NEW BORDERS: migration, hotspots and the european superstate 9780745338460, 0745338461

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New Borders

Radical Geography Series Editors: Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber and Jenny Pickerill Former editor: Kate Derickson Also available: Unlocking Sustainable Cities A Manifesto for Real Change Paul Chatterton In Their Place The Imagined Geographies of Poverty Stephen Crossley Making Workers Radical Geographies of Education Katharyne Mitchell Space Invaders Radical Geographies of Protest Paul Routledge

New Borders Hotspots and the European Migration Regime

Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi

First published 2019 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi 2019 The right of Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 3846 0 978 0 7453 3845 3 978 1 7868 0369 6 978 1 7868 0371 9 978 1 7868 0370 2

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Contents

List of Figuresvi Acknowledgementsvii Series Prefaceviii Prefaceix Glossaryxi Introduction1 1 The Where and When of Migration

12

2 Refuge, Rules and Rights

25

3 Governing Mobility

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4 The Camps

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5 The Sea Is On Fire

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Notes109 Index116

Figures

0.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1

Map of the Mediterranean Map of the Aegean Sea Mural based on a photograph of Alan Kurdi Map of the Schengen Area Number of refugees and asylum-seekers in the countries of the European Economic Area in 2018 A ferry leaving Mytilene Map of Lesbos Migrants queuing Daily life in the camp World borders

2 17 21 39 42 45 65 68 74 92

Acknowledgements

This book is an outcome of Transcapes, a collective research project funded under the ESRC and DFID Mediterranean Migration Research Programme (project reference no. ES/N013700/1). The project was hosted by Durham University and Loughborough University. We would like to thank our good friends and colleagues on Lesbos, without which our research would not have been possible. We thank Elena Katseniou for her help with the field research and Christy Petropoulou for kindly hosting the project at the University of the Aegean’s Urban Geography and Planning Laboratory. We would also like to thank Chris Orton for his cartographic work. All photographs are our own, except where noted.

Series Preface

The Radical Geography series consists of accessible books which use geographical perspectives to understand issues of social and political concern. These short books include critiques of existing government policies and alternatives to staid ways of thinking about our societies. They feature stories of radical social and political activism, guides to achieving change, and arguments about why we need to think differently on many contemporary issues if we are to live better together on this planet. A geographical perspective involves seeing the connections within and between places, as well as considering the role of space and scale to develop a new and better understanding of current problems. Written largely by academic geographers, books in the series deliberately target issues of political, environmental and social concern. The series showcases clear explications of geographical approaches to social problems, and it has a particular interest in action currently being undertaken to achieve positive change that is radical, achievable, real and relevant. The target audience ranges from undergraduates to experienced scholars, as well as from activists to conventional policy-makers, but these books are also for people interested in the world who do not already have a radical outlook and who want to be engaged and informed by a short, well written and thought-provoking book. Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber and Jenny Pickerill Series Editors

Preface

New Borders presents results from our two-year-long research project on Lesbos, conducted in the midst of the migration crisis by our collective, Transcapes. We are a team spanning human geography, urban studies, anthropology, social policy and sociology. We believe that the questions posed by the current transformation of Europe – under the pretext of managing the current migration crisis – cut across disciplinary lines and surpass the academic realm itself. We want our book to reflect this, which is also why we have opted to write for a general audience that is concerned and critical. From applying for the grant that helped all this happen to day-to-dayadministration, fieldwork, writing up and presenting our findings, all aspects of our project were run collectively. Transcapes is the result of team labour and decision-making. We achieved this by assigning roles to team members, who were then transparent about their progress to the rest of the team: rotating tasks, sharing all data and notes among us; collectively thinking about and writing up our findings, reflecting our experiences on the ground. This was a conscious choice that reflects our broader politics. Our aim was to go beyond academic and hierarchical ways of conducting research. We wanted to create – particularly for the more junior members of our team – the conditions for learning and contributing in an equal way: from presenting our key findings to funders to representing the team in conferences, and even in the way that we listed our team in the application grant that made all this possible to begin with. At each step of the process, we tried to break with the academic hierarchy and create a more inclusive and just research space for ourselves. Ultimately, for all of us in the collective, Transcapes has been more than a research project. It is an experiment grounded in prior experiences of collective action that go as far back as the G8 and EU summit protest movements of a decade or two ago. As individuals we came together to research the politics of the EU’s hotspot approach, motivated by our political understandings of migration struggles and the inherent violence and injustice of borders. But at the same time, doing Transcapes

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meant setting some basic parameters about both the knowledge we wanted to produce and the way in which we wanted to produce it, engaging with prior academic work on migration. This included making specific choices about the language we use, who we speak to and what processes we choose to analyse. We have often been asked about our collective work model. Sadly, the state of atomisation and individualisation in academia (and to be fair, most if not all professional circles in the global West today) means that even in the most radical and critical quarters, genuine attempts to break through individual barriers are seen as something of a novelty, a slightly odd way of going about things. ‘How do you share your data?’ we are asked. ‘What happens with credit?’ And of course, ‘Who leads in your decision-making?’ We are not claiming to have found a perfect formula, neither a clean slate away from tried-and-tested models in collective decision-making and work. And it wasn’t always easy – tensions are an inevitable, but a valuable part of the learning curve. But in all honesty, we couldn’t quite see another way of going about this. Put simply, the ramifications of the management of the migration crisis by the powers that be are sure to affect all of us in ways that we might for the time being not be able to fully understand, or even imagine. And so it seemed apt, necessary even, to apply and combine our collective knowledge, our experience and our skills to grapple with what was coming our way. New borders, after all, new barriers drawn, mean we will find unexpected and previously distant allies standing next to us as they or we join the armies of the excluded. To practice collective decision-making and acting, to learn how to work alongside one another despite, through and thanks to our differences is most probably one of the most valuable things that we discovered in this project.

Glossary

CEAS (Common European Asylum System). A set of EU laws completed in 2005, setting out minimum standards and procedures for processing and deciding asylum applications, and for the treatment of asylum-seekers and those recognised as refugees. Dublin III Regulation. An EU law approved in 2013 that determines the member state responsible for examining an application for asylum-seekers seeking international protection under the Geneva Convention. EASO (European Asylum Support Office). An institution formed in 2011 to strengthen the cooperation of EU member states on asylum, enhance the implementation of the CEAS, and support member states under particular pressure. EBCG (European Border and Coast Guard Agency), also known as Frontex. An EU agency headquartered in Warsaw, Poland, and tasked with border control of the Schengen Area in coordination with the border and coast guards of Schengen Area member states. EC (European Commission). The EU institution responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding EU treaties and managing day-to-day EU business. ECJ (European Court of Justice). The supreme court of the European Union in matters of EU law. EEA (European Economic Area). The area that came into existence in 1994 following the signing of the Agreement on the EEA. This agreement allows for the free movement of persons, goods, services and capital within the European Single Market. The agreement also includes the freedom to choose residence in any country within the EEA. In 2016, the EEA comprised 31 states: the 28 EU member states, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. EEC (European Economic Community). The EEC was the regional organisation that preceded the EU. Founded by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, it was aimed at the economic integration of its member states. EU (European Union). The EU is a political and economic union of 28 member states that are located primarily in Europe. It has an area of

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about 4.5 million square kilometres and an estimated population of over 510 million. Eurodac (European Dactyloscopy). The EU fingerprint database for identifying asylum-seekers and irregular border-crossers. The database is the first of its kind in the EU, active since 2003. Eurojust. An EU agency dealing with judicial cooperation in criminal matters among agencies of the member states. Europol (EU Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, formerly the European Police Office and Europol Drugs Unit). The law enforcement agency of the EU, formed in 1998. EU–Turkey Statement. The EU–Turkey Statement was reached on 18 March 2016 and implemented two days later. It was intended to limit the mass influx of migrants entering the EU through Turkey. Key aspects of the deal were the return to Turkey of all migrants found to have entered the EU through Turkey illicitly. The EU agreed to resettle, on a one-for-one basis, Syrians living in Turkey who had qualified for asylum and resettlement within the EU. The EU further incentivised Turkey with a promise of lessening visa restrictions for Turkish citizens wishing to travel to the EU and by offering the Turkish government a payment of roughly €6 billion. Frontex. See EBCG, above. GAMM (EU Global Approach to Migration and Mobility). Adopted in 2005, GAMM was designed to address all relevant aspects of migration in a balanced and comprehensive way in partnership with non-EU countries. GCR (Greek Council for Refugees). An NGO active since 1989 in the field of asylum and human rights in Greece. IOM (International Organization for Migration). Intergovernmental organisation providing services and advice concerning migration to governments and migrants, including internally displaced persons and migrant workers. IRO (International Refugee Organization). IRO was an intergovernmental organisation founded on 20 April 1946 to deal with the massive refugee problem created by the Second World War. In 1952, IRO operations ceased and it was replaced by the UNHCR. MSF (Médecins sans Frontières). Also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, MSF is an international humanitarian medical NGO of French origin, founded in 1971 and best known for its projects in conflict zones and in countries affected by endemic diseases.

glossary  .  xiii

Schengen Agreement. The treaty which led to the creation of Europe’s Schengen Area, in which internal border checks have largely been abolished. Initially signed on 14 June 1985 by five of the ten member states of the then European Economic Community, it now includes 26 European countries, covering a population of over 400 million people. STC (Safe Third Country). The EC defines an STC as a country that treats a person seeking international protection in accordance with five key principles: safeguarding their life and liberty; protection from harm; respect of the non-refoulement principle; protection from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the possibility of requesting refugee status and receiving protection in accordance with the Geneva Refugee Convention and Protocol, if this person is found to be a refugee. UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The UDHR is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the UDHR was ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected. UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees). Formed in 1950, UNHCR is a United Nations programme with the mandate to protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people, and assist in their voluntary repatriation to, local integration or resettlement in a third country. UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). Founded in 1943, UNRRA was an international relief agency, mostly dominated by the United States but representing 44 nations. It largely shut down operations in 1947.

Introduction

For thousands of years people have criss-crossed the Mediterranean Sea. Merchants, explorers, adventurers, invading armies, pilgrims, empire-builders, exiles, fugitives, missionaries, stowaways and fortuneseekers have all trekked to its shores and launched themselves from them in vessels of every imaginable form. Far from dividing Europe from Africa and Asia, the Mediterranean has above all connected them. For the great French historian Fernand Braudel, the Mediterranean and its surrounding plains, mountains and deserts, though often the arena and object of political rivalries, formed an economic, cultural and environmental ensemble – an integrated, if diverse, geographical space. While Braudel’s greater Mediterranean stretched from the Atlantic to the Sahara, it can also be an intimate space. From the northern shore of the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea, the Turkish coast appears on a sunny summer’s day to be no more than a short swim away – or a leisurely day trip on a pleasure boat for holiday makers Athenians. Yet in the space of a few months this narrow stretch of water became one of the most hotly contested political spaces in recent European history and the focus of unprecedented shifts in law, governance and international relations. With the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, an international boundary was formed between Anatolia and the Aegean Islands, including Lesbos, Chios and Samos. When we were out in Lesbos, many of the people we spoke to would tell us they were refugees ‘themselves’: the drawing of the boundary after the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) still remains painful for many of the Greeks who were forced to leave the Anatolian shore, and vice-versa. Today the boundary itself remains where it has been since, so in what sense can we speak of the emergence of ‘new borders’? The answer lies in the distinction between a boundary – the line on the map and its corresponding coordinates on the land or in the sea – and a border, a political and administrative technology used to manage, regulate and police entry to and exit from the territory enclosed by the boundary. What is ‘new’ about ‘new borders’ is not the number or location of boundaries, but their political signifi-

0

TUNISIA

kilometres 250

N

Trapani

LIBYA

Lampedusa

ITALY

ALBANIA

GREECE

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MACEDONIA

KOSOVO

iter

an S ea

BULGARIA

Lesbos Samos Leros Kos

Chios

ROMANIA

rane

Figure 0.1  The Mediterranean.

Pozzallo

Messina

Taranto

SERBIA

MONTENEGRO

BOSNIA & HERCEGOVINA

TURKEY

EU migration hotspots

EU Schengen countries

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introduction  .  3

cance, cultural meaning and economic and social impact. Far from the borderless world imagined by the enthusiastic proselytisers of globalisation in the 1990s, the world of the twenty-first century appears marked by bordering practices of ever-growing intensity, iniquity and violence. In the European Union (EU), foremost among these new bordering practices is the ‘hotspot’. The hotspot approach appeared as an emergency response to the rapid rise in irregular boundary-crossing in the Mediterranean in 2015. The hotspot approach is partly an idea, partly a combination of novel administrative and legal practices and partly a set of physical infrastructures located close to, but not on, the EU’s external Mediterranean boundaries. As an idea, the hotspot approach signals an intention on the part of EU policymakers to intervene directly and decisively in Mediterranean migration flows in order to gain ‘control’, accelerate decision-making, alleviate pressure on receiving areas and deter further irregular migration. As a novel combination of administrative and legal practices, the hotspot approach seeks to coordinate the work of several EU agencies with international bodies and national authorities to provide for a more streamlined (and Europeanised) system for processing and sorting arriving migrants and dealing with their claims for refugee status. As a set of physical infrastructures, hotspots provide accommodation and services for (some) migrants in designated camps, where they are concentrated for processing, alongside offices of the various agencies involved in processing arrivals. While hotspots as both idea and infrastructure are not the only form of ‘new border’, they crystallise many of the key trends in the reordering of European border politics. This book aims to examine how and why the hotspot approach arose, how it operates, how it differs from earlier forms of borders, and what impacts it has had on the lives of those who pass through or around it. This is not a book about migration. It is a book about what the pretext of a migration threat does to our freedom and sense of belonging. From Brexit to Trump and the rise of the European far-right we are living through a moment, it feels, when isolationism, nationalism and the ensuing ‘end of globalisation’ are firmly in sight. This is a book about the ways in which this xenophobic and seemingly introverted turn fuels another form of globalisation that is now swiftly embedding itself in our everyday spaces. It is also a book showing how this force can be lethal in its discretion, showing how this apparent crisis is both the culmination

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and an all-new chapter in a long history of the violent forced movement of people by the powers that be. From wall-erecting to terrorist scaremongering, migration has become Europe’s political focus of blame par excellence. The ‘hotspot approach’ is the European Commission’s response to this crisis: a tool that allows the authorities to declare whole regions, or even entire nation-states, under emergency. For the first time, all relevant EU agencies have been brought together in crisis territories and handed unprecedented powers. We examine Lesbos, an island in the north-east Aegean, that came under the global media and political spotlight as over 1 million people – more than ten times the island’s population – landed and crossed its territory, changing its everyday life in unimaginable ways. We trace the dismantling of local communities and their reformulation into entrenched opponents as supra-national law and enforcement kicks in and takes over. We watch in horror as reception becomes detention, as rescue becomes registration, as refuge becomes duress. This book uses migration as a vocabulary to talk about the human condition in Europe today. In doing so we have opted not to focus on the plight of the thousands of people trying to cross borders into the continent – this is by far the most tragic, but also the most extensively covered part of the story. Instead, we trace the unprecedented and unreported, meticulous and eerily discreet stifling of EU borders in response. As with the financial crisis, these developments have been treated as akin to a natural disaster – all responses seem to start off with the discursive equivalent of an awkward shrug: It happened, such is life, so let’s get on with it and let’s see what can be done right now, at a historical moment oblivious to collective consciousness or any sense of the past, a moment incapable of forward-thinking imagination. In this suspended moment, the urgent becomes the means by which to conduct politics – not an exception in the face of urgency, but a definite and definitive way of acting upon the world. And from within this urgency rabble, the EU’s new migration and border management agenda comes to silently but solidly set a new, firm ground. This is not a book about borders. It is a book about what a border, under the convenient invocation of an emergency, does to the territory that it encloses. It is a book that warns what the unprecedented grounding of EU legislation and executive force means not only for those trying to cross a border but also for those living within its confines. EU executive power is grounding itself with a thump, disrupting our common-place

introduction  .  5

sense of freedom and belonging, and demanding a collective response from all of us who are now under its sway. At a time when Europe’s media and politicians obsess over the migration crisis as an ostensibly outside threat, this book shows it is Europe itself that is dramatically changing. Under the pretext of the crisis, whole swaths of EU territory (islands and regions for now, but potentially anything up to entire member states and the EU itself) have openly come under the direct control of supra-national EU military, policy and judicial agencies, while welfare functions have been taken on by international NGOs – dramatically changing the way in which local and arriving populations are governed. Our research team was on the ground in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, and in the Greek capital, Athens, between September 2015 and August 2016. We ask: What does the management of the migrant crisis tell us about the future of Europe? New Borders is the result of a collective ethnographic project undertaken over the course of two years.

a timeline of events, 2015/16 One of the striking things about the hotspot approach is how rapidly it appeared, both as a policy and on the ground, reflecting a ‘crisis response’ mode of policymaking in the face of rapidly moving events. The series of events that came to be known as the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ commenced in 2015 and marked the arrival in Europe of over 1 million people from the Middle East and other parts of Asia and Africa. These new populations came primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq but also from African countries including Eritrea, Sudan, and countries of the Maghreb. We divide this series of events into three phases: phase one (January to April 2015) played out at the heart of the Mediterranean, along the sea route from the Libyan coast to the island of Lampedusa, south-west of Sicily, and along the south of Italy – in short, the central Mediterranean route. Phase two (April 2015 to March 2016) saw the mass arrival of migrants from the shores of Turkey to the north-eastern Aegean islands (primarily Lesbos) and lasted until March 2016, with the signing of the EU–Turkey Statement. Finally, phase three followed this agreement and the ensuing implementation of the European Commission’s hotspot approach. This third phase was still ongoing at the time of writing (winter 2017/18). It has come to be marked by the endless waiting and desperation of the thousands

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trapped in transit, whether on the shores of Turkey, in Greece or along the western Balkan corridor – in short, anywhere along the route to the European North. Phase One: January to April 2015 The first phase of the migration crisis was marked by mass deaths at sea, culminating with the death of more than 800 migrants in a single shipwreck over the weekend of 18/19 April 2015 when the trawler that carried them capsized off the coast of Libya.1 The testimonies of the 27 survivors and their rescuers brought the full scale and horror of this tragedy to light. Less than a week earlier, on 13 April, another boat had capsized 60 nautical miles off the Libyan coast, with the loss of 400 people, making the total death toll over 1,200 in less than a week. In response, the European Commission (EC) published a blueprint for what it claimed to be a wholly new approach to migration management, the European Agenda for Migration.2 The Agenda featured additional funding for search-andrescue (SAR) operations conducted by Frontex (the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency, EBCG) and the strengthening of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Most crucially, the Agenda introduced the so-called hotspot approach to migration management. This approach envisaged a new model of operational support for EU member states considered to be under ‘extreme’ migratory pressure. It provided a platform for interagency collaboration and intervention that was a prototype for a more integrated EU administration. In the years that followed, the Commission’s entire set of legislation concerning asylum and borders stemmed from this Agenda. Further initiatives to tackle migratory pressures included: (i) the introduction of the EC’s Emergency Relocation Scheme, an intra-EU resettlement system aimed at alleviating border states; (ii) enhanced cooperation with non-EU countries; and (iii) the extended use of the ‘safe country’ concept, most notably the declaration of Turkey as a safe third country for returns. Notably, this new Agenda for Migration also saw an expanded role for Frontex in implementing returns, as well as the introduction of the EBCG. We understand the hotspot approach to be the materialisation of this agenda. Together with the newly established EBCG, the hotspot approach represents one of the EC’s efforts to Europeanise the EU’s borders: a strategic, long-term overhauling of the asylum and migration system that both precedes and surpasses the peak of the migration crisis itself.

introduction  .  7

The Age of Innocence: April 2015 to March 2016 In an attempt to avoid large populations being trapped within their territory, several transit states allowed migrants to cross their borders and territory with relatively little hindrance. Migrants could cross Europe with some speed, and the journey from Turkey to the heart of Europe could be done in a matter of days. Greece did not register arrivals for several months; Macedonia and Serbia allowed arriving migrants 72 hours to cross their territories. Tasia Christodoulopoulou, Greece’s minister for migration at the time, called this second phase an ‘age of innocence’ for migration, even though the Greek government and the EU were already devising strategies to violently control this mobility. Fortress Europe had been breached. For this brief historical moment, EU officials seemed unable to figure out how to handle the migration crisis at all. It was not just the sheer power of the numbers, it was the visibility of these populations and their direct claim to freedom of movement, too. The European public quickly became exposed to images of people arriving in overcrowded dinghies on the shores of Lesbos, activists reaching out to help them disembark and orange life jackets covering beaches where tourists once swam – images that now represent the refugee crisis in our collective memory. Following several attempts at controlling border crossings along the so-called western Balkan corridor with the erection of walls (in Hungary) and a series of consecutive border closures (in Austria, Serbia and Macedonia), the Greek–Macedonian border was eventually sealed off on 7 March 2016. The move was coordinated extra-institutionally – that is, outside official European forums, such as the EC or a summit. It was pushed for by the leaders of the so-called Visegrad countries (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) plus Austria. Later that month, on 18 March, the EU announced it had reached an agreement with Turkey for the management of illicit border-crossings into Greece: Turkey was to accept the return of all new arrivals in exchange for €6 billion in support of its ‘humanitarian infrastructure’. Two years later not only have these funds not reached the intended beneficiaries, but they have been spent on military equipment to deter refugees from fleeing Syria.3 The agreement signalled a whole new era in the Mediterranean migration crisis, an era that came to be entirely ruled and marked by the hotspot approach.

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The Hotspot Approach: March 2016 to May 2017 The EU’s hotspot mechanism was touted as a new way of tackling border crises and safeguarding migrant lives at sea. Even though it was already included in the May 2015 Agenda for Migration and inaugurated as a border infrastructure as early as October 2015, its full implementation only became possible after March 2016, when the deal between the EU and Turkey was reached. At that moment, the hotspot became the EU’s main approach to migration management. Situated at frontline EU member states, the hotspot is a mechanism that allows the hosting in one place of all the relevant European agencies in order to bolster their cooperation and to centralise control over the common external border. Once an area is declared a hotspot, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), Frontex, Europol and Eurojust come in to assist member states to swiftly identify, register and fingerprint incoming migrants.4 What is envisioned by the EC is that the four agencies will support member-state authorities in the registration, identification and removal of apprehended migrants (using Frontex), the registration of asylum claims, the preparation of successful relocation claimants (by EASO) and the investigation and subsequent prosecution of crimes (by Europol and Eurojust). Migration and asylum have been pivotal in the EU’s institutionalisation and governance for quite some time now. For example, the EU has spent years building a Common European Asylum System (CEAS), setting out minimum standards and procedures for the treatment of asylum-seekers and those granted protection (known as the EU Asylum Acquis). It has also set up support mechanisms for the implementation and harmonisation of relevant jurisprudence. Despite the promises seeping through its bureaucratic jargon and the intended functions of its mechanisms, the hotspot phase has been marked by endless waiting, uncertainty and the erosion of whatever meagre rights were previously in place. Its introduction marked the degradation of asylum procedures in Greece (prolonged detention, suicides and humanitarian camps established across the country) and the full institutionalisation and control of mobility.

outline of the book The book is structured in five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the period that came to be known as migration crisis in the Mediterra-

introduction  .  9

nean, and starts off in 2015. Here we consider why anyone should study something as seemingly bureaucratic and mundane as the European Commission’s approach to crisis management. When we started off Transcapes in the fall of 2015, we announced the project to the world with a brief text called ‘Them Refugees’.5 This was a reflection on Hannah Arendt’s classic essay, ‘We Refugees’.6 Our text grappled with the contradictions and dilemmas that opened up once we had decided to study the migrant/refugee crisis at this moment in time, and we considered what it meant to do so from a profoundly privileged, ‘insider’, European position. In a bitterly ironic way, the question why anyone should study the migration issue is no longer relevant; whether we like it or not, the repercussions of the crisis could potentially affect us too – albeit to a different degree than they affect incoming populations, of course. Here, we reflect on the stories we recorded in Lesbos: the shopkeeper-turn-heroine, the lives of local volunteers transformed through their seemingly unwinnable quest against local ignorance, media distortions and lies, global forces of capital. But we also reflect on the stories of those whose lives changed when they saw the arriving populations as potential income generators. And we reflect on the lives of those trapped inside the mechanisms of a labyrinthine system of bureaucracy, subject to the practice of privatisation, global policing and management, a labyrinth of EU-speak where ‘protection’ means entrapment, ‘welfare’ provision means meagre survival, and ‘hotspot’ means a coldly calculated vagueness through which entire territories come under vast European powers. Chapter 2 situates the events of 2015 and their aftermath in relation to a longer historical narrative. While many aspects of the regime are strikingly novel – the hotspot approach foremost among them – they cannot be adequately understood separately from past ways of thinking about and responding to the movement of people across borders and the needs of those seeking refuge from war, famine and persecution. In this chapter we trace the longer history of the international system governing population mobility and some of the ideas on which it is grounded. We examine the changing meaning of the concept of asylum, the emergence of the political figure of the refugee in Europe and the development of the legal and organisational infrastructure associated with international efforts to both protect and regulate refugees. Chapter 3 looks at the differentiated mobility regimes produced by the hotspot mechanism and critically rethinks the relationship between (im)mobility, agency and freedom. The hotspot mechanism is not a

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prison – it doesn’t need to be. Strategically situated on islands, it physically thwarts any unauthorised secondary movement of migrants and, most importantly, it becomes a capture-and-circulation mechanism that governs people’s mobility in multiple places and at multiple scales simultaneously. This is what we call the hotspot mechanism. While migrants are relatively free to move around after being processed without being physically detained, the spaces allocated to them are predicated upon arbitrary criteria, most prominently their arrival date. Some are trapped on frontline Greek islands including Lesbos, Chios, Leros, Samos and Kos; others remain indefinitely inside pseudo-protection zones across Greece. In practice, these spaces are shrunk even further: asylum-seekers receive a scarce allowance that keeps them de facto immobile, while they are often allocated accommodation in places with largely hostile local populations, denying them essential family, social and solidarity networks. Chapter 4 advances the argument that the material, organisational and institutional aspects of the hotspot approach – primarily incarnated in camps for sorting, hosting and detaining migrants – are the culmination of years of attempts to manage migration in a humanitarian way. It does this by tracing the workings of the hotspot of the Moria Reception and Identification Centre (RIC), the first hotspot inaugurated on the island of Lesbos. It also looks at the role of the principle institutions and the effects of changes in asylum procedures on people’s mobility. By making reference to previous management of ‘refugee crises’ in Europe, we argue that Europe is at a crossing point. Here, acts of solidarity and support from ordinary people are contrasted with official expressions of compassion. The camps of the hotspot approach in Lesbos provide a gripping example of the spatial governance of populations and of the transformative potential of the logic of humanitarian emergency upon people’s experiences. Chapter 5 concludes the book by elaborating on the relationship between the hotspot approach, the growth of EU liminal territory and the birth of the EU superstate. First, we unpack the hotspot mechanism and explain why and how so much more is at stake than the mere confinement and filtering practices taking place in registration and identification facilities, the physical infrastructures located on frontline islands (hotspots). The hotspot approach is far more than the sum of all the hotspot parts: it is a decree, powerful in its vagueness, able to cut through and to supersede national boundaries and pre-existing

introduction  .  11

powers alike. This approach creates a new border, fit for a new time: an incubator and a testing ground for what is the tentatively future relationship between individuals, territory and social and political rights across Europe. The immaterial border separating entry from exit, work contract from unemployment and movement from stasis does not concern those arriving in the boats alone. It is a paradigm, a way of drawing lines dividing us, breaking us apart, subjecting us to abstract, abrupt and retractable orders. It is a new border that should – and does – concern us all.

