Between Asylum and Security: Reconfigurations in the EU/Turkish borders capes

The chapter has the dual ambition of offering comprehensive insight into the EU-Turkish border interactions while at the same time critically assessing the merit and limitations of different analytics of border control. I shall here understand the general concept of ‘analytics’ to denote methods designed to separate an object of inquiry into component parts or constituent elements, making possible meaningful propositions about it. Developing an alternative analytics of border control is therefore crucial for a nuanced inquiry into the Turkish borderscapes. The chapter is structured in the following manner: First, a politically salient border control analytics is introduced, but is argued to suffer from severe ontological, epistemological and methodological shortcomings, making it ill-equipped to understand the phenomenon of border control. An alternative analytic, namely that of borderscapes, is therefore introduced, which take into account the dynamic, transnational and multidimensional facets of borders. Then, through the concept of externalization, it is shown how the Turkish border system is integrated into the larger functionality of the European mobility regime, where ‘regime’ means a system regulated according to a certain rationale. The chapter then focus on the EU/Turkish membership negotiations, detailing how processes of issue-linkage and ripple effects concerning the Turkish reluctance to lifting its geographical limitation to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the prolonged process of agreeing on a EU-Turkey readmission agreement have led to both roadblocks and reconfigurations. In its final part, the chapter traces some of the infrastructural changes occurring in the Turkish borderscapes, and asks in which ways these rely on politics of acceleration and time compression, and the kinds of changes this facilitate in the Turkish border system.