Crisis, Routine, Consolidation: The Politics of the Mediterranean Migration Crisis

Abstract

The current ‘migration crisis’ is framed as a moment of reckoning in the EU’s dealings with its Mediterranean neighbourhood. Yet to what extent is crisis the most useful tool to account for migration and European border control practices in the current context? An exclusive focus on crisis, we argue, is misleading. To a large extent, the current crisis management builds on pre-existing practices and enables their consolidation. For us this is an invitation to discuss the relation between crisis, routine and consolidation in Euro-Mediterranean migration policies and practices. This intervention shows how ‘crises’ are spatio-temporally limited and used to further pre-existing migration control practices and techniques of governing. As such we interrogate what it means to talk of crisis versus routine in the field of Mediterranean security practices.

Notes

1. We understand security politics as relating to the protection of populations, broadly defined. As such, security politics relates not only to the security of Europe or the Mediterranean, or their populations, but also relates to the security of ‘others’ ‒ e.g. refugees and migrants.

2. Members of the current SYRIZA administration tasked with managing the refugee flows into Greece repeatedly discussed the enactment of this legislation with Polly Pallister-Wilkins during fieldwork in October 2015.