Gender, race, and crisis-driven institutional growth: discourses of ‘migration crisis’ and the expansion of Frontex

ABSTRACT

Migration movements at the EU external borders are increasingly understood and governed through a logic of crisis that draws on gendered and racialised stereotypes of migrants and colonial Self-‘Other’ representations. These narratives of ‘migration crisis’ not only shape public discourse, but also inform institutional processes within the EU border security architecture, particularly the growth of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). Bringing critical border and migration studies in conversation with feminist postcolonial scholarship on crisis, we argue that gendering and racialisation underpin Frontex’s ‘crisis labelling’ that gives way to institutional claims for extended resources and competences. In an analysis of Frontex’s Annual Risk Analysis Reports (2010–2020), we identify four themes through which Frontex engages in crisis labelling on the basis of gendered and racialised stereotypes, dualisms, and postcolonial (self-)representations: migration as threat; the unknownness of migrants; the hierarchical creation of (non-)European spaces; and humanitarian concerns over vulnerable migrants. Through these themes, gender and race not only made migration intelligible as crisis but importantly justified demands for Frontex’s extension. These findings reveal how gender and race inform the institutional politics of defining and governing migration in ways that reproduce intersectional power relations and (post-)colonial legacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration crisis
• gender
• race
• Frontex
• border security

1. Introduction

‘Crisis’ has become an important logic through which migration movements and developments at the external borders are understood, communicated, and governed in the EU (Lindley 2015; Squire 2020). The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 represented a pivotal point in this process and has become a key frame of reference for debates, policies, and practices that continue to shape understandings of and political answers to challenges linked to migration and border security. Yet, other migration movements across EU external borders, such as those consisting of large numbers of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion in 2022 have (so far) not been framed as ‘crisis’. This supports previous findings that the recurring invocation of ‘migration crises’ is not a self-evident reaction to an objective urgency arising out of changes in the scope and forms of migration (Pallister-Wilkins 2016; Menjívar, Ruiz, and Ness 2019; Squire 2020; Vaughan-Williams 2015). Rather, it is a complex societal process that is steeped in ideologies, value judgments, and normative assumptions. This process is underpinned by intersectional constructions of gender and race such as stereotypes of masculinised migrants as threatening or feminised refugees as deserving and in need of protection (Freedman 2019; Gray and Franck 2019; Schrover 2019). Such gendered and racialised constructions inform distinctions between crisis and the ‘normal’ state of affairs and are main ways through which patriarchal gender orders and postcolonial legacies are continuously reinscribed in EU migration and border regimes (Kinnvall 2016), sustaining hierarchies between ‘Europe’ as a space of security, welfare, and human rights, and crisis-prone and ‘culturally backwards Others’ (Isakjee et al. 2020).

Against this background, this study is not only interested in the gendered causes and consequences of migration crisis, but primarily in how gender and race are mobilised to proclaim crisis in ways that are consequential and productive (Roitman 2013). To this end, we aim to uncover how gender and race are inscribed into crisis rhetoric as a ‘powerful narrative device’ that produces meaning and thereby shapes policy processes and governance structures (Dines, Montagna, and Vacchelli 2018, 441). While studies of media and political discourse remain important, we argue that gendering and racialisation is also institutionally relevant in organisations that shape migration policies, governance, and border security practices, such as the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex. Gender and race are an integral part of institutional processes of ‘crisis labelling’ (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2015) that can legitimise and institutionalise problematic bordering practices and promote the growth and power extension of the involved actors (Everson and Vos 2021; Scipioni 2018). They are thus linked to the detrimental consequences of border security and migration policies and practices for the security and well-being of gendered and racialised subjects at Europe’s ‘violent borders’ (Jones 2016).

To scrutinise the link between gender, race, crisis, and institutional change, we bring into conversation critical studies on the institutionalisation of ‘migration crisis’ in the EU and scholarship on gender and race in constituting crisis. Drawing on a feminist and postcolonial conceptualisation of crisis as structured by hierarchical gendered and racialised power relations, we argue that Frontex continuously legitimised the extension of its competences and reach through the articulation of gendered and racialised constructions of crisis. Through its powerful role in the EU’s politics of border security, Frontex exemplifies the problematic tendencies of expanding powers in terms of exclusion and violence in the wider EU border regime.

Founded in 2004 with the overarching objective to ‘facilitate and render more effective […] the management of external borders’ (European Union 2004), Frontex has continuously grown in terms of resources and capabilities, culminating in two mandate extensions in 2016 and 2019. While these extensions have not been directly caused by the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, they have been repeatedly demanded and justified by referrals to migration as crisis, both by the agency itself as well as by EU and national policymakers (Perkowski 2021). This pattern has continued into the present with repeated claims that extended competences for Frontex are crucial for averting (the repetition of) looming crisis. Against this background, we investigate how Frontex made sense of migration as crisis, how notions of gender and race were inscribed and perpetuated within these constructions, and how they were linked to demands for institutional growth.

As a methodological entry point, we focus on Frontex’s risk analysis as a central part in the EU’s knowledge production on migration (Gundhus 2018; Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019). Risk analysis shapes Frontex’s border control and management practices and strongly influences wider policy-making processes on migration and borders (Fjørtoft 2021; Horii 2016; Léonard 2010; Paul 2017). As such, it provides the data, interpretations, and foresight mechanisms upon which policy changes and the associated institutional power shifts are based. These analyses are regularly published in publicly available reports. Since the meanings produced in risk analysis are inscribed into institutional processes and practices, risk analysis is not outside of the crisis it proclaims and analyses, but rather co-constitutive of it. Crisis constructions in reporting on risk analysis, we thus argue, are indicative of how gendered and racialised power relations are perpetuated in Frontex’s largely successful claims to power and how this might be linked to harmful border control and management policies and practices.

In an in-depth discourse-analytical reading of Frontex’s Annual Risk Analysis Reports (RARs) between 2010 and 2020, we trace four main themes through which migration is constructed as crisis on the basis of gendered and racialised stereotypes and (post)colonial hierarchies: (1) migration as threat; (2) the unknownness of migrants; (3) the hierarchical creation of (non-)European spaces; and (4) humanitarian concerns over vulnerable migrants. We conclude that gender and race underpin the construction and institutionalisation of migration crisis in ways that demand and legitimise Frontex’s institutional growth and mandate extension. These findings show how paying attention to race and gender in analysing migration, crisis, and the EU – also beyond this specific case – is necessary for understanding how ‘Europe’ and its ‘Other’ are continuously reproduced in hierarchical terms and how global migration regimes re-entrench these colonial legacies. These patterns ultimately legitimise discrimination, violence, and human rights abuses such as the violent pushbacks of migrants that Frontex is repeatedly accused of (Tondo 2021).

