Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”

A collaborative project of collective writing

coordinated + edited by:
Nicholas De Genova + Martina Tazzioli

co-authored by:
Soledad Álvarez-Velasco, Nicholas De Genova, Elena Fontanari, Charles Heller, Yolande Jansen, Irene Peano, Fiorenza Picozza, Lisa Riedner, Laia Soto Bermant, Aila Spathopoulou, Maurice Stierl, Zakeera Suffee, Martina Tazzioli, Huub van Baar, Can Yildiz

Note on Authorship: For each of the specific keywords, the first listed name indicates the keyword’s lead author, whereas the names that follow are simply listed alphabetically to affirm the parity of contributions by the co-authors.

Europe / Crisis: Introducing New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”

“Crisis”

“Migrant Crisis” / “Refugee Crisis”

Numbers (or, The Spectacle of Statistics in the Production of “Crisis”)

“Humanitarian Crisis”

Mobility

(The Crisis of) “European Values”

References


Europe / Crisis: Introducing New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”

Martina Tazzioli + Nicholas De Genova

It has become utterly banal to speak of “the crisis” in Europe, even as there have proliferated invocations of a veritable “crisis of Europe” – a putative crisis of the very idea of “Europe.” This project, aimed at formulating New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe,” was initiated in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January 2015, and has been brought to a necessarily tentative and only partial “completion” in the aftermath of the subsequent massacre in Paris on 13 November 2015. Eerily resembling a kind of uncanny pair of book-ends, these spectacles of “terror” and “security” (De Genova 2011; 2013a) awkwardly seem to frame what otherwise, during the intervening several months, has been represented as “the migrant crisis,” or “the refugee crisis,” or more broadly, as a “crisis” of the borders of “Europe.” Of course, for several years, the protracted and enduring ramifications of global economic “crisis” and the concomitant policies of austerity have already been a kind of fixture of European social and political life. Similarly, the events in Paris are simply the most recent and most hyper-mediated occasions for a re-intensification of the ongoing processes of securitization that have been a persistent (if inconstant) mandate of the putative Global War on Terror (De Genova 2010a, 2010c). Hence, this collaborative project of collective authorship emerges from an acute sense of the necessity of rethinking the conceptual and discursive categories that govern borders, migration, and asylum and simultaneously overshadow how scholarship and research on these topics commonly come to recapitulate both these dominant discourses and re-reify them.

As a network of scholars in critical migration and borders studies, we have been particularly concerned to defy the intellectual and political ghettoization of these topics in relation to the ordinarily unquestioned manifold and transversal reality of the multiple “crises” that coexist alongside the purported “migration” or “refugee crisis” in (and of) “Europe.” How indeed may the “crises” associated with border control and asylum and immigration law enforcement be apprehensible as co-constitutive of what is otherwise so ubiquitously known simply as “the crisis” (the economic crisis), as well as the related “crisis” of “Europe” itself (the political, juridical, and institutional crisis of the European Union, and particularly such “European” institutions as the Schengen zone of passport-free travel that has reconfigured the borders of “Europe” by sustaining an “internal” space of [relatively, albeit differentially] free mobility)? Likewise, this critical angle of vision on “the crisis” in and of “Europe” must be further situated within the context of our global historical moment: the recent and ongoing proliferation of wars, civil wars, military interventions, and neocolonial occupations across the planet in which European powers are and have long been profoundly implicated. This perspective illuminates the dire necessity of radically unsettling any self-satisfied European discourse on “migration” or “refugees” as the de facto human refuse of “crises” constructed to be strictly “external” to the presumed safety and stability of “Europe,” erupting always “elsewhere.” In other words, starting from the dramatic increase in the numbers of people seeking asylum in EU-rope because of the violent convulsions and disruptions of war, but also in light of the preemptive unavailability of any other route for migration to Europe for the vast majority of the world’s population, what is at stake here is a rigorously postcolonial critique of the governmentality of migration and asylum and the misleading opposition between “genuine” or “legitimate” refugees and ostensibly“economic” migrants (Garelli and Tazzioli 2013a; Tazzioli 2013; 2014). These contrivances of the global government of human mobility intersect substantially (and consequentially) with the analytical categories that discipline academic research and scholarship. Furthermore, and related to these intersections surrounding human mobility, this project similarly inquires into how these manifold and interconnected “crises” might signal a larger epistemic crisis regarding some of the central and defining categories of thought and action surrounding the contemporary (postcolonial, post-Cold War, neoliberal) constitution of a place called “Europe.”

