Liberal Violence: Governing Irregular Migration Along European Borders

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.