2. (Migration) crisis, EU institutions, gender, and race

The EU and processes of European integration have been described as both producers of and solutions to crisis in policy areas such as finance, global health, and the environment. European integration itself is sometimes seen as a consequence of major crises (Riddervold, Trondal, and Newsome 2021) with the strengthening of institutions being presented as solutions (Everson and Vos 2021; Scipioni 2018). In and beyond the EU, the issue of migration has particularly been understood within the framework of crisis over the last decade, either focusing on the exceptionality of the events of 2015/16 or proclaiming a constant state of crisis. This migration-crisis nexus is however not a self-evident, immediate reaction to an objective state of affairs, but has ‘longer build-up periods and deeper structural causes’ (Lindley 2015, 5) and is informed by politicised processes through which a situation comes to be constructed as crisis and the objects of that crisis are identified. As Squire (2020, 15) argues, the ‘migration crisis’ can thus refer to ‘a crisis of the Schengen Area, of solidarity, sovereignty, values or social cohesion, security, humanitarianism, or international protection.’ Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins (2015, 115) usefully conceptualise the institutional processes through which crisis is constructed as ‘crisis labelling’, centring the process of defining an event as outside of the ‘normal’. They specifically highlight how such labelling enables the ‘adoption and practice of emergency measures while masking more routinised forms of control developed over time’ (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2015). Crisis labelling can therefore have visible and long-lasting effects on the political and institutional set-up of migration management and border control. In the case of the EU, this is inter alia expressed in a strengthening of the role and centrality of Frontex within the integrated border security architecture.

As a perceived panacea to crisis, Frontex’s relevance in securing the external border of the Schengen Area has grown immensely since its foundation in 2004. While in public discourses Frontex is often presented as unified actor with a ‘collective identity’ (Clarke, Friese, and Washburn 2018, 149) in the larger political arena of border security, the institution is best described as a network of various actors, characterised by multiple rationalities and different perspectives. This characterisation reflects organisational debates, power struggles, and discursive controversies among the myriad of units and communities that exist within Frontex (Boswell and Hampshire 2017; Perkowski 2018; 2021). While these inner debates and struggles lead to partly contradictory institutional identities and discourses, they do however not hinder the agency’s attempts to present itself as a unitary actor to the outside world and argue for a constant expansion of its powers for the entire organisation. Over the years, a process of continuous expansion significantly widened Frontex’s capabilities and responsibilities, particularly in the areas of returns, border checks, activities in/with third countries, and enhanced surveillance and data collection. This expansion manifested in two mandate reforms in 2016 and 2019, which solidified the agency’s central role in the implementation of the Integrated Border Management (IBM) strategy. This was accompanied by an ongoing growth of staff, equipment, and financial resources, including the establishment of the so-called Standing Corps, approximately 10,000 border guards under direct command of the agency (European Commission 2018), capacity building, procurement, and development of devices, as well as situating the border surveillance system EUROSUR and the central unit of the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) within the agency. These extensions and reforms are associated with trends towards externalisation (Lemberg-Pedersen 2019) and militarisation (Jones and Johnson 2016). They strengthened not only Frontex’s central role in EU border management but also the creation and promotion of its collective identity.

Understandings of migration as crisis were a powerful basis on which the above reforms were demanded and justified by Frontex and the European Commission. The ‘refugee crisis’ 2015/16 provided a particularly important point of reference (Carrera and den Hertog 2016, 16; Georgi 2019). The 2016 regulation was presented as a direct consequence of the crisis (European Commission 2018, 1) and the Standing Corps introduced in 2019 as a ‘rapid reaction capacity to face future crises’ (European Union 2019). The Commission’s 2020 Pact on Migration and Asylum follows this path and proposes the ‘Migration Preparedness and Crisis Blueprint’ (European Commission 2020) that further inscribes the central role of Frontex in future strategies around counter-crisis measures through its ability to deploy rapid border intervention teams and its key role in providing intelligence and facilitating information exchange between authorities. The agency’s growth thus marks a central element in the EU’s strengthening of crisis preparedness, promoting a view of the agency as a ‘“go-to” solution to a variety of “crises”’ (Perkowski 2021, 138). As such, Frontex has benefitted from and contributed to the reproduction of the crisis narrative (138), ‘using it as a central trope in explaining its work’ (79). Through ‘crisis labelling’ (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2016), the agency has defined migratory movements as crisis by depicting them as a potentially dangerous aberration from the ‘normal’ state of affairs upon which a reaction is demanded (Jeandesboz 2017, 273), normalising practices derived from these interpretations within institutional routines.

While the above scholarship exemplifies the links between migration, crisis, and institutional change in general and for Frontex in particular, they have not investigated how constructions of migration crisis are made intelligible through processes of gendering and racialisation. Feminist scholarship has repeatedly shown how such constructions draw on the ‘intertwined and mutually dependent representations of racialised, masculinised threat and racialised, feminised vulnerability, which are woven into the scaffolding of colonial modernity’ (Gray and Franck 2019, 275). From a historical gender perspective, Schrover (2019) shows how migration crisis was repeatedly constructed using the notion of the victimised migrant women to generate empathy, yet denying migrants any form of agency (see also Chouliaraki and Zaborowski 2017). Bringing ‘age’ into the discussion of outcomes and experiences of migrants, Pruitt, Berents, and Munro (2018) investigate how the portrayal of young people is strongly influenced by gendered and ageist stereotypes and how that may lead to greater insecurities. Freedman (2019), in turn, sheds light on the various origins and forms of insecurity faced by women during the migration crisis, and specifically interrogates the ways in which crisis constructions and securitisation of migration to the EU impact refugees in gendered ways. Moffette and Vadasaria (2016, 293) demonstrate how securitisation is not only gendered but ‘builds upon already established grids of intelligibility [that are] intrinsically connected to the project of race’.

In terms of Frontex, Basham and Vaughan-Williams (2013) as well as Stachowitsch and Sachseder (2019) have shown how the agency produces and bases its work on gendered and racialised assumptions about migrants and migratory movements. The latter have particularly highlighted how Frontex’s risk analysis was underpinned by gendered and racialised framings of problems and solutions in the context of the ‘refugee crisis’ 2015/1016. Beyond the case of migration and borders, Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff (2020) have shown how the perception that Europe’s role as a global power ‘in crisis’ supports gendered meaning-making and identity constructions. Through creating a sense of immediacy and urgency, this, in turn, promotes militarism and masculinism and locates the origins of crisis ‘mostly outside of Europe’s reach’, and associated with the ‘Other’ brown men (Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff 2020, 368). Hence, the above research has shown how gender and race are crucial in constructing, normalising, and legitimising hegemonic understandings of (migration) crisis in the EU.