The aspiration and intended purpose of these New Keywords is to effectively “hijack” the dominant discourse surrounding and superintending how we speak of and think about the conjunctures of “Europe” and “crisis.” Specifically, we posit our interventions into this contradictory problem space from the distinctive critical vantage point enabled by our engagements with the perspectives and experiences of migration and borders. Hence, the primary motivation behind our collaborative work has been to engage in the kind of theoretical dialogue and debate that aims to interrogate and disentangle the multifarious articulations of “migration” and “crisis,” highlighting that the so-called “migration crisis” in fact supplies a crucial lens for grasping the wider dynamics of “crisis” in and of “Europe” and the European border regime (see “Border Regime” in Casas-Cortes et al. 2015).

Nevertheless, while we seek to problematize the very language of “crisis,” it is imperative to underscore that this collaborative intervention arises also amidst the horrific spectacle of migrant and refugee mass deaths that has been produced as a consequence of the European border regime. Far from downplaying the frequently tragic dramas of the migrants and refugees who have braved the violence of Europe’s extended and expansive borders – and the monumental fact that 2015 has been the single most deadly year on record for illegalized migrants and refugees seeking to cross these borders, especially across the Mediterranean Sea – let alone the protracted travails of the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants repeatedly blocked during their “long march” across numerous borders through the Balkans, this project nevertheless emphasizes the generalized crisis of the government (and control) of human mobility instigated for the European border regime by autonomous migrant and refugee movements that have defied the borders and appropriated the space of Europe.

On November 18, 2015 all the borders from Slovenia to Macedonia-FYROM were closed to the refugees who were not from Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq. Refugees from other countries were subsequently stranded at the border for 22 days. (Lisa Hamou-Mamar)

The multiplication of borders and border-zones (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) within and around the amorphous “European” space is seen here as a cascade of reactive responses put into place by a diverse variety of formations of sovereign power. These heterogeneous state formations include the European Union (and various subsidiary agencies such as Frontex, the EU’s border policing operation), as well as particular EU member nation-states, European states that are not EU members, as well as the junior partners in the peripheries of “Europe” who have been variously sub-contracted to police the borders of EU-rope, such as Libya prior to 2011 or Turkey now (albeit with much greater and more complex strategic geo-political and military stakes). Despite their significant differences and inequalities, all are substantially dedicated to disciplining migratory movements that objectively challenge outright the regimes enforcing selective access to the “right” of cross-border mobility and the exclusionary criteria of the “right” to asylum. In the face of militarized border police brutality, including rubber truncheons, stun grenades, and tear gas, as well as razor-wire fences, and the ever-present horizon of interdiction, prolonged detention, and deportation, we are reminded nonetheless of migrant and refugee mobilizations, such as the ad-hoc protest march that departed from Budapest’s Keleti train station and occupied a six-lane highway heading to Austria, chanting “Freedom!”

After three days of camping in front of the Keleti train station in central Budapest, hundreds of refugees decided to take matters into their own hands and walk over a 150 km to the Austrian border.

Beyond such dramatic and overtly politicized mobilizations, however, migrant struggles to appropriate movement and claim space – to enter Europe, claim asylum, and move onward to northern countries in the quest for safer and more promising places to stay – are visible in any European border zone, from Lampedusa to Lesvos, from Melilla to Nicklesdorf, from Ventimiglia to Calais (see “Migrant Struggles” in Casas-Cortes et al. 2015).

“We are not going back. The situation is bad. We need freedom to pass.”

In the face of the “migration crisis” and the “crisis of Europe,”therefore, we are reminded of what Sandro Mezzadra has depicted as “the politicality of migration movements” and must begin to contemplate the politics of “the crisis” from the critical standpoint of what he designates a “Border-Europe,” a “Europe” constituted by the proliferation of borders and border struggles (Mezzadra 2016).