1 The Where and When of Migration

One day, a person living in a certain land decides to move – move away from the life they used to live, move in search of a better future, move out of necessity or despair, move under the vague promise of a better life, or move at gunpoint. The result is – essentially – the same: they move, and on that day, they have become a potential migrant, a potential that turns into reality on another day, not much later: on the day when the German doctor in 1960s Istanbul scribbles something and nods to the nervous young Turk waiting in line; on the day when the Portuguese man smuggled into France sends home half a photograph of himself, the other half being in the hands of the smuggler who will present it to his family in order to get payment. There used to be, up to the present day, a certain point, a threshold in time and space after which the potential became real – after which intended migration actually became so. This book tells the story of the annihilation of this moment, the vanishing of this threshold. Starting from the migration crisis that broke out in 2015 in the Mediterranean – and that is still very much alive today – this book tells the story of the European Commission’s ‘hotspot approach’, which, on the face of it, was developed in response to the crisis. But far beyond the shores of the Greek islands and the management of this particular historical moment, we believe the hotspot approach to represent a new way of managing whole populations and territories – a new kind of governance that turns the fleetingness of transit into a permanent condition of uncertainty. We started off our research knowing that we wanted to study the migration crisis – a crisis of management, administration and governance – yet by no means did we want to study the migrants themselves as they arrived on the shores of the Mediterranean. As this crisis rolled out we came to realise what at first appeared as a hastily put together, temporary measure to halt and manage the arriving flows of people under the guise of a ‘hotspot’ was turning into a much more permanent condition that

the where and when of migration  .  13

required this flow to continue. Not the condition of the past – ‘you can only come through if your teeth are strong and your urine is clean’ – but a new condition – ‘you can only come through as long as you are fit and willing to keep moving, if you are strong enough, if you are cunning enough and determined to keep going’. The ‘where’ of the final destination was now of secondary importance – or perhaps there was no longer a finite or firm destination. The journey, this never-ending journey, was an actual end point leading to a violent separation between territory and rights. ‘If you are to come through, if you are to move, you’ll have to then keep on moving’ – this is the vicious circle at the heart of the EU hotspot approach. As this book will show, this is not a contradiction. It is simply, and alarmingly, the recuperation, the appropriation of the demand for freedom of movement. EU technocratic orders, enforced by policing units converging from all over the EU and facilitated by a private army of international NGO workers in an atypical welfare state that isn’t, all meet in a single, devastatingly simple, new reality. In this reality, movement is permitted but fully and unceasingly controlled; it is allowed only for those lucky enough to be filtered, sorted and assigned to member states according to absurd quotas and ephemeral deals; it comes down to sheer luck. The hotspot approach is a key opening act to an era when the demand for free movement is turned on its head. This is where mobility becomes compulsory, where freedom of movement turns into permanent incarceration-on-the-go. The introduction of the hotspot approach is an abrupt and impactful disruption of the calculation of migration. This calculation means that the migrant will: save enough soon enough. That his woman remains faithful to him. That in the meantime he can arrange that some of his family join him. That when once he has set himself up at home, he will never have to return here. That his health holds out.1 Migration has always been about a thoroughly planned journey, and the planning is thorough precisely because its execution is so unclear. Thoroughness is meant to curb unavoidable uncertainty; it attempts to tame the unknown. But now the use of biometric registration upon entry into the host state removes agency from the migrant and squarely puts power in the hands of the authorities. It is they who decide where, how and for

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how long a migrant-to-be is to be. As John Berger puts it, ‘the frontier is simply where [the migrant] is liable to be stopped and his intention to leave thwarted’.2 Up to this point in time, the frontier had been a geographical one. It was a border to be crossed: a road barrier that lifted slowly before your car, or lifted in front of the truck you were hiding in and which was headed to the next port city. It required visas and passports, even letters from a state-appointed doctor. And once it was crossed, you were in the host state. While the ‘where’ of migration has always been clear enough, the ‘how long’ is negotiated afterwards. That depends on job prospects; it depends on the economy taking an upward or a downward turn in this place or that; it depends on supply and demand; it depends, not least, on the agency of the migrant himself or herself; it depends on whether the remittances have accumulated enough to build that planned home or the capital to start a small business; it depends on whether things back home have quietened at all, whether the new condition is good or tolerable enough to call home. But now things are not so clear. Now the hotspot registers and pre-registers, it distributes and it decides – and it holds for itself the right to change its mind at any given point, at this point or in the future. To the ‘where’ of migration, hotspots add a never-ending ‘when’. Speaking of the migration of men from Mediterranean and Balkan countries to the industrialised cities of the European North in the 1960s, John Berger tells us, ‘what distinguishes this migration from others in the past is that it is temporary’.3 The Portuguese arriving in Munich knew that, under the best of circumstances, they had nine to ten months out of a year to work before they were obliged to head back home, whence they had to reapply to return to Germany. The process would repeat itself for years, during which time the migrant would try to amass enough capital to realise whatever plan had been hatched back home. But there was a home to go back to, just as there was a new home to be founded, to be built for the migrants that crossed the earth before them. For the migrant entering the EU’s hotspots at the present time, there is no longer any state of permanence, only the allowance of the instant and the limbo of the ever-unknown; only the abruptness and the absurdity of cut-off dates decided post hoc, the reliance upon the sheer luck of entering on a good versus a bad day in the bizarre calendrical lottery of international agreements.

the where and when of migration  .  15

If a large part of the labour reserve is made up of migrant workers, they can be ‘imported‘ when needed and ‘exported’ (sent home) when made temporarily redundant, and there need be no political repercussions, for the migrants have no political rights and little political influence.4 The distribution and constant shifting round of migrants that have entered through hotspots, now scattered across the territory of Greece, robs them of the opportunity to socialise, let alone to organise around a demand. To those of us already on the ‘inside’, the atomisation produced by hotspots does not seemingly bear much of direct relevance to our own livelihoods. Consider the Ryanair steward who has heard or read about the registration and filtering of Syrian refugees, who may even have considered how these processes prevent new arrivals from the opportunity of mingling with local or migrant populations. ‘Why should I be concerned?’ they might ask themselves, glancing at a headline as they prepare to embark on a flight with yet another entirely different crew – a carefully designed airline policy that prevents staff from acquainting themselves with one another, lest they organise. ‘Why should I care about the Afghans?’ wonders the Dutch academic in the UK, whose empathy and compassion may be blunted by nervous vigilance for any sign of a cut-off date in the Brexit negotiations – after which their right to live and work in the UK may or may not change – or even vigilance for the nativist sentiment that may hover around otherwise friendly and welcoming personal interactions. The academic’s future is, due to the vagaries of politics, unknown. The air steward’s colleagues and superiors from one flight to another are also unknown. The actual impact of the EU–Turkey Statement on the migrant populations at the time the deal was made was likewise unknown. Why should an EU citizen in the UK, perhaps a transient and precarious worker, care about a misty, bureaucratic, migrant population management plan? They don’t – and this is, after all, the essence of an experimental field: it does not directly concern the entire population, until the moment that it does, until the moment it is tried and tested. And what better population is there, docile in its complete precarity, to try out this new technique of management on other than the millions that attempted crossing into EU territory during and following the long summer of 2015?

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the mytilene present The port of Mytilene basks in the evening sunlight. Lined up along the harbour, towards the hills that engulf the beautiful Aegean port town, are rows of nineteenth-century mansions, those trademarks and vibrant urban footprints of a prosperous past. A key trading point, the island has for centuries benefited from its thoroughfare status, building on the passing through of goods and people alike. In 1922, in the aftermath of the Greek army’s major defeat in Asia Minor, Mytilene became one of the first stopping points for the fleeing Greek population – and for many of them, the last. Tradesmen, skilled labourers, highly educated urbanites all settled in what was one of the region’s truest, quintessentially urban centres. ‘Our grandfathers were refugees’, a fisherman tells us as he scrubs the body of his boat in Epano Skala, the old boatyard. ‘They also came from over there’. He gestures to the east. This popular consciousness seems to have informed recent history. Compared to the stories of the often violent reception of migrants on the neighbouring island of Chios,5 things in Mytilene went relatively uneventfully – no small feat for a small island that saw more than 1 million people cross its territory in a matter of just over a year. In a way, Mytilene locals have too close a memory, passed down the generations, of what it is to be a migrant. The positive reception they gave those now in the position that brought their ancestors to the island came almost naturally. The migrant, Berger tells us, lives the content of our institutions, institutions that transform them violently. ‘[But] they do not need to transform us. We are already within them’.6 There is something to be said about collective memory here, about the ways in which memory of their own migratory origins helped Mytilene locals to avoid immersing themselves fully in such institutions. It is worth mulling over this idea, namely, that the migrant is subject to a violent transformation. There are three points worth noting. First, crossing from what the West considers to be a less to a more ‘developed’ country, within days the migrant faces an extremely condensed experience of perceived capitalist transition that took centuries to complete. In this way the migrant is an inadvertent witness: they carry with them a bodily testimony, a testament of a life seen to lie outside and before the frenzy of advanced capitalism. Second, the experience of the migrant is the experience of a person stripped of any rights related to territory. Their rights, from the moment they cross into a new territory, only relate to

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Figure 1.1  The Aegean Sea.

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the where and when of migration  .  17

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their labour power. They can stake a claim to remain only to the extent that they can continue to produce, to the extent that they can offer their labour power to their host state. In this way they are the ideal population for any attempt at a grossly uneven negotiation concerning the rights of the ‘millions of others who are not migrant workers’.7 Third, and this was largely absent from the story Berger told nearly half a century ago, it isn’t just the migrant who is abruptly transformed by the institution; however uneven, the relationship is still two-way. Migrant labourers who went to Western Europe in the 1960s acted as an inadvertent opening act for the precariatisation of the labour force over the years and the decades that followed. And now, anyone who thought the abrupt violence of hotspots does not concern them, will discover, at breath-taking speed, just how wrong they are: the anxious Dutch academic reads through and between the lines of Brexit updates, looking for any hint of their own day of judgement, the equivalent to the EU–Turkey Statement. In the 1960s, Berger outlined a transition, a transformation of migration in Europe. This involved a shift from the permanent settlement – however exploitative or violent – of populations in the nineteenth century to the prison-like experience of contemporary migrant workers: ‘the temporary migrant worker suffers a kind of imprisonment in a prison without frontiers’, as Berger put it.8 Today, the would-be migrant worker still experiences totalising imprisonment in exchange for a tentative chance at a future – future employment, future settlement, a future life. A certainty in return for a possibility. In entering a hotspot, registering themselves while crossing into EU territory, migrants annihilate a present that becomes mere waiting time ahead of a promised future. ‘Imprisonment is designed as the categorical denial of the present’.9 But even imprisonment has an end date. The contemporary experience of migration offers no certainties of this kind. It is a prolonged, indefinite limbo that denies the past (potentially annihilated at the stroke of an updated deal, at any moment) and the future as well. A hotspot is claustrophobic in that it allows presence in the present – and that alone. Everything is decided at the moment an aspiring migrant enters the territory where they are to register, kick-starting the irreversible categorisation that will follow them through and across EU territory. Registration is both dehumanising and deeply personal. This is no contradiction: by breaking apart citizenship, territory and rights, everybody that attempts the crossing becomes a body in time, a body in a single moment. Their eventual fate comes down to a stroke of luck. A body

the where and when of migration  .  19

that carried a Syrian passport on 19 March 2016 – the day before the implementation of the EU–Turkey Statement – will have an entirely different hotspot story to tell from a body that attempted what became an entirely different crossing of the exact same route only two days later. The hotspot mechanism filters and categorises, it asserts and it divides, it individualises the mass in migration.

us and them: zero-hours citizens In the months that we spent on Lesbos, going back and forth to the UK and to Athens, we experienced a peculiar series of freeze frames. To be sure, ‘memory freeze-frames’ as ‘its basic unit is the single image’.10 But this particular set of images played out in a surreal order. It opened in September 2015 with scenes of utter chaos, with thousands arriving daily and stranded on Lesbos, sleeping rough in every imaginable corner of what could possibly constitute public space across the city of Mytilene – and then stretching the idea some. Thousands of silent shadows walked by the side of the road, making their way from the island’s northern shores all the way down the 60 or so kilometres to the capital. That summer, for a few months, it seemed as if the arrivals were an unstoppable force. By the end of the year however, hordes of professionals appeared, setting up order out of chaos on a week-by-week basis – though this was a certain kind of order, one that made their own presence imperative: a self-fulfilling prophecy of catastrophe that called for the humanitarian management of the perpetrators themselves. Then, last but by no means least, came the authorities from afar that were to set a new reality in stone, laying the ground for the registration and detention centres, setting up the ‘little white houses’ a taxi driver told us she thought the hotspot to be – little white houses trapping those who happened to arrive on the island after they were built. An event, as Susan Sontag tells us, is experienced differently by each one of us. In the case of the arrival of the hotspot, this personalised experience is both produced and taken over by the authorities in a vicious circle of governmentality. But what about those watching? Who is the ‘we’ in migration? Both ‘their’ and ‘our’ reaction hit a crucial turning point following the publication of the photograph of the dead body of Alan Kurdi: ‘the thing that horrified public opinion was the slaughter of civilians … [T]hese sorts of things were not supposed to happen here’.11 Not supposed to happen here? Sontag was referring to the 1930s and ‘the slaughter of

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civilians from the air [that] was happening in Spain’, but it is the exact feeling of shock due to a lack of distance, or shock by proximity, that horrified so many in relation to Alan’s death. No, people seemed to say, this can’t be happening; this is way too close for comfort; this sort of thing is not meant to be happening; not here. Alan’s death was a death out-of-place and a death out-of-time. It was a death that was, obviously, geographically close, but it was also historically distant, a death that came from a past that civilised Europe was supposed to have left behind. Worse than this, it was a death that tore apart the idea of a ‘civilised us’ against a (presumably uncivilised) ‘them’. ‘We’ are supposed to have moved on from the time when atrocities could wash up on our shores, atrocities marked out by the body of a dead three-year-old. The hotspot approach compartmentalises people and breaks down time, it registers upon the bodies that try to come through that their fate is both uncertain and individual. One might even say that it is uncertain because it is individual. We have been led to believe that what we see before us, in terms of the management of the incoming populations, is the one and only truth, even if ‘no “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other peoples’ pain’.12 To speak of an ‘us’ in this witnessing, in this conception of the migrant crisis, is as absurd as it is to speak of a singular ‘them’ when referring to those who cross over into Europe. ‘They’ are not an amorphous mass; ‘they’ are not a single stream of anonymous bodies. The death of Alan Kurdi illuminated this simple truth: for all the tragedy, it was here, for once, that the tide turned. This was death once again, to be sure, but this time it was not an anonymous one. It came with a face, and it came with a name. What the hotspot approach does then is to make this personalisation extreme. It seems to say: Yes, you are one, every one of you now attempting the crossing; you and you alone. Your fate no longer depends only on the colour of your passport or the deals that happen to be in place with your receiving country; it also depends – primarily so – upon the time of the year that it happens to be at this very moment; it depends on the circumstances and, most importantly, it may vary as these circumstances change. Your fate is ever-dependent and ever-conditional. If the migrant worker inside Europe, up until the last major wave of migration in the 1960s and 1970s, epitomised the absolute precariatisation of labour rights, what we stand witness to today is a different kind of precariatisation altogether. The 1960s worker asked for work, and it was work that was handed to them: precarious and underpaid, casual and

the where and when of migration  .  21

Figure 1.2  Mural based on a photograph of Alan Kurdi. Source: Wikipedia, Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Death_of_Alan_Kurdi#/media/File:Alan_Kurdi_Graffiti.jpg).

temporary, an odd win–win for employers (who could keep labour costs down) and some of the workers who longed for their return and who, in any case, were still paid much more than they had been able to earn back home. The banner of labour flexibility was turned into a weapon against those who had waved it: work designed around life turned into precarity, and the flexible contract became a zero-hours contract, a form without content, or rather a form whose content could be (unevenly) negotiated and retracted at will. The demand to open the borders briefly materialised. Was it because of a momentary humanitarian invocation? We think this hugely implausible. Could it be because of the temporary lull in the border and filtering mechanism, a weakness? Or was this opening of the borders an attempt at adapting to a new reality playing itself out? We think the latter is much more likely. Whatever the reason, the EU’s borders did open, albeit briefly, partially and informally. And there was a brief moment of opportunity, over the long summer of migration in 2015, when a trip from a remote Turkish beach to the heart of a German city, for example, became relatively easier. And then? Then came the moment when the EU’s filtering mechanism claimed the ‘openness’ of the border as its own. From the moment when the hotspot approach was established, it wasn’t the access of migrants to EU territory that was thrown open,

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but their fate once they had reached it. Might they be one of the few to join the relocation mechanism? Where would the EU livelihood lottery send them to? Where would they be along their journey on the next date that changed everything for them? Their passport, their visas, had by now become a form whose contents – are they valid? are they not? – were conditional upon the wind of political decision-making of the day. This is the essence of a new, emerging, zero-hours citizenship. And the hotspot approach is the spatial incubator that prepares the geographical region that will host these residents until further notice. It is the morning of 11 May 2017. As we put the final touches to this chapter, we wake up to more news: the German asylum service has decided that as of 1 April it will only accept up to 70 refugee family reunifications – but no more. The news reaches us, and all those directly concerned, retrospectively. The abruptness of the decision carries immense weight for the 2,500 people in Greece that have jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops up till now and who now find themselves in another unexpected limbo. They’re forced to wait for an indefinite amount of time simply because of an order that was given, such is the speculation, in order to quell unrest inside Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party and its allies ahead of German elections later in the year. As a mechanism, the hotspot approach only commences at points of entry, at the moment of registration, at that split second when a migrant’s arrival is recorded and processed. From that point on, the hotspot lives on, marking the life of the migrant who traversed it. It lives on in abrupt orders and their revoking, in quotas susceptible to shifts in the political climate of the moment, of any moment. It is this capacity, to invoke rights and to sever prospects at any moment, that lies at the heart of this new zero-hours citizenship model that dawns here, on the shores of Lesbos, and that follows the migrants as they make their way west and north – a ‘citizenship’ that is not; a mere allowance to pass that is conditional and always retractable. Why should this bother us, humanitarian invocations apart? The hotspot approach responded to the image of pain and suffering by recuperating the identification, the unveiling of the migrant face. If the migrant is to have a face, as Alan Kurdi did, then the hotspot approach is the mechanism that will ensure the face is never forgotten: the hotspot registers and archives, it biometrically identifies and traces bodies and faces as they enter Europe. The hotspot is the recuperation of the demand for mobility in its most institutionally violent of forms. Yes, you

the where and when of migration  .  23

will move. You will move at our will, you will be monitored at every step, you will keep on moving and stopping at the pleasure of new laws and decrees. Movement – enforced at times, denied at others – will become the defining characteristic of your zero-hours citizenship. Institutional violence has forcefully entered Europe. And this is a collective shock to a continent that had led itself to believe, with obnoxious naivety, that it could excuse itself from the dramas of war. Europe was supposed to have ‘claimed the right to opt out of war-making’,13 with words such as Srebrenica and Sarajevo sounding like guilty, unfathomable exceptions to a seemingly distant past. The death of Alan Kurdi was, first of all, a shock at this level. Despite our invocation of history to excuse us from all this mess, war is here. In Europe! The second shock lay at the level of the photograph’s mass reproduction: it was seen by millions, concerned and indifferent alike. The mere fact that some distant onlookers chose to be attentive while others did not adds to the photograph an essence of banality, of an event that is to be taken for granted. Sontag again: ‘the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscores that “no, it cannot be stopped”’.14 Worse still, shock became, once again, familiar,15 and compassion eroded: ‘compassion is an unstable emotion, it needs to be translated into action, or it withers’.16 Compassion may indeed whither, and we are not here concerned with the thousands of those who turned their compassion into action. Just like everyone else, we saw the thousands who arrived on Lesbos and the other islands out of sheer determination and will to help – and we have so much respect for them. What concerns us is the result of the professionalisation of this care-giving, of the authority-led drawing of distance between ‘us’ and some distant ‘others’. This distance, in turn, disorientates; it tricks us into thinking that what plays out in the hotspot concerns those unlucky enough to find themselves under its spell – and them alone. The fact that an arbitrarily set date can decide our rights more than our passport would never concern, say, the Dutch or the French living in the United Kingdom. The privatisation of basic, state-funded security would never concern those of us living in the UK, never mind the private vultures hovering above the corpse of the NHS. The formation of a supernational task force, potentially capable and licensed to operate anywhere on European territory, should not concern those of us living anywhere across this territory, or beyond it. This is not only a logical fallacy; it is a testament to the power of authority’s story-telling to conceal and confuse, to obfuscate the mechanics

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of a system of governance currently under way, playing out right now, acting and interacting between territory, authority and rights. Sontag: ‘to designate a hell is not … to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames’.17 And yet. Still. To designate the hotspot approach – by way of describing what it actually is, by way of explaining its functions both inside, but, most importantly, outside and beyond the points of entry – is a good start: It sheds light on the meticulous over-accumulation of bureaucratic force that has, not by coincidence, stayed below the radar in the excess of information on Europe’s migration crisis. And to designate a hell is to understand the full impact of its reach, the actual level of catastrophe caused by its flames. In this book, we focus on the hotspot. And we hope that maybe, just maybe, this is a first step in putting out its flames.

2 Refuge, Rules and Rights

While many aspects of the rapidly changing migration and border regime in Europe are strikingly novel – the hotspot approach foremost among them – they cannot be adequately understood separately from past ways of thinking about and responding to the movement of people across borders and the needs of those seeking refuge from war, famine and persecution. In this chapter we trace the longer history of the international system governing mobility, and some of the ideas in which it is grounded. Although most of the world’s migrants are to be found outside Europe, our focus is on the impact of the EU’s changing border regime, so here we also provide a historical perspective on patterns of migration into and within Europe with particular reference to the categorisation of certain migrants as ‘refugees’.

international rules and human rights The rules-based international order that emerged in response to the horrors of the Second World War was expressed in two documents. The first, signed in San Francisco in June 1945, was the Charter of the United Nations.1 Originally endorsed by representatives of 51 countries, the Charter has now been ratified by 193 member states, including most recently the newly created state of South Sudan in 2011. The Charter primarily concerns relationships between nation-states, with a particular emphasis on the peaceful resolution of international disputes. While the preamble declares that the signatories ‘reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’, individual people scarcely feature in the 111 articles that make up the Charter, even, or perhaps especially, when their rights as individuals may conflict with those of ‘nations large and small’. That said, Article 1 of the Charter states that among the purposes of the United Nations shall be ‘to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic,

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social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’. Three years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, sought to make good on that promise.2 Article 13 of the UDHR provides for freedom of movement: (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Crucially, while freedom of movement includes the right to leave one country, it does not give a general right to enter another. However, the right to asylum is covered by Article 14: (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. Although it is often regarded as a foundational text of international law, the UDHR is not a binding treaty. In 1951, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (also known simply as the Refugee Convention) established a legal framework for the protection of refugees. Originally providing only for those affected by events in Europe before 1951, the Refugee Convention was extended by a 1967 Protocol to give universal coverage. The Refugee Convention defines the term ‘refugee’ and sets out the rights of refugees and the obligations of signatory states to protect them. The central principle is that of ‘non-refoulement’, which holds that no refugee should be required to return to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the body responsible for overseeing the Refugee Convention and Protocol, and for protecting and assisting refugees in exercising their rights under them. While a large body of international law relating to the rights of refugees and to other forms of forced migration has developed since

refuge, rules and rights  .  27

1951, accompanied by a substantial infrastructure relating to its implementation, other forms of movement, categorised by governments as ‘voluntary’, ‘economic’ or ‘labour’ migration, are not subject to comprehensive international legal regulation. Although the UN’s migration agency, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), has proposed a Migration Governance Framework, it comprises principles and objectives that have no legal force. Indeed the IOM’s constitution states explicitly that ‘control of standards of admission and the number of immigrants to be admitted are matters within the domestic jurisdiction of States’, and that in carrying out its functions the IOM ‘shall conform to the laws, regulations and policies of the States concerned’. The Refugee Convention is grounded explicitly in Article 14 of the UDHR. In Western political thought the idea of human rights dates back at least to the Enlightenment. Key political works of the Enlightenment, such as John Locke’s Treatises on Government, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and the core texts of the French and American revolutions, laid the groundwork for later rights-based arguments for the protection of those fleeing oppression. The French revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), for example asserts that ‘liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression’ are the ‘natural and imprescriptable rights of man’ (Article II). It adds that ‘no one may be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law’ (Article X), and that ‘the free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man’ (Article IX). It is not hard here to discern a precursor of the fundamental universal right to protection from persecution embodied in the Refugee Convention. Universalism is widely regarded as a defining feature of human rights derived from Enlightenment thought. However, it is notable how restricted such rights were in the eighteenth century, extending only to men and by definition excluding slaves. While France abolished slavery in 1794, it was reintroduced to the French colonies by Napoleon in 1802, where it remained legal until 1848, as it did in the British Empire until after 1834 and in the United States until 1865.

the idea of asylum If the idea of human rights is relatively modern, the product of Europe’s political upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the

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concept of asylum has a much longer history. According to Matthew Price, asylum, understood as a form of political protection, dates back to ancient Greece.3 Price challenges the assumption that the origins of asylum were principally humanitarian and argues instead that the connection between asylum and protection from political persecution is long-standing. Greek holy places and their contents were protected, as stealing from them meant stealing from the gods. That protection extended to people (including runaway slaves, defeated warriors and criminals) who sought refuge in such places. Many Greek tragedies feature tales of asylum and demonstrate, Price argues, that asylum claims involved a challenge to the legitimacy of political authority: ‘when one claimed asylum through supplication, one contested the rightfulness with which authority was exercised in one’s particular case’.4 This suggests that: for most of its history, asylum has been viewed in political, rather than humanitarian, terms. The persecution requirement is deeply rooted in, not a departure from, asylum’s long history. Asylum’s origins lie in international criminal law: a recipient of asylum enjoyed immunity to extradition.5 Asylum in ancient Greece also brought with it political tensions between states. Granting asylum to a fugitive from another state could be seen as a challenge to that state’s political authority. Just as today, asylum involved claims by individuals for protection by one political authority from the exercise of power by another. Classical Rome adopted the idea of asylum from Greece, but with adaptations. Under the Roman Empire, a church-based system of asylum became a means to protect the innocent from unjust or erroneous punishment. With the growth and spread of Christianity, churches became places of refuge for those wishing to repent before God for their wrongs, and increasingly asylum was sought not by the falsely accused or the unjustly sentenced, but by the guilty seeking divine forgiveness in place of earthly punishment. The meaning of the term ‘sanctuary’, designating a holy place, became extended to refer to a place of refuge from the law (and eventually took on a general meaning of a place of protection, as in wildlife sanctuary, for example). In the Middle Ages under English common law, a fugitive charged with any offence except sacrilege and treason could escape punishment by taking refuge in

refuge, rules and rights  .  29

a sanctuary and within 40 days confessing the crime and taking an oath leading to permanent banishment. Price documents how this led to tension between the Church and the state, leading to the gradual reduction in asylum privileges until church asylum in England was abolished entirely in 1625.6 As the spatial focus moved from the protection offered by holy places to the potential protection that might be afforded by the state, the idea of asylum shifted away from escaping punishment for wrongdoing and back towards a concern with safeguarding those treated unjustly. For Grotius, the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist who helped lay the foundations of international law, a limited right to asylum could be justified for those accused contrary to natural law. During the eighteenth century the word ‘asylum’ also started to be used to refer to institutions for the seclusion, protection and treatment of people with physical and, particularly, mental illnesses. The French Constitution of 1793 guaranteed the right of asylum to ‘foreigners banished from their homeland for the cause of liberty’. By the nineteenth century a number of states granted asylum as a way of protecting those facing politically motivated charges abroad.7 States varied in their willingness to extradite fugitives from justice to other jurisdictions. Where extradition was allowed, exceptions for political offences were often made. Belgium was the first European country to ban extradition for political crimes in 1833, and most other European states followed suit. As Price notes, in a world of relatively open borders, a right to asylum effectively meant a right not to be extradited at the request of another state.8 As national borders in Europe came to be more tightly regulated after the First World War, asylum started to take on its predominant twentieth-century meaning of a ‘right not to be deported’, given expression in the 1951 Refugee Convention as the requirement of non-refoulement. Historically, asylum has been accorded only to those with the appropriate qualifying status, even if that status has varied over time (the unjustly accused, the fugitive, the political offender, the refugee). Price argues not only that asylum’s distinctive political status is central to its history, but also that it should be maintained into the future. He contests recent proposals, made on humanitarian grounds, to extend the protections of asylum to a much wider group of migrants – those fleeing economic hardship, domestic violence or situations lacking basic needs, for example. For Price it is important to maintain asylum’s focus on protection from political persecution because political persecution

