Search

How does territorial change occur in conflict settings without a radical transformation of state interests and international norms? Territorial change is understood here as the unfolding of nonconflictual territorial visions, actions, and interactions in the absence of sovereignty transfer and/or transformation of the existing status of a disputed territory. This article addresses the question of territorial change in conflict settings by examining Turkey's coastal radar technology as an evolving border security infrastructure in the Aegean Sea. Entailing remotely controlled unmanned stations, mobile vehicles, and drones, Turkey's radar technology generates territorial change. Rather than merely enabling or constraining territorial engagement, technology actively produces territory by transforming it into a nonconflictual state. The altering of territory is achieved by the realignment of security conditioned by and functionally dependent on technology. Radar technology mediates Aegean security in ways that are different from its conventional external-oriented framework targeting another sovereign state. Yet, far from moving away from militarization, radar technology produces irregular migration as a new referent of militarized border security, while simultaneously bringing civilian actors to the fore. Territorial change materializes as technology alters the directionality of territorial vision, transforms “seeing” into “visualization,” and makes possible new types of sovereign violence.

This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and non-discursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots alongside the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope.

This paper examines the EU Police Mission in the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS) with a focus on its effects on everyday police work on the ground. The main argument is that the mission illustrates the ways in which its training and advisory activities work to foster logics and practices that feed into and reproduce the borders that have over the years been imposed, primarily through Israeli security practices. Operating under conditions of contested statehood, EUPOL COPPS promotes Palestinian policing activities based on particular spatial logics and actions as to the governance of the Palestinian population. The article presents new empirical material collected through interviews and document analysis. As such, it aims to build bridges between the literature on critical border studies, EU external relations, the EU’s role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as well as the literature on the EU police missions in conflict and post-conflict missions by emphasising their spatial dimension.

This article examines youth entrepreneurship in Jordan in the context of the country's neoliberal reforms. Drawing on Foucauldian scholarship on neoliberal governmentality and the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism, we argue that youth empowerment is part of the Jordanian regime's strategy of subject formation along neoliberal lines through the dissemination of market ideas of competitiveness, enterprise society and self-responsibility. The article presents new empirical material that includes interviews conducted in Jordan and Egypt and highlights how the King's two initiatives display a win-win relationship for the regime and the youth alike without necessarily challenging the status.

Combining insights from critical studies on humanitarianism and scholarly work emphasising everyday practices, this study examines Turkish policing of human mobility at European Union borders in two border cities: Edirne and İzmir. Through a focus on the central understandings, justifications and operational responses by Turkish border officials, the article highlights the intertwinement of care and control as inherent to humanitarianism in the daily governance of mobile populations at Turkey’s western borders. In so doing, the findings draw attention to discursive articulations and practices, while pointing to their moral, emotional and cultural elements. The article advances the literature by underlining the centrality of geography in impacting on the logics and practices of governing mobility within the territory of the nation state. The findings also underscore variations in border practices and the embodiment of humanitarianism between the two border cities under investigation as well as across the country. In addition, the article adds to debates on the emerging spaces of humanitarianism by bringing into focus the operation of humanitarian border policing in Turkey before departure and/or after the unsuccessful attempt of border crossing.

This article offers a Foucauldian approach to examine the European Union Police Mission in the Palestinian Authority. Using Foucault’s ideas on ‘policing’, ‘discipline’ and ‘normalization’ and applying an interpretive approach, the article argues that the EU police mission rests on ideas, visions and techniques that problematize local capacities and skills in the policing of the population. It highlights the epistemic context of knowledge creation within which the local becomes an object of intervention through two techniques: benchmarking and capacity-building. The article also discusses what is left invisible and unaddressed in EUPOL COPPS activities.

In the wake of the disclosures by Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance practices, a series of public hearings was held before the Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee of the European Parliament in 2013–2014. These hearings offer a wealth of information concerning the details of Snowden’s claims, their implications for privacy rights, and the way in which the transatlantic political dialogue on these issues is unfolding. However, they have yet to receive academic attention. This article suggests that the LIBE Hearings were an important platform that rendered the contested Snowden files into public evidence of contemporary surveillance practices. Drawing on the concept of “material publics” proposed by Noortje Marres and others, we examine how the material setting of LIBE was crucial to the ways in which the Snowden files were made public in Europe. Valid evidence was produced, legal issues were identified, technological solutions were fostered, and responsibilities were enacted and denied.

