The “Covid excuse”:EUropean border violence in the Mediterranean Sea

This article examines developments along the central Mediterranean border, following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in EUrope. In response to the pandemic, EU member states enacted emergency legislation, further curtailing movements across borders. Italy and Malta declared their harbours “unsafe” for migrant arrivals, withdrew rescue operations, and installed offshore detention facilities. Though ostensibly enacted in the name of “saving lives”, these measures had the opposite effect. The article assesses how border violence has become justified by reference to the pandemic, what we call the “Covid excuse”. We highlight how people on the move were subjected to both biopolitical and necropolitical modalities of control through pushbacks, offshore containment and abandonment. Instead of being exceptional, we argue, these measures must be situated in longer continuities of EUropean border violence. We also discuss how people on the move are not only shaped by racialized border violence but enact fugitive practices of resistance

The Micropolitics of Criminalisation: Power, Resistance and the Amsterdam Squatting Movement

This research analyses how the criminalisation of the Amsterdam squatting movement works. The key research question addresses how criminalisation operates as a technology of government, what kind of relations of power are constituted through this processes, and how these are experienced and resisted. By paying attention to the relationship between politics, ethics and affects, the focus of this project is on the micropolitics of criminalisation and its resistances, where affects, everyday lived experiences, and embodied relations of power and resistance play a central role. The analytical framework conceptualises power relations as heterogenous, productive and constitutive forces rather than simply repressive and oppositional ones. This enables to analyse how criminalisation works by deployment of legalistic tools and policing practices, by engendering contested moralities around private property and the uses of urban spaces and by constituting specific modes of experiencing, acting and resisting. Moreover, this perspective unfolds the complex relations between criminalisation and resistance: the focus is placed on the active and creative power of heterogenous struggles that counter relations of power by means of protests and direct actions, as much as by experimenting subversive conducts, social relations and modes of life. This project engages with Activist-Research, aiming at producing a platform for collective reflection on how to resist criminalisation. Here resistance is not intended as an object of study, but as an epistemological perspective: namely a mode of unmasking, knowing and analysing how power operates. The empirical materials presented in the form of Intermezzi (between chapters) and Boxes (within chapters) constitute composite and collaborative process of reflection and narration