Beyond the European Union's Neighbourhood: Liberation Geographies in the Mediterranean (original) (raw)
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European Urban and Regional Studies, 2018
This special issue of European Urban and Regional Studies maps out a move from a strictly geopolitical to more socio-political and socio-cultural interpretations of the European Union’s (EU’s) ‘Mediterranean neighbourhood’. In doing this, the authors propose a dialogic understanding of neighbourhood as a set of ideas and imaginaries that reflect not only top-down geopolitical imaginaries but also everyday images, representations and imaginations. The introduction briefly summarizes conceptualizations of ‘neighbourhood’ provided by the individual contributions that connect the realm of high politics with that of communities and individuals who are affected by and negotiate the EU’s Mediterranean borders. Specifically, three cases of socio-spatial imaginaries that exemplify patterns of differential inclusion of the ‘non-EU’ will be explored. The cases involve Italy–Tunisia cross-border relations, the EU’s post-‘Arab Spring’ engagement with civil society actors and the case of Northern...
(2017) Securing the Mediterranean, inventing the ‘Middle East’
Routledge Handbook of Mediterranean Politics, 2017
This chapter traces the entry, in the 1990s, into the world stage of the ‘Euro-Mediterranean’ as a subject of security in counter-distinction to the ‘Middle East’. Where the latter prioritised insecurities as experienced by the United States and its local allies, the former was designed to address insecurities identified by the European Union. What is more, the former constituted a short-lived attempt to re-cast the ‘Euro-Mediterranean’ as a region and a security community. The significance of tracing the emergence and evolution of the spatial constructs such as the ‘Euro-Mediterranean’ and the ‘Middle East’ is not about the so-called ‘artificiality’ of ‘regions’. For, all regions are ‘artificial’. Rather, the chapter seeks to highlight insecurities that shape the construction of regions, and practices that have been shaped in line with these spatial constructs. Studying the ‘Mediterranean’, ‘Arab World’ or the ‘Middle East’ is no innocent task. For, as ‘our’ spatial constructs are shaped as part of the attempt to respond to ‘our’ insecurities ‘in here’ while insecuring ‘others’ ‘out there’. Accordingly, defining regions and studying regional security in X or Y ‘region’ is a political act worthy of critical scrutiny.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016
My aim in this afterword is to provide a semiotic analysis that captures the contemporary discourse on the Mediterranean and identify potential links to the historical reasons, power relations, colonial archives and memories that constitute what Sandro Mezzadra calls the "postcolonial condition." Semiotics, history, cultural studies, feminist and postcolonial perspectives and critical race studies help me to redefine the Mediterranean in a symbolic frame reproducing those meanings that convey memories and violence, protest, resistance and conflict. Today the sea is no longer a space regulated solely by international law and State jurisdiction, but a space of governmentality. By space of governmentality I mean a space defined by the collaboration of a number of institutional and non-institutional actors (governance) in the management and biopolitical control of global and transnational trajectories of people, products, and capital mobility. I interpret it here as invested in a specific exercise of power that reaffirms the symbolic and discretionary nature of its modern borders and of the border in general. Borders are deconstructed and reorganised across space according to the unceasing re-articulation of international power relations, national sovereignties, market technologies and systems of measurement and control on a global scale. A conception of the sea in terms of a border, or rather as a set of (often de-territorialised) borders that cut across lands, waters, and continents.
2021
Political events following the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have contributed to a new conceptualisation (and management) of border issues. The tumultuous period had a dramatic effects on Europe and the southern Mediterranean countries. On the one hand, Europe is facing a continuous redefinition of its borders, especially in the southern neighbourhood but also in the eastern part of the continent. On the other hand, the MENA countries are part of a game in which the political elites deploy sectarian identity, narratives and symbols to neutralise dissent and (re-)assert control, even on borders, spaces and places. Notwithstanding the counterrevolutionary trend, the presence of ongoing civil conflicts, along with the escalation of regional competition over the past decade, has notably changed the political and social landscape in many countries. In this context, the Euro-Mediterranean space seems more and more unstable, and its margins porous. It has become...