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represents a particular kind of harm, involving the loss of membership of one’s political community, distinct from other deprivations that may impel people to migrate: ‘even if refugee policy on the whole should be more oriented toward meeting people’s basic needs, asylum is the wrong tool to accomplish that broad humanitarian mission’.9 Whether or not we agree with limiting asylum in this way in future, it is clear that asylum has historically been limited both in its criteria and in its effects. The emphasis has been on protection from persecution by spatial means – first through the use of sacred space (sanctuary), and subsequently through the spatial separation of those seeking asylum from their persecutors.

europe’s first refugees In February 2016 the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wrapped the columns of Berlin’s Konzerthaus with 14,000 life jackets salvaged from the beaches of Lesbos. The installation was one of a number of works by Ai drawing attention to the Mediterranean refugee ‘crisis’. Ai’s work has been criticised by some activists and art critics for being self-regarding and for aestheticising the horrors experienced by migrants. Nevertheless, the choice of location for the Berlin installation was significant. The Konzerthaus stands on the Gendarmenmarkt, between the French and German Protestant churches. The German church, to the left of the Konzerthaus, was originally built in 1708 for the city’s Lutheran community. After being destroyed by fire in 1945 it was rebuilt following German reunification. To the right stands the French church, built between 1701 and 1705 for the Huguenot community. The Calvinist Huguenots fled France after the autocratic French monarch Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had granted civil rights and freedom of conscience to French Protestants. Louis’s grandfather Henri IV had granted the Huguenots the right to build a temple at Saint-Maurice on the south-eastern edge of Paris near the Bois de Vincennes. When Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes he ordered Protestant churches to be destroyed. The temple at Saint-Maurice was razed to the ground and the persecuted Huguenots fled the country. The ruler of Brandenburg-Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector, invited the Huguenots to Prussia. Over 20,000 took up the offer and 6,000 settled in Berlin, so that 20 per cent of the city’s population in 1687 was French – and the new arrivals modelled their church on the temple at Saint-Maurice.

refuge, rules and rights  .  31

Ai Weiwei’s installation thus calls attention not only to the present situation, but also to a history of tolerance and hospitality in the city that long predated the obscenities of the Third Reich. However, despite the magnanimity of Friedrich Wilhelm, the residents of Berlin were not entirely welcoming, as Alexandra Richie points out in terms that carry a clear resonance with the treatment of refugees today: The townspeople were suspicious and even hostile to the large number of Calvinist refugees who suddenly appeared in their midst. The French spoke a strange language, wore strange clothing and followed a different religion; worse still, they were given tax breaks and financial assistance funded by the local population through forced collections like that of 20 January 1686, when ‘each and every citizen’ had to contribute to a fund of 14,000 thalers for refugees. Despite later claims of ‘tolerance’ these Berliners did not welcome the newcomers with open arms; Muret decried the ‘Gehässigkeit’, the hateful behaviour of Berlin Lutherans towards the French, and it took generations for them to be accepted. In the end, however, the Huguenots became an integral part of the city. By 1690 the institutional autonomy of the Lutheran Church had crumbled and Calvinism had become the official religion in Berlin.10 Appropriately enough then, it was the flight of Huguenots from France that gave the English language the word ‘refugee’. When the term started to be used in English in the late seventeenth century (in the diaries of John Evelyn among others) it referred specifically to French protestants. It was only subsequently broadened to refer more generally to anyone seeking refuge from war, persecution, political upheaval or natural disaster. The case of the Huguenots – the first migrants in Europe to be labelled refugees – is instructive. Friedrich Wilhelm not only issued a formal invitation to the French to come to Brandenburg-Prussia, he made extensive practical arrangements to assist them in doing so, secretly distributing copies of the Edict of Potsdam containing the invitation in France, sending Prussian diplomats to Hamburg to receive the newcomers and allocating housing, land and resettlement grants. The Huguenots, with official encouragement, made a substantial contribution to the economy, investing assets, establishing industries and helping to make good the economic destruction incurred during the Thirty Years War. The use of the French language was protected and

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the refugees were granted a degree of autonomy in settling their own civil disputes. The official reception was thus both highly organised and notably hospitable, even if the local population was less tolerant. The implementation of the Edict of Potsdam stands out an early (and strikingly benign) example of refugee governance, but it was resolutely an initiative on the part of an individual state. The substantial Huguenot migration to England, for example, lacked the same level of official organisation. It would take a further 235 years before the first tentative moves were made to establish an international system to support refugees in Europe. In the intervening period most European governments were much less hospitable to foreigners. The French Revolution of 1789 resulted in large numbers of people – perhaps 1 per cent of the country’s population – fleeing France. The flow of ‘émigrés’ (in the genteel terminology associated with the often aristocratic migrants) to Britain reached its peak in 1792, with 4,000 arriving in September alone. The British government feared that the incomers included Jacobin spies and revolutionaries. In 1793 it passed the Aliens Act, Britain’s first statutory control on immigration and a precursor to the coercive bordering practices of successive twenty-first century British governments. Controversial at the time, the Aliens Act provided for the mandatory registration of foreigners and allowed for their summary deportation. According to the MP Sir James Mackintosh: It was a bill to subject twenty thousand residents of Great Britain to banishment at an hour’s warning, on secret information, without knowledge of their offence, without the possibility of proving the clearest innocence … To be here in such a state was to live by will and not by law. This was the very definition of slavery.11 Nineteenth-century Europe continued to be subjected to the upheavals of military conflict. The Napoleonic Wars led to widespread population movements, pre-eminently of soldiers, but also of émigrés and refugees, and to the disruption of seasonal economic migration patterns. Nearly half the 2 million Frenchmen mobilised during the conflicts did not return to their homes, and across Europe many combatants stayed in their wartime residences or left for the Americas once the fighting was over.12 In the east, the aftermath of the Crimean War saw the large-scale transfer of Muslims from Russia to the Ottoman Empire.13 Overall however, the nineteenth century saw Europe become a source of emigration, particu-

refuge, rules and rights  .  33

larly to the Americas. Some 30 million Europeans made the journey to the United States between 1815 and 1915. Initially the flow was from northern and western Europe, particularly from Ireland and Germany. Towards the end of the century migration from central, eastern and southern Europe became more significant.

from the league of nations to the unhcr In the early twentieth century the First World War uprooted many thousands of civilians, creating a series of major refugee crises. The effects were particularly severe in areas occupied by German and Austrian forces, such as Belgium and Serbia and the western parts of the Russian Empire, where many non-Russian minorities were concentrated. The German invasion of Belgium and France displaced some 4 million people. About 200,000 refugees arrived in Britain, where local relief committees were established to provide for their welfare, although tensions with host communities soon emerged.14 The Austrian invasion of Serbia generated 500,000 refugees. From 1915 Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were systematically targeted by the authorities in what today is widely, though not universally, acknowledged as the Armenian genocide. While hundreds of thousands of Armenians lost their lives, deportations affected many others and the crisis created large numbers of refugees. By 1930 some 2 million refugees from Armenia and the wider region had been assisted by American-led relief efforts.15 Until after the end of the First World War, the provision of support and assistance to refugees remained a matter for national governments and private and charitable relief organisations. The formation of the League of Nations in 1920 provided the framework through which the first formal international institutional arrangements for the protection and management of refugees were developed. The Russian revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing civil war (1917 to 1922) led to large-scale flows of refugees from Russia to other countries. Consisting largely of so-called ‘White émigrés’, they numbered over 800,000 and possibly as many as 2 million. In 1921, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross appealed to the Council of the League of Nations on behalf of Russian refugees, then scattered across Europe without protection or status. The League responded by appointing a high commissioner for Russian refugees, who was responsible for determining the legal status of refugees, arranging for their resettlement or repatriation and providing

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humanitarian relief in conjunction with private organisations.16 The work of the high commissioner expanded in the 1920s to cover other specific groups of refugees, including Armenians fleeing Turkey, Assyrians and Assyro-Chaldeans in Greece and the Caucasus, former Hungarians in Austria, France and Romania and Jews in Romania. However, the growing numbers of refugees fleeing Italy and Spain were not included, either for fear of provoking Mussolini or because the Italian and Spanish refugees were seen as ‘human rights refugees’ at a time when human rights abuses were seen as a domestic rather than an international matter.17 One of the earliest international agreements concerning the protection of refugees was concluded in 1928, recommending that the high commissioner should provide to refugees the kinds of services normally provided by the consular offices of states, including the provision of documents and the certification of identity. During this period refugees were defined as those who were outside their country of origin and lacking the protection of that state, though only those in specific groups (Russians, Armenians and so on) were protected by the high commissioner. The first high commissioner for refugees was the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen. After Nansen died in 1930, the League of Nations established first the high commissioner’s office for refugees from Germany in 1933, and then in 1938 the high commissioner for all refugees. These developments responded to the growing flows of refugees impelled by the rise of European fascism, and particularly the flight of Jewish people and members of other persecuted groups from Germany and Austria. The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 showed that the League of Nations had failed in its primary purposes of preventing war, promoting disarmament and supporting the peaceful resolution of international conflict. After operating on a reduced basis during the war, it was formally dissolved in 1946 and many of its assets and functions transferred to the newly formed United Nations. The Second World War was responsible for creating more refugees than any other event in human history. Some 60 million Europeans were displaced by the conflict, whether as a direct result of military action or through expulsion and ethnic cleansing.18 International coordination to support those affected and to resettle or return them led to the emergence of the key bodies that formed the organisational basis of the post-war refugee system. Moreover, while the war itself created a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale, the genocidal policies of the Nazi

refuge, rules and rights  .  35

regime and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, prompted the establishment of a new international legal order that sought for the first time to guarantee everyone protection from persecution and to provide for a universal, albeit conditional and circumscribed, right to asylum. The term ‘United Nations’ was coined by the US president Franklin D. Roosevelt to refer to the Allies shortly after the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941. In 1943 the Allies established the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Its role was to provide humanitarian assistance to those displaced by the war. It was originally intended as a temporary arrangement, with a particular concern to help with repatriation. However, in 1946, following the inauguration of the United Nations as an organisation the previous year, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 8, endorsing the principle that no refugees should be forced to return to their countries of origin if they had ‘valid objections’ to doing so. This principle implied that resettlement in a third country (neither the country of origin nor the country of refuge) could be a long-term solution in at least some, and probably many, cases. To manage the process, in December 1946 the UN established the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which ran until February 1952. The IRO was responsible for identification, registration, repatriation and resettlement of those displaced by the war in Europe. Its work was often attacked by East European governments for providing protection to political dissidents and servicing the labour requirements of Western economies. The Constitution of the IRO defined the term ‘refugee’ as referring to someone outside their country of origin who belonged to particular categories, including ‘victims of the Nazi or fascist regimes’, ‘Spanish republicans and other victims of the Falangist regime in Spain’ and ‘persons who were considered refugees before the outbreak of the second world war’.19 The term also applied to Jewish, foreign or stateless residents of Germany and Austria who were victims of Nazi persecution and who were detained in or returned to those countries during the war, but who were not ‘firmly resettled’ there. The IRO Constitution also included the provision against requiring refugees to return if they had ‘valid objections’ defined as ‘persecution, or fear, based on reasonable grounds of persecution because of race, religion, nationality or political opinions’ and ‘objections of a political nature judged by the [International Refugee] Organization to be valid’.20 While this provision enshrined the principle of non-refoulement, or non-return, it also limited it. Lest there

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should be any doubt about the limits to the IRO’s assistance, the Constitution makes them explicit, including: It should be the concern of the Organization to ensure that its assistance is not exploited by persons in the case of whom it is clear that they are unwilling to return to their countries of origin because they prefer idleness to facing the hardships of helping in the reconstruction of their countries, or by persons who intend to settle in other countries for purely economic reasons, thus qualifying as emigrants.21 In 1950 the UN General Assembly voted to establish the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and in 1951 the first high commissioner, Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart of the Netherlands, took up his post. The IRO was then wound up and its role taken by the UNHCR. While the purpose of the new organisation was to seek permanent solutions for the problem of refugees, its immediate workload comprised of the estimated 2.2 million refugees still displaced following the Second World War. The work of the UNHCR is governed by its Statute, which determines that the remit of the organisation covers those outside their country of origin who are unable to return there or who seek protection from their own government because of a ‘well-founded’ fear of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality or political opinion. Over time, the responsibility of the UNHCR has been widened in practice, as later conflicts and disasters created new groups of displaced people in need of assistance, not all of whom met the strict criteria set out in the Statute. In 1959 the UN General Assembly authorised the high commissioner to use his ‘good offices’ to facilitate assistance to refugees not covered by the Statute. In the 1970s, resolutions of the UN General Assembly and Economic and Social Council began referring to ‘displaced persons’ as well as refugees, and today the organisation’s ‘populations of concern’ covers not only those recognised as refugees according to international law and asylum-seekers, but also internally displaced persons, stateless persons and others in ‘refugee-like situations’. As Goodwin-Gill and McAdam put it, this broadening of the UNHCR’s remit: shows awareness of the difficulty of determining in the case of a massive exodus that each and everyone has a well-founded fear of persecution in the sense of the UNHCR Statute. It also suggests that

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something more general, such as lack of protection, should serve as the criterion for identifying persons ‘of concern’ to the Higher Commissioner.22 At the end of 2016 there were 67.75 million ‘persons of concern’ worldwide, of whom 54 per cent were classified as internally displaced persons, 25 per cent as refugees and 4 per cent as asylum-seekers. The large majority are in the global South, with the major concentrations in Colombia, Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Turkey, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. While the scope of the UNHCR may have widened over time, the obligations of individual states under the 1951 Refugee Convention on the status of refugees and its 1967 Protocol are more tightly drawn. The definition of the term ‘refugee’ in the Convention is limited to those defined as refugees by earlier agreements (including the Constitution of the IRO) with the addition of those who meet the requirement of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ and who are outside their country of origin because of events occurring before 1951 in Europe (though individual signatories had the option to extend the geographical scope to the rest of the world). The 1967 Protocol removed both the temporal and geographical restrictions, giving the Convention universal coverage. A majority of UN member states are signatories to the 1967 Protocol. The Convention places obligations on refugees as well as states. For example, it obliges refugees to conform to the laws of the host country. The key obligation on states is that of non-return. Article 33 reads: No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. In addition, refugees are entitled to the same rights as citizens of the host country in a number of areas, including primary education, social security and freedom of religion; they are also entitled to the same rights as other legal migrants in areas including employment, housing and post-primary education, and to free movement and choice of residence within the country. Given the highly charged political debate about the status and rights of ‘asylum-seekers’ in Europe, it is ironic that the term ‘asylum’ does not

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appear at all in the main chapters of the Refugee Convention, just once in its Preamble and once in the Final Act of the conference that finalised and adopted the Convention. Nevertheless, the concept of asylum underpins the injunction against expelling or returning refugees, and Article 31 of the convention also prohibits states from penalising refugees who enter the country illegally, ‘provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence’. In 1967 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on Territorial Asylum, which recommended a set of principles by which states could give effect to the right to asylum contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As well as reiterating the principle of non-expulsion, the 1967 Declaration asks states to offer each other solidarity by taking measures to ‘lighten the burden’ on a state that ‘finds difficulty in granting or continuing to grant asylum’, a provision that takes on particular significance when seen in the light of subsequent debates about responses by European governments to the 2015/16 Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’.

europeanisation There are no stipulations in the 1951 Refugee Convention about how governments should decide the validity of claims for refugee status, and practice therefore varies widely, as does compliance with the Convention. Moreover, the UNHCR has no powers to enforce compliance. However, the European Union has increasingly sought to integrate and harmonise immigration, refugee and asylum policy among its members. In 1985, the Schengen Agreement among five member states of the then European Economic Community (EEC) provided for reduced border checks for travel between signatory countries. This was upgraded in 1990 with the signing of the Schengen Convention, which abolished internal border controls within the EU, and established a common travel area and a common visa policy. The policy became part of EU law by being incorporated into the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999. The Schengen area now extends to 26 countries. They include all the members of the EU with the exception of the UK and Ireland (which have opt-outs), Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Cyprus (which under EU law are required to join once technical requirements have been met), plus the four countries of the European Free Trade Area (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein). The lack of border controls within the Schengen Area

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meant that migrants landing by sea in Greece and Italy would be able in principle to travel on to other Schengen countries in northern Europe without being subject to checks. However, the high numbers of migrant arrivals in 2015 saw the – supposedly temporary – reinstatement of some border controls within the Schengen area. EU Schengen countries Non-EU Schengen countries Migration routes Western Mediterranean Central Mediterranean

FINLAND

NORWAY

Eastern Mediterranean Western Balkans

ESTONIA

SWEDEN

LITHUANIA LATVIA DENMARK

IRELAND

U.K.

POLAND NETHERLANDS BELGIUM 1

GERMANY

CZECHIA

SLOVAKIA

AUSTRIA HUNGARY FRANCE

2 3

SLOVENIA

ITALY

PORTUGAL

TURKEY

GREECE

SPAIN

1 Luxembourg 2 Switzerland 3 Liechtenstein

MALTA

Figure 2.1  The Schengen Area.

The EU has also developed a Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Work on this began in 1999, and the CEAS came fully into effect in 2015. The CEAS seeks to address three issues of concern to the EU. First, it aims to reduce so-called ‘asylum shopping’, in which a migrant whose asylum application has been rejected by one member state might apply to another in the hope of a positive decision. Second, it seeks to harmonise decision-making so that applications are treated in a similar way regardless of where they were made. Third, it aims to stop applicants gravitating towards countries perceived to offer better social benefits to asylum-seekers.

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The CEAS comprises several directives and regulations, described by the EU as follows: • The Asylum Procedures Directive sets out rules on the whole process of claiming asylum, including on: how to apply, how the application will be examined, what help the asylum-seeker will be given, how to appeal and whether the appeal will allow the person to stay on in the territory, what can be done if the applicant absconds or how to deal with repeated applications. • The Reception Conditions Directive deals with access to reception conditions for asylum-seekers while they wait for the examination of their claim. It ensures that applicants have access to housing, food, healthcare and employment, as well as medical and psychological care. It also ensures that detention is only applied as a measure of last resort. • The Qualification Directive clarifies the grounds for granting international protection, and therefore makes asylum decisions more robust. It also improves access to rights and integration measures for beneficiaries of international protection. • The core principle of the Dublin Regulation is that the responsibility for examining a claim lies primarily with the member state that played the greatest part in the applicant’s entry or residence in the EU. • The Eurodac Regulation led to the establishment of an EU asylum fingerprint database. When someone applies for asylum, no matter where they are in the EU, their fingerprints are transmitted to the Eurodac central system. While couched in the language of humanitarian concern, human rights and access to support and protection, in practice the CEAS also involves a considerable increase in surveillance and monitoring, and increased control over the movement of migrants once they enter EU territory. For example, the Dublin Regulation involves the transfer of applicants back to the EU country of first entry. It also facilitates the ‘hardening’ of the EU’s external border, seeking to establish a uniform approach to the processing of migrants wherever they may arrive. Another main component of the Europeanisation of border control is Frontex. Established in 2005, as the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders, Frontex

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originally worked to coordinate cooperation between EU states in relation to the management of external borders. Its role was primarily one of assistance and support. In response to the events of 2015, the European Commission proposed upgrading Frontex, and it was formally launched with its new mandate and title (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) in October 2016. Finally, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) is the EU agency responsible for supporting the implementation of the CEAS on the ground, including through training, capacity building and providing emergency support to EU member states subject to particular pressures on their asylum or reception systems.

refugee trends in europe since 1951 UNHCR data provides insights into the changing numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers in Europe since the organisation was established in 1951 (see Figure 2.1). Most of those recorded as refugees in the early 1950s had been displaced during the 1930s and 1940s as a consequence of the rise of fascism in Europe and because of the Second World War. They included the many Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, as well as others affected by military action and its aftermath. As people made new lives for themselves in their countries of refuge, or were able eventually to return to their homelands, the numbers of refugees in Europe declined steadily from the late 1950s until the late 1970s, until in 1978 they reached a low of just over 500,000 people in the nine countries of the EEC plus Austria, Greece, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.23 Numbers then began to rise again. The Iranian revolution of 1979 and the Iran–Iraq War of 1980 to 1988 led to a growth in Iranian refugees arriving in Europe. Likewise, the Gulf War of 1990/91 following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and its aftermath saw increasing numbers of Iraqi refugees making their way to Europe. In the 1990s the wars in former Yugoslavia displaced over 4 million people, producing a further sharp rise in the numbers of UNHCR-defined refugees and asylum-seekers in other European countries. The number of refugees from the former Yugoslavia began to decline after 1996, but the Kosovo conflict of 1998/9 reversed the downward trend, leading to a second peak in 2002. US-led military action against Afghanistan beginning in 2001 and against Iraq beginning in 2003 created millions of further refugees. While most of those moving were received by neighbouring countries, notably Pakistan

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millions

2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0

1951 1956 1961 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006 2011 2016

Figure 2.2  Number of refugees and asylum-seekers in countries that were members of the European Economic Area in 2018. Source: data from UNHCR Population Statistics Database (http://popstats.unhcr.org).

and Iran in the case of those fleeing Afghanistan, many came to Europe. In 2002, the total number of refugees and asylum-seekers (as defined by the UNHCR) in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA) stood at 2.37 million, before declining to 1.47 million in 2013, meaning that one person in every 350 EEA residents was classified as a refugee or asylum-seeker. Of course not all movements of refugees arise because of war. Political persecution, famine and natural disasters are also important reasons for people to seek refuge in other countries. Historically, however, wars have accounted directly or indirectly for a majority of the refugees coming to or moving within Europe. And European states have frequently been implicated in the prosecution of those wars, something frequently ignored by mainstream public discourse about migration and refugees. Moreover, in addition to the principal flows of refugees generated by the wars mentioned above, other smaller groups have been politically or culturally important at certain times. For example, in 1972 the Ugandan government of Idi Amin announced that it planned to expel people of South Asian descent from the country, including 27,000 British citizens, who came to Britain. The racist right wing of the British Conservative Party, led by Enoch Powell, campaigned against the move, and despite admitting the exiles, the government, led by Edward Heath, made efforts

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to prevent any repetition by trying (without much success) to find an overseas British territory that could be persuaded to take subsequent arrivals.24 Following the overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, many supporters of Allende fled overseas, including to the UK and to communist East Germany, where Michelle Bachelet, later president of Chile, lived between 1975 and 1979. After the end of the Vietnam War, over 230,000 Indochinese refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia settled in Europe, half of whom went to the former colonial power, France. In 2011, civil unrest in Syria developed into an armed uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad. By the winter of 2012/13 a full-scale civil war was underway, and remains so at the time of writing in early 2018. In addition, during 2013 and 2014, the radical Islamist group variously known as ISIS, ISIL, IS and Daesh, gained effective military control of parts of Syria and Iraq. The war in Syria and the renewed conflict in Iraq produced millions of new refugees. According to the UNHCR, in 2016 there were 5.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers worldwide. Most are currently in the neighbouring countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, but some 800,000 are in the EU, including approximately 475,000 in Germany. Those fleeing Syria and Iraq since 2014 have been joined by increased numbers of refugees from conflict and persecution in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan, among others. It is these conflicts and population movements that lay behind the unprecedented movement of people across the Mediterranean from Turkey and North Africa in 2015 and led to headlines about the ‘migrant crisis’ across Europe.

3 Governing Mobility

Moria, Lesbos, 26 October 2015. A group of high ranking officials had arrived on the island of Lesbos. It included the European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos, the Frontex executive director, Fabrice Leggeri, the Greek Minister for Migration Policy, Yannis Mouzalas, and the Luxembourgish Premier, Jean Asselboen. Rumours had been circulating for days around the island about the imminent visit. Preparations were without a doubt taking place: people were being moved from one camp to the other (that is, from Moria to Kara Tepe), others were hastily processed and transported to the mainland. The officials had come to formally inaugurate the first of the European Union’s migration hotspots in Greece. Moments before the arrival of the motorcade, a sewage truck arrived – probably planned by someone unaware of the officials’ visit – to empty the sewage tank which, as it had been full for days, made the area at the back of the camp stink rather wretchedly. The truck was hurriedly turned away, flagrantly disregarding the needs of those residing in Moria in order to avoid it becoming part of the photo spread of the hotspot inauguration. As the motorcade finally drew up to the entrance of the camp-cum-hotspot, a small group of protesters raised a banner in protest against the EU response to the declared emergency. Following the ceremonial visit to the Moria hotspot, the motorcade made its way to the port and the pier where Frontex was stationed. The officials met and saluted the multinational Frontex personnel stationed at the time on the island. They also greeted and chatted with a group of newly arrived migrants who had been brought in for this purpose on a bus. As the guests of honour were leaving, we stayed back, hoping to interview some of the members of the Portuguese Frontex team. In that moment we noticed a ferry sailing away from the commercial pier to other islands and eventually to Piraeus. At this time of year the passengers were mostly migrants who had gone through the process of identification and registration in the Moria hotspot, but also NGO

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workers, researchers and journalists visiting the crisis-stricken island. Right in front of us stood two abandoned half-deflated dinghies and several broken down engines that had been confiscated that day and were showcased for the officials’ visit.

Figure 3.1  A ferry leaving Mytilene. Photograph: Anna Papoutsi.