Thus, the collaborative work compiled here operates at a significant distance from the current proliferation of discourses about the “migrant” or “refugee crisis,” challenging the taken-for-granted meaning of the term “crisis” by looking at the productive dimension that the declaration of a state of “crisis” of “emergency” generates. In the face of the epistemic crisis of both state and other institutional actors (as well as academics) in taking stock of the heterogeneity of practices of migration towards and across “Europe,” we seek here to re-craft some of the most commonplace taken-for-granted categories undergirding the dominant discourse from the standpoint of a constitutive struggle over mobility and space. That is to say, these New Keywords respond to the urgency of producing a collective counter-discourse about migration and refugee movements and the purported “crisis” that ensues, starting from an epistemological destabilizing and theoretical questioning of the very meaning and function of certain key concepts and categories, such as “humanitarianism,” “refugee,” “migrant,” “mobility,” and so forth. By focusing on the (at least) two-fold “crisis” that has dominated the media spectacle and the discourse of the political establishment – “the (economic) crisis” and “the migrant/refugee crisis” – and by refusing the systematic separation of these and other related figures of “crisis,” we hope to direct critical scrutiny toward the frameworks and practices of governmental intervention enabled and energized by the proliferation of“crisis.” Likewise, yet still more importantly, we aim to call attention to the new spaces produced by the diverse manifestations of the autonomy and subjectivity of the migrants and refugees themselves. The politics of austerity, acutely affecting southern European countries in particular, coupled with border enforcement strategies that preemptively illegalize mobile people seeking asylum, together impact upon both “Europeans” and “non-Europeans” – citizens and migrants alike – and thereby simultaneously re-fortify the “obscene inclusion” (De Genova 2013b) of war refugees and other illegalized migrants into the socio-political fabrics of local “European” economies.

Reflecting upon and engaging with spatial and political transformations that are still underway, however, we are notably confronted with the methodological problem of keeping up with the ongoing border struggles and the concomitant reconfigurations of the mechanisms of capture and control that are at play in governing human mobilities, in the dizzying context of the diverse array of recent events in Europe that have directly affected our areas of inquiry. In particular, we must mention the various closures of EU internal borders in the securitarian aftermaths of both the arrival of large numbers of refugees and migrants in the second half of 2015 and the violent events in Paris on 13 November 2015. We must likewise note the moral panic erupting over the sexual assaults in Cologne/Köln during the 2016 New Year’s Eve festivities, which have authorized a new round of debate over the criminalization and prospective deportation of “asylum-seekers.” Consequently, ours is necessarily an intrinsically tentative and always-incomplete grappling with the immanent task of theorizing the contingencies and irresolution of socio-political conflicts and struggles in which we are still immersed. Hence, while these interventions can in no way pretend to provide any semblance of an exhaustive account or comprehensive analysis of the recent political transformations occurring in “Europe,” the keywords that we have chosen – “Crisis”; “Migrant Crisis”/ “Refugee Crisis”; Numbers (or, The Spectacle of Statistics in the Production of “Crisis”);“Humanitarian Crisis”; “Mobility”; and (The Crisis of) “European Values” – each of these signal broad rubrics that allow us to repeatedly tackle anew, and from somewhat different critical angles of vision, the larger over-arching question of the relation between (the government of) migration and (the government of) the wider multiplicity of apparently disparate and divergent formations of “crisis” in Europe today.

It is perhaps self-evident, but particularly noteworthy, that these texts have emerged amidst the still-unfolding and unpredictable repercussions of the securitarian and military responses–within Europe and abroad – by numerous EU authorities and member states to the attacks in Paris of 13 November 2015, which will continue to have multiple impacts upon human mobility at large. These ramifications are particularly consequential for the social and political conditions of refugees and migrants, both for those within the space of “Europe” as well as for those beyond the borders who may yet seek entry to “Europe.” Nonetheless, and very importantly, this is also true for EU-ropean citizens – especially those racialized as “Muslims” or “Roma” or other supposedly “non-white” (“non-European”) “minorities” (De Genova 2010c; De Genova and Tazzioli 2015; van Baar 2016b). On the one hand, all migrants and refugees may now be newly figured as always-already “suspect” – potential “terrorists” who have infiltrated Europe alongside the influx of “genuine” refugees.

Stranded at the border between Greece and Macedonia, refugees chant “we are not terrorists.”

Moreover, Syrian refugees and migrants, in particular, who hitherto have widely enjoyed a distinctly preferential treatment over and against others seeking asylum in Europe, have now been abruptly re-fashioned as inherently suspect and thus, special candidates for the dubious status of “bogus” refugees, albeit now re-figured as potential “secret agents” with the nefarious mission of entering Europe only to perpetrate “terrorist” atrocities. On the other hand, the repeated and successive closures of various internal EU borders have simultaneously accelerated the “crisis” of the Schengen area of “free” mobility (long celebrated as a paramount achievement of European integration), while nonetheless summoning new formations of still more enlarged powers of integrated sovereignty to be configured at the EU-ropean scale. Therefore, simultaneous with the “crisis” of Schengen, we seem to be witnessing its re-fortification through an aggressive push for the unprecedented securitization of the EU’s external borders, specifically targeting EU citizens.

