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The intricate relationship between border control and migrations is the core puzzle of this paper, which takes voluntary returns from Morocco as a case study and autonomy of migration (AoM) as a theoretical framework. More precisely, the paper examines voluntary returns from the perspective of migrants themselves to grasp border control through the lens of its disputed, distorted and sometimes subverted implementation. The paper draws on data collected during fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Morocco, including ethnographic observations and interviews with staff from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), migrants and local intermediaries. It focuses on the case of sub-Saharan migrants leaving Morocco through "Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration" programmes led by IOM and confronts empirical data with the AoM theoretical framework. The paper demonstrates that migrants' entangled appropriations of return are defined in close relationship with a wide range of actors intervening during the process of return. Ultimately, migrants reformulate the meaning of their involvement in voluntary return into strategic, moral, relative, and symbolic terms. However, these entangled appropriations of a deportation device simultaneously reinforce social norms and institutional regulations underlying migration dynamics and border control. Eventually, the paper draws conclusions on the political effects of migrants' entangled appropriation of a deportation device on the production of intertwined im/mobility regimes between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Moria hotspot in Greece as a logistical site which fulfills two different functions within the European migration and border regime. It locates, contains, and sorts individuals locally at the external borders of the EU and creates, inserts, and processes data for controlling people on the move. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece, including interviews with local administrators from the Registration and Identification Service, Médecins du Monde, Frontex and Hellenic Police and a collection of internal and publicly available planning, policy, and management documents and handbooks, the paper scrutinizes how both the movement of migrants and data is organized at the site. By developing an analytic lens of logistics, it outlines a specific mode of infrastructuring which aligns staff from different organizations with databases, devices, and migrants all in one place and organizes mundane practices such as filling out forms, taking fingerprints, signing, and entering datasets along a chain. That way the hotspot is able to locate, sort, and detain those who arrive at the hardened EU border and to create a data infrastructure for controlling, monitoring, and governing further movement by processing data through the bureaucratic channels of the EU's transnational control assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ways of knowing "the Roma" as a category of people. It attends to mobility and its obstructions, and the ways that coincide with bureaucratic, institutional, and everyday modes of sorting and racializing groups of people. Our case study is situated in Romania. Whereas "the Roma" do not exist as a category in the Romanian national registry of citizens, mainstream public discourses regarding "Roma migration" have significantly proliferated over the past decades. Yet, how do authorities come to know "the Roma" and how do they render groups of citizens into racialized populations? We examine two bureaucratic practices in Romania, the census and the registry of citizens, and show how the latter is enacted through various "technologies of vision." We focus on the category of "the Roma" as a material semiotic configuration enacted by various "data" regarding issues such as territorial segregation, phenotypic appearance, smell, and dialect. Situated at the intersection of Border and Surveillance Studies, Romani Studies, and Science and Technologies Studies, this paper contributes to debates about how "the Roma" are rendered visible in practices of identification and migration management in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines biopolitical control practices at the Greece-Turkey borders and addresses current debates in the study of borders and biopolitics. The Greek and Frontex authorities have established diverse surveillance mechanisms to control the borderzone space and to monitor, intercept, apprehend, and push back migrants or to block their passage. The location of contemporary borders has been much debated in the literature. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of borders by demonstrating that while borders are diffusing beyond and inside state territories, their practices and effects are concentrated at the edges of state territories--ie, borderzones. Borderzones are biopolitical spaces in which surveillance is most intense and migrants suffer the direct threat of injury and death. Applying biopolitics in the context of borderzones also prompts us to revisit the concept. While Foucault posits that biopolitics is the product of the historical transition away from sovereign powers controlling territory and imposing practices of death towards governmental powers managing population mainly through pastoral, productive, and deterritorialized techniques, the case of the Greece-Turkey borderzones demonstrates that biopolitics operates through sovereign territorial controls and surveillance, practices of death and exclusion, and suspension of rights. This study also highlights the fact that, despite the biopolitical realities, migrants continue to cross the borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in recent debates on