Effective Protection or Effective Combat: EU border control and North Africa

Martin Lemberg-Pedersen

    Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport/konference proceedingBidrag til bog/antologiForskningpeer review

    Abstract

    At the outset I introduce a dominant mode of analysing border
    control, common in public discourses, namely the closed system perspective.
    This is then juxtaposed to what I claim is a more promising conceptual
    framework, namely that of borderscapes, which serves to highlight the
    dynamic, relational and multilocal character of European border control.
    This is then elaborated via a critical gaze at several attempts to defi ne
    how European states have attempted to externalize migration control to
    other countries in terms of supranational policy drives, ripple and mimicry
    effects. This then facilitates a more nuanced understanding of externalization.
    Since border control reterritorializes geographic spaces according
    to the mobility of the people through them, it follows that the EU’s
    border control, and with it also aspects of the union’s asylum policy, have
    both biopolitical and geopolitical implications. Accordingly, the chapter
    invokes the works of Foucault and Agamben in an attempt to identify
    the political economy underpinning the EU’s mobility regime of free and
    forced fl ows. This perspective also allows for useful spatial interpretations
    of the relations between cartographic representation of the phenomenon of migration and the sovereign power involved in producing knowledge
    about migration and border control.
    By analysing the European efforts to reconstruct its borderscapes
    through the externalization of detention camps to Libya, I argue that
    focusing only on sovereign power and the production of free circulation
    for some, and forced fl ows of others, risk bypassing other political, technocratic
    and public–private dynamics. The chapter focuses in particular on
    the intergovernmental and supranational negotiations of a Northwestern
    Triade of EU states, namely the Netherlands, the UK and Denmark,
    alongside Germany and Italy, which facilitated the rise of Libya as a host
    state for preemptive European control of asylum seekers. These dynamics
    are crucial when seeking a comprehensive understanding of how the
    EurAfrican dynamics of border control are characterized by the export of
    control to regions like Libya or Egypt. This, in turn, has prompted two
    parallel developments reinforcing one another: On the one hand, it has
    led to the closure of legal escape routes from Africa and the Middle East,
    which in turn has created the unprecedented rise of a smuggling industry
    operating often fatal alternative routes. On the other hand, European
    border control and its ‘combat against smugglers’ has emerged as a massively
    lucrative market for the European arms industry, both in terms of
    contracts to guard the EU’s external borders and in terms of the export of
    weapons and control systems to North African states. Finally, the chapter suggests that while many forced migration researchers
    have tended to view border control as a reaction to the movement of
    already-displaced people, externalization is in fact a cause of transnational
    displacement and forced migration in itself. I label this specifi c kind of
    forced migration brought about by EU border control ‘border- induced
    displacement’, since this allow us to appraise both the functionality of the
    EurAfrican border regime and the humanitarian consequences characterizing
    this kind of displacement. Perhaps we can then provide some tentative
    answers to those asking how the tragedy at Lampedusa could have
    happened.
    OriginalsprogEngelsk
    TitelEurAfrican Borders and Migration Management : Political Cultures, Contested Spaces and Ordinary Lives
    RedaktørerPaolo Gaibazzi, Stephan Dünnwald, Alice Bellagamba
    Antal sider35
    ForlagPalgrave Macmillan
    Publikationsdato1 nov. 2016
    Sider29-60
    ISBN (Trykt)9781349949724
    DOI
    StatusUdgivet - 1 nov. 2016
    NavnPalgrave Series in African Borderlands Studies

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