The New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe” emerged from a workshop convened by Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli at King’s College London on 25–26 June 2015. Notably, this is the second iteration of the “New Keywords” endeavor, and follows an earlier but related dialogue that culminated in the analogous project of collective authorship and collaborative publication, coordinated and edited by Nicholas De Genova, Sandro Mezzadra and John Pickles, which appeared in print as a Special Thematic Section on “New Keywords: Migration and Borders” in the journal Cultural Studies (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015). Both of these experiments in thinking and writing together stem from the meetings of a multi-disciplinary research network on “The ‘European’ Question: Postcolonial Perspectives on Migration, Nation, and Race,” initiated by Nicholas De Genova and Sandro Mezzadra with migration and borders scholar-activists and activist-scholars from the UK, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Latvia, and the Czech Republic, as well as Turkey, Iran, the United States, and Ecuador.

Therefore, this interrogation of the conjunctures of “Europe” and “Crisis” is also a contribution to reformulating and expanding the purview of what Nicholas De Genova (2016) has called “the ‘European’ Question” – contending that we must recurrently and unrelentingly ask: What indeed is “Europe”? and Who may be counted as “European”? Posited first and foremost from the conjoined perspectives of migration and race, the “European” Question demands a persistent attention to the postcolonial dimension of the borders of “Europe” and the boundaries of “European”-ness at the core of our analysis. Fundamental not only as a vital corrective against the (re-)bordering of would-be critical reflection within the academic boundaries of migration and refugee studies but also for problematizing the vexed politics of race, national identity, citizenship, migration and asylum in “Europe” today, the “European” Question has supplied a defining framework for debate among the contributors to these New Keywords. Extending this interrogation of “Europe” through the critical lens of “crisis” – the multiplicity of invocations of “crisis” in and of “Europe” – including of course the rationale of “economic crisis” as the presumptive authorization of austerity and reactionary populist backlash – these interventions around “the crisis” therefore emphatically remind us that what is at stake is nothing less than the very question of “Europe” itself. Situated, as we are, in discrepant relations to “Europe” and “European”-ness, we nonetheless seek to seize hold of our moment of “crisis” as a moment of opportunity through which it may be possible to think and act differently in the aspiration to make the place where we live into a place where life is worth living, together.


Essay series continues on next page…

References

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe” emerged from a meeting of the research network on “The ‘European’ Question: Postcolonial Perspectives on Migration, Nation, and Race,” convened by Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli at King’s College London on June 25–26, 2015, which included the participation of: Soledad Álvarez-­Velasco, Manuela Bojadzijev, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Nicholas De Genova, Elena Fontanari, Evelina Gambino, Giorgio Grappi, Charles Heller, Yolande Jansen, Bernd Kasparek, Shahram Khosravi, Sandro Mezzadra, Lorenzo Pezzani, Fiorenza Picozza, Lisa Riedner, Stephan Scheel, Laia Soto Bermant, Maurice Stierl, Zakeera Suffee, Martina Tazzioli, Huub van Baar, and Can Yildiz.

The contributions of Martina Tazzioli to this work have been supported within the framework of the Unit of Excellence LabexMed-­Social Sciences and Humanities at the center of multidisciplinary research on the Mediterranean at the University of Aix-Marseille – which holds the following reference 10-LABX-0090. Tazzioli’s work has benefited from a French state grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche for the project Investissement d’Avenire A MIDEX which holds the reference n ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02.

Soledad Álvarez-Velasco is a Ph.D. candidate affiliated with the “Spatial Politics” research group in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Originally from Ecuador, since 2007 she has been investigating the relation between irregularized transit migration, violence, and the capitalist state, particularly in the case of the Mexico-U.S. migratory corridor. Her doctoral research focuses on the production of Ecuador as a zone of transit used by irregularized migrants moving towards the United States, and how the tensions between the politics of mobility and the politics of control have provoked multiple spatial and temporal transitions that shape the dynamics of that space of transit.  In addition to various book chapters published in edited volumes (in Spanish), she is the author of Frontera sur chiapaneca: el muro humano de la violencia: Análisis de la normalización de la violencia hacia los migrantes indocumentados en tránsito (forthcoming), and co-editor of Entre la violencia y la invisibilidad: Un análisis de la situación de los niños, niñas y adolescentes ecuatorianos no acompañados en el proceso de migración hacia Estados Unidos (2012).

