Liberal Violence: Governing Irregular Migration Along European Borders
Tue, 28 May
|Building 19, Room 710 Waseda Campus
A Talk with Dr. Arshad Isakjee (University of Liverpool) Drawing upon two case studies in Northern France and the Western Balkans (Bosnia, Croatia), this talk examines violent border enforcement along the Schengen and EU borders.
Date and Venue
28 May 2019, 14:45 – 16:45 GMT+9
Building 19, Room 710 Waseda Campus, Japan, 〒169-0051 Tokyo, Shinjuku City, Nishiwaseda, 1-chōme−21−1 早稲田大学 西早稲田ビルディング
About the Event
Date: 28 May 2019 (Tuesday)
Time: 14:45 –16:15 (4th period)
Venue: Building 19, Room 710 Waseda Campus
Free attendance, no registration required
Speaker:
Arshad Isakjeeis a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool. He researches migration, security and identity in the UK and Europe. In particular, his work revolves around informal migration into Europe and Muslim minorities in the UK. His doctoral research was conducted at the University of Birmingham and explored the securitisation of Muslim communities through state counter-terrorism policy. Since 2015 he has been exploring irregular migration into the European Union and its often violent governance, with fieldwork conducted in Northern France and the Western Balkans. He is currently working on an activist-scholar project funded y the Antipode Foundation exploring border violence and resistance to it in Bosnia.
Abstract:
Drawing upon two case studies in Northern France and the Western Balkans (Bosnia, Croatia), this paper examines violent border enforcement along the Schengen and EU borders. Along these two sites, the violence of the border manifests in divergent ways: from the ‘direct violence’ of physical abuse which has become routine in Croatia, at the edge of the European Union to the more subtle forms of abandonment and violent inaction we see in Northern Europe (Davies et al 2017). The use of violence on migrants and refugees sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post-racial self-image of Europe. The concealing and displacing of border governance evidenced in the case studies obscures its violent characteristics. But what this paper argues is that the various violent technologies used within the EU on migrants embody the very contradictions that constitute liberalism’s racial myopia. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests as it does, we gain insight into the racialized logic which underpin it (Goldberg 2003, De Genova 2017). We characterise Europe’s racialized border violence as a form of ‘liberal violence’, which also constructs and sustains the very notions of ‘Europe’ itself.