humanitarianism and security in migration by introducing the notion of 'pop-up governance'. It reflects on our two year-long fieldwork on Lesbos, Greece at the peak of Europe's migrant reception crisis (2015–2017). We present recent developments in border and migration management in the EU and we position these within recent migration debates. We then present the two main facets guiding migrant reception and governance in Lesbos, namely humanitarianism and security. Through our interviews with humanitarian and security actors we show how top-level government decisions followed and resembled the flexibility and adaptability of humanitarian and security operations. We define this turn as 'pop-up governance', which comprises a practice-based, abruptly introduced and retractable set of governance mechanisms responding to the situation at hand. We argue that the seemingly disorganised management of migration actually bore hallmarks of a new, flexible and adaptable mode of governance. Finally, we show how 'pop-up governance' can help move beyond present understanding of governance based either on the rule or its exception. This has important implications for our comprehension of migration, humanitarianism, security and the governance of vulnerable populations and contemporary socio-political crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration is not readily seen. A vast infrastructure supports its visualization, making migration visible and actionable. Recent scholarship on the visuality of migration has clearly shown how visualizing migration is an integral part of governing it. Concepts and research approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS) are particularly appropriate when studying these connections between knowing and doing. In this paper, the performativity of visual methods and their data practices are analysed with respect to the monitoring infrastructure of European border management. Three such methods – patrolling, recording and publicizing – are reconstructed through analysis of their histories and their present. Patrolling involves the tactical domination of terrains. Recording involves the production of documentary objectivity. Publicizing involves the pictorial capture of fleeting realities. These methods are irreducibly political. Their political significance is explored through the concept of demonstrative effects that helps to show how methods of visualising migration at once involve specific demonstrations of the European association that is operative in them. These demonstrations make visible what Europe can and cannot do. The so-called 'migration crisis' of Europe turns out to be more than political discourse but entangled with the very methods that render migration apparent and governable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes the interrelation between technology and processes of bordering. In particular, it addresses the ways through which biometrics, dataveillance, predictive analytics, and robotics enlist the human body, networks, and human-machine assemblages in practices of inclusion and exclusion at the contemporary dislocated and 'smart' border. Through a description of the sociotechnical apparatuses underlying biométrie, algorithmic, and automated border work, the paper develops the term iBorder, and connects its specific affordances to an emergent late-modern regime of security. With reference to the notion of cultural technique, the paper argues that contemporary technologically facilitated practices of bordering coconstitute, rather than merely process, contingent subjectivities and frames for practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the politics of mapping along the US-Mexico border to explore how humanitarian activists wield geospatial technologies in challenging border securitization. In addition to 'bounding' societies within delimited territorial zones, mapping technologies have recently been elevated to encompass observing, locating, and tracking mobile bodies--outcomes that, in the context of immigration control, have heightened the risk of clandestine border crossings and produced a sharp rise in migrant fatalities. As geospatial tools have been integrated into official gatekeeping strategies, activists have deployed them to protect migrants, promote mobility rights, and disrupt borders and the spatial, legal, and technical orders underpinning their materialization and enforcement. This case study considers the political implications of these interventions, and highlights how technologies traditionally aligned with state security and surveillance have been reappropriated in the service of transnational solidarity, recognition, and hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A market for mental health apps, designed to help millions of refugees manage symptoms of Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder and other mental health issues, has proliferated since the outbreak of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. These bite-size, on-the-go, mindfulness-based apps have emerged at the intersection of new investment models, state-of-the-art AI and surveillance and border control regimes. Conceived of as a more cost-effective approach to refugee mental health care, mental health apps are part of a larger endeavour to create the 'smart' refugee. Self-monitoring, agile, entrepreneurial and resilient in the face of adversity, the smart refugee is expected to emerge as a node in a network of information flow, constantly connected to digital technology, at once receiving and providing real-time data. Biometric and data markets, some of the fastest growing in the world, have already been eagerly collecting refugee fingerprints, iris scans, facial images and other genomic information. To add to this arsenal of data, the new apps are harvesting, storing and selling what I call the mental prints of refugee trauma, turning the human experience of loss, grief and suffering into quantifiable and marketable commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the contested geographical imaginaries of the so-called "Balkan Route" as part of the wider Mediterranean migration complex. More specifically, we interrogate how such varied imaginaries of the Route contribute to shaping conflicting geographies of responsibility for migration in the region among a shifting set of international and state actors. We highlight how the attribution of responsibility for the governance of migration is shaped by numerous geographical and historical entanglements, including on-going processes of post-conflict state-making and the geopolitics of European Union accession, with migrants becoming pawns in the negotiation of preferential relations between the countries of the region and the European Union. Focusing in particular on the framing of migration policy responses along the Croatia–Bosnia and Italy–Slovenia sections of the Route, we examine the perspectives of both policy-makers and solidarity networks active in the area, noting how their divergent narratives contribute to the proliferation of conflicting formal and informal practices of border control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the US border control strategy of 'prevention through deterrence' as an instance of biopolitics that has resulted in an alarming increase in migrant deaths over the past sixteen years. I argue that this policy renders unauthorized migrants as 'bare life' individuals whose deaths are deemed of little consequence. Geographic space has been an essential aspect of this policy, both for its presumed (though not realized) deterrent power and in the fact that it provides a moral alibi that enables policy makers to deny responsibility for the deaths. This study contributes to recent conversations on biopower and bare life by (1) highlighting the fact that biopower as it pertains to the constitution of 'the population' is far from being solely a local or national phenomenon, but rather is inherently connected to drawing distinctions between the national and the international and by (2) arguing for the significance of race in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon and contributing to a feminist geography of borders, the chosen methodological approach examines women's bodily experiences at a Southern EUropean border, the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article scrutinises the care interactions unfolding in a Centre for Immigrants between medical humanitarians and women residing there in their position as both migrants and patients. The analysis foregrounds the gendered forms of domination that the care function of the humanitarian border entails. I argue that medical humanitarians are vested with the power to decide over women's mobility in the name of care on the basis of an entanglement of administrative and medical procedures in this border context. While women are subject to greater humanitarian intervention due to the association of their embodied states with vulnerability, the biopolitical migration management of the border grants medical humanitarians a decision-making authority. The article uncovers how medical humanitarianism, enmeshed in the border regime, yields gendered constraints from practices of immobilisation to imposed practices of mothering. It traces the rationale for these practices to racialised and gendered processes of othering that usher in perceptions of undeservingness and sustain a humanitarian claim for biopolitical responsibility over these women's mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on airports, addressing a current gap between literature that focuses on the cosmopolitical experience of the airport and that which focuses on the potentially dehumanising impacts of a technologized, securitised border by investigating the ethos of the space. We do not present an account of how the airport ought to work; rather, we consider what ethical relations and subjectivities are constructed, encouraged and made (im)possible in the airport space. We argue that the airport border assembles a variety of commercial, security and spatial technologies in areas of both ‘flow’ and ‘dwell’ which generate and privilege a particular type of ethical subject – the temporarily suspended, atomised individual. We begin with an understanding of space as produced through plurality and movement, and analyse how atomisation is produced and sustained before reflecting on the potentially dangerous implications of such processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do border security practitioners engage with data and technology, and what difficulties or limitations arise from these engagements? Responding to calls for critically examining how technological ‘solutions’ are enacted, we analyse the notion of e-Borders in the UK context as an assemblage comprising abstract conditions, concrete objects, and agents whose roles often manifest themselves through perceptions and practices. We draw upon interviews with former and currently serving senior staff from the UK Home Office, UK Border Force, intelligence services, and private sector suppliers. Practitioners’ reflections reveal how political, social, and human factors—including intuition and management cultures—both construct the e-Border assemblage and introduce discontinuities and frictions within it. Using a more tightly specified theory of assemblage, we highlight how human agents contribute to datafied phenomena like border control. In total, our study emphasises how assemblages are dynamic, never entirely coherent, and always being re-made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]