Nicholas De Genova is Reader in Urban Geography and Director of the Spatial Politics Research Group at King’s College London. Originally from the United States, he has previously held teaching appointments at Stanford, Columbia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as visiting professorships or research positions at the Universities of Warwick, Bern, Amsterdam, and Chicago. He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (2005), co-­author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (2003), editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (2006), and co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (2010). He has also edited a new volume, entitled The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (under review), showcasing recent research by several of the contributors to the New Keywords projects, and has co-edited (with Can Yildiz) a special thematic journal issue on the racialization and criminalization of eastern European Roma (“Gypsy”) migrants in the European Union (forthcoming in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies). He is currently writing a new book on The “European” Question: Race, Migration and Postcoloniality. See www.nicholasdegenova.com for more information.

Elena Fontanari is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Milan (Statale). Originally from Italy, she is currently affiliated as a visiting student with the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her ethnographic research focuses on the tension between the mobility practices of migrant subjects engaged in migration for asylum and the control mechanisms implemented in Europe over the “secondary movements” of asylum-seekers and temporary refugees. She is part of the editorial board of the journal Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa (edited by Il Mulino, Bologna). She is a co-founder of the critical research network “Escapes” at the University of Milan, working with associations, activist groups, and institutions on the topic of forced migration. She has published in the journals City, PERIPHERIE: Zeitschrift für Politik und Ökonomie in der Dritten Welt, and Mondi Migranti. She has worked on several projects with NGOs supporting migrants and asylum-seekers, namely the KuB in Berlin and the Naga Onlus in Milan.

Charles Heller is a filmmaker and researcher whose work has a long-standing focus on the politics of migration. Originally from Switzerland, he completed a Ph.D. in 2015 in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently based in Cairo, conducting postdoctoral research as part of the “Precarious Trajectories” documentary project based at Goldsmiths. His writing has appeared in the journals Global Media and Communication and Philosophy of Photography. Together with Lorenzo Pezzani, since 2011, he has been working on Forensic Oceanography, a project that critically investigates the militarized border regime and the politics of migration in the Mediterranean Sea, and co-founded the WatchTheMed project. Their collaborative work has been published in several edited volumes as well as in the journals Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and in the Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales.

Yolande Jansen is a Lecturer in social and political philosophy and globalisation studies at the University of Amsterdam, and a Socrates Professor of Humanism in Relation to Religion and Secularity at VU University Amsterdam. Originally from the Netherlands, she has worked on secularism and minorities in France, European border practices, and is now studying the emergence of the secularity-religion distinction as a global political paradigm, in relation to the political history of liberalism and neoliberalism. She is the author of Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of Multi­culturalism: French Modernist Legacies(2013), and co-editor of The Irregularization of Migration in Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning (2015). She has been a neighborhood volunteer for Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland for many years.

Irene Peano is a precarious researcher. She currently holds a postdoctoral research position at the University of Bologna, where she was previously a Marie Curie fellow. Originally from Italy, she earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Cambridge, based on a study of bonded sex-labor migration between Nigeria and Italy, for which she conducted extensive field research in both countries. Her academic interests include: forms of subjectivity and resistance, especially in connection with migration and its governance, and with sexual and farm labor; reproductive work and its relationship to global commodity chains, logistics and infrastructures, with particular reference to the agri-food sector; the conceptualization of spaces of containment, such as zones, camps, ghettoes, and their ambivalent relationship to forms of power and discipline; postcolonial formations, particularly in relation to slavery and indentured servitude, and their resurfacing in the present.

Fiorenza Picozza is a Ph.D. candidate affiliated with the “Spatial Politics” research group in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Her doctoral thesis is provisionally entitled “‘Dubliners’ on the Move: The Fragmented Mobility of Refugees within Europe’s Geographies of Asylum.”  Originally from Italy, she holds an M.A. in Migration and Diaspora Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London), and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Rome – La Sapienza. She has also worked in education projects with migrants and refugees in Rome.