This scholarship leaves an opening through which to study how such gendered and racialised crisis narratives are institutionally anchored and inscribed into the practices of the emerging EU border security architecture. The continuous process, through which border security actors have invoked crisis through gendering and racialisation and how these crisis narratives are linked to (demands for and legitimisation of) institutional growth have so far not been systematically addressed. Therefore, we combine the scholarship on the institutional relevance of crisis constructions, especially drawing on the concept of ‘crisis labelling’ (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2015), with approaches that highlight how gender and race matter in these constructions. In the following, we build on feminist and postcolonial approaches to conceptualise crisis as co-constitutive with gendered and racialised power relations.

3. Crisis labelling through a feminist postcolonial lens

Feminist approaches conceptualise crisis as a consequential social construct structured by and productive of ‘socioeconomic and political inequalities and unequal power relations’ (Bergman Rosamond et al. 2020). As such, crisis shapes and is shaped by gendered inequalities and their intersections with other social divisions, such as class, race, or ethnicity (Sjoberg, Hudson, and Weber 2015; Walby 2015). Crises illuminate already existing continuums of violence and can exacerbate intersectional hierarchies of power (True and Tanyag 2019). This nexus between gender and crisis cannot ‘be reduced only to impacts on women [but] also concerns both the gendered creation (production) and maintenance (reproduction) of crises, and the institutional and non-institutional responses to crises’ (Hozić and True 2016). The invocation of crisis creates gendered and racialised meanings (Tickner 2015) that in turn shape knowledge(s), policy decisions, and institutional processes (Dines, Montagna, and Vacchelli 2018; Georgi 2019; Menjívar, Ruiz, and Ness 2019). Gender and race thus function as sense-making tools that are central to crisis labelling, i.e. the construction of crisis as a reality distinguishable from the ‘normal’ (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2015). This also entails the creation of silences and ignorances around whose crisis is (not) seen (e.g. Kronsell 2006; Parpart 2010) by defining the suffering of marginalised populations as ‘normal’ (Strolovitch 2013). In the context of postcoloniality, these processes depend on the racialisation and gendering of colonised territories and peoples, and take the form of binary divisions and categorical conceptions of inside-outside and us-them (De Genova 2018).

Feminist and postcolonial scholarship points to four key ways in which gendered and racialised stereotypes, dichotomies, and (post)colonial Self-‘Other’ representation inform processes of crisis labelling: the construction of threat; the construction of the ‘unknown Other’; the spatial hierarchisation of the world; and histories and discourses of humanitarianism and vulnerability. Within the postcolonial condition, notions of threat to Europe and Europeans draw on portrayals of the masculinised ‘Other’, which entails the simultaneous construction of feminised ‘vulnerable’ subjects (Abu-Lughod 2002; Collins 2000; Hooks 1982; Moffette and Vadasaria 2016). With regards to migration crisis, this plays out in dichotomous constructions of migrant subjects along the lines of feminised/deserving and masculinised/undeserving or the gendered and racialised dualism between refugee and economic migrant (Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Kmak 2012; Holmes and Castañeda 2016). Such racialised and gendered understandings of difference between non-/European bodies as well as between different groups of migrants are anchored in colonial histories, and serve as the ‘conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans’ (Weheliye 2014, 3). Gendered and racialised crisis labelling thus contributes to framing migration as an ‘external intrusion disrupting an otherwise ordered European polity’ by constructing migrants as a threat to security, economic productivity, and gender equality in the EU (Bhambra 2015). This obscures the underlying reasons for migration and how controlling the movement of racialised groups is constitutive of Europe’s ‘normal’ liberal order. Such processes of ‘Othering’ not only construct migrants as a threat to be violently suppressed but are also underpinned by notions of migrants as unknown, unpredictable, and deceiving. This legitimises colonial practices of categorising, surveilling, and governing racialised subjects (Said 2003) as an answer to crisis caused by the unknown and potentially threatening ‘Other’.

Gendered and racialised hierarchies that inform notions of (migration) crisis not only relate to bodies and subjects, but also entail a spatial hierarchisation of the world that draws heavily on postcolonial legacies. These reproduce binary divisions, such as self-representations of ‘Europe’ as post-racial (Bilgin 2020; Isakjee et al. 2020), tied to notions of reason, rule of law, and security, as well as ‘European’ values of solidarity, (neo)liberal democratic reason, and human rights (Perkowski 2021; Van Houtum and Lacy 2020a) in opposition to ‘culturally backwards’ non-European spaces represented by the countries of origin of migrants. This is articulated through (post)colonial relations of power that still position Europe as the ‘gold standard’ for interpreting non-European life worlds (Kinnvall 2016). The ‘Other’ is consequently evaluated on the basis of universalised European norms associated with rationality and masculinity that reproduce postcolonial spaces as irrational and feminine, justifying continued ruling over those spaces through ‘Western’ governance and knowledge practices.

Finally, gender and race inform processes of crisis labelling through discourses of humanitarianism, vulnerability, and protection that are closely linked to histories of colonialism and white supremacy (Spivak 1988; Ticktin 2008; Pallister-Wilkins 2020). These draw on gender and race to determine who is deemed worthy of protection and who is seen as an able and trustworthy protector (e.g. Åse 2018; Young 2003). Ensuing instances of masculinist protectionism and white saviorism are central to notions of humanitarian crises and the vulnerability of migrants, as well as understandings of Europe as vulnerable to the threat of migration. This supports representations of border actors as masculinised white bearers of humanitarian values, provides the grounds for rights to act in Europe’s ‘interests’ (Aas and Gundhus 2015; Franko 2021), and consolidates Europe’s superiority by ‘saving the souls of white people’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2020, 100).

Taken together, the construction of crisis is intensely linked to Europe’s (post)colonial history and embedded within associated gendered and racialised systems of meaning. Based on feminist and postcolonial theory, we argue that processes of crisis labelling render these meanings institutionally effective and thereby inscribe gendered and racialised hierarchies into the institutional architecture of EU border security and migration governance. This can enhance the status of actors such as Frontex, justify their practices, and legitimise their demands for power and resources. In the following, we develop a methodological approach to examine how Frontex engaged in crisis labelling over a ten year period, how this process underpinned demands for and justifications of the agency’s growth, and how it drew on gendered and racialised stereotypes, dichotomies, and (post)colonial Self-‘Other’ representation in four key areas identified above: (1) the construction of migration as threat, (2) the construction of migrants as unknown, (3) spatial hierarchisations, and (4) humanitarianism.

