A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Highlights the enduring significance of borders in the production of space and spatial knowledge. Particular emphasis is placed on the spatial relations that shape, order and police borders and their relationship to the politics of mobility and immobility. At stake here is a multi-scalar perspective that foregrounds the increasing securitization of migration management.
"The City in Transgression" transcends resistance, which is typically seen as organised mobilisations against capital in the form of uprisings. Behind the cameras and the curtain of publicity, along with the glitz of media razzmatazz, many migrants are involved in covert resistance, a silent revolution
Two new books focus upon how creeping imperialism, (re)colonization and the exportation of the modern surveillance state are central to First Worldist border regimes and their responsibility to protect privilege. Andersson and Miller both unveil how the financing of states in the Global South to act like pre-emptive border forces, through ‘keeping people sedentary’ as much as through ‘dampening extremism,’ has become central to 21st century geopolitics.
Devastating to families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in particular--countries where US meddling has long stoked the violence and instability that cause migrants to flee in the first place--this and other policies of the Trump era can be understood, as Ananya Roy has put it, as an ideological commitment to, and renewal of, “white power in statecraft”.
Five years into its implementation, those arriving and caught up in the hotspot system are still being warehoused where they are not wanted, pushed back to where they came from and constantly moved around at will. With the introduction of fast track asylum procedures and geographical movement restrictions on the islands, hotspots have become spaces where exceptional rules apply and where mobility is explicitly targeted.
This article deals with the ways in which migrants are controlled, contained and selected after landing in Italy and in Greece, drawing attention to strategies of containment aimed at disciplining mobility and showing how they are not narrowed to detention infrastructures.
This paper intervenes in recent debates on humanitarianism and security in migration by introducing the notion of ‘pop-up governance’. It reflects on our two year-long fieldwork on Lesbos, Greece at the peak of Europe’s migrant reception crisis (2015–2017).
This article examines how contending constructions of safe space for migrants reflect the geopoliticization of humanitarianism and its geosocial discontents. It documents the ways in which Hotspots have made migrants unsafe, even as they have been simultaneously justified in humanitarian terms as making both Europe and refugees safer.
Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot.