REJREG · Rejection Regimes: An Ethnographic Study of the Social Life of Intra-EU Border Regimes
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-04-01 → 2020-07-21
- EU contribution
- €165,599
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-CAR
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Rejection Regimes: An Ethnographic Study of the Social Life of Intra-EU Border Regimes
While in the last years the Mediterranean has been at the centre of the terrible “border spectacle” (De Genova 2002) as one of the main stages of the EU’s migration crisis, systematic pushbacks of migrants at internal EU borders are largely removed from public debate. Since the spring of 2015, the increase of migratory flows towards the EU, particularly intense in Southern EU countries such as Italy and Greece, reshaped the whole EU political landscape. Disputes between member states on the “burden” of refugees, followed by a series of cascading reintroductions of border controls at internal Schengen borders, made evident that the so-called “migration crisis” was in reality an EU crisis of governance. REJREG sheds light on the emergence of border securitization within the Schengen area as a response to the general perception of “crisis” related to the management of migratory flows and contributes to understanding the unexpected social and political consequences of the reintroduction of intra-EU border controls, at local and international level. REJREG comparatively focuses on two crucial borders: the French/Italian and the Austrian/Italian ones. It aims to uncover and understand: 1) side-effects and unintended consequences of border enforcement at the local level (by collecting and analyzing empirical data on the increasing number of border deaths, social mobilizations, growing smuggling economies, and evolution of migrant strategies) (research objective 1) 2) its political implications on international relations between EU member states (providing knowledge on the daily practices of border police and their implications in terms of shifting/ conflicting/ overlapping sovereignties) (research objective 2).
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Since the spring of 2015, several EU member states have begun implementing border enforcement measure as a response to the general perception of “crisis” related to the management of migratory flows. As a consequence, intra-EU mobility of migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea is increasingly governed through systematic rejections at the borders within the Schengen area. Border ""rejection regimes”, as I term this phenomenon, are currently enforced at the Italian/French border of Ventimiglia and the Italian/Austrian border of Bolzano, aimed at regulating migratory flows toward France and Germany, respectively. Forced stops turned Ventimiglia and Bolzano into “buffer zones”, where hundreds of migrants are stuck waiting for the best opportunity to reach their destinations. The proposed research project provides a theoretically informed, in-depth ethnographic account of a phenomenon that has so far been under-researched: the unexpected social and political consequences of border enforcement within the Schengen area. REJREG comparatively focuses on two crucial border zones: Ventimiglia and Bolzano. It intends to uncover and understand side-effects of border enforcement at the local level (by collecting empirical data on rising economies of smuggling, escalating numbers of deaths at the borders, social mobilizations and evolution of migrants' strategies) and its political implications on international relations between EU member states (by providing knowledge on the daily practices of the border police who enforce the bilateral agreements). These questions are addressed through in-depth interviews, participant observation and content analysis.By comparatively focusing on two significant areas of transit/buffering, REJREG challenges traditional conceptualizations of migratory dynamics in order to illustrate the impacts of the securitarian approach both on migration governmentality and on the evolution of the political constitution of the EU itself.""
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM · AmsterdamCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union