Introduction:Europe - fortress or refuge?

The theme articles in this FMR challenge Europe’s leaders to ensure that development of a common European asylum policy focuses on tackling the root causes of forced migration and on providing protection and integration and not simply keeping asylum seekers out of Europe

The Politics of Refugee Protection in a (Post)COVID-19 World

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a “great equaliser” as some have claimed, but rather an amplifier of existing inequalities, including those associated with migration. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is refugees, often the most marginalised of all migrants, who have had the most to lose. Refugees and displaced populations living in crowded and unhygienic conditions have often been unable to protect themselves from the virus, face increasing economic precarity and often find themselves excluded from measures to alleviate poverty and hunger. The threat to refugees comes not only from material (in)security, but from increasing exclusion and exceptionalism associated with the politics of protection. Evidence from the first nine months of the pandemic suggests that some governments, in Europe and US but also the Global South, are using COVID-19 as an excuse to double-down on border closures and/or dip into their migration policy toolboxes to demonstrate the robustness of their response to it. Refugees are increasingly prevented from accessing the international protection to which they are potentially entitled or used (alongside migrants more generally) as scapegoats by populist leaders exploiting the pandemic for political mileage. Some states have used the pandemic to push through controversial policies that further limit access to protection and/or institutionalize the marginalization of refugees. In this context, it seems likely that COVID-19 will accelerate the course of history in relation to refugee protection, rather than changing its direction

Refugees, migrants, neither, both:Categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with 215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our paper challenges this ‘categorical fetishism’, arguing that the dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move. However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or privilege ‘refugees’ over ‘migrants’ arguing that this reinforces rather than challenges the dichotomy’s faulty foundations. Rather those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding, that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and discriminate

Understanding the dynamics of migration to Greece and the EU:Drivers, decisions and destinations

No abstract available

Boxed: Exploring Containment and Resilience in Times of Crisis

This article draws upon materials created between May and July 2020 as part of an artistic collaboration between the two authors which took place during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The authors worked together remotely, drawing on their personal and professional experiences to explore the themes of identity, migration and belonging in times of crisis. One of the strongest themes to emerge from the collaboration was the importance of individual and collective resistance to the deeply gendered social and political categories that ‘box us in’, and serve constantly to remind us of our place and how we should – and shouldn’t – behave and be. As mothers, grandmothers and wives. As migrants, artists and academics. And as women