This book examines the management of migratory flows in the Mediterranean within an international security perspective. The intense migratory flows registered during the year 2015 and the tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea have tested the mechanisms of the Union’s immigration and asylum policies and its ability to respond to humanitarian crises. Moreover, these flows of varying intensities and geographies represent a threat to the internal security of the EU and its member states. By using Spain and Italy as case studies, the author theorizes that the EU, given its inability to adopt and implement a common policy to effectively manage migratory flows on its Southern border, uses a deterrence strategy based on minimum common denominators.

The Mediterranean refugee crisis presents states across Europe with a common security challenge: how to intervene responsibly in mitigation and support. This book seeks to advance the UN concept of ‘human security’ in showing how a human security approach to the crisis can effectively conceptualize and respond to the intricacies of the challenges faced. It argues for a politics of solidarity in proffering integrated solutions that call out the failure of top-down, statist security measures. Leading international authors from a range of disciplines document key dimensions of the crisis, including: the legal mechanisms enabling or blocking asylum; the biopolitical systems for managing displaced peoples; and the multiple, overlapping historical precedents of today’s challenges.

Having often been framed in terms of security concerns, migration issues have simultaneously given rise to issues of insecurity: on the one hand, security of borders, political, societal and economic security/insecurity in the host country; on the other, social, legal and economic concerns about human security, with regard to both EU citizens and migrants entering Europe. In terms of state security, migration is a core target of increasingly globally networked surveillance capabilities, whilst with respect to human security, it exposes the gap between the protections that migrants formally enjoy under international law and the realities they experience as they travel and work across different countries. Drawing on the latest research from across the EU, Security, Insecurity and Migration explores the concerns of states with regard to migration and the need to protect the fundamental rights of migrants. An interdisciplinary examination of the issues of security and insecurity raised by migration for states, their citizens and migrants themselves, this book will be of interest to scholars of politics, sociology and geography researching migration, race and ethnicity, human and state security and EU politics and policy.

Drawing on the concept of the ‘politics of compassion’, this Handbook interrogates the political, geopolitical, social and anthropological processes which produce and govern borders and give rise to contemporary border violence.

Border security has been high on public-policy agendas in Europe and North America since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City and on the headquarters of the American military in Washington DC. Governments are now confronted with managing secure borders, a policy objective that in this era of increased free trade and globalization must compete with intense cross-border flows of people and goods. Border-security policies must enable security personnel to identify, or filter out, dangerous individuals and substances from among the millions of travelers and tons of goods that cross borders daily, particularly in large cross-border urban regions. This book addresses this gap between security needs and an understanding of borders and borderlands. Specifically, the chapters in this volume ask policy-makers to recognize that two fundamental elements define borders and borderlands: first, human activities (the agency and agent power of individual ties and forces spanning a border), and second, the broader social processes that frame individual action, such as market forces, government activities (law, regulations, and policies), and the regional culture and politics of a borderland. Borders emerge as the historically and geographically variable expression of human ties exercised within social structures of varying force and influence, and it is the interplay and interdependence between people's incentives to act and the surrounding structures (i.e. constructed social processes that contain and constrain individual action) that determine the effectiveness of border security policies. This book argues that the nature of borders is to be porous, which is a problem for security policy makers. It shows that when for economic, cultural, or political reasons human activities increase across a border and borderland, governments need to increase cooperation and collaboration with regard to security policies, if only to avoid implementing mismatched security policies.

In recent years the borders of Europe have been perceived as being besieged by a staggering refugee and migration crisis. The contributors to The Borders of "Europe" see this crisis less as an incursion into Europe by external conflicts than as the result of migrants exercising their freedom of movement. Addressing the new technologies and technical forms European states use to curb, control, and constrain what contributors to the volume call the autonomy of migration, this book shows how the continent's amorphous borders present a premier site for the enactment and disputation of the very idea of Europe. They also outline how from Istanbul to London, Sweden to Mali, and Tunisia to Latvia, migrants are finding ways to subvert visa policies and asylum procedures while negotiating increasingly militarized and surveilled borders. Situating the migration crisis within a global frame and attending to migrant and refugee supporters as well as those who stoke nativist fears, this timely volume demonstrates how the enforcement of Europe’s borders is an important element of the worldwide regulation of human mobility. Contributors. Ruben Andersson, Nicholas De Genova, Dace Dzenovska, Evelina Gambino, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Clara Lecadet, Souad Osseiran, Lorenzo Pezzani, Fiorenza Picozza, Stephan Scheel, Maurice Stierl, Laia Soto Bermant, Martina Tazzioli

This book introduces a new approach to understanding security in the Mediterranean and explores current challenges at the European Union (EU) Mediterranean borders. It investigates the intertwined area at the South of the EU that we call the ‘Mediterranean Global South’ where common actions and strategies are required to face common security challenges. The book critically addresses the EU's capacity to manage its expanding borders and analyses the actors involved in providing security in the Mediterranean Global South. Specific attention is devoted to South to North migration, one of the most critical security issues of current times, deploying its effects well beyond states’ borders.

“Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Undoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights movements within a transnational analysis of capitalism, labor exploitation, settler colonialism, state building, and racialized empire, it provides the alternative conceptual frameworks of border imperialism and decolonization. Drawing on the author’s experiences in No One Is Illegal, this work offers relevant insights for all social movement organizers on effective strategies to overcome the barriers and borders within movements in order to cultivate fierce, loving, and sustainable communities of resistance striving toward liberation. The author grounds the book in collective vision, with short contributions from over twenty organizers and writers from across North America. Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and popular educator rooted in emancipatory movements and communities for over a decade. Praise for Undoing Border Imperialism: “Border imperialism is an apt conceptualization for capturing the politics of massive displacement due to capitalist neoglobalization. Within the wealthy countries, Canada’s No One Is Illegal is one of the most effective organizations of migrants and allies. Walia is an outstanding organizer who has done a lot of thinking and can write—not a common combination. Besides being brilliantly conceived and presented, this book is the first extended work on immigration that refuses to make First Nations sovereignty invisible.”—Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author of Indians of the Americas and Blood on the Border “Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism demonstrates that geography has certainly not ended, and nor has the urge for people to stretch out our arms across borders to create our communities. One of the most rewarding things about this book is its capaciousness—astute insights that emerge out of careful organizing linked to the voices of a generation of strugglers, trying to find their own analysis to build their own movements to make this world our own. This is both a manual and a memoir, a guide to the world and a guide to the organizer's heart.”—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World “This book belongs in every wannabe revolutionary’s war backpack. I addictively jumped all over its contents: a radical mixtape of ancestral wisdoms to present-day grounded organizers theorizing about their own experiences. A must for me is Walia’s decision to infuse this volume’s fight against border imperialism, white supremacy, and empire with the vulnerability of her own personal narrative. This book is a breath of fresh air and offers an urgently needed movement-based praxis. Undoing Border Imperialism is too hot to be sitting on bookshelves; it will help make the revolution.”—Ashanti Alston, Black Panther elder and former political prisoner

In Blurring Boundaries: Human Security and Forced Migration scholars from law and social sciences offer a fresh view on the major issues of forced migration through the lens of human security. Although much scholarship engages with forced migration and human security independently, they have hardly been weaved together in a comprehensive manner. The contributions cover the issues of refugee law, maritime migration, human smuggling and trafficking and environmental migration. Blurring Boundaries critically engages boundaries produced in the law with the main ideas of human security, thus providing a much-needed novel vocabulary for a critical discourse in forced migration studies.