4. Studying crisis labelling through risk analysis

Our main site of empirical analysis is Frontex’s risk analysis as a central instrument that the agency draws upon for crisis labelling in its institutional interest. A complex process of data-driven assessment of risks at the external border and the ‘pre-frontier area’, risk analysis defines the rationale and scope of Frontex Joint Operations (Gundhus 2018; Horii 2016; Paul 2017; Peers, Guild, and Tomkin 2012), and serves as the basis for policymaking and resource allocation (European Union 2019), as well as intervention into member states’ border protection (Fjørtoft 2021). Framed as technical calculation (Amoore 2013), risk analysis follows a specific methodology – the Common Integrated Risk Analysis Model (CIRAM) – which assembles data from a wider network, the Frontex Risk Analysis Network (FRAN). It compiles data collected during operations (Frontex 2012a, 6), from tools as EUROSUR, and from member states and international organisations (Horii 2016).

With migration being ‘a particularly non-scientific risk’ (Paul 2017, 691), risk analysis however fulfills functions that exceed the ‘objective’ assessment of risks for the purpose of guiding operational practice. As a sense-making security practice embedded within societal and political power relations (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019), it makes threats and insecurities intelligible, defines policy problems and solutions, and makes normative claims about the appropriateness of bordering practices. As such, it is not only a governance tool for managing and securing borders, but also an important means of communication that represents the agency’s institutional interests within the EU institutional architecture as well as opposite member states and the wider public. While risk analysis is a result of the social formations and organisational power struggles within and beyond Frontex (Perkowski 2021), it serves as an articulation of Frontex’s perspective as a unitary actor in the larger arena of EU (border) security.

Frontex’s Annual Risk Analysis Reports (RARs), the main empirical material of this study, stand at the end of the extensive process of risk analysis. Written in a specific technical jargon, these reports convey how Frontex views and governs migration and represent an interface between internal processes, the EU level, and broader societal debates. While it is important to understand the complex processes of the risk analysis methodology, our analysis of the RARs centres the output rather than the process itself and understands them as an instrument used by the agency to create an institutional narrative from a heterogeneous set of approaches. As public-facing policy documents foregrounding selected insights generated by the Frontex risk analysis machinery, the RARs are producing and productive of societal power relations (Hunter 2008, 507) and important sites of institutional meaning-making (Bowen 2009, 37). The way RARs feature gendered and racialised crisis narratives, we hence argue, is indicative of the institutional politics through which the agency conceptualises and governs borders, migrants, and migration.

Against this backdrop, we engage in a close reading of all RARs beginning with the first publicly available report in 2010 until 2020. We base our analysis on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Van Dijk 1993) that emphasises the role of language in the construction and perpetuation of social power relations and focuses on institutions in mediating discourses and practices which render certain policy decisions intelligible (Fairclough 2003). We situate our findings within broader political and institutional developments by conducting a content and context analysis, reading risk analysis reports against relevant policy documents, such as the regulations on the Frontex mandate extensions (European Union 2016, 2019), and the European Commission’s Pact on Migration and Asylum (European Commission 2020).

In the following analysis, we first screened the reports for language, narratives, and themes that explicitly or implicitly referred to crisis and created a sense of emergency and urgency. Building on the four pillars of a feminist postcolonial conceptualisation of crisis labelling – constructions of threat, the unknown ‘Other’, spatial hierarchisations of the world, and discourses of humanitarianism ‐ we identified the dominant themes that linked gendered and racialised constructions of crisis to Frontex’s demands for or justifications of the extension of its resources, capabilities, and mandate. In a second step, we analysed the crisis labelling within these themes, how it provided the rationale for institutional claims, and how it drew on gendered and racialised stereotypes, e.g. the masculinised economic migrants, the feminised refugee, the White savior; the reproduction and transformation of binaries, such as wanted/unwanted migration, irregular migrant vs. bona fide traveler; as well as the constitution of gendered and racialised identities, such as the constructions of ‘Europe’ (European values, identities) and its ‘Other’.

5. Analysis of Frontex’s crisis labelling

The analysis reveals that crisis labelling within risk analysis works at different levels of the institution and draws on a variety of institutional claims that are heterogenous and sometimes conflicting. We observe a variation in scope of Frontex’s demands for growth on the basis of four gendered and racialised themes that linked migration, crisis, and the need for a more powerful Frontex. These include the construction of migration as a threat, particularly through framings of ‘migration pressure’ (Tazzioli 2020); the claim of ‘non-knowledge’ (Aradau and Perret 2022) and the construction of migrants as ‘unknown’; the spatialisation of threats, through which non-European and semi-peripheral regions and countries are constructed as dangerous or endangered; and the invocation of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2015; Perkowski 2018) that warrants immediate action. Within these four themes, claims and demands are formulated on different levels: The themes of threat and humanitarianism rely on a more comprehensive depiction of Frontex as a catch-all solution to larger ‘crises’, which can only be alleviated by a more potent agency. The themes of ‘unknownness’ and hierarchical spatialisation, on the other hand, formulate the strengthening of the agency through more specific demands, such as the expansion of surveillance systems or access to databases. However, the themes serve as an analytical device with which to dissect the multiple understandings of crisis that are being perpetuated, rather than the representation of neatly separable discursive realities. Furthermore, the data does not suggest that these iterations represent conflicting claims of different branches. Rather, despite some logical contradictions between them, they work together in the production of a sense of crisis from different angles in an overall thrust towards institutional growth and expansion of the agency in its entirety.¹ Gendered and racialised meanings structure all these crisis constructions and contribute to solving their seeming contradictions. Furthermore, rather than capturing the evolution of each theme along a timeline, we paid attention to the continuities and discontinuities and highlighted the years of 2015/16 as central turning points. This enabled linking the shifts in gendered and racialised meanings to Frontex’ institutional changes.