This powerful tableau painfully captures the very essence of European border policies and their intensification by the hotspot approach. As Etienne Balibar, one of the leading contemporary thinkers on borders in Europe today, points out: For a rich person from a rich country the border has become an embarkation formality, a point of symbolic acknowledgement of his social status to be passed at a jog-trot. For a poor person from a poor country, however, the border tends to be something quite different: not only is it an obstacle which is very difficult to surmount, but it is a place he runs up against repeatedly, passing and repassing through it as and when he is expelled or allowed to rejoin his family.1 While it is true that we live in an increasingly mobile world, this doesn’t necessarily entail that we are more mobile than we have been in the past: human history is filled with, and has been defined by, movements, resettlements, colonisations and migrations of people(s) – violent, peaceful, voluntary and forced. It does entail, however, that our world and our societies are ones of increased and amplified interconnectedness: people, places, practices, policies, states, all tied up in a global web of things that

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are on the move: ‘nowhere can be an island’.2 Global processes, transnational networks and translocal connections define and transform our daily lives, routines, desires and needs in ways that we cannot straightforwardly fathom or grasp; organised society increasingly depends on daily, regular and timely flows of goods, people, labour, information and knowledge. But most importantly, this increasingly mobile world is transforming our very understanding and conceptualisation of notions such as presence and absence, proximity and distance, family life and community, belonging and resistance. In this sense, studying the social world through the lens of movement, speed and temporality rather than that of stasis and linear time seems imperative. However, mobility and temporality are notions that are themselves contested and are simply the tools we use to aid our understanding of the social world and our challenging of its emerging hierarchies. This chapter looks at the differentiated mobility regimes produced by the hotspot mechanism and critically rethinks the relationship between (im)mobility, agency and freedom. The hotspot is not a prison – it doesn’t really need to be. Strategically situated on islands, the hotspot mechanism physically thwarts any unauthorised secondary movement of migrants and becomes a capture and circulation system that governs people’s mobility in multiple places at once. This is what we call the hotspot approach. While migrants are relatively free to move around after being processed and are not physically detained, the spaces ‘allocated’ to them are predicated upon arbitrary criteria, such as their arrival date. Some are trapped on the frontline Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, Leros, Samos and Kos, while others remain indefinitely across Greek territory. In practice, these spaces are then shrunk further: asylum-seekers receive a scarce allowance that keeps them de facto immobile, while they are often allocated accommodation in places with largely hostile local populations, denying them essential family, social and solidarity networks. In what follows we first examine hotspots both as infrastructure but also as an integrated approach to population management during times of crisis. An integral part of this approach is the EU–Turkey Statement which, as we argue, makes the hotspot mechanism possible, providing the framework for governing migrant mobility. The main institutions and actors that have come to be involved in the new regime of the spatial management of mobility are also of interest here. The second part of the chapter lays out the main concepts, analytical tools and literature which help us understand the processes that are underway today, transform-

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ing European borders and the management of mobility. The third part brings in empirical evidence from our collective fieldwork on Lesbos and in Athens between September 2015 and August 2016. The chapter concludes with our collective thoughts on these processes and their implications for migrant but also for local populations and the potential for resistance.

the hotspot and the eu–turkey statement: from state of emergency to the europeanisation of the border Introduced in the European Agenda on Migration in May 2015, the hotspot was presented as an integrated approach to tackle what was seen as uncontrollable, and thus threatening, migrant mobility at Europe’s southern gates, and its knock-on effects on the rest of the continent. We argue that the hotspot is the apogee of the European Commission’s endeavours to Europeanise the border. Situated in so-called ‘frontline’ EU member states, the hotspot is a mechanism that allows the accommodation of all relevant European agencies in order to bolster their cooperation and to centralise control over the external border and asylum process. Once an area is declared a hotspot, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), Frontex, Europol and Eurojust come in to assist the affected member state to swiftly identify, register and fingerprint incoming migrants.3 What is envisioned by the European Commission (EC) here is that these four agencies will support member-state authorities with the registration, identification and removal of apprehended migrants (Frontex), the registration of asylum claims and preparation of relocation and family reunification claimants (EASO) and the investigation and subsequent prosecution of crimes and terrorism (Europol and Eurojust). Migration and asylum have been pivotal within EU institutionalisation process and governance apparatus for some time now. Accordingly, the EU has spent years building a Common European Asylum System (CEAS), setting out minimum standards and procedures on issues related to the treatment of asylum-seekers and those granted protection (known as the EU Asylum Acquis), and has set up support mechanisms for the purpose of implementation and harmonisation as well as relevant jurisprudence. The hotspot is the latest in this line of events: a tool that, under the guise of emergency, provides, as we will examine in the following chapters, the flexibility and obfuscation necessary for the advancement

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of the Europeanisation of the border and the asylum process. It is no coincidence that, while the hotspot idea was initially the EC’s political reaction to the increased migrant death toll in the central Mediterranean route (from Libya to Italy) during the spring and summer of 2015, it found the perfect testing ground on the Greek frontline islands, and mostly on Lesbos in late 2015. In other words, the hotspot is about the facilitation of EU operations at the local level, a way for the above mentioned four key EU agencies to ‘work on the ground with the authorities of the frontline member-states to help fulfil their obligations under EU law’.4 But it is at the same time much more than an infrastructure and set of operating procedures. In the words of one of our informants, a high ranking EC official working in Moria: ‘The hotspot is a concept, an idea, not just a tangible infrastructure; its primary aim is to record and control incoming migrants’. Our findings point to a similar conclusion: the hotspot is a multifaceted management tool that has become the main border instrument for the management of migrant mobility within the European border regime today, far exceeding the space enclosed by its gates and the geographical location of the border. It creates zones of indistinction5 as asylum becomes a bordering practice,6 while the border gets dislocated into sovereign EU territory, creating buffer zones7 of pseudo-protection in the EU periphery. It disentangles decision-making and border enforcement from legal scrutiny, and rights from territory. In this sense, it is an integrated approach to the spatial management of population mobility with a potential far greater reach than its implementation on incoming populations. The EU–Turkey Statement: Fast-Track Border Procedure or Admissibility as Asylum? While the first hotspot in Moria was inaugurated in October 2015, it wasn’t until the EU–Turkey Statement in March 2016 that the hotspot approach became practically functional. The EU–Turkey Statement is a political agreement between the government of Turkey and the EU. It complements the hotspot approach by providing the framework for the control and management of migrant mobility at specific geographical locations, that is the north-east Aegean Islands. Following months of negotiations at the highest level, but also threats by both sides and political machinations, the EU and Turkey came to a political agreement in March 2016. The Turkish government agreed to stem the flow of

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migrants crossing the eastern Mediterranean by boat and to crackdown on smuggling networks. In return, the EU would substantially fund the country’s humanitarian infrastructure and revamp Turkey’s accession negotiations to the EU. A controversial promise was annexed to the agreement, stipulating that Turkish citizens would soon enjoy visa-free travel to the EU, but this was conditioned upon Turkey overhauling its legal framework in order to protect human rights and offer adequate protection for refugees. None of these materialised. One of the most controversial parts of the EU–Turkey Statement is the stipulation that Turkey shall accept the return of all migrants who illicitly crossed to the Greek islands after 20 March 2016. Although presented as a concession on the part of Turkey, in fact it was the European legal framework that did not previously allow such returns. This was because Turkey was not considered by the EU as a Safe Third Country (STC) as it is not a full signatory of the Geneva Convention. The STC concept entails that, from March 2016, all asylum claims are processed on the basis of their admissibility and not their merit. The distinction between admissibility and merit represents a key change in the practice of asylum law. Fast-Track Border Procedure In April 2016, the Greek Parliament approved the Asylum Law (4375/2016), introducing the fast-track border procedure that implements the EU–Turkey Statement. According to this law, the procedure applies in the case of massive arrivals of third country nationals who apply for international protection at the border. In that case, the Greek Asylum Service, supported by the EASO, considers whether an individual claim is admissible rather than whether an asylum-seeker is in need of international protection. For an asylum claim to be considered admissible, the asylum-seeker must be in considerable danger should s/he be returned to Turkey. In all other cases, Turkey is considered to be able and willing to process asylum applications while offering asylum-seekers temporary protection and respect for their rights. By default this upgrades Turkey to an STC, even though the country is not a full signatory of the Geneva Convention. Legal scrutiny aside, human rights violations in Turkey, both of citizens, especially after the July 2016 attempted coup, and of refugees are well-documented by many NGOs and watchdogs who work on the ground. UNHCR has additionally come to admit that it has no

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oversight of the returns nor access to the returnees as stipulated in the EU–Turkey Statement. Recognition Rate This admissibility procedure prioritises applications lodged by Syrian nationals. This means that when a Syrian national’s claim is deemed admissible, this person is allowed to move to mainland Greece and get his/her asylum claim processed by the Greek Asylum Service. For non-Syrian nationals, admissibility is determined by the recognition rate of each nationality, which is the share of positive decisions in the total number of asylum decisions. For non-Syrian nationals who come from countries with a high recognition rate – when over 25 per cent of all asylum decisions are positive (such as Iraq and Afghanistan) – the admissibility consideration is followed by an eligibility interview. This leads either to the lifting of geographical limitations on their mobility (in the case of eligibility) or to the processing of the merit of their asylum claim in the hotspot (in the case of ineligibility), given that they appeal the first instance decision. However, from December 2016, according to the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR), the claims of these nationalities are also assessed on the basis of their admissibility. Finally, applicants from countries deemed to have a low recognition rate (below 25 per cent), that is applicants from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Pakistan, undergo in-merit processing in the hotspot. However, by February 2017, GCR reports that they were aware of at least one case of an applicant from this category whose claim was considered on the basis of its admissibility. This intricate set of different routes to asylum applies arbitrary criteria (that is nationality and recognition rates) and cut-off dates (for example, 20 March 2016) to govern and discipline migrant mobility. A Toxic Agreement On the European side, the EU–Turkey Statement has been toxic for the rule of law. For its implementation to be possible, in June 2016 the Greek Minister for Migration Policy, Yannis Mouzalas, restructured the Independent Appeals Committees, which examine appeals against the first decisions of the Asylum Service, using the 4399/2016 amendment to the 3907/2011 law. This move was characterised by many legal experts as highly problematic, even unconstitutional. It came at a time when the Appeals Committees were issuing positive decisions

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on admissibility, refusing in this way to consider Turkey to be an STC for migrants. This meant that returns to Turkey were blocked. At the time of writing (spring 2018), after the intervention of the minister, this trend has been reversed: positive decisions dropped dramatically, with Appeals Committees rejecting a staggering 93.63 per cent of the cases. In addition, the Greek National Committee on Human Rights states that the inclusion of judicial personnel in the Appeals Committees could be unconstitutional as these are prohibited from performing administrative work. Similarly, the participation of EASO personnel in admissibility interviews contravenes the principle that limits the exercise of power on sovereign Greek territory to Greek civil servants. Finally, the EU– Turkey Statement poses a serious threat to the entire post-war refugee protection regime as it erodes fundamental legal protections for refugees on European territory by disentangling it from territory and forcing mobility and a lack of stability on people. In any case, the EU–Turkey Statement is not under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice because it is a political agreement between countries rather than a legally binding agreement. At the time of writing, the Greek Supreme Court rejected the claim of two Syrian nationals whose asylum claim had been deemed inadmissible in the second degree that Turkey is not a safe country for them. This opens the door for the return of thousands of Syrians whose claims have been deemed inadmissible and whose appeals have been pending this decision.

the spatial management of mobility The processes that we are currently witnessing in the EU periphery, internalising or domesticating the border, are driven by the need to facilitate the free circulation of goods and certain people while keeping others out. As a consequence, the border is experienced differently by different groups and individuals. For some (EU citizens, tourists, business people and academics) it is a gateway while for others (migrants) it is an insurmountable barrier. On the one hand there is pressure for a globalised borderless world, and on the other there is a securitisation discourse pulling in the exact opposite direction. Within the context of a constant struggle between these two discourses and practices, some borders are opening up or becoming softer (deterritorialisation), while others are closing or becoming harder (re-territorialisation). This tension between economic globalisation and security concerns tends to create

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uneven and tenuous border regimes in order to govern mobility.8 The resulting regime provides excess mobility or hyper-mobility for some, while immobilising others: the ‘exceptions’, such as migrants, refugees and other identity-based groups.9 Put differently, mobility – the ability to move across space or to have access to opportunities for movement – becomes a differentiated regime that is predicated upon the construction of specific categories of people as threats.10 A Politics of (Im)Mobility Within the literature on mobilities there tends to be a glorification of mobility: it is usually understood as increased agency11 and power;12 a resource available to everyone rather than ‘an instrument of power, which can be used or experienced punitively’.13 Sheller and Urry challenge the idea that increased agency is associated with (an excess of) mobility.14 As hypermobile individuals move around and travel the world, they leave their traces behind, ‘reconfiguring themselves as bits of scattered informational traces’15 in the form of plane reservations, Oyster card records, CCTV images, GPS data, hotel bookings, fingerprints, travel itineraries and biometric data, all stored and analysed, ultimately used to sort and categorise people. Richard Sennett challenges the privilege associated with hypermobile Western middle-class workers by looking at how it creates additional burdens rather than freedom.16 This ‘mobility burden’17 has an impact on their identity and community life. Moreover, the state itself imposes mobility on people or uses it punitively, turning it into a tool of control and discipline.18 As Nick Gill explains, ‘mobilities are employed within prisons in order to deliver their punitive functions’.19 Both prisons and migration detention centres move prisoners and detainees between facilities for punishment or to invisibilise them.20 Spierenburg stresses the way that ‘free movement’ within certain spaces in prisons is used as a way to intimidate prisoners and subjugate them to the prison hierarchy.21 Finally, studies of the use of electronic monitoring demonstrate that mobility ‘can function as a way to … responsibilise convicts and ensure that they remain answerable to a range of authorities, including family, employers, neighbours and other community officials’, which has a heavy impact on their sense of freedom.22 It is also worth noting that the boundaries between voluntary and forced movement, choice and constraint, are not always clear-cut.23 For example, asylum-seekers, when granted legal status, are usually

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restricted to specific places,24 while people without formal status might be ‘enjoying’ a higher degree of movement in practice.25 Neither condition is pleasant nor desirable, and certainly adds frustration to whoever is subjected to it, but it goes to show the various ways in which mobility and immobility can be contested. The power geometry of mobility is another way to think about a politics of mobility as it is not just about who moves and who doesn’t. Massey urges us to think about power in relation to movement: Different social groups have distinct relations to … differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movements, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.26 At one end of the spectrum are ‘the groups who are really, in a sense, in charge of time-space compression; who can effectively use it and turn it into advantage’; at the other side of the spectrum, there are ‘groups who, although doing a lot of physical moving, are not “in charge” of the process in the same way’.27 Here Kaufmann’s concept of ‘motility’, the potential for movement rather than movement itself, is necessary to understand these power geometries at play. Motility is ‘the way in which an individual appropriates what is possible in the domain of mobility and puts this potential to use for his or her activities’.28 Mobility on the other hand involves actual physical movement. So, while we are all more or less mobile, it is motility that should be associated more with power, while mobility more accurately describes the experiences of migrants trapped in Greece. Layers of (Im)Mobility According to official estimates, about 60,000 people were captured by the closure of the border between Greece and Macedonia in the winter of 2016. However, numbers have been a contested field, and much political machination has resulted from inflating and deflating the numbers, making populations visible or invisible as a result. For example, the Greek authorities are known to have manipulated numbers in order to maximise the population counted as stranded within Greek territory because valuable EU funds are predicated upon this number.29 This is common knowledge and practice among those working in camps

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throughout Greece. One of our informants, a worker in the Elaionas camp, who was also involved in the latest survey of the population residing in the camp, told us that there are two numbers: the official one, which is given to the Greek Ministry for Migration Policy and the unofficial one, which is the true number of inhabitants. In particular, the Greek government ignores the UNHCR’s calculation of the number of people who illicitly cross the border into Macedonia. Another common practice is to move migrants between camps in order to make them invisible. However, there is an undeniably significant number of people trapped throughout Greece, people who are at best kept waiting for a decision on their asylum claim, family reunification or relocation, and at worst waiting to be deported. Most of those trapped in the mainland by the closure of the border between Greece and Macedonia arrived before the completion of the EU–Turkey Statement in March 2016. Many are semi-settled across Greece in humanitarian camps, but also in unofficial structures, such as the 18 squats in Athens hosting about 1,500 individuals.30 Their only options since the closure of the border are: to claim asylum and remain in Greece; to apply for relocation under the Emergency Relocation Scheme or for family reunification under the Dublin Regulation; to return to their countries of origin via the International Organization for Migration’s voluntary returns scheme. However, relocation is now only the privilege of Syrian and Iraqi nationals. In the first months of the implementation of the EU–Turkey Statement, in order to claim asylum, people first needed to pre-register this intention. The aim of this ‘pre-registration exercise’, as it came to be known, was to buy government agencies some additional time in order to process the increased number of asylum claims, as all those trapped would now claim asylum and would need to be processed by the Greek Asylum Service. Pre-registration in turn allowed migrants to move within Greece but criminalised any attempt at secondary movements: once pre-registered and digitally fingerprinted, any attempt to cross the border in order to claim asylum in another EU member state was automatically criminalised since their fingerprint would turn up when checked against Eurodac. One of our informants, a lawyer and activist who works closely with asylum-seekers, claims that this is still a common practice: sometimes, for unspecified reasons, the Greek Asylum Service, instead of registering actual asylum claims, opts to pre-register individuals.

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From summer 2015 until March 2016, there were intensive efforts by the Greek Asylum Service, UNHCR and EASO to convince people to stay put and opt for legal ways to move on. During our fieldwork, we witnessed regular visits by representatives from these agencies to the Kara Tepe camp on Lesbos and to camps on the mainland. The representatives tried to inform transiting migrants about the EC’s relocation scheme, but their success was very limited. In the words of one of our informants, a UNHCR worker in the Elaionas camp in November 2015: ‘It is really tricky. There are people who have been waiting for five or six months trapped in Greece. Most of them can’t wait any longer. There are some who apply for relocation and then don’t have the patience to wait’. Migrants who arrived after the EU–Turkey Statement have found themselves worse off: according to the Greek Ministry for Migration Policy in September 2017, 13,000 people were at the time captured on the frontline islands of Lesbos, Samos, Chios, Leros and Kos. There, once registered at the hotspot and following a 25-day detention period, migrants were allowed to move around the island but often lacked the funds to do so, thus ‘voluntarily’ residing in a prison and depending on the humanitarian assistance provided by NGOs. Taking a closer look at the drawing of the cut-off date of the EU–Turkey Statement (20 March 2016), the arbitrariness, injustice and blurred boundaries of such categories become evident: the arrival date of a migrant is not marked on a ferry or plane ticket. Those that arrived around the date that separates the two categories know this very well. Adding to the confusion, a computer glitch on 19 March 2016 mixed up the declared arrival dates on many people’s registration papers, while others tried to claim that they had arrived before or after the specific date. This is a new kind of disciplining of mobility through cut-off dates and other mechanisms of access to protection and relocation that change in unpredictable ways – such as the aforementioned requirement for relocation that the applicant comes from a country with an EU recognition rate for international protection of at least 75 per cent. As research on the Italian hotspot regime shows,31 hotspots often force different kinds of mobility on people who are already on the move. In Greece, since mobility across the Aegean islands has been almost fully institutionalised, migrant journeys have become longer, more erratic and often more dangerous as those crossing from other routes. This means that migrants now arrive on more distant islands, such as Crete. These new arrivals, which theoretically don’t fall under the geographical

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purview of the fast-track border procedure and the EU–Turkey Statement, are nonetheless now also transferred to hotspots to be processed. This goes to show the different ways in which the hotspot regime geographically reaches well outside its purview to capture incoming migrants and subject them to unequal mobility regimes. Recently, the EC announced that the Dublin Regulation, suspended for Greece since 2012 due to the inhumane conditions for migrants in the country, is to come back into force. This means that asylum seekers for whom the country of entry is Greece will have to be returned there in order for their asylum claim to be processed. Even though this applies only to those who arrive in other member states after March 2017, it adds a whole new layer of uncertainty and (im)mobility for those stranded. Some will be returned to Greece, despite the statement of the Greek Ministry for Migration Policy that Greece will accept very few returnees under the Dublin Regulation as a sign to and token of ‘solidarity’ with other EU countries that have received the bulk of refugees from Greece. Less intuitively though, the EC announcement already pushes migrants to move in an effort to avoid further unfavourable conditions. Finally, family reunification under the Dublin Regulation has been very slow, keeping people on their toes. Even when applications are accepted, people have to wait for months, even years, before they can move on. In particular, Germany, which has received the bulk of requests for family reunification since 2015, and Greece secretly agreed in spring 2017 to slow down the process of reuniting families. According to media reports, in May 2017 the Greek Dublin Unit was informed by their German counterparts that family reunifications would be capped at 70 transfers per month. Additionally, German immigration authorities tend to give asylum-seekers the status of subsidiary protection instead of full asylum, banning them in this way from family reunification. While it has not been officially admitted by either side, our informant, a lawyer and an activist, told us: ‘We are sure it is happening. It is illegal but it is happening. And it intensifies the suffering for families who have been separated since 2015’. Essentially, the EU, in an effort to regain control over mobility through the hotspot approach, paradoxically keeps migrants on the move rather than stopping them altogether. Our findings resonate with the relevant literature and hint at increasing and more erratic mobility being inflicted on migrants. Rather than containing populations that are already on the move through detention, the hotspot approach disrupts and protracts their journeys. What was a relatively autonomous migrant mobility in

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the summer and autumn of 2015 is now a set of fragmented flows and restless mobilities,32 stopped and bounced off different and mobile (and often bureaucratic) obstacles. Migrant mobility is now effectively illegal within the territory of a single member state; those who, for one reason or another, fail to register at a hotspot upon arrival are criminalised. The only way to travel to the mainland is illicitly, but this, for the first time, produces multiple exclusions: exclusion from claiming asylum, from finding accommodation in a camp or other official facilities run by NGOs, from the allowance received by asylum-seekers, and from relocation or family reunification or any other funding and humanitarian scheme or programme. The authorities are exempt from providing such migrants with protection. Migrants are invisible, and they are permanently deterritorialised, more akin to nomads than migrants who eventually get re-territorialised: ‘the nomad has no points, paths or land … [I]f the nomad can be called the deterritorialised par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialisation afterwards as with the migrant’.33 This prompts us to critically reconceptualise mobility and immobility and their relationship with freedom and agency. While migrants are relatively free to move around and are not really physically detained in detention centres and prisons, the spaces that are ‘allocated’ to them are predicated upon arbitrary criteria (such as their arrival date) and could be further constrained by financial or other factors, such as being allocated accommodation somewhere where they know no one and may face a hostile local population. Therefore, going from a largely disparate and spontaneous movement of populations to a highly institutionalised and governed regime has meant that people are stranded along what has become known as the Balkan route, waiting for change. Vulnerability as Border Practice There is an obligation on the Greek state to spot and assess vulnerable cases upon arrival in order to channel them accordingly. Under Greek law, victims of torture, sexual or gender-based violence, pregnant women and children, and people with disabilities are considered vulnerable. These people require special protection and, until recently, were entitled to an exemption from the fast-track asylum procedure which is based on the admissibility of a claim rather than its merit. This means that they are given priority and processed on the mainland rather than on

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the frontline islands. The Greek state has devolved the responsibility of identifying vulnerable cases to the international NGO Médecins du Monde. According to one of our informants working in Moria for the International Organization for Migration, vulnerable cases are identified during the first interview. In that instance, the geographical limitation is lifted and they are able to move to the mainland and have their claim processed by the Greek Asylum Service on its merit. However, in May 2017, a joint action plan on the implementation of the EU–Turkey Statement recommended an amendment to Greece’s Asylum Law (4375/2016). This amendment was put in place to exempt vulnerable persons from border procedures resulting from the EU– Turkey Statement. According to a comprehensive report by Human Rights Watch on the issue, the rationale of the amendment is that too many people were being recognised as vulnerable as half of all asylum seekers who received a positive first-instance decision on their asylum claim had been recognised as such.34 From May 2017, according to the same informant, the geographical limitation was no longer lifted for vulnerable cases, who were now forced to remain in the hotspot. They could, however, skip the admissibility stage of their claim, which is also processed mainly by the Greek Asylum Service and not by EASO. At the time of writing (2018), however, there are increasing reports by local activists and in the media that, due to overcrowding on the Aegean islands, the vulnerable cases that are exempt from the EU–Turkey Statement will again be moved to the mainland. This is a new kind of disciplining of mobility through vulnerability criteria that change on a whim in unpredictable ways according to need. Vulnerability is turning into a bordering practice. It also goes to show the arbitrariness of border governmentality that migrants are subjected to. Governing Mobility through Time Compared to the frantic pace of the transformations that have taken place in the spatial management of migration since 2015, migrant temporalities are subjected to deceleration and are characterised by increased uncertainty. Time and mobility are inextricably linked: we move through space and through time; there is always a temporal aspect in movement, whether one commutes to work or decides to migrate to another country. One cannot study one without considering the other. Immigration and border management in particular, exerting control over time rather than

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space, is all about governing mobility. This control over time is inextricably tied up with power relations, discipline and bureaucratic domination. We therefore need to study mobility and temporality in relation to global governance and state processes and practices: governments, states and bureaucracies, increasingly concerned with mobility, create new and differentiated temporalities and mobility regimes and subject certain people to these. Industrial time and daily routines organise our collective pace and life in the urban and national contexts.35 In a more dramatic fashion, the wasted time, ‘empty presents’36 and ‘permanent temporariness’37 experienced by asylum seekers is another form of domination and discipline: ‘the imposition of waiting, always with a glimmer of hope for eventual change, is part of the technique of control that sustains the marginality and compliance of undocumented migrants’.38 In this sense, both time and mobility seem to be turning into commodities and resources, of which some people have an excess and some a lack, and which are bound up in power hierarchies within capitalist societies: not having enough time and having an excess of mobility are seen as a symbol of power (think of the busy business person or the academic constantly flying around the world). ‘To preclude the critical thinking afforded by idle time, the prized virtue of neoliberalism has become busyness, which transforms a society of atomised monads into a sea of ever-circulating nomads remaining politically disempowered’.39 Nowhere shows this more clearly than the port of Mytilene, which in 2017, even with the subtle segregation of local populations and transiting migrants, was buzzing with people, pre-departure arrangements and so on. Today, it is devoid of any spontaneous activity; it is fenced, heavily policed and access is controlled; police vans transferring prisoners is not a rare sight, either transporting detained migrants to mainland detention centres (during riots, for example) or carrying migrants from the mainland to be deported back to Turkey.

conclusion Lesbos, 22 September 2015. Our very first visit to the island was coming to an end, and we were due to head to London for an initial meeting with our funders. We walked towards the ferry, tired and with our backpacks, ready for the ten-hour journey to the port of Piraeus, seemingly sharing the migrants’ fate for a moment. This sense was immediately interrupted by the sight of the two separate queues of passengers waiting to board the

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ferry. For some reason, our queue was moving a lot faster than the other. Then we understood why: the second queue was for migrants who were finally able to continue their journey onwards to mainland Greece, and from there on to the rest of Europe. Following a stand-off with a coast guard officer over taking pictures, we boarded the ferry only to notice that there was still some sort of subtle separation between passengers: the staff were directing migrants towards the lower decks of the ferry while the rest of the passengers were shown to the front lounges. Baffled at how they even were able to figure out who was who, we made our way towards the upper deck and settled at one of the available tables. We couldn’t help but think that this must be what a differentiated mobility regime40 would actually look like on the ground: different queues and different lounges; different identification requirements. We were never asked to provide documentation, while the tickets of the migrants were literally stapled together with their documentation, the police papers they got at registration in the hotspot. While hierarchised access to mobility has been mostly studied through a global perspective, in which some individuals are hypermobile and others immobile,41 our experience described above hinted at the processes that are underway and are internalising this global regime: the hotspot is the spearhead of such processes, swiftly creating and spreading several layers of differentiated mobility well beyond the borders of and throughout EU territory. Controlling and governing the mobility of both the unwanted and the wanted becomes central to the sovereign state. Mobility raises massive problems for the modern state because a mobile population is hard to monitor and thus control. So, as Urry points out: ‘The security of states increasingly involves complex control systems of recording, measuring and assessing populations that are intermittently moving, beginning in the “west” with the system of the humble passport but now involving many elements of a “digital order”’.42 Thus mobility needs to be reframed in relation to the state, which is the vector of border governmentality, favouring relatively immobilised populations.43 We need to track everyday power geometries,44 hierarchies and practices that create hypermobile individuals while immobilising others,45 unevenly distributing ‘motility’.46 This differentiated access to mobility and the ensuing global mobility regime is predicated upon the construction of specific groups of people and their movement as a threat to social order and national security.47 In this sense, it becomes essential to challenge at the same time place-bound membership48

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and existing categorisations between mobile and immobile subjects.49 We need, therefore, to rethink and explore the relationship between mobility and immobility, but also between mobility and freedom, critically exploring the ways in which the former is also regularly used to govern and punish populations. Further exploring state bureaucracies and practices of surveillance and monitoring,50 biosocial profiling51 and technologies of sorting and intervention will allow us to better understand the multiple ways in which border systems produce inequalities and distribute mobility unevenly through the control of time and the creation of temporal vacuums and altered geographies. Such an exploration will also help us challenge traditional and static categories of citizens and non-citizens and to reconceptualise identity and belonging along the spectrum of inclusion/exclusion and social dispossession, as this is produced through struggles over the (re)appropriation of time and access to mobility as integral parts of the construction of the social. Furthermore, as Massey argues, a politics of mobility should ask: whether our relative mobility and power over mobility and communication entrenches the spatial imprisonment of other groups. A politics of mobility might range over issues as broad as wheelchair access, reclaiming the night and the streets of cities for women and for older people, through issues of international migration, to the whole gamut of transport policy itself.52 In the words of Georg Simmel, the first theorist of a mobilities paradigm in the social sciences, it is ‘only in visibly impressing the path into the surface of the earth that the places [are] objectively connected’.53 While he was referring to infrastructures such as roads and railways that create permanent connections between places and have the effect of ‘freezing movement in a solid structure’54 and materialise the Nietzschean ‘will to connect’,55 it is not a far cry to talk in similar terms about the wave of migrant arrivals in Europe in 2015/16. They built a path and created the imaginary of a permanent connection between East and West.

