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This article explores vulnerability assessments as practices of filtering, caring and border enforcement. Following the EU-Turkish Agreement which came to force March 2016, migrants crossing from the Turkish coast onto the Greek Aegean islands are subject to a set of administrative procedures which assess the country responsible for processing their asylum claim. As I demonstrate their chances of accessing the asylum process or risk being returned to Turkey are shaped by the outcome of vulnerability assessments. Drawing together feminist approaches on vulnerability and geopolitics with recent work that addresses hotspots and the humanitarian border, the article suggest that vulnerability assessments are is crucial for understanding the ways in which state strategies to discourage mobility are woven into protection practices and the ways in which exclusions are authorised through the strategic deployment of vulnerability. The study is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted on the island of Lesbos during three separate periods between the summer of 2017 and December 2018. By interrogating processes of documentation and the role of state and non-state actors in the operationalising vulnerability, I demonstrate how mobile bodies are governed through vulnerability, medical knowledge and trauma. As a result, vulnerability assessments privilege certain, often gendered mobilities as opposed to others while in parallel contribute to enhancing a mode of care and control at the border that justifies the perpetuation of forms of violence. [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]

This article makes a theoretical argument stemming from our study of the European Commission's hotspot approach to the management of migrant populations. It draws on empirical research findings from field research which took place on the island of Lesbos and in the city of Athens over the course of 20 months and links these to emerging critical studies of the new EU border regime. No clear definition exists of what comprises a hotspot: instead, the European Commission describes this as an integrated 'approach' for the enhancement of the capacity of member states to deal with crises resulting from pressures at the Union's external borders. Effective in its ambiguity, the 'hotspot approach' therefore constitutes, as we argue, an integral part of the Europeanisation and institutionalisation of border management: a powerfully ambiguous dispositif in the EU's emerging border regime. The article unpacks the notion of the hotspot from a historical perspective and explores the ways in which the hotspot contributes toward the culmination of European integration, paving the way for the flexible governance of mobility and asylum. We situate the hotspot within the historical shift of migration and mobility control from the border to the territory as a whole and conclude by arguing that the hotspot plays the role of a territorial incubator for the liminal EU territory: a paradigmatic space for a new form of governance that further disentangles territory from rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]