Lisa Riedner is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen. Originally from Germany, she received her M.A. in Anthropological Research at the University of Manchester. Her main research interests concern attempts at governing EU-internal migration, post-liberal racism, and municipal regimes of migration and labor. She is part of the Network for Critical Border and Migration Studies (kritnet), the research laboratory of the same name in Göttingen, the editorial board of the journal Movements, and the Munich-based initiative Zivilcourage.

Laia Soto Bermant is a Visiting Researcher at the Nucleo de Estudios Migratorios (NEMI) of the Universidad de San Martin (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires. She was previously a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Bournemouth (2015); a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at the University of Loughborough (2014); a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Comparative Border Studies at Arizona State University (2013/2014); and a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Oxford (2012–13). Originally from Spain, she received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2012. She has conducted fieldwork in Spain and Morocco since 2008, and has a long-­standing interest in the historical and contemporary relationship between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. She has published in Social Anthropology, the Journal of Borderland Studies and the Journal of North African Studies among others, and is completing a book-length manuscript based on her research in Melilla, entitled Beyond the Fence: Anatomy of a Border Enclave.

Aila Spathopoulou is a Ph.D. student affiliated with the “Spatial Politics” research group in the Department of Geography at King’s College London.  Originally from Greece, she holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University in Istanbul, where she lived for five years and volunteered in several NGOs supporting internally displaced refugees and migrants in Turkey. Her current doctoral research examines where, when, and how “Europe” emerges in the context of the different patterns of mobility and border management on the Greek-Turkish border across the Aegean Sea, through a comparative ethnographic study of three Greek islands.

Maurice Stierl is Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Border Studies at the University of California, Davis. Originally from Germany, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study there. His research focuses on migration and border struggles in contemporary Europe and North Africa. He has published in the journals Globalizations, Movements and International Migration Review, and has articles forthcoming in Citizenship Studies, Antipode, and Global Society. He is a co-editor of the journals Citizenship Studies and Movements. He is also a member of the research and activist collectives WatchTheMed, Kritnet, MobLab, and Authority & Political Technologies.

Zakeera Suffee is currently a researcher at Statewatch, and is a Ph.D. student affiliated with the “Spatial Politics” research group in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Her current doctoral research, provisionally titled “Postcolonial Whitewashing: Constructing the ‘Illegal’ and Framing the ‘Ethnic Minority’ in Britain,” is focused on the intersections of migration and race. Originally from Britain with Mauritian roots, she has worked for a number of pan-European charities on refugee and migration issues, and is involved in the grassroots activist collective Black Dissidents as well as NoBorders London.

Martina Tazzioli is a postdoctoral researcher in the Mediterranean Sociology Laboratory (LAMES/ LabexMed) at the University of Aix-Marseille. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oulu (Finland). Originally from Italy, she received a Ph.D. in Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionized Space of Migration (Palgrave-Pivot, 2016), co-editor of Spaces in Migration: Postcards of a Revolution (Pavement Press, 2013), and co-editor of Foucault and the History of Our Present (Palgrave, 2015). She is also part of the editorial board of the journal Materialifoucaultiani (www.materialifoucaultiani.org).

Huub van Baar is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Giessen, Germany. Originally from the Netherlands, he is also a Research Fellow of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) in the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, and an affiliated researcher of the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE). He was previously a Lecturer in Political Philosophy (2012) and an Assistant Professor in European Studies (2012–14) at the University of Amsterdam. He received his Ph.D. in the Humanities from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of The European Roma: Minority Representation, Memory and the Limits of Transnational Governmentality (2011) and co-editor of Museutopia: A Photographic Research Project by Ilya Rabinovich (2012). He has published in various journals, including: Third Text, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, City, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Citizenship Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. He coordinates a research project (2014–17) on Roma minority formation in modern European history, which is part of the research program “Dynamics of Security: Forms of Securitization in Historical Perspective.”His research has focused primarily on the changing social position and political, cultural, historical and scholarly representation of Europe’s Roma minorities, with particular attention to the nexus of citizenship, security, and development.

Can Yildiz is a Ph.D. student affiliated with the “Spatial Politics” research group in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. She has recently co-edited (with Nicholas De Genova) a special thematic journal issue on the racialization and criminalization of eastern European Roma migrants in the EU (forthcoming in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies).Originally from Turkey, her current doctoral research, provisionally titled “The Roma Spectacle: Foreignness, Racialisation, and Mobility among Roma Women in and out of a London Prison,” examines the British criminal justice system from the vantage point of eastern European Roma women who serve time in prison for committing petty offenses such as pickpocketing and shoplifting.

--