4 The Camps

The half kilometre-long side road separating Moria First Reception Centre from the adjacent farming plots is lined with people queuing up for registration. In the days of heightened arrivals, waiting times can stretch up to a week. Behind the fence, Greek police transcribe individuals’ personal information onto A4 paper, which confirms their identity and nationality and which serves, at least for a short while, as a travel document for the onward journey. Towards the end of 2015 the queues became considerably smaller; the site had already been recast as a hotspot and the new order of things was slowly settling on the routines of migrants, humanitarian workers, volunteers and the hotspot authorities. Moria’s fences grew taller as the detention spaces within it multiplied. At the end of March 2016, it was no longer possible to enter Moria as a visitor. The hotspot had become an open prison, the process of identification, screening and registration more humiliating than ever. Dedicated teams of EU bureaucrats were applying soft interrogation techniques that, according to one of those who were temporarily caught in its net, aimed ‘to prove that you are lying about who you are and where you come from, before you even get the chance to present your case for asylum’. There are no longer queues outside Moria; migrants can complete the registration processes from the comfort of their own overcrowded tents. Alas, the winter of 2017 was the coldest in 50 years. Deaths caused by attempts to heat the tents were quickly framed as a humanitarian emergency and the solution came with the ‘winterisation’ of the Moria camp.1 At the time of writing (2018), those deaths have still not been investigated. The EU’s hotspot approach is a grey, misery-producing institution.

saving schengen In 2015, besides the 3,771 that perished at sea, more than 700,000 migrants made landfall in Europe in the north-eastern Aegean Islands. This autonomous and diverse migrant movement was initially facilitated transit through Greece and the western Balkans. The conditions

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within which they realised their mobility were hampered by obstacles at the borders, overcrowded and expensive transportation, lack of shelter and cold weather. The deadly Paris attacks in November 2015, attributed to individuals who had previously landed in Greece, became the catalyst for an explosive xenophobic and racist discourse that reduced sentiments of empathy towards asylum-seekers. Unilateral initiatives by countries along the so-called western Balkan corridor to coordinate the proclaimed emergency, followed by short-sighted responses, such as the reinforcement and building of new physical barriers at border crossings, produced a disjointed, frenzied image of the EU. Sentiments of empathy that drove a short-lived humanitarian approach were now critically low, with devastating effects on the lives of hundreds of thousands of border crossers, stuck in transit, separated from family and loved ones. Europe has been running on an emergency mode to save itself. Responding to the movement of migrants has a long history within European cooperation efforts to manage unauthorised migration. As a direct response to the growing number of refugees in July 2012, the EU accepted a reform of the Schengen Agreement that allowed Schengen countries to once again carry out passport checks for arrivals at national borders ‘for a limited period’. In 2015, some EU member states re-established ‘exceptional’ border controls. For instance, passport controls were reintroduced between Denmark and Sweden. These were tactics to deter intra-European mobility for those in transit but deemed undeserving of international protection by means of thorough documentation checks and racial profiling at ports and train stations. Before long, saving Schengen becomes Europe’s newest existential crisis, and the focus turned to the situation at Europe’s peripheral borders. Politically it culminated in Greece being threatened with expulsion from the Schengen accord in 2016 for failing to effectively protect the border of Europe. In a move to take control of the situation, the European Commission (EC) set in motion a series of key interventions to previously established modes of asylum processing and border governance. To begin with, the EU’s Dublin Regulation, a legal provision that openly disfavours countries of first arrival with the obligation to examine asylum claims, was temporarily overturned and replaced by a mechanism of relocation from the periphery to the core. The relocation scheme was introduced and showed a measure of EU solidarity regarding the burden of asylum processing on peripheral states, but it soon proved to be no more than yet another attempt to reinforce deportations. This renewed

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production of migrant deportability was a result of a combination of two main things: the extremely low qualification quota for participation (only nationalities with a 75 per cent recognition rate were allowed to participate); and the gradual advancement of the resettlement scheme, particularly regarding Syrian nationals, who made up the vast majority of relocatable migrants. With those qualifying for asylum already registered as relocation candidates and the rest waiting in Turkey to be resettled, it is simple maths: those who fall outside the frame must leave. In addition, the emergency mode of EC governance during this period generated a covert and legally dubious agreement with Turkey, the EU– Turkey Statement, for the return of all unauthorised border crossers. This new modus operandi was made possible to an extent by the reshuffling of the EU’s funding mechanisms in order to channel financial assistance to support emergency operations. It is in this context that the hotspot approach, a flexible border management mechanism that can respond to exceptional migratory pressures, came to enjoy enthusiastic support.

hotspots The first hotspot on the Aegean Islands was launched in October 2015 at Moria, a former military base 8 kilometres north-west of Mytilene, the islands’ capital. The site has been used as one of the main registration points, receiving an impressive facelift since the start of the emergency. Up until March 2016, over 600,000 asylum-seekers had reached Greece from Turkey, making Lesbos the main gateway to the EU. However, following the EU–Turkey Statement of 18 March 2016 and its implementation from 20 March onward, the number of arrivals dropped rapidly. A little over 18,000 individuals and families crossed into Lesbos between April and October 2016, still a record number compared to the years before the 2015 crisis. Despite the fluctuation in numbers, the island has remained one of the main points of entry to the EU for migrants throughout 2017. What is a hotspot and in what ways has it had an impact on the lives of those it purports to govern? Firstly, a hotspot is not new in the sense of novel. It builds on existing administrative routines and introduces new ones for the purpose of facilitating fast-track procedures to deal with migrant flows. Second, it is aimed at being an effective management strategy that encompasses both deterrence of potential border crossers but also caters to the needs of the vulnerable. As such, the design and

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kilometres

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Ándissa

Ae g e a n S e a

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Mandamárdos

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Figure 4.1 Lesbos.

Vaterá

Polchnitos

Parakila

Kalloni

Lesbos

Petra Anaxos

Molivos

Eftalou

Moria

Thermi

Krátigos

Pikpa

MYTILENE

Kara Tepe

Kalloni Other settlements

Molivos Main arrival points

Moria Camps

MYTILENE Capital

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implementation of hotspots in Greece were a collaborative effort headed by Frontex’s EU Regional Task Force, together with European agencies, the UNHCR and International Organization for Migration (IOM) and national authorities. Third, in order to operationalise the hotspot approach, certain changes were introduced to Greece’s Asylum Law (4375/2016) to allow for the organisation and operation of the asylum authorities and appeal committees, as well as the organisation of the reception and identification procedures for newcomers, as can be seen in detail in Chapter 3. The hotspot approach and its material manifestations are coconstitutive of a mechanism that regulates movement by externalising asylum, and at the same time it animates the border as a site for biometric registration that seeks to trace mobile subjects beyond its geographical boundaries. Additional institutional and administrative procedures at the border, most notably border procedures and interviews for the admissibility of international protection applications, enact processes of filtering, attempting to determine who enters and exits the EU and defining them as non-citizens, within and outside the EU frontier. A hotspot is also a space of humanitarianism, in which moral concerns about the welfare of those that are subjected to it translate into vulnerability assessments and medical examinations, and material provision for the minimum necessary for survival. A hotspot is, or tries to be, an all-encompassing bordering tactic, by means of outsourcing the welfare of the population it purports to govern. Blossomed as it has in the spatio-temporality of the migration crisis, we understand the hotspot approach to be something of a rescission in a contractual agreement between the EU and the world’s undesirables. Entering EU territory no longer guarantees migrants’ access to rights. Strict and fragmented access to asylum procedures in Greece, along with the readmission of Syrian nationals to Turkey following the signing of the EU–Turkey Statement, form the backbone of the hotspot approach. The latter is facilitated by the provision of development funds for the improvement of humanitarian conditions in Turkey. This strategy, also known as aid conditionality, is specifically aimed at keeping refugees at a distance, relocating the problem of migration management to the country of departure. In turn, this is legitimised and sustained through the transformation of refugee rights into humanitarian needs. The hotspot approach uses the metaphors of crisis and emergency, and

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exceptional pressure at the border, to neutralise the political force of migrants. In conjunction with other bordering tactics and building on existing rationalities of government, the hotspot regime aims to redress the perceived lopsided effects at Europe’s internal and external borders by attempts to reorganise global human mobility. As such, the hotspot approach cannot be separated from questions regarding Europe’s own place in the world and its identity.

the performativity of the eu border How is this emergency mode of governing termed the hotspot approach politically legitimised? In this section we draw attention first to an understanding of the border as practice, process and performance, and second to the idea of emergency as a cultural construct and political instrument. Migration and border scholars understand migration to the EU to be controlled remotely. That is, the political geography of migration controls is extended away from the border, outwards to neighbouring transit countries and countries of origin, and inwards through drawing boundaries between migrants and citizens within European societies, but also through the intensification of immigration control in everyday spaces within EU territory. In effect this is seen as a means that states have at their disposal to mediate between contradictory political demands about protecting borders and respecting rights. At the same time, and increasingly so since the Arab Spring, the border as a line that establishes the southern perimeter of the EU has been foregrounded as diverse actors seeking to enforce controls by means of interception at sea and on land have gained public attention. The strategy of visibly enforcing control at the territorial border resonates particularly with the hotspot approach. The tactic of employing visibly enforced border controls is meaningfully captured in the notion of ‘border spectacle’. Nicholas De Genova invites us to conceive of the border as a kind of a stage upon which migrant illegality is performed for the purpose of making the expulsion of unwanted migrants visible.2 To arrive at such a metaphorical conceptualisation of the border entails an ontological leap, one of divorcing the border from territory and even from place. Here De Genova considers migrant ‘illegality’ and ‘deportability’ as epistemological, methodological and political problems at the core of the nexus between labour

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markets and citizenship. In the context of 2015, the performance of the border spectacle, through the hotspot, is animated at the territorial border in response to an autonomous movement of individuals crossing into what is considered European space, a movement which the border treats as bodies misplaced. Sandro Mezzadra and Breit Neilson are similarly interested in border crossings and practices of border reinforcing.3 Borders are more than just a line on the map; they are constantly redrawn to separate territories. They also point to the ways in which irregular migrants are included in the labour market as cheap labour but excluded from citizenship. In this way borders perform or enact migrant exclusion through denying citizenship to irregular migrant workers, who are, however, included in the labour force. Borders are thus a method of creating social division and the multiplication of labour. In other words, Mezzadra and Neilson emphasise that borders are not simply geopolitical boundaries but also have specific functions within the global political economy. In the processes of becoming a border by producing a spectacle of ‘illegality’ or exclusion, borders acquire both a materiality and spatiality. The enforcement of migrant expulsion is thus rendered visible through physical violence, smart technologies and spaces of containment and forced mobility. The hotspot approach as a strategy of control and enforcement manifests itself in the shape of a camp, spreads through policing practices and geographical controls and transpires in offices and rooms that professionals of care and control occupy. The

Figure 4.2  Migrants queuing. Photograph: Evie Papada.

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hotspot approach is finally lived and embodied in the experiences of all those migrants who encounter it. Borders are thus better understood as tactics and as processes rather than as geopolitical facts. To make processes of bordering legible requires one to abandon the idea of borders as physical and visible lines for the separation of social, political and economic spaces in which we live. In moments when the permeability of the territorial border is exposed, and hence the discontinuity of the border narrative as an invisible wall between us and them, it is not uncommon for states to employ non-state actors to implement border and protection functions. A variety of actors participate in policy elaborations and implementation, influenced by a wide range of liberal norms. The declared humanitarian emergency in Lesbos and other European borderlands has compelled states to delegate action for the purpose of relieving suffering and the orderly restoration of the original, bounded image of the border. The hotspot approach materialised during our fieldwork, in the midst of an unfolding humanitarian emergency that, in the words of the EU bureau chief of the UNHCR, was ‘of proportions we commonly attribute to natural disasters’. Moral concerns over the welfare of border-crossers are thus deeply inscribed within the logic and operational culture of the hotspot approach. That being said, humanitarian emergencies during border crossings are rarely portrayed with such determinism. Medical deliberations over bodily integrity are part of a culture of intervention that underlies modern humanitarian action, and, as Fassin has shown, are pervasive in the government of asylum and immigration too.4 Relatedly, in parts of the world where conflict and poverty drive mass cross-border movements, humanitarian intervention is chosen alongside other government logics of control, such as military occupation. The idea of humanitarian border management is an example of a governmentalised attempt to manage human mobility. As a framework of intervention, it is embraced by a variety of actors who see the orderly management of human mobility as beneficial to host societies and migrants themselves. The bordering processes and practices we witnessed, and the look and feel of the hotspot border arrangement on Lesbos, is resolutely a manifestation of this governmentality. Whilst feelings and acts of compassion towards border-induced migrant suffering is an inevitable response, organised compassion can become ambiguous. The role of humanitarianism in processes of

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bordering, as William Walters argues, needs to be seen in conjunction with the transformation of state frontiers into ‘privileged symbolic and regulatory instruments within strategies of migration control’.5 The author draws on Foucault to illuminate modern processes of bordering and governing populations. Accordingly, long-term death and suffering at the border has attracted professionals such as humanitarian actors and human rights workers, who apply their medical and legal know-how to the bodies of migrants, affecting a kind of ‘minimal biopolitics’, giving birth to the ‘humanitarian border’. This type of ‘humanitarian power’ is made legible in the application of principles of international protection, the assessment of vulnerability, material forms of humanitarian assistance, medical certificates and so on. By virtue of its association with other socio-political processes, the humanitarian border becomes a field of knowledge production and it carries its own political force. One productive aspect of this political force is the transformation of border controls into a management concern. Camps on the borders of the EU feature as humanitarian migration management tools in the same way that Michel Agier identifies refugee camps in the global South as spaces of ‘colonial government’ and as enclaves.6 Similarly, as Polly Pallister-Wilkins has shown,7 humanitarian rationalities produce new types of border practices around the provision of basic needs and introduce new actors in the process, reproducing hierarchies of humanity and categorising individuals in ways that facilitate their management for the purpose of restoring what Malkki has called the ‘national order of things’.8 Hence, the moral overtones vociferously expressed by the then Greek minister of migration policy, Yannis Mouzalas, in relation to the living conditions of mobile migrants during the course of the so called crisis. Mouzalas authorised the mushrooming of camps across the country, promising dignified housing for the victimised and security and peace of mind for Greek citizens. The materialisation of the hotspot on Lesbos reflects both the humanitarianisation of the Greek border zone and the intensification of coercive strategies of control. However, these processes of humanitarianisation are driven by the logic of migration management and exclusion, and less as a protest against violations of asylum and migrant rights. A final point to consider in relation to the legitimation of such liberal forms of intervention is the function of emergencies. Humanitarian emergencies have become a common point of reference through which we ruminate on certain forms of human adversity. Most of the images

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of them come to us through professional photographers commissioned by humanitarian agencies in the form of appeals and campaigns to raise funds. When emergencies do occur, the types of operational responses deemed appropriate by policymakers and humanitarian actors often mobilise large parts of the global humanitarian system. The decision or not to intervene is ultimately a political one. We join others in seeing emergencies as social and cultural constructions, and we propose treating them, in the context of the ongoing transformations of the EU border regime, as discursive borders animated for the purpose of generating singular interpretations of a given reality. According to Craig Calhoun, we have historically come to think of certain events as emergencies, owing to a gradual cultural transformation in the way humanity is understood. This is coupled with our tremendous capacity to respond to distant suffering primarily through humanitarian action and the new immediacy of awareness made possible by mass media.9 Emergencies essentially arise as exceptions to otherwise normal social conditions, and therefore they have a bordering effect: they separate norm from exception. At the same time, our constructed idea of an emergency is linked to the arousal of humanitarian sensibilities and our sense of what it means to live and act responsibly by means of interventions to alleviate suffering. That being said, the notion of distant suffering itself is today contested. Border enforcement regimes practised on those crossing between Mexico and the United States, and into Australia, South Africa and of course the EU, result in situations of protracted violence on migrant bodies that are visible, while not distant. Equally, the invocation of a humanitarian emergency in the Greek– Turkish border zone legitimises the interventionist logic that underpins efforts of humanitarian border enforcement. This does not mean that all border crossings are dubbed as emergencies; in fact, political anxiety regarding the management of population displacement across borders can leverage humanitarian emergencies into discourses about crisis. The argument here is that the extent of human suffering as a result of cross-border movement is not the principal factor behind emergency response mobilisation. To illustrate this point, one can contrast the size of cross-institutional engagement and resource mobilisation during the EU refugee crisis to the ineffectiveness of the humanitarian community to mount a response to the needs of refugees crossing the Tanzanian border in spring 2015. During the latter event, approximately 150,000 Burundian

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refugees fleeing violence from local youth militias landed in the camp of Nyarugusu, home at the time to a community of Congolese refugees who had escaped the 1996/7 civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A cholera outbreak in the camp in June 2015 prompted initially Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) to declare an emergency. The organisation denounced the poor living, hygiene and nutritional conditions in the camp as the most likely cause of the outbreak. While the outbreak was contained, the life-threatening conditions in the East African camps did not mobilise institutional actors, and the emergency remained considerably underfunded. At about the same time, global media headlines framed the humanitarian emergency in Syria as spilling into Europe. The UNHCR spoke of a deepening refugee crisis in the Aegean Islands, with thousands of newly arrived migrants and refugees in need of food and temporary shelter along the eastern Mediterranean migration route. Over the course of the year, the UNHCR bureau in Greece changed from a trivial national office based in Athens into a full-blown emergency operation, increasing its staff capacity by almost tenfold. Increasing the presence of humanitarian operations and boosting aid for the Aegean emergency serves to legitimise the maintenance of a standard of living for the newly arrived and those trapped in Greece that is measurable by humanitarian standards but is below the standards of European citizens, while also reducing the political claim for asylum to a humanitarian issue. Being a discursive border, a humanitarian emergency is then a form of ‘othering’. The image of the dead body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi on the Turkish coast opposite the island of Kos contributed significantly to the production of a discourse that privileged a view of EU borders as places of great misfortune. Border deaths evoke a sense of urgency, but so too do images of rescue on the beach, of migrants on foot transiting through the Greek islands. EU flags at the Moria hotspot announce that EU authorities are present, guaranteeing that terrorists will be prevented from entry to the EU and that EU citizens will be protected. The spectacle of humanitarian border enforcement materialises within the camp.

the camps of our extraordinary times The landings on the coasts of Italy and the Aegean Islands during 2015 are understood as inordinate and unwarranted. This is despite widespread recognition among government officials and humanitarian

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and human rights actors that a substantial percentage of those involved comprise individuals and families fleeing ongoing conflicts in neighbouring countries in which the West has in one way or another been involved. In the securitised and territorial logic of the EU border regime, migrant mobility not only represents a threat to the imaginary frontier but also a consequential problem to be managed once the lines that separate EU citizens from irregular migrants have been breached. The island of Lesbos through which the majority of migrants have transited has been for many years the site of the implementation of Greek and EU migration policies through the operations of Frontex, for example. The violence inflicted on migrant bodies in the past has necessitated the participation of international human rights organisations – in fact the UNHCR has had a permanent delegate on the island for a long time. The local community has been divided and united on the question of immigration, making Lesbos into a definite ‘borderscape’, socially produced and constantly redefined, in a process of becoming. Border transgressors become spectacularly visible on the Aegean Islands. During summer 2015, the island assumed characteristics of a humanitarian aid operation zone: from the landing points on the northern shores to the southern migrant registration and departure points, an elaborate web of humanitarian assistance unfolded that resembled similar efforts mounted in the borderlands of the developing world. The orderly and assisted transit of hundreds of thousands of migrants from one side of the island to the other was above all a major logistical challenge. With the transit at its peak and the western Balkan route still open, conditions on the island were exacerbated by overcrowding, lack of shelter and basic food and hygiene items – particularly around landing, registration and departure points. The UNHCR assumed a leading role in the humanitarian relief operation, attracting additional funding and resources. These were also channelled through the emergency support instrument set up by the EC Directorate for General Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection. Other major international humanitarian agencies, such as Oxfam and the International Rescue Committee, rushed to aid the relief. They took on the logistics (such as transport) and practicalities (such as translation, medical screening) of the registration operation. Their relief efforts were guided by their understanding of the protection needs of their beneficiaries and what constitutes acceptable living conditions, focusing on the decongestion of the island as a key priority. At the same time their

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efforts were challenged by the fast turnover of the migrant population. Relief efforts were tied together with border controls through the registration process. Border controls and humanitarian relief became an ad hoc attempt at humanitarian border management, which, unlike official humanitarian border management programmes such as those run by the IOM, lacked coordination and programme cycles. A significant segment of these activities were later incorporated into the functioning of the hotspot on Lesbos. Let us zoom into the spatiality and materiality of bordering practices. In the summer months of 2015 a humanitarian relief corridor was established from the northern landing points to the registration and departure points in the island’s capital, Mytilene. The purpose of this corridor was to manage an orderly and quick transit through the island by taking stock of the people arriving and pacing the speed of transit so as to avoid congestion at registration points. Polly Pallister Wilkins (2017) identifies this process as ‘border triage’, similar to the medical triage activities of humanitarian organisations like MSF.10 More specifically, it involves a preliminary categorisation of individuals and families according to nationality, gender, age and other criteria of vulnerability. In turn, this determines who will be eventually transferred to different accommodation sites and transit camps near to or at registration points. As part of our fieldwork during the early days of the emergency, we witnessed and documented the proliferation of new spaces of humanitarian administration in previously empty sites: large, empty marquees that served as

Figure 4.3  Daily life in the camp. Photograph: Evie Papada.

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resting and waiting places, commonly referred to as assembly points. The task of humanitarian personnel was to distribute colour-coded tickets to transiting migrants, along with basic information on the registration process and follow-on journey, before boarding a bus. The camp solution featured promptly in the management of this emergency, as it formed an essential instrument in humanitarian border management. But to stick to ideal-type definitions of a camp would mask an important part of the reality. The diversity of the administrative procedures and the various technical and humanitarian constraints aimed at regrouping migrants go beyond confinement and assistance, and lead us to consider the camps as places to keep migrants at a distance and as institutions that force them into circular mobility. The camps of our extraordinary times have many faces, institutional, material and symbolic. The Kara Tepe Reception Site We believe that mass arrivals in August 2015 and the desperate conditions in the town of Mytilene were a breaking point in the management of the emergency. Marios, a respondent and close aide to the mayor of Lesbos, recalled during our interview in October of that year: There were tents everywhere in the city, tension among migrants. It was something that superseded us, it was beyond us. It was like a war zone, something had to happen. Near the end of August we had an arrivals record of 9,500 per day. We gave a football pitch and set up 22 registration desks – there was no biometric registration. After that, things started moving a little more smoothly. Kara Tepe was meant to be a temporary solution in anticipation of the EU’s implementation of assistance. Now, however, it is a camp of international standards. The site had evolved during the summer of 2015 as a space where Syrian nationals were hosted and registered relatively fast – according to the authorities, within about two days. Eventually, those nationalities welcomed in Kara Tepe enjoyed a better night’s sleep and a cleaner environment. The overall responsibility of the camp lay with the local administration, but it was run in close coordination with humanitarian agencies, the UNHCR in particular. The site quickly became formalised and

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better organised and a growing number of humanitarian NGOs started to compete for contracts to deliver services. The UNHCR established overarching coordination mechanisms within the camp, as well as for the organisation of the humanitarian response throughout the island, by organising and chairing thematic working groups, as well as by organising a general coordination meeting with all relevant actors involved. Discussions with aid workers revealed that the internal governance of the camp had proved rather challenging, largely due to the quick turnover of the population. Kara Tepe became a space of experimentation for humanitarian personnel, who had to improvise in fashioning protection activities and camp-upgrading interventions. Governance of the camp was linked to broader efforts regarding the coordination of the relief response on the island. Humanitarian actors were not the sole protagonists. The island of Lesbos is in fact an important locus of the Regional Administration of the North Aegean, a geographical denomination that includes nine islands. As such, a host of regional government functions are delegated to local functionaries, relating to the distribution and management of the islands’ resources. In one of the coordination meetings held at the imposing Baroque building that hosts the offices of the Regional Administration, we observed cracks in the relief response. An indication of the level of discord may be discerned in the simple fact that the meetings, chaired by a representative of the UNHCR, were held in English without provision for translation into Greek. During this meeting we were informed that the camp was built on a site where refugees from Asia Minor had settled in 1921 and planted olive trees. To the dismay of local functionaries, the UNHCR had taken the unilateral decision to expand the site of Kara Tepe, despite pleas from members of the local authority to consider alternative venues. The UNHCR’s site-planning manager was explicit about the need for Kara Tepe to adhere to the planning standards of UNHCR camps across the world. The olive trees had to be removed and with them the few contemporary traces of the settlement of refugees from Asia Minor on the island. The look and feel as well as the size and purpose of the reception site changed progressively and over the course of 2016 and 2017. Kara Tepe became a space for the accommodation of vulnerable asylum-seekers and families, and a site for those who met the criteria of the EU’s relocation scheme. The site was laboriously planned and densely built; the IKEA-designed, prize-winning temporary homes were gradually

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replaced by smaller containers that residents referred to as ‘boxes’. Following the EU–Turkey Statement and perpetual introduction of more coercive controls, Kara Tepe assumed a harder appearance. Identity controls and security checks made access to the site all the more difficult. Its residents, unlike its visitors, were free to come and go as they pleased. The Moria Hotspot There has always been a regular exchange between Kara Tepe and Moria, the registration site that lies a few kilometres away. Prior to the inauguration of the hotspot in October 2015, the Moria registration site was operated by Greek authorities in partnership with the UNHCR. The site had been used as a military training base by the Greek army until parts of it were eventually taken over by the Greek police in 2012 to set up what was then called the First Reception Service for migrants arriving on the island. Syrian nationals were registered at the Kara Tepe reception site, and their nationality was quickly identified as the majority held passports, thereby speeding up the process. After October 2015, registration routines were reorganised, and Kara Tepe no longer operated as a registration site. There were two separate sites for registration at Moria, one at the south entrance to the camp and one at its side. At the former there were distinct queues, one of Syrian families and another of Syrian, Yemeni and Somali nationals. At the second registration site, there were queues of Iraqi, Afghani and other nationalities. The distinction between those perceived to have a valid asylum claim as opposed to those without was a key aspect of how registration was organised in Moria until the implementation of the EU–Turkey Statement. Other humanitarian agencies such as MSF and the International Red Cross had been operating with smaller-scale activities in and out of the centre, where people camped in an informal settlement erected at an olive grove, which later gave birth to the Better Days for Moria solidarity space, along the side of the registration centre. This was an informal waiting zone quite literally formed out of registration delays and backlogs. Eventually, a ticketing system was put in place. Even so, queues remained long. In theory, vulnerable groups such as pregnant women and single parents were prioritised. Registration queues were managed by the police and for the most part they seemed endless and stalled. During our visits, we had many opportunities to engage those being registered in conversation. It didn’t take long for us to realise, for instance, that

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getting to the front of the queue could be achieved by several means – including aggression or payment. On another occasion, in an effort to discipline those further down the queue, a police officer picked out a male individual and assigned them the role of ‘peacekeeper’ in return for quicker registration. Along the queue of Afghan nationals there were sometimes men carrying sticks (ravdia), which were handed to them by the police to use as a disciplining tool. It was understood to be a culturally appropriate form of crowd control in Moria since Afghanis, as one police officer put it, ‘obey the stick’. The launch of Moria as a hotspot signified the gradual incorporation of the new management approach into the operations of the first reception centres. The prefabricated containers of the registration and identification centre were surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, typical of the globalised detention centre aesthetic. The closed facility is operated by the Greek police, while registration and identification is managed by personnel from the Greece’s Ministry for Migration Policy and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Behind locked compounds, aside from UNHCR and EU institutional representation, a certain number of local NGOs operationalise medical and interpretation activities as implementing partners. There are additional spaces reserved for unaccompanied minors, detained on the premise that they are of a vulnerable age and stand the risk of falling victim to unscrupulous smugglers and other criminal networks. Anger and frustration reign in Moria. This is the state of mind that people experience everywhere within the European detention estate. The site is divided into sections for different categories of ‘irregular’ entries and according to ethnic and linguistic groups. In 2017 tents were slowly replaced by semi-permanent constructions and prefabricated containers installed by the UNHCR. This was the humanitarian response to the deteriorating living conditions in Moria and deaths in the camp caused by freezing winter temperatures and the desperate attempts of residents to heat their dwellings. The implementation of the EU–Turkey Statement and the new admissibility procedures, as explained in detail in the previous chapter, caused anger and frustration across the board. One of the most contested aspects of the governing regime that aimed to facilitate the transfer of unauthorised border-crossers to Turkey was the introduction of a geographical restriction of movement. According to interviews with the authorities, the geographical restriction of movement within the island is not part of the hotspot’s operational plan, but rather

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a result of negotiations between the Greek police and Turkish authorities, who required assurances that they would only readmit individuals who entered Greece following the implementation of the EU–Turkey Statement. A second layer of restrictions on freedom related to the 25-day detention sentence prescribed in the new asylum legislation. The introduction of movement restrictions in what was originally planned as an open registration centre caused widespread condemnation and protests, as well as outbursts of violence in Moria. The fence around the camp had visible entry and exit points which were not policed. Many would exit the camp in order to socialise in the canteens situated by the roadside. These were understood as a way of appeasing the local population, giving them the ability to make money from serving coffee and tea to the personnel and residents of the hotspot. During our last visit we were genuinely surprised by the number of rented cars parked outside Moria. The days of the emergency had long passed and rates of arrivals were significantly lower. It felt as if migrants in queues had been replaced by men in suits. The inside of this peculiar site was further compartmentalised. The main entrance was situated by the main road to Mytilene. The registration area and all administrative units within Moria were closed off to the public. Organisational logos adorned the entrances of each block – there were even marked safe spaces for women, a support bus for children and families, areas for the distribution of food and non-food items, information centres, mobile-phone charging points and so on. From this description, Moria appears like a cross between an ideal-type refugee camp such as the ones found in East Africa and a high-security government area. We asked both officials and residents to describe the registration and identification process, the backbone of the administrative architecture of the hotspot. We received many conflicting responses, an indication of the experimental, bureaucratic and non-uniform nature of border controls. A typical registration process was described by officials as follows. Upon arrival, beneficiaries go through the so-called first reception screening, a procedure that existed, at least on paper, before the hotspot arrangement, during which individuals received a personal registration number. The main purpose of this interview was to identify whether individuals wished to claim asylum. They were then moved to the next container, in which the European Border and Coast Guard, formerly known as Frontex, and the Greek police conduct what was known as a nationality identification interview. They possessed several tools to aid them in the

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identification procedure, including standard interview questions, experts on local languages and customs from the countries of origin of individuals and so on. For most of those who had gone through the identification interview, the experience was described as unfriendly and often humiliating as interviewing personnel approached individuals with suspicion. Next step was fingerprinting for the purpose of data collection. This process took place in a separate compartment and included advanced security checks implemented by Europol staff; finally, information was sent through to the Eurodac database. The screening process was completed after a medical check up conducted by a contracted NGO and the issuing of a health card. The First Reception Process was thus considerably augmented in the hotspot, made possible due to the allocation of resources, both human and fiscal, and the development of a ‘field of expertise’ regarding identity verification and biometric data collection. For those nationalities that had a less than 25 per cent recognition rate, the hotspot in Moria offered a dedicated detention space, where individuals averaged a stay between three and six months.11 A second, longer and more detailed interview was conducted by the European Asylum and Support Office (EASO) at a later stage, in another temporary structure and in collaboration with the Greek Asylum Service. This was an offshoot of the screening process and it relates to the border procedures that determined the future of the asylum process. The main tool available to the EASO for deciding on this important matter was the criteria of vulnerability set by Article 14.8 of the Greek Asylum Law (4375/2016). Those deemed vulnerable include: unaccompanied minors; persons suffering from a severe disability or a terminal disease; victims of torture, rape or other forms of physical, psychological or sexual violence; persons with post traumatic stress disorder, in particular survivors or members of the families of victims of boat disasters; and finally victims of human trafficking. A positive decision on vulnerability automatically redirects the claimant under the regular asylum procedure. In case of a negative decision, individuals could lodge an objection within five days and had a right to a lawyer – provided of course that there were lawyers available. The volume of appeals became a cause of concern for the architects of the hotspot approach as the fast-track process was hampered at the appeal committees that met in Athens. An amendment was finally introduced in Law (4399/2016), which removed the representative of the UNHCR from these committees and replaced them with public prosecutors. The amendment came through on 22 June 2016. The

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admissibility procedures at hotspots sought to use the right of asylum as a tool of exclusion. This was made possible by the humanitarian reasoning underpinning the notion of vulnerability, which in turns seeks to legally legitimise an outright exclusionary process. It should come as no surprise then that violence was common at Moria. The deplorable conditions in which migrants lived, coupled with fear and anxiety caused by restrictions on freedom and knowledge, created a climate of tension and aggression. In the autumn of 2017, when we were last present, Moria was visibly overcrowded. The olive-grove plot adjacent to the camp was dotted again with tents. In June 2017 several provisions were made to allow individuals involved in family reunification processes under the Dublin Regulation and vulnerable Syrian nationals to travel to the Greek mainland. We noticed, finally, that the EASO compartment within Moria was guarded by police and a private security company. The activities and professional conduct of EASO officers in Moria have caused an outcry among Greek lawyers involved in the asylum process and those who are subjected to the admissibility procedures. During our conversations, lawyers revealed that EASO personnel lacked adequate knowledge of the Greek legal framework and they were often openly negatively predisposed towards individuals from certain nationalities. Several NGOs have also raised questions regarding EASO’s lack of accountability in the admissibility procedures. Interestingly, EASO’s role appears significantly revamped within proposals for the reform of the Common European Asylum System, developing into a core European agency on an equal footing with that of the European Border and Coast Guard within the migration hotspot management regime. As identification, registration and asylum processes appear to be merging into one management solution, the hotspot approach looks like it is here to stay.

the ‘camp’ in migration management solutions The ubiquity of camps as solutions to unwarranted population movements globally is a sine qua non of our diminishing (post)colonial differences. Today in Europe the notion of the refugee camp may animate a range of institutional and infrastructural representations, from prisons, as in the UK and Germany, to detention centres within island hotspots along the Greek and Italian coasts, to the so called ‘open reception centres’ on the Greek mainland, abandoned factories and military camps which serve as spaces of internment aimed at mobility regulation. Over the past few

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decades, camps have been the answer to shipwrecks and capsizing boats transporting migrants across the Adriatic, from the centri di permanenza per i rimpatri (CPRs) to the French zones d’attente, or ‘waiting zones’. They are, in fact, an indispensable tool for the international management of migration, and feed into processes of the denationalisation and delocalisation of border controls. Across the Mediterranean, camps are the designated first reception centres dedicated to screening and registration, bringing together a diversity of administrative procedures and humanitarian constraints aimed at reordering migrant mobility. For instance, in the context of its emergency response to the refugee crisis, Italy has intervened in Libya, supporting the International Organization for Migration in its efforts to ‘voluntarily return’ migrants from detention centres in Libya to their home countries and relocating vulnerable individuals to Italy. A defining characteristic of Europe’s refugee camps is the aspiration to govern those who inhabit them according to humanitarian ideals. In this way, they have been invariably characterised as generalised biopolitical structures in which life becomes the ultimate object of government. Whilst the Mediterranean region is on its way to earning a place in the world map of camps, one is invited to consider the function these camps serve as the EU’s border devices. Historically, refugee camps, in their ideal-type formation as enclaves of aid delivery and interminable containment prevalent in Africa and Asia, disappeared from post-war Europe. This is broadly understood to be a legacy of the liberal democratic tradition within the European polity. As opposed to refugee confinement in camps in East Africa, in the West, asylum-seekers are predominantly dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The individualised scrutiny with which asylum-seekers are treated upon arrival in Europe is in marked contrast to the depersonalised treatment of refugees elsewhere. Many critical scholars understand the former to be a condition for the latter, given that the scrutinised, bureaucratic and resource-intensive process involving respect for the human rights of asylum-seekers supposes the selection of small numbers; this in turn is made possible by the extensive internment of refugees in poor countries and the strict control of their access to the benefits of the protection granted by wealthy nations. Internment camps in Europe have been thus principally legitimised under the pretext of administrative detention for the purpose of deportation and not for asylum processing.

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What this liberal legal framework guarantees in practice is that granting first asylum en masse, even on occasions of heightened cross-border movement, is highly unlikely to occur in Europe. To safeguard this framework, the principal strategy has been to create the conditions to prevent such events. On the one hand, the EU’s concurrent efforts to regulate mobility, framed within its Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM), promotes asylum externalisation, development and labour-mobility controls. These strategies operate in tandem with efforts to protect its maritime borders (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) and with the ongoing building of common EU institutions, particularly the EU Asylum Acquis (a reformed version of the CEAS). On the other hand, the use of the metaphor of crisis at the borders of the EU, particularly since the Arab Spring, testifies to the anxiety and intensified search for additional solutions to the threat of uncontrolled migration. In other words, a plan B needed to be put in place in case of mass arrivals should frontier states lose their capacity for individualised scrutiny of asylum applicants. The hotspot approach had been discussed since 2011 as a particular kind of corrective mechanism for the inevitable porosity of borders. The hotspot approach, as we demonstrate, is not a uniform set of rules and regulations, but context specific. In the Aegean Islands, the mechanism contains specific rules, legislation and procedures with regards to the asylum process. The asylum process focus within its implementation relates directly to the profile of the incoming population. More than half of the migrants arriving in the EU since the beginning of the so-called emergency are categorised as originating from refugee-producing contexts. The Moria camp is a hybrid solution, as it serves both as a space for scrutinising the admissibility of asylum applications and as a space for administrative detention for the purpose of deportation. Refugee crises at the frontier of the EU are thus internationally managed events that reflect on the EU’s own processes of legitimising itself as an (il) liberal institution and its workings as a democratic, federalised community of states.

europe’s crisis and the refugee question The last time a refugee crisis confronted the EU (and Europe at large) was during the wars that marked the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia. Following the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

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during the Kosovo War in 1999, over 390,000 refugees crossed the border to nearby Macedonia in less than nine days. Due to its high visibility, the crisis attracted unusually high financial resources. Macedonia’s refusal to provide unconditional first asylum caused a variety of responses from donors. The first-asylum approach was strongly advocated by the UNHCR but rejected by others. In particular, the United States and the UK, fearful of Macedonia’s potential withdrawal of support of NATO, initiated a burden-sharing scheme in which onward passage to third countries was offered as an incentive for Macedonia to admit refugees. Other countries, including Canada and the Nordic states, pushed for evacuation on general humanitarian grounds. The lack of support for the UNHCR’s proposed legal solution of unconditional first asylum left the organisation exposed as agreeing to these solutions meant promoting differential treatment to persons of concern in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The emergency lasted approximately eleven weeks. Over two-thirds of the refugees who crossed into Macedonia were housed as guests in local homes. An external UNHCR evaluation report on the humanitarian response to the refugee problem at the time problematised the stakes involved in fashioning a response whereby competing humanitarian and military actors, donors and EU member states favoured independent action. With only 3.5 per cent of the overall funding being distributed through UNHCR, the camp as a ‘protection solution’ targeted only one-third of the refugees and the refugee camps in Macedonia were at the time characterised as being at the luxury end of the market. Along with special asylum treatment (evacuation to Western states), the refugee crisis was a high-visibility event for Western states who sought to exonerate their involvement in the Kosovo War by providing what amounted to an unusual amount of relief resources.12 Etienne Balibar problematised Europe’s engagement in wars in the former Yugoslavia by claiming that it was a case that highlights the ambiguity of interior and exterior in European space.13 By affirming the principle of intervention (through the dogma of Responsibility to Protect), Europe clearly marked Yugoslavia as an exterior polity; at the same time, its treatment of refugees arising from the Yugoslav conflicts symbolically marked them as belonging to a privileged group, and so Europe marked the Balkans as lying within its borders. The preferential treatment received by refugees from Kosovo is a marker of the incorporation of the Balkans into Europe, and refugee bodies are turned

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into privileged signifiers of its own identity. Today, the crisis at the EU’s borders produces refugee bodies as nothing more than racial markers that define ‘us’ and ‘them’. The hotspot approach lavishly embodies not only the crisis at the border but also the colonial and racial undertones of Europe’s own identity.

us and them/each other What is the flip side of this image of Europe? We argue that during the 2015 migration event, the boundaries that divide ‘us’ from ‘them’ were challenged in other ways too. The arrival of migrants was announced not only through images of loss and rescue at sea, but also through stories of vindication, perseverance and hope that migrants themselves tell to one another and their families using social media. There is, in fact, a growing constituency among the peoples of contemporary Europe who can identify with the migrant struggle, who are inspired by the boldness of migrant journeys, while their journeys are reproduced in art, books and podcasts as examples of human resolve, forming part of the contemporary cultural landscape. Solidarity activism forms an indispensable part of Europe’s friendly community. Testifying to this is the plurality of actors operating on Lesbos since early 2015, from formal NGOs and humanitarian agencies to informal groups and individual volunteers whose support has been crucial to the attendance of the humanitarian needs of those arriving on the island or stuck in between borders. During our fieldwork, we came into contact with a loose network of international volunteers and solidarity groups setting up autonomous spaces such as temporary accommodation sites along the coast and beyond. These efforts were marked by a large amount of empathy for and affinity with the migrants, their struggles and their journeys. Considering that at its peak the number of arrivals often reached 7,000 a day, the ability to quickly animate informal networks to fill supply gaps at points of arrivals was critical to the humanitarian relief effort. Individuals and groups from the activist-led solidarity initiatives on Lesbos framed their humanitarian action in direct opposition to the EU’s border policies. This challenged the notion of the humanitarian space at the border as an apolitical and neutral space in two important ways. First, solidarity practices allowed for acts of disobedience in relation to border controls. Such acts included the illegal transportation of

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transiting migrants from landing points to the main registration centres; the diffusion of information regarding rights and journey possibilities; the non-differential treatment and reception of transiting migrants. Second, it provided the grounds for the articulation of political demands concerning freedom of movement, and for the growth of solidarity networks beyond Lesbos and across Europe. Solidarity activism at the humanitarian border is different from principled humanitarianism. The Village of All Together on Lesbos, a solidarity initiative which, like many others of its kind, grew out of the need to coordinate activities in support of those suffering the economic consequences of Greece’s 2008 financial crisis, occupied an old children’s summer camp, Pikpa. Renamed Lesvos Solidarity, the volunteer group has hosted refugees since 2012. As an alternative to camps in Europe’s borderlands, a diverse set of individuals and families have found shelter there and are invited to self organise, cook, clean and attend to the needs of everyone in a spirit of reciprocity. Decisions and actions arise from public assemblies and responsibility is shared equally. Embedded in this philosophy of solidarity is a recognition of the injustices that push people to take on the dangerous journey to Europe – framed against a short-sighted politics of pity and philanthropy. This is a polymorphous space in which practical and emotional support is complemented with campaigns, coordination, calls to action and continuous engagement with local and international solidarity initiatives. The implementation of the hotspot approach and the effects of the EU–Turkey Statement on Lesbos really stretched solidarity activities to near breaking point – indeed, Pikpa has been since threatened with closure by the Greek authorities. We argue that the distinction between humanitarian action and solidarity support matters for several reasons. First, the differentiation between the activities of large, established humanitarian agencies such as the UNHCR and those of smaller, solidarity structures helps distinguish the political as acts of citizenship14 and the humanitarian as acts of compassion. For one, UNHCR emergency operations in Lesbos have been and still are inextricably linked to the exclusionary EU Agenda on Migration. In contrast to this, individual and informal solidarity structures are highly critical of the hotspot logic of management. Second, it provides a lens through which to view broader transformations within the Greek polity. This particularly refers to the weakening power of the Greek state in the face of external controls and demands from its lenders,

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as well as in its international management of its borders. As such, the extent to which humanitarian agencies take on the role of policy elaboration and perform acts of sovereignty within Greek territory has contributed to the country’s consolidation as a border zone within the European border regime. Last, a deeper historical analysis of the role of the eastern Mediterranean region in the formation of the idea of Europe (and the EU) today is needed in order to better understand the entanglements around mobility in the region and the exclusionary potential of discursive bordering inherent in the emergency discourse and the transformation of rights-bearing individuals into humanitarian victims.

conclusion As the brief description of the implementation of the hotspot approach in Lesbos has shown, protecting the EU’s borders today is a political problem with severe logistical implications. Effective regulation of entry into the privileged club of European societies requires a logistical apparatus that allows many actors, often with contradictory aims, to work together under one roof or towards one goal: the management of migration. The protracted discourse of humanitarian emergency was ultimately successful in engaging humanitarian actors with experience in logistically managing population movements through the method of encampment. At a separate analytical level, the hotspot approach appears to be not only a tool for the regulation of entry of unauthorised individuals, but also a means to reinforce divisions among European countries and prospective members of the EU (most evident in aid conditionality), creating conditions of economic and technical dependency. This analysis begs the following question: If Europe’s emergency mode of management is about saving the system of free movement enshrined in the Schengen Agreement and hence safeguarding cohesion and intra-EU mobility, what further divisions does it generate? The hotspot approach moulds into a camp, takes the shape of an institution, jumps over the fence and arranges the lives of those who are deemed unwelcome in the borderlands. As a spatial strategy of migration management, it folds and unfolds into the European territory and outside it. It assimilates the smooth space of migrants’ rightful movement into the striated space of a securitised superstate order. It borrows from liberal norms and at the same time subjugates them to the fierce competition for survival ubiquitous in the global borderland.

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Never before have the undesirables achieved such proximity, never before have we felt so vulnerable, knowing that they – needy, jobless, without property – could have as easily been us. The hotspot revokes our historically honoured contractual agreement with the world’s uninsured, which promised treatment of those in need of protection according to international human rights law and standards. The good management of migration replaces the individualised scrutiny of asylum, the foundational pillar of the Common European Asylum System and the rights framework that has endowed the relationship between EU citizens and those of other countries. In Moria, guarantees of access to international protection are retracted. A final theoretical reflection relates to the consolidation of humanitarian actors within the grid of EU border and migration management. Whilst humanitarian practice in the context of the hotspot approach on Lesbos can be said to contribute both to the exclusion and inclusion of migrants, humanitarian discourse per se has been analysed extensively by scholars as being politically debased, particularly in relation to representations of border-crossers as humanitarian victims. What kind of political action can liberate these mobility struggles from the delimited frame of humanitarianism and promote an alternative politics of inclusion? As we demonstrate, this grisly image of insular, parochial Europe is countered by a sizeable solidarity movement that has sprouted in numerous spaces, in which thousands have organised to bring assistance to refugees and campaigned for inclusion in their communities. This mirror image of existential xenophobic Europe is as real as it is suffocated by the discourse of emergency and crisis. In place of a view of the border as a socio-cultural space productive of mutual interactions and lived experience, the crisis border privileges racial division and reinforces a view of refugees as victims. Promoting an analysis of the EU border regime and its current manifestation under the hotspot approach that emphasises the continuities and diverse logics can counter the short-lived framing of the crisis discourse and help establish counter-politics and strategies.

5 The Sea Is On Fire

So far, so good. Our plea for the plight of the millions reaching Europe’s shores would reverberate with resounding clarity down history’s corridors – chiming with the fine tradition of ringing the alarm bells for the persecuted and the excluded. Look at power, how it compartmentalises and weakens, we would protest. Look at the shameless ways in which it breaks up and controls, we would indignantly exhale. Shake your head in disagreement, even disgust, as it dribbles its victims into enclaves. And watch in hope and awe as they then get to transform themselves from passive victims into self-driven actors. Or throw in a passing reference to Hannah Arendt, one of the first Jewish writers who made it through the Nazi horror and who Gentiles then saw as their own – or at the very least as being on a par with their own: here is a woman in a man’s world, the serenity of her prose and her stout thought stemming, it would appear, not from some gendered privilege but from her lucidity alone. No matter: this lucidity, this clarity was to register perfectly, to be read as discernible and thereby acceptable by the white, Gentile, male world that steers and controls thought domains – academia included, of course. In her stoutness, Arendt cut a familiar figure, something for the male gaze and the powers that be to recognise. Recognised as an enemy perhaps, but recognised nevertheless. Think of that ‘we’ that opens her essay ‘We Refugees’.1 The prime voice of the Jewish over-adaptation of and zealous integration into Western ways of life, Arendt put into eloquent words the Jewish striving to abandon agency and to become Gentile, to integrate more than anyone else, to become more of a citizen than citizens themselves. Arendt took a vehement position. She placed herself in the chamber of history – just like Sennett positioned Venetian Jews within our line of sight, but at a safe enough distance. Look at them, says Sennett: the Others locked behind ghetto walls, pushed outside the life of the city at large. Look at the ways in which Venetian authorities tie ‘place to right’,2 and look, then, how Venetian Jews position this right at the centre of

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their very own community-building. Look at how they define their collective existence through subverting and overturning their displacement, look at how they claim control over their forced isolation. And look at us, echoes Arendt: hunted out of place, we create community in and through our displacement. We get to become acceptable and even indiscernible from you as we adapt to your ways of life, in ways beyond the wildest dreams of your imagination. We become you in ways not even you ever thought possible. Us and them, us and you: this has been the centuries-long division at the very heart of, at the core of, our thinking about community of any sort. At the very moment when we believe ourselves to be part of a communion, we also – by definition – exclude ourselves from another. In assuming to be part of a sum we position ourselves outside and against all that remains. So far, so recognisably divisive. But what the present migration moment does is to shake the ground beneath this recognisable, logical argument – the same ground demarcated by the hotspot, that acquires another value every single time orders from above change, every single time the newest deal replaces the previous one, every single time.

rights-in-place One might hardly think of a more strange juxtaposition than the one between the Jews of Renaissance Venice as laid out by Sennett, Nazi-fleeing Jews in the United States and Europe as represented by Arendt, and migrants arriving on the shores of Europe today. But we wish to draw a link between them in this chapter. Why? Because through this seemingly peculiar exercise we believe it is possible to better understand what is historically unique about our present moment, to show the rupture both in the migrant experience and in the way we, non-migrants, get to conceive and relate to it. So let us delve into this for a brief second. The story of Jews in Renaissance Venice was and remains the story of most groups forced into isolation the world over. Important in its indistinctness, it tells us much about a universal trait and experience. Jews in Venice, explains Sennett, were tolerated and even protected under the strict understanding that they were to live, socially act and interact within the physical confines of the Ghetto. Their right to be in the city was not a right to the city: it was inextricably tied to an obligation to reside in a particular quarter.

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This tying of rights to place is all the more startling in light of Venice’s conception of human rights as placeless; what set the city apart from its contemporaries was the apparent universality of its contracts, valid as they were regardless of the background of the parties involved. This is of course the great contradiction at the heart of the Venetian contract: the contracting exercise generated rights in itself – in principle, at least – and therefore the origin, the background, of the contracting parties was superseded. And yet the contract’s validity would not exceed the lifespan of the contract. It concerned the commercial transaction and that alone: tolerated as unavoidable partners in said transaction, Venice’s foreigners were never to lay claim to any more permanent connection or entitlement to the city. And here is a crucial detail in our story: Venice itself was no territorial power. It was not the capital of an empire capable of potentially uniting its foreigner-in-common residents. It had not laid claim to any far-away lands, and it was therefore seen as somewhat reasonable that no far-away foreigners would claim settled presence in the city in return: non-Venetians were barred from citizenship, they were permanent immigrants.3 Renaissance Venice is in this way a much more apt predecessor of the privileged enclaves of monetary capital, the pockets of wealth that rule what is laughably still thought of by some as our non-territorial world: the Singapores, the Monacos, the Hong-Kongs of our time. Venice gave those passing through the city no rights over time, no contract of settlement going even an iota beyond what was set out in the commercial contract. This fleeting agreement left no time, and most crucially no space, for the contracting parties to claim as their own. The meagre rights of foreigners in the city were finite and bounded, limited in time and tightly tied to place. They were, quite literally, rights-in-place. This is an understanding of space as a confine: space as something that only permits and never permeates, and that sustains pockets of tolerance – if at all. The reason why these rights havens exist is utilitarian to its core. You will exist, goes the argument, but you will only exist here and here, but nowhere else. And even in this case, you will exist only because your presence facilitates the transaction. So you exist only as an interested party, as a stakeholder; a confined segment of and in the transaction. There are rights unbound to place of origin: anyone with the capital or resources to make a transaction is allowed here. And then, there are rights-in-place: you can exist only inasmuch as you confine yourself to where you are told to be. Is there a contradiction here? If

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Borders with fenced sections:

Fully or partially constructed Planned Countries of the Global North EU Schengen countries

Figure 5.1  World borders (above and opposite). Source: data from ‘Borders with walls and fences, world map’, Reddit, 2017 (https:// www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/625nkh/borders_with_walls_and_fences_ world_map_753x682/).

there is, it has sustained itself well. From establishing and affirming safe transaction havens to grounding surplus populations in space and over time, capital has held this apparent contradiction close at heart. You can trade with anyone in the world from Singapore but good luck in ever becoming a Singaporean citizen, even if you were born in and happen to spend most of your life in the country. There is not much new so far. After all, these were the two cornerstones of capitalist hegemony up to this point: capital’s ability to move freely

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(placeless capacity) and the right of certain populations to exist within specific confines (rights-in-place). We assign ability to the movement of capital and right to the movement of populations. This is deliberate: the former comes from a position of self-righteous and reserved power; the latter is the outcome of a negotiation and eventually a concession granted to governed populations. The hotspot approach is the opening act in a new era where rights-in-place become retractable, reliant not just on contracts between interested parties, but on global conjunctures entirely beyond their control. And it is not just that these rights are precarious and temporary. Most importantly, they are no longer tied to settlement. They no longer ground one’s existence, no longer grant one the freedom to stay put. Quite the opposite: when and if granted, the freedom to exist is now tied to an obligation to move. How and where, who and when, this is all secondary – or almost. The main thing is to make sure people are, and continue to be, on the move. If and when granted, their rights are now rights-away-from-place.

