Playing Politics with Schengen

The European Commission has been at the forefront of criticism of France and Denmark for re-introducing border controls. This was not because they in fact threatened Schengen but because such decisions undermine the Commission’s power as the executive of Europe

Entry Denied: Revolution in North Africa and the Continued Centrality of Migration to European Responses

The recent revolutions in Tunisia and Libya have brought the issue of trans-Mediterranean migration to the forefront of popular discussions about Europe’s relationship with its immediate neighbors in the Middle East and North Africa. It was on the back of hyperbolic and cataclysmic predictions of Europe being “swamped” by migrants that the case for intervention in Libya was partly made and following this, a number of EU member states have agreed on a temporary suspension of the Schengen Agreement

Searching for accountability in EU migration-management practices

The uprisings in North Africa, the subsequent increase in migrants crossing the Mediterranean and the cataclysmic predictions about an end to the Schengen acquis has highlighted a hitherto under-investigated policy practice of the EU: migration-management. Polly Pallister-Wilkins scrutinizes current practices in search of accountability

Criticism of EU-Libya migration policy is too little, too late

An EU-Libya framework agreement signed in 2010 is only the tip of the iceberg of shameful EU extraterritorialised migration-management, argues Polly Pallister-Wilkin

‘Keeping on the move without letting pass’: Rethinking biopolitics through mobility"

“This is the sixth time that I am coming back to the border, in Ventimiglia, after being taken by force to the city of Taranto. I am now trying again to cross to France, I really hope that this time I make it, as I have no money and no energies left”. M., a Sudanese national who arrived in Italy in 2018 from Libya, is one of the many migrants who try to cross to France, along the coast, passing through the Italian city of Ventimiglia. Yet, most of those who try are pushed back to Italy by the French police, sometimes being held for hours in the police station at the border, without being allowed to claim asylum. On the Italian side of the border, some migrants are randomly caught by the police and put on one of the coaches and, on a weekly basis, transferred to Taranto, a city located 1200 kilometres southern of Ventimiglia. Migrants are taken to the Hotspot of Taranto and, after being identified, they are usually released few days later; the majority of them goes back to the Italian-French border, by train or by bus, despite they might be exhausted and running out money. Such a routinised police practice of internal forced transfers does not discourage migrants from going back to Ventimiglia and from trying again and again; nor are migrants taken to Taranto with the goal of detaining them for long time. And yet, they are kept on the move, forced to divert their routes and to repeat the same journey multiple times. The forced hyper-mobility of the migrants who try to cross to France from Ventimiglia is not an exceptional case study; rather, the focus on Ventimiglia sheds light on the dramatic migrants’ goose game , that is, on the convoluted geographies that they are forced to undertake due to legal restrictions, police measures, spatial blockages and ad-ministrative violence

Radical Ground: Israeli and Palestinian Activists and Joint Protest Against the Wall

This paper will seek to address a new and vibrant development within the field of Israeli-Palestinian socio-politics and social movement studies. By interrogating the received wisdom surrounding social movements as agents bearing collective claims as expressed by Charles Tilly (2004), this paper will suggest that the joint activism around the building of the Wall sees Israeli and Palestinian activists move beyond the traditional liberal/Marxist paradigm of counter-hegemonic action (Gramsci, 1971). Instead, understanding the activism of these activists belongs more within the field of post-structuralism where power is contested from all angles and its networks, extensions and connections identified (Foucault, 1980, p. 145). The activists' actions and motives revitalise the theories of protest-anarchism (Braidotti, 2002) with their insistence on creating change through direct action. They do not act to be granted emancipation by their oppressors (Day, 2005, p. 89), but their actions seek to bring about their own liberation. The Palestinians act on their own terms to ensure the survival of their communities while the Israelis, since they share nationality with the more powerful and repressive actor, the Israeli state, through their actions break down the theoretical barriers that see grass-roots activism as the preserve of the ‘have-nots’. By combining post-structuralist notions of networks of power with anarchist ideas privileging pre-figurative forms of struggle over the politics of demand; the Israeli and Palestinian activists of the ‘intifada of the fence’ offer a break with traditional methods of theorising social movements and asks the question how relevant is much social movement theory today

Crisis, Enforcement and Control at EU Borders

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

The wall, the network and the border guard

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe