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Immigration to Europe increasingly emerges as a core security concern. In response to these growing anxieties the external border of Schengen space of free movement of people was established to limit uncontrolled immigration to the European Union. Yet, looking closely at how this border works in Lampedusa and its surrounding seawaters, one realizes the functioning of the European external border works to undermine the legitimacy of institutions on the island, de facto challenging law enforcement both on the island as well as at sea. Based on the data collected during the six-months-long fieldwork that I conducted on the island, this paper disentangles the complex machinery of the border as it structures in Lampedusa, and presents how such complex governing technology works through authorities' strategic use of local land and seawaters and their simultaneous neglect for the concerns of the population inhabiting them - representing a major source of insecurity for islanders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on migration-related border controls has greatly expanded during the past decade. Special attention has been given to processes of contestation and of rights-claims enacted by migrants, drawing greatly on Isin’s work on acts of citizenship and Rancière’s articulation of the ‘uncounted’ and the political. Within this broad debate little attention has been devoted to the acts of common people in contesting current border management and especially in refusing the policing and the bordering of theirownterritory. By focusing on the Lampedusa borderland, this paper will explore and interrogate the verbal protests made by the people of Lampedusa in response to the drowning of some 366 African migrants on 3 October 2013. The protests were mostly against current border patrolling and its politics of (non-)life, which prioritise border protection against (migrants’) life protection. The call to protectingallhuman life, equally worthy of being protected, transformed these protests into political acts. Using and extending the work of Rancière, I explore the extent to which the people of Lampedusa have highlighted a ‘wrong’ and enacted ‘dissensus’ by contesting the (natural) securitised order of EU border management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]