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rights-away-from-place At this moment the act of forming physical borders, the material infrastructure that keeps bodies apart, that prevents them from moving, is neither enough nor even relevant any longer. Yes, a fence is still an obstacle. People know that. The liquid death of the Aegean Sea might await those crossing it in a makeshift vessel. People know that too. But neither of these work any longer as deterrents alone – they now also work as filters, filters that decide who gets to cross and who doesn’t. And to be sure there is luck. But there is also the vitality and strength of the young, the cunningness of some, the money that others bring with them as they cross. If you are young, healthy, cunning and/or rich you have a fantastically better chance of making it past the migration pre-screening stage that is the Aegean Sea. You no longer need a doctor in Istanbul to test your teeth and hear your lungs to tell you that you will be a good and productive migrant. The journey itself will now assess you. In a strange way the hotspot approach is then both a precursor and an opening act to an era where states no longer hold the same level of control, the same grip over every tiny detail of the migration journey. There is no need to, not quite. Those lucky or able enough to squeeze themselves through the Aegean’s liquid filter reach the next hurdle, the registration at the hotspot point. A sort of modern-day marking, this is bound to determine their journey. Earlier on, in our first days in Mytilene, we thought this to be some sort of lottery: it is not who gets to cross – or where to – that matters. It is the seemingly random timing, the when of migration, that counts: arrive on Lesbos on 19 March 2016 and you are faced with a range of possibilities. Arrive some time the next morning and your trajectory will already look very different indeed. Sure there is coincidence – the question of being in the right place at the right time. But what becomes quickly apparent is that at the centre of it all lies the randomness that leads to haplessness. Venetian Jews were spatially confined up until the moment when they were valuable to the circulation of capital, up until when they signed a contract on the Rialto Bridge, up until when they got to trade, when they could partake in shifting money or commodities. Unless they did their bit in making the world go round, they had to stay put. Think, now, of the state of the migrant coming through the EU’s hotspots today. On the face of it, their movement is frictionless: the sea barrier is one of the few physical obstacles in an otherwise seamless experience of movement.

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Provided you have the financial capacity and luck to cross land and water, the hotspot is there to register you – and quite remarkably to raise no further physical barriers to your onward journey, if you tick the right boxes at the right time. Filter yourself through it, and from that point on you are meant to be able to move. But this right comes not as an ability, not as a freedom. It is a capacity you are obliged to exercise: a right in name only, a constant mobility requirement in disguise.

the endless border From Renaissance Venice to the twenty-first-century European Union, power has used the tangible, the material and the concrete to break up and control, to limit movement and exert its machinations over populations under its spell. In putting the natural and the physical to use, power reaches a state of self-proclaimed physicality: it lays claim to its own naturalisation. It redefines the use of physical barriers as it erects new, artificial ones. It turns the sea – that ancient passage and connector – into an insurmountable boundary, a deadly deterrent. It turns spatial characteristics to its advantage, whether physical (a vast sea) or human-made (a fortified, secluded ghetto). But this is not a binary, mutually exclusive division. The Venetian human-made Ghetto also relied on the city’s physical geography to exist. Without this, it would not have been feasible for the powers that be to build and sustain the Ghetto with the limited technologies available to them. Simply enough, the Venetian Ghetto would not have existed if it weren’t for water, a natural element, enabling exclusion at a modest price; relatively limited effort returned unfathomable barriers. Today, we might think that physical characteristics matter less, that nature is by this point conquerable and tameable. But even now, the main thing holding back the forty-fifth US president from materialising his wildly dystopian dream of a physical barrier to separate his country from its southern neighbour is the physical reality of it all: simply put, the geographical border is too long. At just under 2,000 miles it has proved impossible for anyone to even accurately estimate the cost of this wall, let alone actually build it. More often than not, barriers have in this way been a hybrid of physical characteristics (a sea, a mountain, a territory that is difficult to cross) and the capacity, the ability or willingness of power to turn this difficulty into impossibility. Today, the unrealistic price tag of Trump’s wall might make us laugh off the pertinent physicality of borders in the twenty-first

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century. The idea sounds bizarrely outdated after all. To build a material barrier is strangely anachronistic at a time of WhatsApp groups and seamless air travel, instant messaging and live updates, drones and biometric recognition (now easily conducted by our own phone), let alone border security agents. At this point in time, trying to hold back the tide of information-powered bodies with bricks and mortar, fences or barbed wire is not just crude. To a great extent, it is a waste of time, an exercise in futility. Right? Well, not quite. The information revolution and the ever pertinent and ever increasing permeability this brings with it open up new realities and new horizons that can only be – and are – policed by new borders. But these new borders are amalgams: hybrids that take on the physicality of the old and impose some very contemporary forms of governance. In this way, the hotspot approach constitutes a very twenty-first century way of policing movement. It does not directly deter: it monitors. It does not necessarily prevent: it channels. It swaps teleology (the fence or the concrete wall: ‘your journey ends here’) for openness (the ambiguity of the permeable and interchangeable filter: ‘your journey will continue under these conditions, alone and always’). Adaptive and flexible, it is a type of resilient border – to use academia’s flavour of the day, a resilient border most ironically (or perhaps not) deployed against populations that are ever more frequently asked to be more ‘resilient’ themselves. The hotspot is the border fit for its time, a post-materialist concept that ranks and registers, that marks, demarcates and channels. It is abstract enough in its conception, but sufficiently solid to determine and decide without having to even bar physical entry. The hotspot is the border fit for the age of precarity. Destitution is presented as prospect, and raising a limit on movement is portrayed as raising potential. But ‘prospect’ and ‘potential’ are also the cornerstones of the precarity economy. They theoretically allow the possibility of achievement, while actually exploiting and making destitute those that partake in this economy. Potential is, by default, not quite achieving a state. For something to have potential means that there is still a way to go until achievement, a lag between the present state (undesired or incomplete) and a future state (desired or complete). The age of precarity robs the worker of their means of living decently in the present. But most importantly, it violently cuts off trajectory and prospect; it dissolves the possibility of continuity. Precarity is, first and foremost, the assault of a never-ending present upon an ever elusive future.

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when the border met precarity It might seem an ill-fated exercise to compare the plight of the millions that arrive on the doorsteps of Europe – those lucky enough to survive the lethal journey – and those already inside, seemingly enjoying the very safety and privileges the former are trying to reach. So no, this is not a comparison of privilege and despair. But it is still important to chart what aspect of the journey of those arriving might be used by Europe’s powers that be to inform their policies concerning those already living and working in the continent. This is an attempt to answer (beyond any humanitarian invocation) the question ‘why should we care?’ when seeing how migrant populations are categorised, filtered, brought to a halt or ushered through – in short, how they are managed. In the previous pages we have tried to convey one of our strongest feelings about seeing how migrant populations were atomised and administered according to abstract and ever invocable criteria; fluid and hazy, their experience reminded us of the tingling sensation of working in the gig economy. In a way, the hotspot does to the aspiring migrant what a precarious contract does to the aspiring worker. The core of the message is, in essence, similar: your presence will be tolerated, you may partake in our way of being (working in the gig economy, existing within and traversing EU territory). But your partaking – through presence alone, or through your work – is always retractable. You are allowed to be present for as long as you are needed. Do not aspire to any longer-term settlement. There will be none. In discussing the Transcapes project with people outside our group we have sometimes encountered a response typical of the often reserved ways of academic thought – in particular, of the school that suggests there is never any ‘real’ rupture in unfolding events, not even when these are quite evidently cataclysmic. From what we gather, the underlying notion here is that everything has pretty much happened and has been told before, to one extent or another. What is assumed is that history proceeds in such slow, linear and near-invisible steps that it is useless – if not simply wrong – to introduce new concepts to describe what is going on. There are few attitudes that invariably depress, bemuse or infuriate us more than this one. The idea that history follows both a certain trajectory and velocity, that changes to either happen rarely – and even when they do, they are discernible and identifiable – is beyond being simplistic. It is perplexing to think that historical events will proclaim

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themselves to us in real time, instead of requiring us to understand the underlying social processes that lead to them, instead of looking for the iceberg whose tip they are. In the case of the hotspot approach, this line of argumentation goes as follows: the transition from disparate legislative and executive force to the unified strategy that gave birth to hotspots as a way of managing populations is not as dramatic as it might initially appear to be. In some ways, it simply represents the amassing of such pre-existing but disparate legislation and force in a relatively unified, singular direction; a step up and further along a pre-existing trajectory. For example, there never was an official breaking point, no rupture – continues this argument – ever represented in the EU–Turkey Statement (since there was an array of deals preceding it). As for the EU executive and legislative bodies, they too have certainly tried to join forces for quite some time now. The argument appears logical enough, bar two ‘minor’ details. First, history moves in increments, in a slow trajectory that is highlighted – but not skewed – by what, after the facts, we consider to be ‘historical’ events. So yes, in the case of the hotspot approach, the EU has indeed, for quite some time now, followed a trajectory whereby power moves up from the national to the supernational level. This does not reduce the importance of what happened in March 2016 and all that has followed since. Let us not forget that the EU–Turkey Statement came in response to the stream of images of suffering and pain floating across the screens and timelines of millions of Europeans, watching as these strangers were dying on their doorstep. The hotspot approach was presented as a humanitarianism-driven intervention, a means by which to provide more effective governance. Ultimately, the stated goal was to achieve more effective humanitarian support and the potential integration for those filtered through, those considered to be ‘deserving’ enough. In this way, the introduction of the hotspot approach chimes with flexible and casual workforce arrangements in a simple enough way: both are presented as a victory of the excluded and the persecuted and as a concession, a giveaway from power toward its disgruntled subjects. Read under the same light, precarious labour was after all born in response to workers demanding more flexible working arrangements fit for them regardless of their gender, and adaptable to their needs as they lived their lives. A new work model taking into account – rather than excluding – the young and the female, for example, or one that would even recognise other forms of caring for and in the community.

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In short, a model that would help us move beyond the male breadwinner stereotype of the patriarchal figure and male breadwinner by integrating into the sphere of production those previously shoved out and kept at the margins. The aspiration here was that participation in the workforce would also offer these previously marginalised and silenced populations access to the perceived freedoms that came with it. Of course, this flexibility was quickly adopted and adapted by the powers that be, turning a demand into an imposition: the imposition of precarity. The precarious worker resides in the shell of old cradle-to-grave agreements, contracts, provisions and requirements, some of which still stand as relics and facilitators. Much of the infrastructure is still there: the very same tools – from the tangible and the concrete to the abstraction that is knowledge and experience – that collectively made up our ways of being in the world before are still around today, very much so. What has changed is our level of access to these agreements and infrastructures. What has changed is the conditions under which the worker gets to negotiate their labour power in return for a wage. This is already thoroughly documented, a solidly established landscape of precarity that has relegated the Fordist model of production and its matching pattern of consumption to history’s waste bin. However, our seeming inability – or is it reluctance, or mere delay? – in grappling with the effect of precarity on the social as a whole, far and beyond the sphere of production, is still quite staggering. We trade our labour for an ever unequal, ever temporary – in short, ever screwed – agreement with our ever abstract bosses. First it was the eyes of the factory-floor supervisor, then the bureaucrat; now it is the metadata of the ever watchful app. All this is true, and this has all already transformed the sphere of production. But what happens to everything else that constitutes our social self? What happens to the bonds that turn individual selves into social entities? Yes, we have delved into the existential crises of the compartmentalised individual, but what happens to our collective spirit? And the word ‘spirit’ here is not meant to denote merely something of transcendental value. It conveys the quintessential quality of the social, the fabric and glue that holds it – and us – all together, our collective belonging and our civic sense. What happens to this civic sense in the age of precarity? Post-Second World War industrial mass production was directly linked to mass democracy, so to speak, to the liberal post-war consensus for a need to sustain a far-reaching social contract, a social guarantor of welfare that was as wide and

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all-encompassing as possible. Social democracy was built on the factory floor. Social welfare was as indistinct and encompassing as the roles and functions of the workers it provided for. And today? Work is tailor-made and on-demand – or rather, always available in supply to match corporate demand. It is there strictly only when fully necessary and profitable for the bosses: this is the utter twisting and wiggling of the social contract, to extract the maximum surplus value for the benefit of the strongest of the two parties. This too has been documented well: the rise of the precarious, the individual, the world-at-will (but not their own will) and the devastating effect of this permanent sense of precarity seeping through the social fabric. But what about the political? What happens when the social order of mass consensus – or even mass confrontations and mass resolutions – gives way to the absolutely and totally individualised society of the precariat? What happens to the civic and to collective citizenship then?

zero-hours citizenship By this point we are certainly familiar with the extensive analyses of the precarious conditions of our lives today, standing as we are at the intersection of rampant neoliberalism and the emergence of technology as a pillar of a new social order. And of course one does not ever have to even read through obscure analyses to understand what is going on. For most of us, this is a long-established reality in which the uttermost certainty, the one thread running through otherwise unstable lives, jobs, relationships – statuses of all kinds – is that there is no certainty. And yet it is still staggeringly unclear – and muted, perhaps, by our sense of unease – what potential (and very real) effects this new mode of production and organisation has upon our social and political ways of being. Sure, we are no longer cemented into an unmovable relationship with the state. But there is still a cradle and still a grave. Where human life begins and where it ends is still pretty much inevitable. That hasn’t changed. But everything in between has been thrown into disarray. The certainty of a single direction, of a solid and unstoppable, single-facing trajectory as denoted by the single preposition ‘to’ has been undone. The ways in which our lives unroll are wide open. It is fully questionable what terms and conditions our relationship with the state will take. The form – though this is perhaps a mere remnant of more certain times – remains largely the same: we still all very much have some sort of documenta-

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tion that affirms our right of presence by the issuing authority. A green card, a receipt of registration, some of us will eventually get an ID card and a passport. But this permit is ever retractable and ever temporary: retractable not only on the basis of individual circumstances, but also lingering at the mercy of the wider, social and political context in which we happen to be. The value and usability of an Afghan passport on 20 March 2016 was diminished when compared to the day earlier – even if its holder’s own individual circumstances had not changed. What was a previously affirmed and permanent state (‘permanent’ in the sense that it equated the course of one’s lifetime) has now become something fleeting. The right of presence relates to a fragment of our time: it has become a right of passage – passage here invoking both the passing of time and the passing of people as they flee. It is a ‘right’ that is inextricably connected to a moving condition and one granted only to those deemed to run far enough, fast enough, and for good enough reason. In turn, this ‘right’ is not revoked for as long as its holder continues to flee, for as long as they continue to move on – and provided, of course, that the bureaucratic validation of the original reason for them to flee still holds up. Settlement becomes an unreachable dream, elusive for most. In its essence, at its utmost, migration is alienation in its ultimate form: we succumb to alienation from our surroundings to the ultimate degree. These surroundings can now vanish and transform, they can move and they can become something else, and the result will still be preferable, now matter how alienated we are from them. An issue that might help illuminate this connection better is that of agency, or compliance or even coercion – depending on how one might read such things. Oddly enough, we live in the most politically shaping (and maybe for this reason, also the most apolitical) of times. By this we mean that we are fascinated by all sorts of political developments, and we are only too often unable to make even the most obvious of connections. Take a cryptocurrency and its moment of fame, or look at any set of technological advances that are meant to usher ‘us’ into the future. An app instead of a boss, anyone? But what is particularly startling in our eyes is the seeming inability to discern the power structures that originally produce – and then keep on reproducing – inequality and social divisions through the uneven distribution of wealth. In one word this is, of course, capitalism. And for all its vicissitudes – or maybe better, precisely because of them – this has always depended on the allure of wealth and the abstract potential for one and all of us to reach a magical point: the American dream, the European

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dream, the get-rich-while-watching-your-smartphone-do-the-rest kind of dream. As Sennett observes, ‘for oppressed groups, the state is more willing to guarantee the rights of place than universal rights’.4 At the time when we were dreaming of transcending our status as workers by dreaming-out-of-place, migrating at the hope of making it, we lost out on this crucial detail in the way that the state, the Western state, has historically seen us as its citizens. Even if for the briefest of historical moments we glimpsed the promise of ‘universal’ human rights, these have always been fragmented and partial, used by the state (or union of states) to fractionally and fractiously guarantee those rights needed to reproduce and perpetuate its own authority. The ‘universal’ rights of past decades chimed well enough in a Western world that had conceived of itself as ‘free’, something of a counter-balance and an antidote to the ostensibly totalitarian ways of the East. Today, at the moment when our world has become so perplexing, this appeal to universality is gone. This is not a contradiction: it fully represents, it chimes perfectly, with a system of order presented with the unparalleled opportunity of solidifying its sovereignty through compartmentalising and individualising the very idea of rights. Here, the social contract gives way to what we have previously described as a spatial contract: a geographically dependent exercise of rights that is to become all the more individually adjusted and time-tuned as the technological tools develop to allow this. Think, for example, of the passport. In its current form it is already something of a relic. A paper document that allows full and unhindered access to territories thanks to inter-state accords such as Europe’s Schengen Agreement or the South American Mercosur. While having an expiration date, a passport is easily renewable as long as the issuing state has no strong objections. In short, it is a document with effectively indefinite validity, allowing the bearer unhindered access to territory, regardless, for example, of the needs of the issuing state, regional variations in its development and ensuing need for migrant labour, and whatever emergencies might arise and so on. The hotspot approach is one of the migration control mechanisms introduced precisely to fill the gap between the relatively unhindered freedoms offered by passports and the desire of potential host countries to control movement even if – and particularly once – they have granted entry to the passport bearer. Why rely on a document issued on a certain date, that opens the door to a full swath of territory, when technological advances and the current political conjuncture means power now

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has the capacity to do so much more, to allow so much less, with fewer means? Power can fully individualise access to territory. It can specify, compartmentalise and condition this access. It can impose terms, grant and revoke rights in part or in full. All of this at will, all of this electronically, with an ease potentially comparable to searching or updating a database. This is precisely where the logic of the hotspot approach lies: to gain access through the hotspot means succumbing to a reality where such access is ever revocable – and where revoking the right to access does not depend solely on individual circumstances. As a logical consequence, passage through a hotspot cannot be guaranteed based on the individual performance, actions or behaviour of the bearer – not alone at least. In its essence, at its heart, the hotspot logic holds an excruciating and vindictive logic of fleetingness. Sure you might pass through. But this is all that is granted, all that is guaranteed to you. What happens next is uncertain and will constantly remain so. This uncertainty over the future has a direct and dire effect on your prospects: the indecision at the heart of the hotspot logic represents the victory of the present in its war against the future. It really wasn’t long ago that commentators and social scientists, including geographers, proclaimed the end of space.5 What was meant by this was that distance was no longer relevant in our rapidly globalising and connecting world. Today, the sheer scale of this blasphemy is there for all to see. Yes, space is annihilated for the privileged few, connecting seamlessly, transcending distance, doing away with the onerousness of commuting and other meaningless ways of wandering around and beyond the urban; chores are taken care of by apps, work can now be conducted through screens, consumption is too few clicks away. Yes, for these few, the annihilation of space is yet another addition to their trophy case of privilege. But today, more than ever, space is compartmentalised and demarcated in ways that limit access to it and curtail the rights of many over it. It is this increasingly complex set of conditions, agreements, rules and regulations that we have in mind when arguing that a new spatial contract is replacing the social contract and its universality. Space is not becoming irrelevant at all. It is firmly establishing itself at the epicentre of an ever diffused system of ordering. The seeming paradox here is that the more this system diffuses itself (see the UK’s ‘hostile environment’, where attempts have been made to outsource border control to health and education professionals, among others), the more centralised it becomes. In this diffused matrix of control, space

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becomes a painstakingly measurable quality; access to it and the capacity to traverse and transcend it all become indicators of wealth – not at all unlike access to information and of course money. Space now filters the haves from the have-nots through assessing their means to traverse it. Those Syrian migrants able, resourceful or lucky enough to make it across their war-torn country and all the way to the shores of Europe, the ones who reached it first, were the lucky ones. But this in itself is not that different to the history of refugees the world over. What is new is the requirement that their journey continues.

a spatial contract In describing the forces that make and shape our cities, urbanists make the fundamental distinction between the ville and the cité.6 Broadly, the ville is meant to convey the hard infrastructure of the city: the material realities brought about by the top-down planned and executed rules and regulations that make it operational. As for the cité, this is the community, the set of intricate and everyday experiences and relationships that weave the city together, the random sets and encounters that give it its soul. Such divisions might sound binary, perhaps quite simplistic, but we are all guilty of using them time and time again: formal versus informal urbanism, top-down versus grassroots planning, established citizenship versus informal social actors. What is important in this distinction, at this conjuncture, is that such a binary schema still assumes there is a hard and immovable structure: a solid framework that people find themselves in or out of. This framework is power, and by this we mean the dominant, ruling authority of the day; in the majority of cases, in the liberal democratic paradigm, this framework is the nation-state. But the legitimacy of the nation-state itself, this seemingly perennial granter and guarantor of rights, is itself in crisis, a crisis of both legitimacy and function. This means that our political framework is now eroding, and with it, new grey zones of belonging, of being included or excluded from it, now inevitably arise. This legitimacy crisis is marred with a rising technological potential to ever more definitely and accurately divide and contract, to compartmentalise and order – a capacity to highlight and select the few still entitled to the privileges of diminishing power, and to assign them rights in much more individualised and retractable ways. This is a far cry away from the supposed universality of citizenship or human rights of the relatively recent, but already feeling distant, past.

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Examples? The ever fleeting granting of temporary access and living rights to aspiring citizens would be one. From US green card holders to intra-Schengen migrants, aspiring migrants – even those not headed towards but moving within the affluent global North – now have more hoops than ever to jump through before reaching their permanent status. Settlement becomes a fleeting aim, and end turns into a process. Sennett lays out, in the ingenuously simplest of ways, the distinction between geographical ‘space’ and ‘place’ as being one between what is designed and lived.7 A public square is a space that lives in the urban designers’ drawings up to the day of its inauguration. After that, it may continue to be a space, serving function over lived experience, but it also has the potential to become place, a lived site shaped by the desires of its very own dwellers. This can happen either despite or thanks to the planners’ desires. Only time will tell. And as a whole, time is a formidable force, a fierce critic of mistakes, injustices and oversight. Time tends to be on the side of those that might not have a voice in planning but have a stake and active role in the living of a space. Like a city, larger, nominally common spaces of identity, such as the nation-state, also see this peculiar quality play out. In time, the persecuted settle. Fleeing is for a fleeting moment, historically speaking. In time, helplessness turns into settlement and uncertainty into affirmative status. But the transition from one to the other requires time and the prospect this brings along with it. The hotspot approach epitomises a deliberate move away from the permanence of settlement. The fleetingness of movement becomes permanent instead, and we are all robbed of time, and along with it of future prospects. Precarity was, and indeed still is, the mode of production apt for a culture of instantaneous consumption: it matches its instantness, as the worker is replaceable as swiftly as the time it takes to consume the product they produced. Similar in its fleetingness, the hotspot logic (and soon enough we will have a name for this too) is the mode of migration governance fit for the age of precarity. The incoming worker is assigned no rights other than an absolutely essential acknowledgement and bare tolerance of their presence – and this only inasmuch they are deemed worthy and potentially able to contribute enough to justify their presence. This evaluation begins but does not end at the border. It carries itself through, in and with the body of the migrant as s/he crosses the continent, as s/he attempts to settle, to build her/his life and then sustain it. In the midst of the crisis, not so small pieces of news crackle through

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mainstream media every now and again. These include headlines that mean a potentially catastrophic change of status for some. For example, the UK government recently announced that those granted asylum will have their cases re-evaluated every few years.8 It is difficult to even put this into full perspective. Even at the height of a humanitarian crisis, even when someone originates from a war-torn country, the idea is that, even after they have escaped and arrived here, they cannot feel secure. They cannot settle or grow roots. No one can feel they have the luxury of counting on time. No exceptions.

new borders The hotspot approach is not a continuation, it is a rupture. It is a new logic – a logic exemplified by migration management but that considerably exceeds it. There are three main pillars underpinning this logic. First, it sees entire populations – documented or not – compartmentalised, controlled, ordered into enclaves to which access is both limited and revocable. From the gated community to the Schengen area, territories – across different scales – are made subject to access rules, rules that can and do change to serve the function of capital. Second, passage through these new borders is retractable. In other words, free passage is dependent upon variables that can and do change. The mere physical crossing of a barrier guarantees nothing other than the act of crossing in itself. Third, these new borders might give a sense of permeability, allowing as they do greater ease of crossing than older, more material, barriers: walls, fences. But the border logic is now inscribed, quite literally, on the bodies of those that cross. Registration, now increasingly biometric, means that the border is carried indefinitely by the body of the migrant once and after the point of crossing. It is there at the rejected application for asylum in a third country; it is there at the random metro station checks that occur from Athens all the way to Gothenburg. The border is, and this is no lyrical exaggeration, truly and firmly embedded in the everyday. The hotspot logic is the epitome of this new border. The EU officials we spoke to would like to dub it an approach: the word conveys something innocuous, something perhaps non-threatening, a seemingly indecisive step in a certain direction. But for all its apparently disorganised state and failures, the hotspot already represents a much deeper, rapidly entrenched logic. A failure, after all, is a necessary and unavoidable step in any experiment. And the hotspot logic is a fine laboratory for these new borders.

