they emerge in the mobilization of South European migrants in Berlin. The effects of the 2007–2008 financial crisis and European austerity politics have reoriented migration flows within the EU, increasing South-to-North migration with Germany as a prime destination. German public discourse on the matter reveals a view on (EU) migration that focuses on its economic ‘usefulness’ and tries to regulate it accordingly. EU citizenship turns out to be a key instrument of such EU internal ‘migration management’. The emergence of migrant activist groups, however, hints at another force at play. In their fight for social rights and better working conditions, migrant activists show they will not allow themselves to be easily ‘managed’ into precarious ‘productivity’. Against this background, I argue that EU internal mobility is a field of struggle where attempts to control migrant labour clash with moments of autonomy and resistance. My aim is to explore this field from a migration perspective, analysing rationales of EU ‘migration management’ and their impact on migrants’ lives as well as investigating the strategies that migrants develop in response. Based on an analysis of EU legislation and interviews with Italian activists in Berlin, I trace conflicts around EU internal mobility and migrant labour. Against the background of critical migration studies, I analyse EU internal ‘migration management’, especially regarding the role of EU citizenship. Then, I look at EU migrant struggles in Berlin through the lens of autonomy of migration, drawing on the example of the Italian activist group Berlin Migrant Strikers.

Copyright of Journal of Family Research (JFR) is the property of University of Bamberg Press 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 high number of persons lost, missing, or dead without confirmation of decease in the Euro-Mediterranean in the context of migration and seek of asylum pose a challenge to the technical and conceptual tools available in order to account for their lives. This article explores the reach and possible uses of the category of enforced disappearance. The genealogy of enforced disappearance in Latin America in the 1970s is presented and discussed in terms of its legacies and teachings, like the importance of distinguishing disappearances from deaths. The recent incorporation of "disappearances in context of migration" as a matter of concern in explorative studies of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances is subsequently exposed and analyzed. Indirect, outsourced, or externalized state agency, creation of spaces of abandonment from the states, and emergence of spaces of indeterminacy between life and death are some of the aspects related to migratory routes to Europe tackled by the recommendations of the Working Group. Finally, the text explores the affinity between migrants' disappearances and other contemporary forms of exclusion or expulsion which may be subsumed under the category of "social disappearances." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Saxon immigration statistics noted a vast "floating population" in the multilocal and transregional border society of Upper Lusatia but did not consider them immigrants. Indeed, agricultural and factory workers - the majority of them women - showed a high level of mobility, some of them even on a daily basis. On the one hand, national authorities on both sides of the border struggled to categorize and control these short-distance and temporary, but widespread mobilities. Customs checks, on the other hand, gave rise to a personalised border control. These checks not only targeted the small-scale mobility that was highly common in the border region, but also promoted the establishment of sedentariness and border regulations as the normal scenario in local society. But it was not until the late 19th century that there was migration control with cultural and racist undertones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as a starting point studies on the biopolitics of bordering, as well as media studies, this article explores how information campaigns deter potential migrants and refugees from leaving their countries depict them in very specific ways, operating as 'new bordering practices' that are in conjunction with extraterritorial border policies. This article probes this question through the example of a specific information campaign – Aware Migrants (2016) – funded by the Italian Government and managed by International Organization for Migration (IOM) to dissuade potential newcomers from attempting the journey across the Mediterranean Sea. As the analysis of Aware Migrants makes clear, it contributes to normalizing a transnational imaginary into a militarized borderscape comprising places of violence and death, exploitation and detention, which is part of the complex dichotomies of care and control, proper of contemporary border regimes. Finally, the article sheds light on how these symbolic bordering practices contribute to nurturing a 'compassionate repression' that increasingly and silently legitimizes the difference between the 'us' (the figure of the citizen) and the 'them' (the figure of the foreigner). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the theoretical and political potentials of Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation and its approach to the issues of borders, migration, and the setup of political communities as proposed by his pensée nouvelle de la frontière (new border thought), against the background of the German migration crisis of 2015. The main argument of this article is that Glissant’s work offers an alternative epistemological and normative framework through which the contemporary political issues arising around the phenomenon of repressive border regimes can be studied. To demonstrate this point, this article works with Glissant’s border thought as an analytical lens and proposes a pathway for studying the contemporary German border regime. Particular emphasis is placed on the identification of potential areas where a Glissantian politics of relation could intervene with the goal of transforming borders from impermeable walls into points of passage. By exploring the political implications of his border thought, as well as the larger philosophical context from which it emerges, while using a transdisciplinary approach that borrows from literary and political studies, this work contributes to ongoing debates in postcolonial studies on borders and borderlessness, as well as Glissant’s political legacy in the twenty-first century.

Automatic identification system (AIS) is a vessel tracking system, which since 2004 has become a global tool for the detection and analysis of seagoing traffic. In this article, we look at how this technology, initially designed as a collision avoidance system, has recently become involved in debates concerning migration across the Mediterranean Sea. In particular, after having briefly discussed its emergence and characteristics, we examine how through different practices of (re)appropriation AIS, and the data it generate, have been seized upon, both to contest and to sustain the exclusionary nature of borders, and the mass dying of migrants at sea to which it leads. We do so by referring to forms of data activism we have contributed to in the frame of our Forensic Oceanography project as well as to situations in which AIS has been mobilized by xenophobic groups to demand even stronger exclusionary measures. At the same time, we point to the multiplicity of actors who participate in the politics of migration through AIS in unexpected ways. We conclude by highlighting the irreducible ambivalence of practices of appropriation and call for persistent attention to one's own positioning within the global datascape constituted by AIS and other data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the Strait of Gibraltar has been a crossroads between Africa and Europe. Since the 1980s, however, it has increasingly become a "zone of illegality" (Hannoum 2020) where racial governmentality produces illicit lives and creates an apartheid-like hierarchy of humanity. By exploring how colonial legacies and EU policies play out in the Strait of Gibraltar, I show how categories of difference are made and remade across time and space. Through a genealogical and ethnographic approach, I study the historically produced particularities that make racialised "Others" emerge and explore how human differences are created in terms of race, gender, and class. Migrants are historical actors that shape and are shaped by the social fabric of a border region. I thus argue that categories of difference are not fixed entities, but instead they are simultaneously reworked, reinforced, contested, and subverted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]