Suchergebnisse

The arrival of over six million asylum seekers in Europe since 2011 has engendered profound and ongoing governance transformations, which this article examines through the understudied perspective of asylum seekers' accommodation. The article uncovers the unevenness of accommodation standards across reception centres in an Italian province, demonstrating how this heterogeneity selectively dis/enables the meaningful participation of asylum seekers in the social life of communities surrounding them. Second, it reveals how the circulation of asylum seekers across these facilities responds to performance-based deservingness criteria. Deservingness functions as a disciplining mechanism that mediates access to better forms of accommodation.

What can be learned about the European migration crisis by studying it at its margins? Framed by this question and premised on evidence collected during four months of field research in a central Italian province, the paper investigates the governance transformations engendered by the migration crisis through a study of the Extraordinary Reception Centres (CAS) set up by the Italian government to host asylum seekers across its territory. The paper builds upon Dikeç's (2009) conceptualisation of the "where" of asylum to map their legal and geographical location within the EU border regime, and engages with current debates on EU borders a) to highlight the centrality of marginal locations such as Macerata to the functioning of the EU border regime, arguing that CAS are central to such regime as they confirm its humanitarian pretences b) to intervene on debates concerned with the spatiality of EU borders, arguing that greater analytical attention should be given to their territorial configurations c) to evidence the neoliberal character of the governance transformations engendered by the crisis, beyond their migration management function. Border management is an engine of state transformation. The paper highlights the all-pervasiveness of neoliberalism in this process and the weakening of democratic accountability that accompanies it. It suggests, on these bases, that what can be learned about the European migration crisis by studying it at its margins, is that the governance transformations it has engendered invest migrants and non-migrants alike, offering two reflections in this respect.

What is a border? Who is a migrant? The paper uses these questions to distinguish between constructivist, Marxist and postcolonial answers provided by critical border scholarship, with three aims. First, identifying common concerns and interrogating divergent trajectories, the paper offers a practical invitation to dialogue between these various positions. Second, it evidences how critical border scholarship follows a social-to-spatial analytical trajectory to answer these questions: borders and migration function as a spatial confirmation of a pre-defined ontology of the social. As this is deemed unsatisfactory, third, the paper proposes turning this analytical trajectory on its head by going back to borders, i.e. by studying the spatial manifestations of borders and migration to investigate how the social is heterogeneously configured in place-specific and embodied settings. The paper argues that what is left after these debates is the need to focus on actual social hierarchies, as opposed to epistemological ones.