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Let us pause and take the example of data collection at hotspot registration sites as an example. When we first arrived in Lesbos, and for many months to come, there was in practice no data collection going on. Incoming migrants were not registered biometrically. They were asked to provide a name, they were given an entry card, they were told they had 30 days to leave the country and then they were ushered off. Slowly, visit after visit, we watched as the data registration regime established itself. Today, as these final pages are written, the EU apparatus has reached the following point: in April 2018 something called the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights published a report entitled ‘Under Watchful Eyes’, about the collection, storing and use of biometric data.9 On first reading this report it is difficult to understand what the somewhat creepy title is meant to convey. Does this mysterious agency see itself as the watchful observer of ‘fundamental rights’? Or is the report’s title a reference to the ever present surveillance that is seeping into our everyday lives, from biometrics to big data? Funnily enough, the report itself was released only weeks after the scandal of data harvesting involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,10 a moment that may in the future be called an ‘event’ – a turning point in how much the public understands its rights when it comes to the use of personal electronic data by others, not only governments but also corporations. So what ‘watchful eyes’ does the EU agency refer to? The eyes of Big Brother, or its own, as a guarantor of rights? On a second reading it is probably the latter. Of course, it is wildly ironic that such confusion exists in the first place. What is also confusing, as this report itself inadvertently conveys, is the staggering lack of clarity over procedure, protocol, hierarchy and decision-making powers. A lack of clarity over who is in charge – and what their power actually entails. This confusion signals the difficulty of transition from a union of states to the ever-present and pertinent European Union that oversees and then rules over all the single member states at will. And adding to the confusion is the sea of data produced at the point of entry, and the only too often dubious means by which this is acquired. The report, inadvertently or not, raises the question of who gets to decide what information is collected, and who has access to this information once it is acquired. This is only one of the myriad questions that open up with the operation of the hotspot logic. Similar questions open up in the public realm regarding the use of personal data beyond their initially intended use. And this is a good indicator of the battles that lie ahead. Built with

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data as much as bricks and mortar, these new borders no longer simply concern the ‘rights of place’ that the state guarantees to oppressed groups, as per Sennett. The definition of the oppressed, in any case, is opening up widely, facilitated by the technological opportunities and ever reactionary political climate settling across Europe. Put simply, states now filter an ever increasing segment of populations, both their own and incoming, and they do so simply because they can, despite the existence of supposed universal rights. And the rights of place reluctantly guaranteed for oppressed and not-so-oppressed groups are now dependent and conditional upon where and when each of us happen to be. The borders of our time are no longer just coordinates on a map: we also carry them with us as we move around a city, going about our everyday lives. They shift around from one day to another to match the global dynamics of the day. How can we possibly deal with these new borders? Read them, understand them, break with them, break free from them. That, surely, is the new political project fit for our times.

Notes

introduction   1. A. Bonomolo and S. Kirchgaessner, ‘UN Says 800 Migrants Dead in Boat Disaster as Italy Launches Rescue of Two More Vessels’, Guardian, 20 April 2015. Available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/20/italy-pmmatteo-renzi-migrant-shipwreck-crisis-srebrenica-massacre (accessed 10 May 2015).  2. ‘Communication on the European Agenda on Migration’, European Commission, 13 May 2015. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/ sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/ background-information/docs/communication_on_the_european_ agenda_on_migration_en.pdf (accessed 7 June 2015).  3. Z. Sentek and S. Arsu, ‘No Way Out: The European Union Is Funding Military Equipment Used by Turkey to Stop Refugees from Fleeing the Syrian Civil War and Entering the EU’, 23 March 2018. Available at: https://m. theblacksea.eu/billions-for-borders/article/en/no-way-out (accessed 1 July 2018).  4. ‘Communication on the European Agenda on Migration’, European Commission, 13 May 2015. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/ sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/ background-information/docs/communication_on_the_european_ agenda_on_migration_en.pdf (accessed 7 June 2015).   5. Transcapes, ‘“Them” Refugees: What Does It Mean to Study the Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Our Time?’, Department of Geography, Durham University, 4 November 2015. Available at www.dur.ac.uk/geography/news/ allgeognews/?itemno=26159 (accessed 1 July 2018).  6. H. Arendt, “We Refugees”, in M. Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (London: Faber, 1943), pp. 110–119.

chapter 1  1. J. Berger, A Seventh Man (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 151.   2. Ibid., p. 47.   3. Ibid., p. 64.   4. Ibid., pp. 141–142.   5. B. Julian, ‘The Mob in Chios’, 14 April 2016. Available at: https://refugeetrail. wordpress.com/2016/04/14/the-mob-in-chios/ (accessed 20 April 2016).   6. Berger, Seventh Man, p. 201.   7. Ibid.

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  8. Ibid., p. 183.   9. Ibid., p. 182. 10. S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 6. 11. Ibid., p. 31. 12. Ibid., p. 6. 13. Ibid., p. 38. 14. Ibid., p. 42. 15. Ibid., p. 82. 16. Ibid., p. 101. 17. Ibid., p. 114.

chapter 2   1. United Nations, ‘Charter of the United Nations’, 26 June 1945. Available at: www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/ (accessed 16 April 2018).   2. United Nations, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, 10 December 1948. Available at: www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ (accessed 16 April 2018).   3. M.E. Price, Rethinking Asylum: History, Purpose, and Limits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).   4. Ibid., p. 29.   5. Ibid., p. 25.   6. Ibid., p. 34.   7. Ibid., p. 48.   8. Ibid., p. 48.   9. Ibid., p. 13. 10. A. Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 56–57. 11. J.R. Dinwiddy, ‘The Use of the Crown’s Power of Deportation under the Aliens Act, 1793–1826’, Historical Research 41 (1968): 193–211, p. 207. 12. K. Aaslestad, ‘Napoleonic Empire and Migration’, in I. Ness (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Malden, MA; Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 2266–2270. 13. H. Kirimli, ‘Emigrations from the Crimea to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War’, Middle Eastern Studies 44 (2008): 751–773. 14. P. Purseigle, ‘“A Wave on to our Shores”: The Exile and Resettlement of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918’, Contemporary European History 16 ( 2007): 427–444. 15. S.E. Moranian, ‘The Armenian Genocide and American Missionary Relief Efforts’, in J. Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 185–213. 16. G.S. Goodwin-Gill and J. McAdam, The Refugee in International Law, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17. On fears of provoking Mussolini, see T. Sjöberg, The Powers and the Persecuted: The Refugee Problem and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) 1938–1947 (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991); on ‘human

notes  .  111 rights refugees’, see G. Melander, ‘Refugee Policy Options – Protection or Assistance’, in G. Rystad (ed.), The Uprooted: Forced Migration as an International Problem in the Post-War Era, (Lund: Lund University Press, 1990), pp. 137­–157. 18. M.J. Proudfoot, European Refugees, 1939–1952: A Study in Forced Population Movement (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1956). 19. International Refugee Organization, ‘Constitution of the International Refugee Organization’ (1946), Annex I, Part I, Section A.1. Available at: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000004-0284.pdf (accessed 26 July 2018). 20. Ibid., Annex I, Part I, Section C.1(a). 21. Ibid., Annex I.1(e). 22. Goodwin-Gill and McAdam, Refugee in International Law, pp. 29–30. 23. Data from UNHCR. See: https://popstats.unhcr.org (accessed 16 April 2018). 24. A. Travis, ‘Ministers Hunted for Island to House Asians’, Guardian, 1 January 2003. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jan/01/past. politics (accessed 16 April 2018).

chapter 3   1. E. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), p. 82.   2. M. Sheller and J. Urry, ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A 38/2 (2006): 207–226; p. 208.   3. European Commission, ‘The Hotspot Approach to Managing Exceptional Migratory Flows’, 2015. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/ homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/ background-information/docs/2_hotspots_en.pdf (accessed 29 July 2018).   4. Ibid.   5. A. Downey, ‘Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s “Bare Life” and the Politics of Aesthetics’, Third Text 23/2 (2009): 109–125.   6. A. Papoutsi, J. Painter, E. Papada and A. Vradis, ‘The EC Hotspot Approach in Greece: Creating Liminal EU Territory’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (in press).   7. A. Dimitriadi ‘Governing Irregular Migration at the Margins of Europe: The Case of Hotspots on the Greek Islands’, Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 1 (2017): 75–96.  8. J. Ackleston, ‘The Emerging Politics of Border Management: Policy and Research Considerations’, in D. Wastl-Walter (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 245–262.   9. K. Hannam, M. Sheller and J. Urry, ‘Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings’, Mobilities 1/1 (2006): 1–22. 10. R. Shamir, ‘Without Borders? Notes on Globalisation as a Mobility Regime’, American Sociological Theory 23/2 (2005): 197–217.

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11. T. Cresswell, ‘Embodiment, Power and the Politics of Mobility: The Case of Female Tramps and Hobos’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24/2 (1999): 175–192. 12. B. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). 13. D. Moran, D. Conlon and N. Gill, ‘Introduction’, in N. Gill and D. Moran (eds), Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 1–12; p. 4. 14. Sheller and Urry, ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’. 15. Ibid., p. 222. 16. R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998). 17. E. Shove, ‘Rushing Around: Coordination, Mobility and Inequality’, paper prepared for the Mobile Network meeting, Lancaster, October 2002. 18. B. Michalon, ‘Mobility and Power in Detention: The Management of Internal Movement and Governmental Mobility in Romania’, in N. Gill and D. Moran (eds), Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 37–55. 19. N. Gill, ‘Mobility versus Liberty? The Punitive Uses of Movement Within and Outside Carceral Environments’, in N. Gill and D. Moran (eds), Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 19–35; p. 20. 20. N. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 21. P.C. Spierenburg, ‘Punishment, Power, and History: Foucault and Elias’, Social Science History 28/4 (2004): 607–636. 22. Gill, ‘Mobility versus Liberty?’ 23. N.B. Salazar and A. Smart, ‘Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18 (2011): i–ix. 24. S.C. Lubkemann, ‘Involuntary Immobility: On a Theoretical Invisibility in Forced Migration Studies’, Journal of Refugee Studies 21/4 (2008): 454–457. 25. A. Bloch, N. Sigona and R. Zetter, Sans Papier: The Social and Economic Lives of Young Undocumented Migrants (London: Pluto Press, 2014). 26. D. Massey, ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds), Mapping the Futures, (London: Routledge), pp. 59–69; p. 61. 27. Ibid., p. 61. 28. V. Kaufmann, Re-Thinking Mobility: Contemporary Sociology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 37. 29. D. Howden and A. Fotiadis, ‘Where Did All the Money Go? How Greece Fumbled the Refugee Crisis’, Guardian, 9 March 2017. Available at: www. theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/09/how-greece-fumbled-refugee-crisis (accessed 3 July 2018). 30. ‘Refugee Squats in Athens’, Moving Europe, 2016. Available at: http:// moving-europe.org/24-06-2016-refugee-squats-in-athens/ (accessed 29 July 2018).

notes  .  113 31. M. Tazzioli, ‘Containment through Mobility: Migrants’ Spatial Disobedience and the Reshaping of Control through the Hotspot System’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (in press). 32. M. Collyer, ‘In Between Places: Undocumented Sub-Saharan Transit Migrants in Morocco’, Antipode 39/4 (2007): 620–635. 33. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 52. 34. Human Rights Watch, ‘EU/Greece: Pressure to Minimize Numbers of Migrants Identified as “Vulnerable”’, 2017. Available at: https://www.hrw. org/news/2017/06/01/eu/greece-pressure-minimize-numbers-migrantsidentified-vulnerable (accessed 3 July 2018). 35. M. Griffiths, A. Rogers and B. Anderson, ‘Migration, Time and Temporalities: Review and Prospect’, COMPAS Research Resources Paper (Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, 2013). 36. M.B.E. Griffiths, ‘Out of Time: The Temporal Uncertainties of Refused Asylum Seekers and Immigration Detainees’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40/12 (2009): 1991–2009. 37. J. Simmelink, ‘Temporary Citizens: US Immigration Law and Liberian Refugees’, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 9/4 (2011): 327–344. 38. Bourdieu, quoted in Griffiths, ‘Out of Time’, p. 1996. 39. G. Feldman, We Are All Migrants: Political Action and the Ubiquitous Condition of Migranthood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 52. 40. Shamir, ‘Without Borders?’ 41. See Cresswell, ‘Embodiment, Power and the Politics of Mobility’; and S. Franklin, C. Lury and J. Stacey, Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Routledge, 2000). 42. J. Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 50. 43. Salazar and Smart, ‘Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility’. 44. Massey, ‘Power-Geometry’. 45. See Cresswell, ‘Embodiment, Power and the Politics of Mobility’; and Franklin et al., Global Nature, Global Culture. 46. Hannam et al., ‘Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings’. 47. Shamir, ‘Without Borders?’ 48. T. Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 49. A. Mountz, ‘On Mobilities and Migration’, in N. Gill and D. Moran (eds), Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 13–18. 50. P. Adey, ‘Secured and Sorted Mobilities: Examples from the Airport’, Surveillance and Society 1/14 (2004): 500–519. 51. Shamir, ‘Without Borders?’ 52. Massey, ‘Power-Geometry’, p. 62. 53. G. Simmel, ‘Bridge and Door’, in Simmel on Culture, ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 170–173; p. 171. 54. Ibid. 55. Urry, Mobilities, p. 20.

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chapter 4  1. Médecins du Monde, ‘Report on the Situation in the Reception and Identification Center of Moria Lesvos’, report, January 2017. Available at: http://mdmgreece.gr/app/uploads/2017/03/Report-on-the-SituationMoria-Hotspot-January-2017.pdf (accessed 3 July 2018).   2. N. de Genova, ‘Spectacles of Migrant “Illegality”: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36/7 (2013): 1180–1198.   3. S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).   4. D. Fassin, ‘Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France’, Cultural Anthropology 20/3 (2005): 362–387.   5. W. Walters, ‘Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border’, in U. Bröckling, S. Krasmann and T. Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 138–164; p. 138.   6. M. Agier, Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).  7. P. Pallister-Wilkins, ‘Médecins avec Frontières and the Making of a Humanitarian Borderscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36/1 (2018): 114–138.   8. L.H. Malkki, ‘Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523; p. 495.   9. C. Calhoun, ‘A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41/4 (2004): 373–396. 10. Pallister-Wilkins, ‘Médecins avec Frontières’. 11. Danish Refugee Council, ‘Fundamental Rights and the EU Hotspot Approach’, report, October 2017. Available at: https://drc.ngo/media/4051 855/fundamental-rights_web.pdf (accessed 3 July 2018). 12. J. Philips, Macedonia: Warlords and Rebels in the Balkans (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004), p. 75. 13. E. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002). 14. E. Isin and G. Nielsen (eds), Acts of Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

chapter 5   1. H. Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, in M. Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers in Exile (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 110–119.   2. R. Sennett, The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011), p. 4.   3. Ibid., p. 4.   4. Ibid., p. 8.

notes  .  115   5. See e.g. D. Bethlehem, ‘The End of Geography: The Changing Nature of the International System and the Challenge to International Law’, European Journal of International Law 25/1 (2014): 9–24; T. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); B. McCabe, Geography is Dead: How America Lost Its Sense of Direction (Champaign, IL: Common Ground, 2012).   6. R. Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (London: Allen Lane, 2018), p. 8.   7. Ibid., p. 12.   8. A. Travis, ‘Refugees Applying to Live in UK Face Being Sent Home after Five Years’, Guardian, 9 March 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/mar/09/refugees-applying-to-live-in-uk-face-being-sent-homeafter-five-years (accessed 18 July 2018).   9. EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, ‘Under Watchful Eyes: Biometrics, EU IT Systems and Fundamental Rights’, report, March 2018. Available at: http:// fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2018/biometrics-rights-protection (accessed 5 July 2018). 10. ‘Cambridge Analytica: Facebook Data-Harvest Firm to Shut’, BBC News, May 2 2018. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43983958 (accessed 5 July 2018).

Index

Aegean Sea, 1, 17, 94 Afghanistan, 37, 41, 43, 50 Agier, Michel, 70 Ai Weiwei (Chinese artist), 30, 31 al-Assad, Bashar, Syrian president, 43 Algeria, 50 Allende, Salvador, Chilean president, 43 American dream, 101 Amin, Idi, Ugandan president, 42 Amsterdam, Treaty of (1999), 38 app, 99, 101, 103 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 89–90 Armenia, 33 Asselboen, Jean, Luxembourgish premier, 44 Asylum Law, Greek (2016), 49, 58, 66, 80 Asylum Procedures Directive, 40 asylum, 37–8, 39, 47, 49, 63, 66, 106, concept of, 9, 27–30, 38, right to, 26, 51, 70, 82 Athens, 5, 19, 47, 54, 80, 106 Australia, 71 Austria, 7, 33, 34, 35, 41 Avramopoulos, Dimitris, EU Commissioner, 44 Bachelet, Michelle, Chilean president, 43 Balibar, Etienne, 45, 84 Belgium, 29, 33 Berger, John, 14–15, 16–18 Berlin, 30 Big Brother, 107 biometric identification, 13, 66, 80, 106, 107 border controls, 38–40, 63, 67, 70, 74, 79, 82, 85, 103

border, as spectacle, 67, humanitarian, 69–70, 74–5, internalisation and externalisation of, 66, 67, 82–3, performativity of, 67–72 bordering practices, 67–70 borderless world, 3, 51 boundaries, distinguished from borders, 1 Brexit, 3 Britain, see United Kingdom British empire, see empire, British Bulgaria, 38 Calhoun, Craig, 71 Cambodia, 43 Cambridge Analytica, 107 camps, 70, 72, 73–83, 84 see also Elaionas, Kara Tepe, Moria, Pikpa Canada, 84 CEAS, see Common European Asylum System Chile, 43 Chios, island of, 1, 10, 16, 46, 55 Christianity, 28–9, 30 Christodoulopoulou, Tasia, Greek minister for migration, 7 citizenship, zero-hours, 22, 104 Columbia, 37 Common European Asylum System (CEAS), 6, 8, 39–40, 41, 47, 81, 83, 88 community, idea of, 90 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 37, 72 Conservative Party, British, 42 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, see Refugee Convention (1951) Crete, island of, 55

index  .  117 crisis, financial, 86 Croatia, 38 cryptocurrency, 101 Cyprus, 38 Daesh, see Islamic State de Genova, Nicholas, 67 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), 27 Declaration on Territorial Asylum, 38 Denmark, 63 deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation, 51, 57 development funding, conditional 66 displaced persons, 36 Dublin Regulation, 40, 54, 56, 63, 81 EASO, see European Asylum Support Office East Germany, see Germany, Democratic Republic of Edict of Nantes, revocation of, 30 Edict of Potsdam, 31, 32 Elaionas (camp), 52, 55 Emergency Relocation Scheme, 6, 54 emergency, idea of, 67 empire, British, 27, French, 27, 43, Ottoman, 1, 32, 33, Russian, 33 England, 32, see also United Kingdom Enlightenment, the, 27 Eritrea, 43 EU-Turkey statement, ix–x, 9, 18, 19, 46, 48–51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 64, 66, 77, 78, 79, 86, 98 Eurodac Regulation, 40 Eurodac, EU fingerprint system, 40, 54, 80 Eurojust, 8, 47 European Agenda for Migration, 6, 8, 47, 86 European Asylum Support Office (EASO), 8, 41, 47, 51, 55, 58, 80, 81 European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), 6, 8, 40–1, 44, 47, 66, 73, 78, 79, 81, 83 European Court of Justice, 51

European dream, 101–2 European Economic Area (EEA), 42 European Free Trade Area (EFTA), 38 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 107 Europeanisation, 38–41, 47–51 Europol, 8, 47, 80 Evelyn, John, English diarist, 31 extradition, 29 Facebook, 107 family reunification, 56, 81 Fassin, D., 69 fingerprinting, see Eurodac First World War, see war Fordist production model, 99 Foucault, Michel, 70 France, 27, 30, 31, 43 see also empire, French Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, 30, 31 Frontex, see European Border and Coast Guard Agency Geneva Convention, 49 Germany, 14, 22, 33, 34, 35, 43, 56, Democratic Republic of, 43, Third Reich and Nazism, 31, 34–5, 41, 89, 90 ghetto, Venetian, 89–91, 95 gig economy, 97 Gill, Nick, 52 Gothenburg, 106 Greco-Turkish War, see war Greece, 34, 39, 41, ancient, asylum in, 28 Greek Asylum Service, 49, 50, 54, 55, 58, 80 Greek Council for Refugees, 50 Greek National Committee on Human Rights, 51 Greek Supreme Court, 51 Green Card, 101, 105 Grotius, Dutch jurist, 29 Hamburg, 31

118 

.  new borders

Heath, Edward, British prime minister, 42–3 Henri IV, King of France, 30 Holocaust, the, 35 Hong Kong, 91 hostile environment (UK), 103 hotspot approach, 46, 47–48, 64–7, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 94, 96, 98, 103, 105, 106, definition of, 3, 8, 10–11, in Italy, 55, origin of, 3 hotspot logic, 103, 105, 106, 107 Huguenots, 30–2 human rights 104, concept of, 27, 91, violations of, 49 Human Rights Watch, 58 humanitarian corridor, 62–3, 74–5 humanitarian emergency, 69–72 humanitarianism, 21–2, 29–30, 66, 69, 86, 88, 98 Hungary, 7 Iceland, 38 illegality, 68 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 27, 54, 58, 66, 74 International Refugee Organization (IRO), 35–6, 37 International Rescue Committee, 73 IOM, see International Organization for Migration Iran, 41, 42 Iraq, 37, 41–2, 43, 50 Ireland, 38 Islamic State (ISIS/IS/ISIL), 43 Islamism, radical 43 Istanbul, 94 Italy, 34, 39, 48, 82 Jewishness, 89–90 Jews, Venetian, 89, 90, 94 Jordan, 43 Kara Tepe (camp), 44, 55, 75–7 Kaufman, Vincent, 53 Kos, island of, 10, 46, 55, 72 Kosovo, 41, 84

Kurdi, Alan, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 72 Kuwait, 41 labour power, migrants as, 15, 16–18, 20–1 Laos, 43 League of Nations High Commissioner for Russian Refugees, 33 League of Nations, 33–4 Lebanon, 43 Leggeri, Frabrice, Frontex director, 44 Leros, island of, 10, 46, 55 Lesbos, island of, 1, 7, 9, 10, 19, 23, 30, 46, 47, 48, 55, 59, 69, 70, 72–81, 85, 86, 88, 94, 107 see also Mytilene Lesvos Solidarity, 86 liberalism, 82–3 Libya, 6, 48, 82 Liechtenstein, 38 Locke, John, 27 Louis XIV, King of France, 30 Macao, 91 Macedonia, Republic of, 7, 84, border with Greece, 7, 53–4 Mackintosh, Sir James, British parliamentarian, 32 Malkki, L.H., 70 Massey, Doreen, 53, 61 Médecins du Monde, 58 Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), 72, 74, 77 Mediterranean, history of, 1 memory, collective, 16 Mercosur, 102 Merkel, Angela, German Chancellor, 22 Mexico, 71 Mezzadra, Sandro, 68 migration crisis, as pretext, 4–5, 66, phases of 5–8 migration routes, 39 western Balkan, 7, 57, 73, central Mediterranean, 48 mobility, as permanent condition, 13, 23, 56–7, data and, 52, global, 45–6,

index  .  119 hypermobility, 52, management of, 48, 50, 51–9, 73 Moria Reception and Identification Centre, 10, 44–5, 48, 58, 62, 64, 72, 77–81, 83, 88 Morocco, 50 motility, 53 Mouzalas, Yannis, Greek minister for migration, 44, 50, 70 Mussolini, Benito, 34 Mytilene, 5, 16–19, 59, 74, 77, 79, 94 Nansen, Fridtjof, high commissioner for refugees, 34 Napoleonic Wars, see war NATO, 83–4 Neilson, Breit, 68 NGOs, 13, 49, 57, 76, 78, 80, 81, 87 Nigeria, 37, 43 non-refoulement, principle of 26, 29, 37 Norway, 38, 41 Ottoman empire, see empire, Ottoman Oxfam, 73 Paine, Thomas, 27 Pakistan, 37, 41, 43, 50 Pallister-Wilkins, Polly, 70, 74 Paris, 63 passport, 14, 19, 20, 22, 23, 60, 77, 101, 102 Pikpa (camp), 86 Piraeus, 44, 59 place, 91, 105, 108 Powell, Enoch, British politician, 42 power geometry, 53, 60 precarity, 96, 99, 105 Price, Matthew, 28 protestants, French, see Huguenots Qualification Directive, 40 Reception Conditions Directive, 40 recognition rate, 50, 55, 64, 80

Red Cross, International Committee of the, 33, 77 Refugee Convention (1951), 26, 27, 29, 37–8, Protocol to (1967), 26, 37 refugee, definition of in international law, 26, 35, 37, political figure of, 9, 29, 89–90 refugees, Armenian, 34, Assyrian, 34, Burundian, 71–2, Cambodian, 43, Congolese, 72, Hungarian, 34, Iranian, 41, Iraqi, 41, 43, 54, Jewish, 34, 35, 41, 90, Kosovan, 84–5, Laotian, 43, numbers of, 37, 41–3, rights of, 37, 51, Russian White émigrés, 33, Syrian, 43, 50, 51, 54, 64, 81, Ugandan Asian, 42, Vietnamese, 43 registration, 8, 15, 32, 35, 44, 47, 60, 73–5, 77–81, 94, 107, migrants’ experience of, 18–19, 22, 55, 62, 80, see also biometric identification revolution, American, 27, French, 27, 32, Iranian, 41, Russian, 33 Richie, Alexandra, 31 rights of place 91, 107 rights, universal 102, see also human rights rights-away-from-place, 93, 94–5 Romania, 38 Rome, classical, asylum in, 28 Roosevelt, Franklin D, 35 Russia, 32, see also empire, Russian Russian revolution, see revolution, Russian Samos, island of, 1, 10, 46, 55 San Francisco, 25 sanctuary, 28–9, 30 Sarajevo, 23 Schengen Agreement, 38, 63, 87, 102 Schengen area, 38–9, 106 Second World War, see war Sennett, Richard, 52, 89, 102 Serbia, 7, 33 Sheller, Mimi, 52 Simmel, Georg, 61

120 

.  new borders

Singapore, 91, 92 slavery, 27 social democracy, 100 solidarity activism, 85–7, 88 Somalia, 43 Sontag, Susan, 19–20, 23, 24 South Africa, 71 South Sudan, 25, 37 space, 91, 92, 103, 104, 105 Spain, 34 spatial contract, 104–6 Spierenburg, Pieter, 52 Srebrenica, 23 Sudan, 37, 43 Sweden, 41, 63 Switzerland, 38, 41 Syria, 7, 37, 43, 72 Tanzania, 71 Thirty Years’ War, see war time, governing mobility through, 58–9 torture, victims of 57, 80 Transcapes, ix–x, 9, 97 Trump, Donald, 3, 95 Tunisia, 50 Turkey, 7, 15, 34 , 37, 43, 59, as safe third country, 6, 49, 51, see also EU-Turkey statement UDHR, see Universal Declaration of Human Rights Uganda, 42 UNHCR, see United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Kingdom, 19, 23, 33, 38, 42–3, 84, 103, Aliens Act (1793), 32, see also empire, British; United Nations, 34, 35, Charter, 25, Economic and Social Council, 36, General Assembly, 26, 35, 36, 38 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Office of the (UNHCR), 26, 36–7, 38, 41–2, 43, 49, 54, 55, 66, 69, 72, 73, 75–6, 77–8, 80, 84, 86

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 35 United States of America, 27, 33, 35, 71, 84, 90 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 26, 27, 38 Urry, John, 52, 60 van Heuven Goedhart, Gerrit Jan, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 36 Venice, 88–91, 95 Vietnam, 43 ville and cité, 104 violence, 80, 81 institutional, 23, gender-based, 57, 80 Visegrad countries, 7 vulnerability, 57–8, 74, 76, 80 Walters, William, 70 war, 32–5, 42, Balkan Wars (1990s), 41, 83–5, Crimean War (1853–1856), 32, First World War (1914–1918), 1, 29, 33, GrecoTurkish War (1919–1922), 1, 16, Gulf War (1990–1991), 41, Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), 41, Iraq War (2003–2011), 41–2, Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), 32, Russian Civil War (1917–1922), 33, Second World War (1939–1945), 25, 34, 36, 41, 88, Syrian Civil War (2011– ), 43, Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 31, Vietnam War (1955–1975), 43, war in Afghanistan (2001– ), 41 WhatsApp, 96 World War One, see war World War Two, see war xenophobia, 63, 88 Yemen, 37 Yugoslavia, 41, 83

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