5.1. Migration threat

One prevalent vehicle for crisis labelling observed in the material is the notion of migration as a threat, particularly through constructions of ‘migration pressure’. The agency constructs these threats through claims of ‘(c)risis situations […] at the southern border with thousands of people trying to cross the border illegally’ (Frontex 2013, 7) or ‘sharp increases’ and a ‘permanent threat of migration’ (Frontex 2014, 39). While such depictions are present throughout the period of investigation, they are intensified over time. Until 2015, ‘crisis’ is largely used to either refer to the economic and financial crisis in the EU or the humanitarian crisis at the external borders. A more coherent and frequent use of the term referring to migratory movements as ‘crisis’ evolves around the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, with emphasis on ‘record numbers’ and ‘unprecedentedness’ that becomes synonymous with the notion of crisis:

[N]ever before had detections on the Western Mediterranean route been as high as in 2016, with more than 10,000 detections. This is 46% more than in 2015 on the same route, and 21% more than in 2011, the previous record-breaking year. (Frontex 2017, 8)

Numbers are further dramatised by linking them to criminality, the ‘underlying threat of terrorism-related movements’ (Frontex 2018, 39), health risks of ‘communicable and non­communicable diseases’ (Frontex 2016, 49), welfare overstretch, and violence:

[S]ituations when a large number of people are crossing the border en masse have led to violence requiring public order policing, an area for which border-control authorities are not adequately equipped or trained. (Frontex 2016, 8)

The construction of migration per se as ‘crisis’ is closely linked to demands for large-scale expansions of the powers of the agency. For example, by labelling the tense situation at the Greek-Turkish border in March 2020 as crisis, the 2020 RAR claims that these developments ‘make even more urgent the establishment of the European Border and Coast Guard standing corps, with staff and equipment able to reinforce Member States and to strengthen EU responsiveness capacities.’ (Frontex 2020, 7)

Gender and race give meaning and legitimacy to this crisis labelling that provides the rationale and justification for Frontex’s institutional expansion. They do so either by explicitly linking migrants’ assumed gender and nationality to the threat of criminality, fraud, welfare overstretch, and violence, or by implicitly masculinising and racialising migrants as invasive, undeserving, and exploitative vis-a-vis Europe as a socio-cultural and political-economic space that represents prosperity, welfare, and security (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019). The former is expressed through links between ‘migration pressure’ and references to ‘mostly adult males’ (Frontex 2015, 5) or ‘young single men’ with different ‘backgrounds and nationalities’ (Frontex 2016, 45). Thereby, a connection is established between crisis caused by migration pressure, migrants as threatening, gender, and a racialised understanding of nationality:

Another cause of clashes among migrants involves the mixing of different ethnicities and cultures. In particular, as a group with distinct socio-cultural and religious background, Afghan migrants were over-represented among nationals involved in incidents in the reception centres. (Frontex 2017, 41)

Migration is further labelled as crisis through a growing concern over ‘economic migration’. The reports increasingly refer to the masculinised and racialised figure of the ‘economic migrant’ as linked to potential welfare overstretch and exploitation of the EU economic and asylum system (Kmak 2012). This is achieved through portrayals of ‘young male Somalis’ or ‘Egyptian migrants for economic opportunities’ (Frontex 2014, 30) and overarching claims that ‘the main factors pushing Pakistanis to migrate are of economic nature’ (Frontex 2016, 40). Economic migrants are imagined as calculative actors who ‘diversify their methods’ as a means to cross the borders illegally (Frontex 2013, 23), as economically motivated visa overstayers (Frontex 2013, 25), looking for employment opportunities (Frontex 2013, 26) and ‘better living conditions’ (Frontex 2013, 30), or as engaging in ‘document fraud’ and ‘visa shopping’ (Frontex 2014, 6). As laid out in one future scenario projection, this is imagined as potentially leading to the large-scale societal crisis within the EU:

The high numbers of economic migrants - mostly with low educational qualification and with a different cultural background - are not truly integrated into European societies. This causes social conflicts and critical perception of migration. (Frontex 2016, 56)

These forms of crisis labelling that build on colonial understandings of the masculinised, racialised, non-European ‘Other’ to create a sense of threat (Dines, Montagna, and Vacchelli 2018) are continuously used to mark migration movements as something outside of the ‘normal’ requiring immediate action. This feeds into demands for transforming Frontex into ‘the operational arm of the EU, and a partner for the Member States’, and making border security a ‘shared responsibility of the Union and the Member States’ (Frontex 2018, 6), thereby shifting powers from member states to the agency. While these demands have partly been realised with the framework of the Integrated Border Management (IBM), which was introduced in the 2016 mandate extension and strengthened in the 2019 mandate, the Pact on Migration and Asylum by the European Commission (2020) further gives the agency ‘a leading role in the common EU system for returns’ (European Commission 2020, 8). Frontex’s power in the field of border checks and cooperation with third countries is thereby increasingly being centralised (European Union 2019). Taken together, notions of pressure and crisis underpinned by masculinised and racialised constructions of the invasive ‘Other’ provided the basis for and gave legitimacy to Frontex’s demands for institutional growth, specifically enabling the agency to claim its position as key actor in returns, technical procurement, the channelling of resources, and cooperation with third countries.

5.2. The unknownness of migrants

The second theme through which Frontex labels migration as crisis in gendered and racialised ways entails the problematisation of lacking knowledge and data for effective border management and EU (internal) security. Accordingly, knowledge gaps lead to a loss of control over masses and movements and result in chaos, overstretch, and breaches of the EU’s internal security. Gendered and racialised constructions of the deceiving, unknown migrant provide the link between the ‘need to know’ and Frontex’s institutional claims for a hegemonic role in knowledge production in the EU’s migration control infrastructure. While lacking data and information are problematised from the beginning, 2015 again represents a turning point after which the inability to know and categorise migrants is explicitly linked to threat, crisis, and migration pressure. This proclaimed knowledge crisis allegedly arises from the lacking possibilities for distinguishing between different types of migrants:

The challenge for the border guard is clear: how to differentiate for example, between the asylum seeker who arrives at the external border with no papers and the economic migrant or a migrant who might pose a security threat attempting to abuse the system by claiming a false nationality?. (Frontex 2015, 53)

Postcolonial perspectives suggest that this ‘danger of not-knowing’ (Puar 2007, 185) is central to colonial justifications for invasive knowledge and governance practices against the ‘Other’. Gender and race therein constitute the ‘unknown’ as something to be categorised, ordered, and managed. Following this pattern, Frontex’s crisis labelling depends on gendered and racialised binaries as resources for differentiating between ‘unwanted’/’undeserving’ irregular migrants and ‘desired’ forms of mobility exemplified by the ‘bona-fide traveler’. This figure embodies a ‘credible, genuine’ person on the move (Aas 2011, 338) for purposes of e.g. business, tourism, or education, and obtains this status through their (European) citizenship. This focus also frames risk analysis as the dominant knowledge practice to enable desired mobility through more ‘gathering and pool­ing intelligence at EU level’ (Frontex 2016, 26):