This contribution explores the intersection of humanitarianism and neoliberalism as ‘recipes’ to address the ‘migration’ or ‘refugees crisis’ in the Mediterranean. It takes the recent proposal of Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris to buy a ‘refugee island’ as a starting point for a discussion of the increasing propensity to view refugee communities through their economic potential in a neoliberal marketplace. Such an understanding in turn feeds into the continued construction of the Mediterranean as a particular neoliberal market space.

This forum is around Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones, the winning volume of the first edition of the biennial book award of the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographic Society with IBG (PolGRG) in conjunction with Political Geography Journal. The book award was established in 2016 to give recognition to new academic volumes that engage with the thematic remit of PolGRG and contribute to develop the diverse field of political geography more widely. In line with the diversity of PolGRG interests and membership, the PolGRG Book Award is aimed at published volumes advancing the debate around themes spanning territoriality and sovereignty; states, cities, and citizenship; geopolitics, political economy and political ecology; migration, globalization and (post)colonialism; social movements and governance; peace, conflict and security. All this appreciating the implications of these phenomena with gender, race, class, sexuality and religion. Importantly, the idea of a book award was conceived to reward the slow and cumulative work that goes into publishing scholarly volumes.

Nick Vaughan-Williams’ book offers an intellectually stimulating and conceptually challenging and rich discussion of what he terms “EUrope’s border crisis” (p. 3). In view of tragic deaths and huma...

As a response to the Arab uprisings that started in 2010, the European Union has emphasised, more determinated than ever, the urgency of inclusive and sustainable socio-economic development in the Arab region. The central objective of this article is to understand the nature and operation of European Union support for development following Arab mass movements. More specifically, it examines the European Union’s Twinning instrument in Egypt and Tunisia through a neoliberal governmentality framework, with a major focus on visualisations, technologies and subject formation. This approach enables us to observe the application of an agenda through which Twinning intervenes into non-economic domains of governance in the target countries and aims at shaping these spheres by economic rationalities and techniques. By constructing change around local governance capabilities, the Twinning programme acts upon individual skills, institutional arrangements and relationships, deploys benchmarking techniques, and empowers subjects and government behaviour in order to bring conduct to certain economic logics and exercises. The outcome is the rendering of Tunisian and Egyptian socio-economic development open to enterprise-based, calculative and professionalised operations that make local conditions serviceable to neoliberal governing patterns, linkages and practices of business, capital production and investment.

This study applies a governmentality approach to analyse the European Union’s civil society promotion in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process through the EU’s Partnership for Peace instrument. Contrary to a widespread conviction in earlier academic research, it argues that the EU engagement with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has political substance, and the Partnership for Peace provides a good illustration of this. The governmentality perspective highlights the power of the technical in guiding civil society towards particular visions, activities and goals. It brings to light a set of supposedly neutral definitions and technical instruments related to project applications and project selection that sort out, promote and link together civil society action in a way that manages and reinforces the existing dynamics of the peace process. The technical brings with it a particular idea of civil society, which is encouraged to assume functions that focus on the management of the outcomes of the conflict rather than striving for a transformative vision of peace based on political deliberation and fundamental change. The use of the governmentality approach not only aims to provide a better understanding of the nature of the Partnership for Peace programme, but also contributes to debates over the theoretical merits of governmentality by applying the approach to peace and conflict research.

Bu makalenin ana amacı, AB’nin terörle mücadele söylemleri üzerine yapılan çalışmalara, bu söylemin “dış boyutu” konusunu inceleyerek katkıda bulunmaktır. Bu amaçla makale, “söylemsel tarihsel” yaklaşım kavramlarından faydalanmakta ve AB’nin terörle mücadele söyleminin uluslararası yönünün derinlemesine bir dilsel incelemesini sunmaktadır. Makale, bu söylemin iki ana temasını iyi yönetişim ve Arap “Baharı” olarak tanımlamakta ve bu iki konunun terörle mücadeleye ilişkin “doğallaştırılmasında” ve “normalleştirmesinde” kullanılan dilsel araçları göstermektedir. Analiz AB’nin söylemsel inşasının siyasi ve normatif etkilerini de tartışmaktadır., The central objective of this article is to contribute to studies on EU counter-terrorism discourse by bringing the “external dimension” in. To that end, it borrows concepts of the Discourse-Historical Approach and provides an in-depth linguistic examination of the international aspect of the EU’s counter-terrorism discourse. The article identifies good governance and the Arab “Spring” as two central themes of this discourse and illustrates the linguistic means in which the two topics are made “natural” and “normal” by reference to counter-terrorism. The analysis also discusses the political and normative effects of EU discursive construction of counter-terrorism.&nbsp