Suchergebnisse

In this paper, we critically interrogate the registration of migrants in pan-European, large-scale biometric databases, like Eurodac (European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database). We employ the notion of "epidermal politics", which analytically captures how human bodies – and skin in particular – become sites of identification, violent control, and contestation. Thinking through epidermal politics allows us to understand how the development of technologies that render skin visible and analysable, such as fingerprint scanners and biometric matching algorithms, are entangled in relations of power, structural racism, and subjugation. Drawing on the work of Simone Browne (2015) and her elaboration of Franz Fanon's theory of epidermisation, we argue that migration control in Europe, and its violent and racialising effects, are embedded within data infrastructures that "stigmatise" (Van Der Ploeg 1999) post-colonial "others" with codes to control their mobilities. We unpack this argument in three stages. First, we discuss the governmental rationales that inform the use of Eurodac for the management of migration and asylum in Europe. Second, we discuss how biometric control is related to different forms of state violence, including deportation, prolonged detention, and physical violence associated with the forced registration of migrants' fingerprints. Third, we attend to strategies employed by migrants to contest biometric control, focusing specifically on fingertip burning and mutilation, which we interpret as acts of dissent and self-determination to escape control. Overall, our goal is to emphasise the need to pay closer attention to dynamics of violence and racialisation that emerge at biometric and other kinds of "hi-tech" borders.

The article discusses the language of border externalisation processes by examining the knowledge that stands as the basis of the EU–Turkey deal and reports on its implementation, placing them in the context of the transformation of the EU border regime. It is the result of a study addressing the language and key concepts that organise border externalisation and its geographic and biopolitical episteme. Our interest lies in the production of knowledge emerging from the EU–Turkey deal, and its effects on both the mainstream discourse on migration and the legitimation and acceptance of violent border management practices. To do this, we offer an interpretation of the textual materials composing the deal as promoting a discourse on migrants that strictly categorises territories and peoples, and establishes geographies of control and hierarchies of deserving and undeserving subjects, by asserting new forms of biopolitical control and care over their bodies. The presentation of research results combines the extraction of keywords and sentences from the documents analysed with an interpretation of their epistemic strength in producing and promoting specific biased Eurocentric narratives on migrants and migration. At the core of the agreement's texts we find the category of the 'deserving migrant' as increasingly defining and circumscribing mobility, and realised in the one-for-one swap policy.

Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban dissent in the so-called Arab Spring offers a good opportunity to develop a critical approach based on the observation of the nexus between an event (a punctual expression of dissent) and a site (the urban environment in which the former takes place). The goal is to avoid theoretical rigidities inherent to the assumptions about the intrinsic qualities of cities or social movements. The paper also aims at connecting different academic and disciplinary traditions across linguistic divides—and especially the Anglophone urban studies with the Francophone stream of city-focused political science and political sociology.