Border management will increasingly be risk-based, to ensure that interventions are focused on the movements of high-risk individuals, while movements of bona fide travelers are facilitated smoothly. (Frontex 2018, 45)

The notion of desirable, de-racialised mobility of ‘legitimate’ travelers is accompanied by colonial perspectives on ‘unknownness’ as threatening to European security, cohesion, and lifestyle, and linked to the ‘malicious’ behaviour of migrants, who refrain from providing information on their nationalities:

With record numbers of migrants crossing the border illegally, resources are devoted to their immediate care, rather than screening and obtaining information on their basic characteristics such as nationality. After they are rescued, they continue their journey to other Member States and not knowing who is travelling within the EU is a vulnerability for EU internal security. (Frontex 2015, 5)

Document fraud poses significant risks: Individuals assuming a bogus identity and operating in the black market seriously affect internal security and undermine international criminal investigations, as well as national social systems and the ability of any state to effectively manage and protect its legitimate communities. (Frontex 2014, 26)

In these crisis constructions, risk is articulated through the gendered and racialised notion of the EU’s ‘vulnerability’ in terms of internal security and social systems and the protection of its ‘legitimate communities’ from deceiving, unknown migrants who are making ‘bogus’ claims. Such notions of vulnerability feminise European populations, playing on nativist understandings of citizenship and community, and rendering Europe an object of masculine protectionism. Knowledge practices that enable a gendered and racialised categorisation of European/non-European bodies are suggested as the solution to the crisis caused by migration. This, in turn, is linked to demands for more rights and capabilities for surveillance, the collection, storage, and sharing of data (Frontex 2019, 34), and the development of ‘appropriate’ border management practices for accelerating passenger flows and filtering out ‘risky’ migrants. This gives way to justification of situating EUROSUR within the agency in the 2019 mandate, and the implementation of the pre-travel registration system ETIAS in 2023, which signifies a crucial change in using visa policy and pre-travel control as a measure for sorting out illegal and undesired mobility:

[ETIAS will] provide an additional layer of control over travellers by determining the eligibility of all visa-exempt non-EU nationals to travel to the Schengen Area. Frontex will host the Central Unit of ETIAS, which will help improve internal security, limit public health risks and identify persons who may pose a risk before they arrive at the EU’s external borders. (Frontex 2018, 7)

Taken together, the crisis labelling of knowledge gaps as a central concern legitimises Frontex’s security practices, such as increased surveillance, profiling, fingerprinting, biometric screening, and the integration of different information databases. Gender and race sustain these claims by promoting racialised and masculinised stereotypes of migrants as unknown, threatening, and deceiving, dualisms between different groups of migrants, as well as colonial imaginings of superior ‘EUropean’ knowledge practices and technologies aimed at identifying, controlling, and managing the ‘Other’.

5.3. The hierarchical creation of (non-)European spaces

The third theme through which migration is labelled as crisis in the RARs is spatial hierarchisation, i.e. the demarcation of different zones and regions beyond the EU external borders that are linked to crisis-proneness in terms of migration pressure and illegality. These regions are constructed as sources of, but also solutions to crisis. In both instances, crisis labelling is based on postcolonial-racial hierarchisation of non-European geographies, Self-‘Other’ dualisms, the masculinisation of third country nationals, and feminisation of ‘failed’ states in the periphery that are imagined in opposition to European identity and values. This gendered and racialised crisis labelling is connected to Frontex’s claims for and justifications of an extended reach into third countries that goes hand in hand with a more central role for the agency in the overall border regime. Not only does spatialisation support specific policy initiatives, it also enables the upholding of a notion of perpetual crisis after 2015 by shifting the geographical focus onto regions or ‘routes’ where migration numbers remain high, despite an overall decline (Frontex 2018, 18f.):

The continuously mounting migratory pressure on the Western Mediterranean route and the once again rising pressure on the Eastern Mediterranean route caution – inter alia indications attesting to the persistent migratory pressure – against overemphasizing the fact that the total number of detections stands at its lowest level since 2013. (Frontex 2019, 16)

Over the period of investigation, spatialised notions of crisis – supported by the increased use of migratory maps that problematised migration as ‘invasion’ (Van Houtum and Lacy 2020b) – are expressed in a growing focus on postcolonial ‘problem-spaces’ (Chamlian 2016) in Africa and the Middle East which are constructed as homogeneous entities and identified as sources of continued risk and crisis:

The proportion of African migrants, and in particular West African migrants, detected crossing the border illegally, is likely to grow. (Frontex 2018, 9)

New sections added to the reports in 2016 further amplify postcolonial spatialisation of crisis. These specific country analyses are dedicated to the description of major transit countries (e.g. Turkey, Libya, Morocco) and countries of origin (e.g. Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria). Foregrounding notions of criminality, links to terrorism, and ‘economic’ migration, the analyses place states in a colonial hierarchy by categorising them as failed and a space of lawlessness, chaos, violence (Bilgin 2010). This is evident in the case of Libya, where it is alleged that ‘all state institutions are fragmented and weak, and therefore the country’s vast land and sea border remain largely uncontrolled’ (Frontex 2016, 39). Links between crisis and specific postcolonial spaces are further underpinned by constructions of Europe as a space of security, values, and wealth separated from, but threatened by crisis emanating from elsewhere:

In the countries of destination, migration often stretches the capacity of healthcare systems to adapt to the additional demand for health services, and the unfamiliar and changing health profiles and needs. (Frontex 2016, 48)

Threats at the borders may also take non-conventional forms, some physical such as terrorism, others are more subtle, like misinformation campaign and media manipulation to undermine core European values. (Frontex 2018, 39)

The link between illegality, crisis, and specific countries was further underscored by masculinised descriptions of their nationals as risky:

Syrian nationals remained the most prevalent nationality detected with fraudulent documents at the air borders. (Frontex 2016, 24)

Libya is also very [sic!] important theatre of jihad, which is also the closest to the EU’s external borders. Moreover, Libya has been attracting battle-hardened jihadists from Syria, which has resulted in the same atrocious modi operandi being utilised elsewhere besides Syria. (Frontex 2016, 39)

The construction of threatening masculinities as sources of crisis is often explicitly linked to gender, i.e. victimised ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe 1990). In this context, gender-based violence is described as a product of barbarian traditions in accounts of ‘voodoo rituals’ in which it is claimed that ‘the Nigerian victims are mostly women and increasingly younger girls, many of whom are minors’ (Frontex 2018, 36). Hence, spatialisation links ‘problematic bodies’ and ‘problem-spaces’ through a racist and sexist ‘symbolic cartography of modernity, rationality and personhood’ (Baker 2021, 124) and puts them in opposition to Europe as a space of progressive gender orders.