19.–29. September 2016, Rethymno (Crete). Application deadline: 9 April 2016 The Forum Transregionale Studien, the Max Weber Stiftung, the Centre Marc Bloch and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (Greece) invite postdoctoral researchers to participate in our transregional academy in Rethymno (Crete) on the theme “De-Framing the Mediterranean from the 21st Century: Places, Routes, Actors”. Recent developments ― revolutions and crises, new social movements, migrants and refugees, interventions and border regimes, civil wars and authoritarian restorations― have transformed the Mediterranean into a zone of fragmentation and disaster. Perceptions of the Mediterranean have long been shaped by European perspectives. The Mediterranean has been seen as an idyllic space of civilization, of exchange and mobility, a view related to re-translations of the Roman mare nostrum; to those nostalgic visions of nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial cosmopolitanism; and to modern practices of tourism and food consumption. Other discourses, also mainly shaped in Europe, consider the Mediterranean to be a zone of long-lasting conflicts extending from the Phoenicians to Arab expansion in the seventh century and from the Crusades to contemporary demographic and social disparities. In view of newly emergent political and strategic challenges, current European approaches to the Mediterranean have increasingly focused on issues of (dis)order and security. However, Europe itself has become part of a more global Mediterranean space that extends far beyond its shores.
The Mediterranean: A Space of Division, Disparity and Separation
2018
The Mediterranean is perceived by Southern stakeholders as a space of division, disparity and separation, performed into being through European depoliticizing, securitizing and technocratic practices in the spheres of politics, economics/development and migration. This imaginary holds up a mirror to the EU’s boundary-drawing exercise and production of the “ideal European self against its imperfect Southern Mediterranean others” (Cebeci and Schumacher 2017: 22). In contrast to the EU’s self-production, it is no longer externally perceived as a model; other models are emerging (Tunisia, Turkey, Russia) but do not yet represent an alternative. EU policies are seen as ineffective, mainly due to problems in EU visibility, coherence and a substantial gap between expectations in the South and actual EU output.
Book chapters in The Mediterranean Reset, Geopolitics in a New Age.pdf
2017
The geopolitics of the Mediterranean region has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century, partly as a result of local state dynamics and partly as a product of transformational changes at the international and broader regional levels. As opposed to the early 1990s, the EU today is no longer the dominant or key actor in the Mediterranean and it now has to balance its policies and interests in the Mediterranean against the perceptible influence of a range of major and regional powers, most importantly the United States, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. In order to remain an influential actor, the EU needs to understand how these eight powers perceive the Mediterranean, interact with and within it, and conduct themselves in pursuit of their interests. This volume is the first of its kind which aims at shedding light on these issues – on how these powers have been constructing, or at least attempted to construct, different geopolitical imaginations of what the EU has labelled the Mediterranean region, and how their identity formations has impacted their role. Applying a common framework of analysis the contributors to this volume explore these and related issues comprehensively and systematically, shedding new light on these actors’ foreign policy and geopolitical considerations, in the process discerning with which actors in the Mediterranean they most closely interact, and the methods and policy areas they have tended to focus on. In so doing, the volume will show the areas of divergence, competition and conflict, between these actors, as well as the basis on which the EU can cooperate with one or more of these influential states for mutual benefit.
Mobilities post-2011 in the Eastern Mediterranean: Transformations over Time or sudden Change?
“Guests and Aliens”: Re-Configuring New Mobilities in the Eastern Mediterranean After 2011 - with a special focus on Syrian refugees
This work recalls the book Guests and Aliens by Saskia Sassen (2000). Each of the essays in Sassen's collection on globalization introduces a new type of complexity and ambiguity to the study of the global, confronting questions of space and the fact that both the local and the global are increasingly multi-scalar. Her work also expands the analytic terrain of the global, demanding new methodologies and interpretive frameworks for the study of globalization. With such a theoretical framework, we can, as Sassen also does, locate an increasingly urban articulation of global logics and struggles, and an escalating use of urban spacelike Istanbul-to make political claims, not only by citizens but also by foreigners. Therefore, by emphasising the interplay between global and local phenomena, we can examine new forms and conditions such as global cities, transnational communities, transnational families, new mobilities and diaspora, and transnational networks of humanitarian responses. In such a context, the case of Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian refugees seems to have a distinctive importance. It underlines the diasporic space composed by multiple trajectories which have a particular impact in the Eastern Mediterranean (especially on Syria's neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey) as well as in a wider cartography including the borders of "Fortress Europe" (Greece, Italy, the Moroccan-Spanish borders) as well as Scandinavian countries, Germany, and France where Syrian refugees are also present.