Politics of Fear: Migration, Control and National Imaginations (original) (raw)
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Navigating through the politics of fear - a case study of Europe's migrant crisis
Perceived as a stable and free continent with good economic prospects, Europe has always appealed to people around the world. However, since 2015, the number of people entering Europe has grown rapidly. What is different now, as compared to past migration phases, is that these people are not economic migrants, but asylum-seekers seeking refuge. This situation owes its roots to the instability from conflict-ridden countries in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Balkan region. Between 2015 and 2016, over 2 million people have requested asylum within the European Union (EU), contributing to Europe’s biggest migrant crisis since World War 2. The influx of migrants is a transboundary crisis: frontline states such as Italy and Greece; transit states like the Balkans, Central and Eastern European countries; and destination states such as Germany and Sweden have all been affected. The scale of this crisis has brought about a raft of problems for the continent, leading to an increasing number of European countries sealing off their borders to stem the migrant flow. Now, only Germany holds the distinction of being the only EU state practicing an open border policy for migrants, upholding this stance despite relentless criticism from other EU nations, German politicians, and the German people. This paper shall examine the empirical puzzle: Why has Germany continued to open its borders, despite the growing trend of insularity in Europe?
States of Suspicion: How Institutionalised Disbelief Shapes Migration Control Regimes
2021
By Lisa Maria Borrelli, Annika Lindberg, and Anna Wyss This special section emerged out of discussions between a group of scholars researching border and migration control regimes in Europe. In our research, we had all identified suspicion as characteristic of migration governance. We saw it in the anxietyridden public discourses surrounding ‘unwanted’ immigration, in increasingly repressive legal frameworks, in bureaucratic classification schemes and technologies designed to identify suspected, illegalised travellers or deserving from undeserving asylum applicants, and finally, in the distrustful gaze of streetlevel bureaucrats enforcing migration law. We had also experienced suspicion directed against us as researchers by the state agencies we were studying. Based on these observations, this introduction develops a conceptual framework of states of suspicion, which captures how suspicion permeates migration control on the individual as well as structural level: as an affective element, as codified in law and institutionalised practice, and as manifested in material border and migration control technologies. The contributions to the special section shed light on these various elements, and taken together, enabling us to capture the constitutive nature of suspicion in contemporary migration control regimes. The special section discusses the implications of suspicion, in particular for those people who are rendered suspicious by default. Studying suspicious states, we argue, enables us to trace how migration control produces, sustains and normalises racialised global inequaliti
From narratives to perceptions in the securitization of the migratory crisis in Europe
The EU is currently living the greatest migratory crisis since the end of World War II. A crisis that is shaking the founding values of the EU, such as the respect for human rights and the freedom of movement, while questioning the EU’s capacity to deal with a humanitarian crisis. There has been a rich debate on the securitisation of migrations in the EU over the last decades. This link between migrations and security is based on a constructivist perspective, where migrations are perceived as a threat to internal, societal and even human security. This chapter argues that a securitisation of migrations in the EU is taking place during the current refugee crisis (from 2013 to date), through the implementation of emergency actions by the EU to face this situation and the adoption of securitarian narratives by European political leaders to support these actions. An analysis of the security practices and narratives of the political leaders shows us that the EU has entered a crisis mode and the discourses of some European politicians, increasingly resorting to negative and xenophobic statements, have promoted racist and xenophobic feelings among host communities. Furthermore, by exploring the perceptions of European citizens, through the analysis of surveys on racism, xenophobia and internal security, and the growing support to nationalist/populist parties in Europe, we have determined that there has been an acceptance of this securitisation by the audience (European citizens).
Deployed fears and suspended solidarity along the migratory route in Europe
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 24 : 4 pp. 441-456. , 15 p. , 2020
The aim of the paper is to understand the reasons for the spread of fear, the suspension of solidarity, and the securitizing national and local context along the European migratory route. A settlement that at the Hungarian side of the Serbian-Hungarian border, heavily affected by international migration in 2015, is the focus of inquiry. The mayor of the village is a major figure in the Hungarian far-right who mobilized not only the political scene but also various segments of the media to create and legitimize a discourse involving threatened villagers (and more generally, threatened Hungarians and Europeans) and a migrant menace (perceived as non-European, non-white, and non-human). Based on an ethnographic inquiry, the paper reveals the variety of discourses and attitudes which emerged as immediate reactions to people on the move appearing in large numbers in the village. These initial reactions included empathy and a willingness to help which rapidly disappeared. The paper analyses how welcoming acts and voices were silenced and eliminated, and a hegemony of fear was constructed. It contributes to the special issue by showing how fragile solidarity with refugees can be, and how its elimination can occur if social precarity and far-right politics are combined.
This article tries to reveal the recent debates revolving around the issue of migration in Europe, and claims that migration has recently become securitized and stigmatized in a way that prompts the autochthonous societies to generate a set of migrant-phobic attitudes. This work further argues that this kind of fear does not really have material sources; it is on the contrary an artificial fear fabricated by the conservative political elite who are likely to use the politics of fear as a form of governmentality to sustain their power. Hence, this work will specifically concentrate on the processes of othering migrant origin individuals as anti-citizens.
Festung Europa: Securitization of Migration and Radicalization of European Societies
Festung Europa: Securitization of Migration and Radicalization of European Societies , 2016
Europe is undoubtedly changing into Festung Europa – Fortress Europe. While its external boundaries are daily traversed by hundreds of migrants and refugees, its heretofore invisible internal borders have begun to sprout barbed wires, barriers and armed patrols. This paper analyzes the problem of migration and the ongoing European migration crisis through the lens of societal insecurity, arguing that the trend toward radicalization of European societies and electoral politics is one the most volatile ramifications of securitizing migration. The European migration crisis has led to a societal security dilemma resulting in a growing chasm between the political elites in member states of the European Union and their societies. The radicalization of those societies is visible in the rising popularity of anti-establishment (populist) parties, the push for direct democracy (demonstrations, manifestations, referenda), and the attractiveness of vigilante groups. Where the state responds to this trend, culture becomes a security policy and “immiskepticism” is the default approach. If it does not respond, society either looks for new political representatives or takes matters into its own hands, sometimes resorting to violence. While the former trend is more visible in the Eastern part of the European Union, the latter is more typical of its Western part.
The Plasticity of Our Fears: Affective Politics in the European Migration Crisis
Society, 2021
In the field of migration politics, a dominant rhetoric argues that liberal immigration and asylum policies must be avoided because they will inevitably lead to anti-immigration backlashes that exacerbate the very conditions they were supposed to remedy. Drawing on the work of German sociologist Heinrich Popitz and empirical data on the aftereffects of the European migration crisis, the article criticizes this “rhetoric of reaction” (Albert Hirschman) for ignoring the many variables shaping the consequences of more open borders. Backlashes to immigration are real and pose a constraint for liberal immigration policies, but these backlashes are not necessarily politically successful. Societies react neither uniformly nor automatically to rising immigration. A critical variable is the fear engendered by the (real, expected or imagined) arrival of large numbers of migrants, and this fear can be either ramped up to paranoid levels or calmed by a politics of hope aimed at restoring what Popitz called the “human openness to the world.”