Another shift in postcolonial spatialisations can be observed with regards to ‘semiperipheral’ regions such as Turkey and the Balkans. While earlier reports associate them with crisis (Frontex 2011, 41; 2012b: 13 and 19; 2013: 63), they are later reframed as victims of ‘unprecedented numbers of migrants, which overstretched the capacities of the affected countries’ (Frontex 2016, 38). Processes of feminisation that attribute weakness to the regions thereby serve as a rationale for integrating them as part of the solution to crisis in the context of border externalisation. This framing promotes agreements for cooperation in securing the border and conducting returns, such as the EU-Turkey agreement, which is given as a reason for why migration pressure has eased after the 2015 ‘crisis’ (Frontex 2017, 6). The Balkans are equally presented as a key site of Frontex activity, including an agreement that initiated the first Joint Operation outside EU territory in Albania in 2019 (Frontex 2019, 7). Drawing on the internal hierarchies of Whiteness, which ‘has its own core and peripheries’, this reflects that ‘the region has become a site for managing insecurity that has originated elsewhere, in ways that still cast the region’s place at the European centre as contingent.’ (Baker 2021, 126). On this gendered and racialised basis, externalisation is presented as a ‘key element of successful migration management’ (Frontex 2018, 7), arguing ‘that any perceived or actual deficiency of migration management systems and their components in these transit regions can result in much higher pressure towards the EU’ (Frontex 2020, 19) and therefore requires expanding capabilities in terms of third countries (Frontex 2020, 11).

Spatialised crisis labelling thereby legitimises cooperation, but also extended surveillance and monitoring of the so-called ‘pre-frontier’, which refers to any geographical area beyond the external borders which is deemed relevant for border management (European Union 2019, 19). This approach has already manifested in the introduction of IBM which identifies measures with third countries as a main pillar, including border management, return agreements, and data exchange. The integration of EUROSUR into the 2019 mandate further supported the reach of Frontex’s surveillance practices into third countries. The 2020 EU Pact on Migration follows this pattern, envisioning EU status agreements with the Western Balkan partners that will enable Frontex to cooperate with national border guards on third country territory, provide practical support in the development of border management capacities, and ‘optimise’ voluntary returns (European Commission 2020).

Taken together, gendering and racialisation are productive of spatialised crisis labelling in that they feminise, masculinise, and racialise countries of origin and transit, giving legitimacy to a stronger agency through a colonial hierarchy of different spatialities. This hierarchy positions Europe as an ordered space that is the standard and norm, against a threatening ‘Other’ that is eternally crisis-ridden and ‘culturally backwards’. Importantly, this includes the creation of semi-peripheral spaces that are part of the crisis solution, yet clearly positioned outside of the EU’s core, further cementing a (post)colonial, racialised inside-outside logic. Gender and race are thus inscribed into the crisis constructions that justify the reach into and governing of non-EU spaces.

5.4. Humanitarian concerns over vulnerable migrants

The final form of crisis labelling that relies heavily on gender and race is the construction of humanitarian crisis, expressed in concern for vulnerable migrants. Related gendering and racialisation not only allow for the self-representation of Frontex as a humanitarian actor (Pallister-Wilkins 2015, 2022; Perkowski 2018; 2021), but also legitimate various institutional claims toward the extension of Frontex’s role and mandate, including demands for more resources and equipment as well as justifications for increased maritime surveillance.

Through the humanitarian frame, migration is labelled as crisis over the years by emphasising lives lost and endangered, particularly at sea, in increasingly dramatic language and imagery. While humanitarian concerns are present throughout the period of investigation, the focus increasingly shifts from concern over the ‘humanitarian crises arising in third countries’ (Frontex 2012b, 5) as fueling migratory movements, to a focus on ‘humanitarian crisis at the EU border’ (Frontex 2014, 64). In 2014 – and possibly following the public outcry over a large drowning incident in 2013 – Frontex starts foregrounding its own role in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations (Frontex 2014, 63). Despite the relatively small and even decreasing role of SAR within Joint Operations (Cusumano 2018), Frontex continues to highlight its importance in ‘saving the lives of an unprecedented number of migrants’ (Frontex 2016, 16), particularly in the RAR 2016 that covers the year of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. In the later reports, explicit references to humanitarianism decrease, for example the term ‘humanitarian’ is not mentioned in the RAR 2019 and 2020. References to the humanitarian crisis thus reflect institutional priorities beyond ‘saving lives’ but also beyond self-representation of Frontex as protector and savior. Rather, they justify the agency’s contentious practices, such as interceptions and large-scale surveillance, by consistently linking humanitarian crisis to cross-border crime and embedding it within a 'pull-factor' narrative according to which humanitarian efforts are causing migration and facilitate crime:

Search and rescue operations were crucial in saving the lives of an unprecedented number of migrants. Nevertheless, they also contributed to the enrichment of smugglers who could cut on travel costs and advertised to susceptible migrants that rescue operations make the journey safer, thus increasing the demand for crossings. (Frontex 2016, 20)

In this context, it transpired that both border surveillance and SAR missions close to, or within, the 12-mile territorial waters of Libya have unintended consequences. Namely, they influence smugglers’ planning and act as a pull factor that compounds the difficulties inherent in border control and saving lives at sea. (Frontex 2017, 32)

Gender and race are pivotal in giving meaning to notions of crisis in the context of humanitarianism in two ways: First, an explicit focus on gender issues in discussions of human trafficking and sexual exploitation manifested in a particular emphasis on ‘women and children [as] the most vulnerable’ (Frontex 2012b, 32; see also 2010: 31), e.g. ‘African girls being lured’ into working in the European sex market by false promises (Frontex 2011, 39). This narrative is especially observable in the earlier reports but remains relevant throughout the period of investigation. The second link between humanitarianism, gender/race, and crisis is more implicit and entails the feminisation of all migrants, not just those affected by gender-based violence, as in need of protection, agency-less, and endangered by the masculinised figure of the ‘people-smuggler’ who is portrayed as aggressive, ‘profit-seeking’ and threatening: 

Tragically, this period of an intense flow of migrants between North Africa and the EU saw several major incidents of boats capsizing in the region resulting in a massive loss of life, including women and children. (Frontex 2014, 32)

People smugglers, motivated by profit, increasingly put migrants’ lives at risk and even threaten border guards to recover boats or escape apprehension. (Frontex 2016, 8)

