Suchergebnisse

AbstractHow does territorial change occur in conflict settings without a radical transformation of state interests and international norms? Territorial change is understood here as the unfolding of nonconflictual territorial visions, actions, and interactions in the absence of sovereignty transfer and/or transformation of the existing status of a disputed territory. This article addresses the question of territorial change in conflict settings by examining Turkey's coastal radar technology as an evolving border security infrastructure in the Aegean Sea. Entailing remotely controlled unmanned stations, mobile vehicles, and drones, Turkey's radar technology generates territorial change. Rather than merely enabling or constraining territorial engagement, technology actively produces territory by transforming it into a nonconflictual state. The altering of territory is achieved by the realignment of security conditioned by and functionally dependent on technology. Radar technology mediates Aegean security in ways that are different from its conventional external-oriented framework targeting another sovereign state. Yet, far from moving away from militarization, radar technology produces irregular migration as a new referent of militarized border security, while simultaneously bringing civilian actors to the fore. Territorial change materializes as technology alters the directionality of territorial vision, transforms "seeing" into "visualization," and makes possible new types of sovereign violence.

This study applies a governmentality approach to analyse the European Union's civil society promotion in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process through the EU's Partnership for Peace instrument. Contrary to a widespread conviction in earlier academic research, it argues that the EU engagement with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has political substance, and the Partnership for Peace provides a good illustration of this. The governmentality perspective highlights the power of the technical in guiding civil society towards particular visions, activities and goals. It brings to light a set of supposedly neutral definitions and technical instruments related to project applications and project selection that sort out, promote and link together civil society action in a way that manages and reinforces the existing dynamics of the peace process. The technical brings with it a particular idea of civil society, which is encouraged to assume functions that focus on the management of the outcomes of the conflict rather than striving for a transformative vision of peace based on political deliberation and fundamental change. The use of the governmentality approach not only aims to provide a better understanding of the nature of the Partnership for Peace programme, but also contributes to debates over the theoretical merits of governmentality by applying the approach to peace and conflict research.

As a response to the Arab uprisings that started in 2010, the European Union has emphasised, more determinated than ever, the urgency of inclusive and sustainable socio-economic development in the Arab region. The central objective of this article is to understand the nature and operation of European Union support for development following Arab mass movements. More specifically, it examines the European Union's Twinning instrument in Egypt and Tunisia through a neoliberal governmentality framework, with a major focus on visualisations, technologies and subject formation. This approach enables us to observe the application of an agenda through which Twinning intervenes into non-economic domains of governance in the target countries and aims at shaping these spheres by economic rationalities and techniques. By constructing change around local governance capabilities, the Twinning programme acts upon individual skills, institutional arrangements and relationships, deploys benchmarking techniques, and empowers subjects and government behaviour in order to bring conduct to certain economic logics and exercises. The outcome is the rendering of Tunisian and Egyptian socio-economic development open to enterprise-based, calculative and professionalised operations that make local conditions serviceable to neoliberal governing patterns, linkages and practices of business, capital production and investment.

In February 2020, Turkey announced that the country would no longer prevent refugees and migrants from crossing into the European Union. The announcement resulted in mass human mobility heading to the Turkish border city of Edirne. Relying on freshly collected data through interviews and field visits, this article argues that the 2020 events were part of a state-led execution of 'engineered migration' through a constellation of actors, technologies and practices. Turkey's performative act of engineered migration created a spectacle in ways that differ from the spectacle's usual materialization at the EU's external borders. By breaking from its earlier role as a partner, the Turkish state engaged in a countermove fundamentally altering the dyadic process through which the spectacle routinely materializes at EU external borders around the hypervisibilization of migrant illegality. Reconceptualizing the spectacle through engineered migration, the article identifies two complementary acts by Turkish actors: the spectacularization of European (Greek) violence and the creation of a humanitarian space to showcase Turkey as the 'benevolent' actor. The article also discusses how the sort of hypervisibility achieved through the spectacle has displaced violence from its points of emergence and creation and becomes the routinized form of border security in Turkey.