"New Keywords: Migration and Borders" is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i)

Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, "Fortress Europe" continues to fail as an effective means of controlling irregular migration. As a consequence, European states are restructuring their border regimes by externalizing migration management to non-EU countries beyond the border and creating new programs and policies to do so. Autonomy of Migration (AoM) offers a distinct way for thinking about border control mechanisms and goals of managing mobility. AoM does not read this offshoring of borders through the lens of centralized and coordinated state powers, but develops an autonomous gaze that supplements these institutional readings of apparatuses of capture with a view that takes as its starting point the ways in which border architectures, institutions, and policies interact with and react to the turbulence of migrant mobilities. By engaging current EU externalization policies, this paper illustrates the shifting relationship between border control and mobility. Resumen: A pesar de las actualizaciones tecnológicas recientes de la frontera en el perímetro de la Unión Europea, la llamada "Europa Fortaleza", tanto como metáfora como realidad, continua sin poder controlar la migración irregular. En respuesta, los estados miembros de la Unión están restructurando sus sistemas fronterizos externalizando la gestión migratoria a países no miembros de la UE, delegando funciones de control migratorio a países fuera de la frontera europea. El enfoque de la Autonomia de la Migracion (AoM) ofrece un anáisis poco común para pensar los mecanismos de control fronterizo y sus objetivos de gestionar la movilidad humana. AoM no interpreta dicho desplazamiento de fronteras únicamente desde la óptica del poder estatal centralizado. AoM ofrece una mirada autonoma de la movilidad, complementando esas lecturas institucionales que enfatizan los aparatos de captura. Así, AoM enfatiza la turbulencia de las migraciones como parte constituyente, y no solo receptiva, de las arquitecturas, instituciones y políticas fronterizas. Este artículo sobre la externalización de las politicas fronterizas de la Union Europea ilustra la relación productiva entre control migratorio fronterizo y movilidad migratoria.

In recent years border externalization has emerged as a central policy framework for European Union (EU) border and migration management. New multi-lateral and bi-lateral agreements on border management have been forged between the EU, its member states, and its North African neighbours and neighbours-of-neighbours. In the process, what is meant by the ‘border’ is being transformed with implications for where the border is located, who has jurisdiction over particular spaces, and how border and migration management is undertaken. This paper analyses the spatial logics of EU border externalization practices as they are being applied to and in North and West Africa. It focuses on Operation Seahorse and the transnationally coordinated border control projects and infrastructures implemented by the Guardia Civil of Spain. Seahorse serves as an implementation case of the Migration Routes Initiative, an approach toward migration management emphasizing interregional cooperation between designated origin-transit-destination countries. The initiative is the organizing strategy of the Global Approach to Migration, the EU’s overarching framework toward migration policy. The paper shows how Seahorse is changing migration policy and re-articulating Europe’s relations with African countries, producing new bordering processes, creating new geographies of integration and border management, and redefining the practices of territory, sovereignty, and extra-territoriality.

This paper highlights the ways in which the emerging models of migration management are producing new geographies of the European Union’s borders that complicate notions of a tightly bounded and easily delineated ‘Schengen space’ or ‘Fortress Europe’. Under policy frameworks such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and the EU’s Global Approach to Migration, a process of economic and political regional integration is under way that is beginning to transform the ways in which non-accession neighbours and neighbours of neighbours in North Africa and beyond are articulated with the EU. Central to these changes are programmes, institutions and practices of both regional economic development and border routes management. This changing geopolitical and geo-economic approach to regional integration and the nature of European borderlands has at its heart a series of new spatial imaginaries, institutional actors and cartographic experiments that point to a project in process in which the relationships between territory, state and population are being reconfigured to produce new notions of sovereignty across more complex and multiple borders and, in some cases, beyond borders.

No abstract

Cartographies for “migration management” are part and parcel of controversial border practices far from conventional borderlines. Focusing on the i‐Map, this study renders how the European Union's current practices of remote border control are visualised among migration policy circles and expert security actors through a “mapping migration matrix”. The lines portraying migration flows in recurrent maps generate a shared expert language and a common geographical imaginary reinforcing practices of contention and classification of those assumed to move toward the European Union irregularly. It is argued that illegality is constructed in ways that target border crossing long before any border is crossed, making someone illegal at the very moment and place where s/he might decide to migrate. This paper analyses the cartopolitics and limits of cartographic expertise in the production of a “routes thinking” able to legitimise extra‐territorial interceptions and practices of remote border control.

No abstract

No abstract