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

The evolution of EUropean border governance through crisis: Frontex and the interplay of protracted and acute crisis narratives

“…Neal (2009: 353) warns against focusing primarily on the “spectacular dialectic of norm/exception” regarding Frontex, arguing instead for examining “an ongoing process of incremental normalization.” Other scholars have focused their analysis not on securitization per se but on Frontex’s relationship to crisis narratives. Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins (2014: 121) contrast what they frame as Frontex’s more managerial logic with the crisis labelling conducted by professionals of politics, arguing that “[t]he managerial outlook of the EU border agency not only co-exists with the spectacular politics unfolding through crisis labelling; it has rather regularly been at odds with it.” On the other hand, Sachseder et al. (2022: 13) show that Frontex’s risk analyses centrally rely on gendered and racialized crisis narratives.…”

“…Meanwhile, the designation of acute crises lends credibility to the constant threat of being or becoming overwhelmed also in ‘normal’ times, thus giving renewed strength to protracted crisis narratives. Importantly, both forms of crisis narratives construct migrants as “invasive, undeserving, and exploitative vis-a-vis Europe as a socio-cultural and political-economic space that represents prosperity, welfare, and security,” and are based on a “postcolonial-racial hierarchisation of non-European geographies” (Sachseder et al., 2022: 13).…”

“…In view of this ever-present possibility of an acute crisis, Leggeri considered Frontex’s increased budget and resources as “necessary steps in order to prepare the agency in its role today and possible reinforcement tomorrow” (EUobserver, 2019). Importantly, the spatialization of crisis played a key role in enabling this transition from acute to protracted crisis: “shifting the geographical focus onto regions or ‘routes’ where migration numbers remain high, despite an overall decline” enabled Frontex to uphold “a notion of perpetual crisis” after the acute crisis ended (Sachseder et al., 2022: 13).…”

“…This spatialization of crisis locates the origin of crisis outside of EUrope. It simultaneously legitimizes surveilling, monitoring, and patrolling of the pre-frontier area, fueling policies, and practices of externalization (Sachseder et al., 2022).…”

“…Invocations of ‘crises’ 1 have come to shape political and public debates on governing European Union (EU) borders over the last two decades. In response, a body of scholarship that critically scrutinizes narratives and imaginaries of ‘migration or refugee crises’ has emerged and developed, not least in response to continuous invocations of such imaginaries and narratives in policy discourses and the media (Sachseder et al., 2022; Squire et al., 2021; Stierl, 2020). This scholarship has shown that political actors might deliberately mobilize crisis narratives to create supposed moments of exception that allow for expansions of power and authority (Cuttitta, 2014; Mountz and Hiemstra, 2014).…”