The search for order in a migration crisis world: On the EU’s biopolitics of racialised bordering and everyday struggles of migrants at Europe’s spaces (geographies) of exception
Eda, Luke
Authors
Luke Eda
Abstract
The contemporary making of EU immigration law and policy shape and are shaped by the biopolitics of inclusive-exclusion that seeks to draw a binary line between the legal subjects of law (inclusion) and those excluded from the law’s protection (exclusion). The consequence for migrants seeking protection in Europe but trapped in Europe’s spaces (geographies) of exception is the forcible reduction of their life to mere biology when they are stripped of political rights by the state which has the ultimate sovereign power to determine who is in/excluded from legal protection as worthy human beings. Drawing upon Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’ theory (Foucault, 1998), Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) and Arendt’s concept of ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1973), the paper critically investigates the foundational structures of exception deeply rooted in EU migration laws and policies designed to regulate migrant lives. The paper argues that the systemic biopolitical ‘Othering’ of migrants inherent in the EU migration governance system results in a series of insidious outcomes—(1) deprivation of migrants’ ‘place’ in the European political community; (2) uprooting of migrants’ ‘legal personhood’ in Europe’s rural-urban sanctuaries; and (3) stripping of migrants’ political agency to claim rights in Europe. The paper recounts European migration events of modern history (e.g., the Left-to-Die Boat Case) in which one legal-political imperative emerged: a bid to the EU, its member states, and its institutions—to recognise the structures of exception in the EU migration system, to question those structures, their founding principles, and to search for and find a new migration order or system devoid of state of exception and premised on the shared values of human dignity.
Presentation Conference Type
Conference Abstract
Conference Name
Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) International Conference
Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Files
The search for order in a migration crisis world: On the EU’s biopolitics of racialised bordering and everyday struggles of migrants at Europe’s spaces (geographies) of exception
(805 Kb)
Presentation
