Viapolitics

Viapolitics
Author: William Walters
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478021594

Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are fundamental to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of viapolitics to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, Viapolitics interrogates anew the phenomenon called “migration,” questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested. Contributors. Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters

Mediated Bordering

Mediated Bordering
Author: Sabrina Ellebrecht
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3839447534

The external border of the EU remains under permanent construction. Sabrina Ellebrecht engages with two of its primary building sites - the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) and the Refugee Boat. She analyzes how the function and quality of the EU's current political border is crafted, shaped, produced and eventually stabilized through these two mediators. Eurosur and the Refugee Boat mediate a level of Europeanization which has hitherto - and would otherwise have - been impossible. While Eurosur mobilizes the limits of border policing in various ways, the Refugee Boat functions as the vacillating European Other to legitimize both control and humanitarian interventions. The study shows the specific, if not constitutive, ambivalences of EU border policies, and explores the emergence of viapolitics.

The Digital Empowerment-Control Nexus

The Digital Empowerment-Control Nexus
Author: Mihaela Nedelcu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2024-11-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040223168

This book analyses the diverse and complex interactions between the emancipatory practices of precarious (i.e. forced, vulnerable, undocumented or deported) migrants enabled by information and communication technologies, and the constraints imposed by technological tools used for surveillance and migration control. It explores the digital empowerment-control nexus by articulating the use of digital technologies - whether by migrants themselves, civil society actors or institutions - with their mediating role in the processes of empowerment, surveillance and migration control. Based on original empirical studies, the chapters bring contrasting and complementary insights into the use of digital technologies as agentic and/or surveillance tools in different national and supranational contexts (Turkey, Mexico, the United States, Switzerland, France, Romania, Greece and the European Union) and from different disciplinary perspectives (anthropology, sociology, geography, media studies, law and deportation studies). Using different theoretical lenses, they demonstrate the varying degrees of (dis)entanglement between individual and institutional practices, at micro and macro levels. Helping readers to understand the ambivalent role of digital technologies in (forced) migration processes, The Digital Empowerment-Control Nexus can be used as a resource by students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers interested in digitally mediated migration practices and migration regimes. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Foucault and the History of Our Present

Foucault and the History of Our Present
Author: S. Fuggle
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1137385928

According to Michel Foucault, the 'history of the present' should constitute the starting point for any enquiry into the past. This collection considers the continued relevance of Foucault's work for thinking the history of our present and includes essays and interviews by Judith Butler, Judith Revel, Mark Neocleous, and Tiziana Terranova.

Borders as Infrastructure

Borders as Infrastructure
Author: Huub Dijstelbloem
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262542889

An investigation of borders as moving entities that influence our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. In Borders as Infrastructure, Huub Dijstelbloem brings science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology, to the study of borders and international human mobility. Taking Europe's borders as a point of departure, he shows how borders can transform and multiply and and how they can mark conflicts over international orders. Borders themselves are moving entities, he claims, and with them travel our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. The philosophies of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk provide a framework for Dijstelbloem's discussion of the material and morphological nature of borders and border politics. Dijstelbloem offers detailed empirical investigations that focus on the so-called migrant crisis of 2014-2016 on the Greek Aegean Islands of Chios and Lesbos; the Europe surveillance system Eurosur; border patrols at sea; the rise of hotspots and "humanitarian borders"; the technopolitics of border control at Schiphol International Airport; and the countersurveillance by NGOs, activists, and artists who investigate infrastructural border violence. Throughout, Dijstelbloem explores technologies used in border control, including cameras, databases, fingerprinting, visual representations, fences, walls, and monitoring instruments. Borders can turn places, routes, and territories into "zones of death." Dijstelbloem concludes that Europe's current relationship with borders renders borders--and Europe itself--an "extreme infrastructure" obsessed with boundaries and limits.

Tracing Asylum Journeys

Tracing Asylum Journeys
Author: Ugur Yildiz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2019-09-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429775571

This book explores the asylum journey of non-European asylum applicants who seek asylum in Turkey before resettling in Canada with the aid of the Canadian government’s assisted resettlement programme. Based on ethnographic research among Syrian, Afghan, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Iranian, Somali, Sudanese and Congolese nationals it considers the interactions of asylum seekers with both UNHCR’s refugee status determination and Canada’s refugee resettlement programme. With attention to the practices of migrants, the author shows how the asylum journey contains both mobility and stasis and constitutes a micro-political image of the fluidity and relativity of attributed identities and labels on the part of state migration systems. A multi-sited ethnography that shows how the migration journey is linked to the production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the diffusion of produced knowledge among past, present, and future asylum seekers who form trans-local social networks in the course of their route, in Turkey, and in Canada. Tracing Asylum Journeys will appeal to sociologists and political scientists with interests in migration and transnational studies, and refugee and asylum settlement.

Border Transgression

Border Transgression
Author: Eva Youkhana
Publisher: V&R Unipress
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3847007238

This volume addresses processes of human mobility in times of crisis from different scientific perspectives and at a global and trans-regional level. The first part sets out to discuss established paradigms in migration studies and politics in order to suggest new approaches to analyse mobility, migration and to challenge boundary making approaches. The second part presents empirical cases from Latin America and Spain to demonstrate how migrants challenge, negotiate and mobilize citizenship and belonging. The third part deals with the question how belonging is produced and identity is constructed at a transnational level. New information and communication technologies, human mobility but also the mobility of concepts, ideas and values foster these collectivization processes across and within physical and symbolic borders.

Border abolitionism

Border abolitionism
Author: Martina Tazzioli
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526160927

Building on an abolitionist perspective, this book offers an essential critique of migration and border policies, unsettling the distinction between migrants and citizens. This is the only book that brings together carceral abolitionist debates and critical migration literature. It explores the multiplication of modes of migration confinement and detention in Europe, examining how these are justified in the name of migrants’ protection. It argues that the collective memory of past struggles has partly informed current solidarity movements in support of migrants. A grounded critique of migration policies involves challenging the idea that migrants’ rights go to the detriment of citizens. An abolitionist approach to borders entails situating the right to mobility as part of struggle for the commons.

State Secrecy and Security

State Secrecy and Security
Author: William Walters
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-05-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351977644

In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly.