13:00-14:00, 30 October 2019, Humanities Building, Room H0.03

Refugee crisis or EU crisis? Security and market forces at internal EU borders

Dr Cecilia Vergano, University of Amsterdam, Visiting Scholar PAIS Warwick

Critical scholars highlighted that the so-called European refugee crisis can be better defined as an internal European governance crisis. The ‘pushback-based’ governance of asylum seekers’ internal movements, strongly connected with increasing surveillance and militarization of Schengen internal border, makes the endogenous, rather than the exogenous, character of this crisis especially visible. However, borderization processes at the internal EU level take place in different ways according to several factors and local specificities. Is the "border spectacle" (De Genova 2013) always a necessary condition to justify the selective border closure and the exclusion of undocumented, racialized migrants from the free-mobility privilege? The comparative, ethnographic analysis of governance strategies and everyday border practices at the French/Italian and the Austrian/Italian borders clearly discloses the interplay between the two imperatives of security and free market needs. The comparison between the two cases, based on quantitative and qualitative data, suggests the hypothesis that market needs of borders’ openness and invisibility may influence the dynamics of border management, in terms of visibility of border controls (border spectacle). Where the interest in fast circulation of freight prevail, such as at the Austrian/Italian border of the Brenner Pass, the filtering of irregular migrants tends to be less visible (and more effective in securitarian terms) than border controls aimed at feeding an increasing border security industry, such as at the French/Italian border.

Cecilia Vergnano is a Social Anthropologist from the University of Barcelona, with a PhD dissertation on forced (im)mobilities of Roma migrants in Europe. She is currently a Marie Slodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Sciences Research (AISSR) of the University of Amsterdam, with a research project about the social and political impacts of the reintroduction of border controls within the Schengen area and the policing of asylum seekers autonomous mobility through pushbacks at internal EU borders. Her research interests are borderization processes, forced (im)mobilities, racialization processes, border-crossing facilitation practices, territorial stigmatization, forced evictions.

This event is co-organised by the Department of Politics and International Studies and the Warwick BREM network. Please contact Vicki Squire if you would like to join the BREM network V.J.Squire@warwick.ac.uk