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(As) Conflict: Reflections on the European Border Regime www.ssoar.info Under control?: or border (as) conflict; reflections on the European border regime Kasparek, Bernd; Hess, Sabine Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Kasparek, B., & Hess, S. (2017). Under control?: or border (as) conflict; reflections on the European border regime. Social Inclusion, 5(3), 58-68. https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v5i3.1004 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zur This document is made available under a CC BY Licence Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden (Attribution). For more Information see: Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de Social Inclusion (ISSN: 2183–2803) 2017, Volume 5, Issue 3, Pages 58–68 DOI: 10.17645/si.v5i3.1004 Article Under Control? Or Border (as) Conflict: Reflections on the European Border Regime Sabine Hess 1,* and Bernd Kasparek 2 1 Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, University of Göttingen, 37073 Göttingen, Germany; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 bordermonitoring.eu, 81671 Munich, Germany; E-Mail: [email protected] * Corresponding author Submitted: 30 April 2017 | Accepted: 10 August 2017 | Published: 19 September 2017 Abstract The migrations of 2015 have led to a temporary destabilization of the European border and migration regime. In this con- tribution, we trace the process of destabilization to its various origins, which we locate around the year 2011, and offer a preliminary assessment of the attempts at re-stabilization. We employ the notion of “border (as) conflict” to emphasize that crisis and exception lies at the very core of the European border and migration regime and its four main dimensions of externalization, techno-scientific borders, an internal mobility regime for asylum seekers, and humanitarization. Keywords asylum; border conflict; borders; externalization; humanitarianism; migration; smart borders Issue This article is part of the issue “Perspectives on the European Border Regime: Mobilization, Contestation, and the Role of Civil Society”, edited by Ove Sutter and Eva Youkhana (University of Bonn, Germany). © 2017 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1. Disputed Borders that despite the purported stability of the nation-state system, the issue of bordering, of ordering territory, is In one of the most bizarre turns of the ongoing Brexit ne- still fraught with fragility and contention. gotiations, the British Overseas Territory Gibraltar and its These Westphalian border disputes, which William future status has become a bone of contention. The Span- Walters (2002) described in his seminal work “the de- ish government is using the Brexit process to renew its naturalization of the border” as typical aspects of the “ge- claim to the 6.7-square kilometer territory, and indeed ographical border,” are characterized by a high degree of the dispute heated up quickly, with alleged violations of symmetry, usually with two nation-state entities facing territorial waters by the Spanish Navy (MacAskill & Jones, off over disputed territory. In this article, however, we 2017), analogies to the Falklands War (Asthana, 2017), want to focus on a different challenge to borders, namely and (deliberate) chaos at the border crossings (Agence that posed by the movements of migration. This chal- France-Presse, 2017). Similarly, the issue of Northern Ire- lenge is inherently different in character. For one, the land and the possible re-imposition of a “hard border”1 asymmetry and number of actors could not be starker. towards the Republic of Ireland in the wake of the Brexit For the other, the center of the challenge is not posses- is troubling the EU. These territorial disputes remind us sion or control over bounded territory, but rather access 1 The term “hard border” has been used by various newspaper and media outlets to refer to the probable future configuration of the Irish–UK border, e.g. O’Hagan (2017) in The Guardian, or Anonymous (2017) in The Telegraph. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus (n.d.) defines a hard border as “a border between countries that is strongly controlled and protected by officials, police, or soldiers, rather than one where people are allowed to pass through easily with few controls.” Whether there is a co-semantic with the term “hard Brexit” can only be speculated, but the choice of the term certainly points to the normality of invisible borders in the EU context, even if both the Republic of Ireland and the UK are not part of the Schengen Area. Social Inclusion, 2017, Volume 5, Issue 3, Pages 58–68 58 to territory—it is the “biopolitical border” that is at stake ducing geographically stretched border spaces described here (Walters, 2002). The issue at core is not the border- as “border zones,” “borderlands,” or “borderscapes.” At ing of territory, but the ordering of populations, and their the same time, these concepts include the idea of mo- different hierarchical positioning. To this end, the border bile, fluid, selective, and differentiated border situations. disputes of contemporary migration are already an indi- In this context, Balibar argues in favor of describing bor- cator of a post-Westphalian global order.2 ders as “overdetermined, polysemic (that is to say that However, both phenomena share the fragility, the borders never exist in the same way for individuals be- instability, the constant need of re-production of the longing to different social groups) and heterogeneous” border through patches, “quick fixes” (Sciortino, 2004) (cited in Salter, 2011, p. 67). There is thus also talk of and border work on a daily basis. This has become bla- “mobile borders” (Kuster & Tsianos, 2013, p. 3) or “net- tantly obvious through the “long Summer of Migration” worked borders” (Rumford, 2006, p. 153; Walters, 2004). of 2015 (Kasparek & Speer, 2015), and the temporary col- This shift not only induced a geographical refocus- lapse of the European border regime and its fragile re- ing away from the level of the (nation) state, but also a stabilization since. The classical description of the events methodological reorientation with a focus on bordering of the 2015 and 2016 as a “refugee crisis” is mislead- processes and practices, on doing border, “rather than ing in several respects. For one, it was at its very core [on] the border per se” (Newman, 2006, p. 144; van Hou- a crisis of the border regime, while for the other, its as- tum & van Naerssen, 2002, p. 126). The border is now be- sumed temporality—the crisis as a strictly limited period ing conceptualized as an effect of a multiplicity of agents of time with a beginning and an end leading to a phase and practices, as becomes clear in the concept of “bor- of stabilization—is not empirically tenable.3 der work” (Rumford, 2008). The concept of border work In contrast, we argue that the border, and especially in particular draws attention to the everyday microprac- the European border regime, is structurally ridden by mo- tices of a wide range of actors. Following this perspec- ments of crisis as its order is constantly contested by the tive, “to border” is to be understood as a performative movements of migration, and that this contested and in- act. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, herently unstable relationship between the border and Marc Salter points to the fact that also “sovereignty, like migration has to be put into the center of any analysis of gender, has no essence, and must continually be articu- contemporary border theory. In order to underline this lated and rearticulated in terms of ‘stylized repetition of perspective, we will approach both the period before the acts’ of sovereignty” (Salter, 2011, p. 66). summer 2015 as well as its aftermath from the notion of All these recent practice-oriented conceptualizations border conflict, i.e., through a perspective on the past indeed understand the border as an effect of a multi- and present struggles and contestations in the context tude of actors and practices—human and non-human of migration control at the borders of Europe. To this alike. However, many of these constructivist approaches end, we want to analyze in this article: a) which processes still ignore the constitutive power of migration, or once and dynamics led to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015; again conceptualize migrants as structurally powerless and b) the multidimensional, hybrid, and at times contra- and as ‘victims.’ The dominant focus of border studies, dictory re-stabilization attempts that demonstrate that especially those following the classical securitization ap- the crisis of the border regime is not solved by draw- proach looking at the function of the border as a barrier ing on our recent research project in the Aegean region or filter—to exclude people—also seem mostly to lead to and along the Balkan route.4 Even though the scope of an epistemological exclusion of the agency of migrants. this article prevents us from presenting our ethnographic By contrast, in their recently published volume Bor- material in more detail, we nevertheless find the ethno- der as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson graphic approach, meaning observing dynamics in situ (2013) define borders as “social institutions, which are and in actu, indispensable
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