While the first discourse contributes to the general problematisation of (male) migrants and enables Frontex’s self-portrayal as ‘white’, masculine protector, the latter is integrated into the theme of larger, multiple crises in terms of pressure and criminality. In this context, gendering and racialisation support the underlying assumption that mass movements are simultaneously dangerous and endangered (Cusumano 2018; Steinhilper and Gruijters 2018) and that those in humanitarian need are not only ‘at risk’, but also ‘risky’ (Andersson 2012; Pallister-Wilkins 2015). The dichotomies between helpless, at risk, feminised migrants and threatening, risky, masculinised ones provides the grounds for the legitimisation not only of Frontex’s role in SAR, but also its broader approach of discouraging and criminalising migration on the basis of a perceived crisis (Welfens and Bonjour 2021). This gives way to demands for increased resources and capabilities for anti-smuggling measures, maritime surveillance, and data gathering and exchange to determine who is deserving of humanitarian assistance, e.g. ‘more vulnerable families, including women and children’ (Frontex 2016, 45), and who is deemed ‘risky’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2015). Riskiness is however also extended to women, e.g. in assessments that ‘Islamist radicalisation is no longer a male dominated phenomenon’, which makes it ‘particularly difficult to assess the threat posed by women and children’ (Frontex 2018, 30). While this indicates a move toward understandings of women and children as agents, the intersection with race again privileges understandings of migrants as threatening, rather than of women as more than victims.

While migrants’ crises are seemingly addressed under this theme, this was largely done by linking them to a crisis for the EU in terms of security and criminality, constructing a dichotomy between feminised/masculinised migrants, and obscuring the humanitarian crisis in the countries of origin and transit as a cause for migration. Not only did this promote the institutional growth of Frontex and legitimised its practices, it also produced silences around the complicity of the EU in victimising migrants by directly engaging in violations such as illegal pushbacks (European Parliament 2021), by establishing border regimes that make smuggling profitable and journeys dangerous (Andersson 2012), or by externalising border management (Lemberg-Pedersen 2019). This crisis labelling of humanitarian issues led to a diversion of attention from discriminatory surveillance practices, but also specifically of gender-based violence and insecurity, e.g. human trafficking of women and girls (Bilgin 2020; Welfens 2020), toward growing victimisation of all migrants that are simultaneously assumed as threatened and threatening. 

6. Conclusions

Conceptualising crisis as structured by intersectional hierarchies and postcolonial legacies, we asked how gendered and racialised constructions of crisis are linked to the institutional growth and legitimisation of the risk-based border security actor Frontex. Drawing on and advancing the concept of ‘crisis labelling’ (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2015), we have shown that gender and race matter for how Frontex’s risk analysis reporting constructs migration as crisis and builds the case for its own growth on the basis of four dominant themes, including threat through migration ‘pressure’, lack of knowledge and data, spatialisation, and humanitarianism. These strongly overlapping, yet sometimes conflicting themes make sense of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities as crisis in the context of Frontex’s widening scope of activities, its increasing centrality within the EU border security architecture, and its overall growth in terms of resources and capacities, especially with the 2016 and 2019 mandate extensions and the Pact on Migration and Asylum 2020. Together, they justify continued investment in the agency towards a centralised, independent border police with far-reaching competences and capabilities at and beyond the EU external borders.

With growing budgets and power for Frontex, gendered and racialised crisis narratives become progressively inscribed into risk analysis and give legitimacy to Frontex’s institutional claims, particularly in the wake of intensified crisis rhetoric from 2015 onwards. Masculinised stereotypes of migrants as undeserving, exploitative, unknown, and deceiving ‘Other’ that is threatening to European cohesion, security, and welfare, as well as feminisation and victimisation of migrants in the context of masculinist protectionism and white saviorism are crucial elements in broader narratives that constructed migration as crisis over more than a decade. So are postcolonial imaginings of non-European geographies, including feminisation of ‘weak’ states and problematisation of violent, ‘risky’ masculinities associated with them. This complex intersectional process of crisis labelling underpins specific institutional demands such as access to databases, widening of surveillance and data gathering activities, and an extended reach into third countries through externalisation processes, or more generally the extension of Frontex’s role in border management by promoting a positive image of the agency as managerial and/or humanitarian.

While we do not claim causality between gendered and racialised constructions of crisis and the implemented changes, we conclude that gender and race are crucial to Frontex’s largely successful crisis labelling that leads to the consistent reification of the agency’s perspectives in policy reforms and institutional transformations. This process entails the production of silences around inequalities and power hierarchies, disavowing insecurities and risks, which migrants face in their countries of origin, on the move, and at the EU borders, as well as broader structural inequalities within and between countries of origin and destination rooted in postcolonial legacies. Hence, the root causes of many of the phenomena Frontex claims to tackle are invisibilised, concealing the harm border practices such as returns, surveillance, or profiling are causing, especially for vulnerable subjects.

While studies of media and political discourse thus remain important for understanding the construction of ‘migration crises’, our study points to the relevance of examining how the rhetoric of crisis becomes institutionally relevant, how gender and race are inscribed into the institutions that shape migration policies, governance, and security practices, and how this may be linked to the gendered and racialised effects of border regimes associated with externalisation (Lemberg-Pedersen 2019) and militarisation (Jones and Johnson 2016). Risk analysis is an important space in which to trace these processes. It is not a neutral or technical tool to assess threats and (in)securities but importantly shapes migration governance and border management through its meaning-making capacities. It is thus not outside of the crisis phenomena it analyses, but rather co-constitutive of them.

Beyond the realm of migration, our feminist-postcolonial theorisation of ‘crisis labelling’ enable linking the role of gendered and racialised crisis constructions that normalises emergency measures to the trajectories of institutions designed to identify and handle such crisis politically and practically. Further studying these links in and beyond the context of border and migration governance will yield important insights into how gender and race not only work to make crisis tangible and intelligible, but also how they are anchored in the institutional politics of defining and dealing with crisis and how this is connected to gendered and racialised reproductions of crisis.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Hallie Shlifer and Christian Haddad as well as the anonymous reviewers for their support of and invaluable feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported through funding by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: P-33355) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (DOC 25314).

Notes

1 An interview-based research design might be able to make connections between specific crisis constructions and the concrete demands of different groups within the agency, and also allow for additional insights into how the connection between understandings of crisis and institutional perspectives is mediated by relevant actors. In the risk analysis reporting, the outward-facing role of crisis labelling as an all-encompassing process that is attached to a multitude of themes and demands becomes clearer and is more easily observable. A combination of both approaches would yield further knowledge about how internal processes and external relations interact to construct and institutionally anchor crisis narratives.