Antonis Vradis - NEW BORDERS: hotspots and the european migration regime;hotspots and the european migration regime

New Borders

Radical Geography

Series Editors:

Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber and Jenny Pickerill

Former editor: Kate Derickson

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Hotspots and the European
Migration Regime

Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada,
Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi

First published 2019 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi 2019

The right of Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3846 0 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 3845 3 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0369 6 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0371 9 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0370 2 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

This book is an outcome of Transcapes, a collective research project funded under the ESRC and DFID Mediterranean Migration Research Programme (project reference no. ES/N013700/1). The project was hosted by Durham University and Loughborough University. We would like to thank our good friends and colleagues on Lesbos, without which our research would not have been possible. We thank Elena Katseniou for her help with the field research and Christy Petropoulou for kindly hosting the project at the University of the Aegeans Urban Geography and Planning Laboratory. We would also like to thank Chris Orton for his cartographic work. All photographs are our own, except where noted.

The Radical Geography series consists of accessible books which use geographical perspectives to understand issues of social and political concern. These short books include critiques of existing government policies and alternatives to staid ways of thinking about our societies. They feature stories of radical social and political activism, guides to achieving change, and arguments about why we need to think differently on many contemporary issues if we are to live better together on this planet.

A geographical perspective involves seeing the connections within and between places, as well as considering the role of space and scale to develop a new and better understanding of current problems. Written largely by academic geographers, books in the series deliberately target issues of political, environmental and social concern. The series showcases clear explications of geographical approaches to social problems, and it has a particular interest in action currently being undertaken to achieve positive change that is radical, achievable, real and relevant.

The target audience ranges from undergraduates to experienced scholars, as well as from activists to conventional policy-makers, but these books are also for people interested in the world who do not already have a radical outlook and who want to be engaged and informed by a short, well written and thought-provoking book.

Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber and Jenny Pickerill

Series Editors

New Borders presents results from our two-year-long research project on Lesbos, conducted in the midst of the migration crisis by our collective, Transcapes. We are a team spanning human geography, urban studies, anthropology, social policy and sociology. We believe that the questions posed by the current transformation of Europe under the pretext of managing the current migration crisis cut across disciplinary lines and surpass the academic realm itself. We want our book to reflect this, which is also why we have opted to write for a general audience that is concerned and critical.

From applying for the grant that helped all this happen to day-to-day-administration, fieldwork, writing up and presenting our findings, all aspects of our project were run collectively. Transcapes is the result of team labour and decision-making. We achieved this by assigning roles to team members, who were then transparent about their progress to the rest of the team: rotating tasks, sharing all data and notes among us; collectively thinking about and writing up our findings, reflecting our experiences on the ground. This was a conscious choice that reflects our broader politics. Our aim was to go beyond academic and hierarchical ways of conducting research. We wanted to create particularly for the more junior members of our team the conditions for learning and contributing in an equal way: from presenting our key findings to funders to representing the team in conferences, and even in the way that we listed our team in the application grant that made all this possible to begin with. At each step of the process, we tried to break with the academic hierarchy and create a more inclusive and just research space for ourselves.

Ultimately, for all of us in the collective, Transcapes has been more than a research project. It is an experiment grounded in prior experiences of collective action that go as far back as the G8 and EU summit protest movements of a decade or two ago. As individuals we came together to research the politics of the EUs hotspot approach, motivated by our political understandings of migration struggles and the inherent violence and injustice of borders. But at the same time, doing Transcapes meant setting some basic parameters about both the knowledge we wanted to produce and the way in which we wanted to produce it, engaging with prior academic work on migration. This included making specific choices about the language we use, who we speak to and what processes we choose to analyse.

We have often been asked about our collective work model. Sadly, the state of atomisation and individualisation in academia (and to be fair, most if not all professional circles in the global West today) means that even in the most radical and critical quarters, genuine attempts to break through individual barriers are seen as something of a novelty, a slightly odd way of going about things. How do you share your data? we are asked. What happens with credit? And of course, Who leads in your decision-making? We are not claiming to have found a perfect formula, neither a clean slate away from tried-and-tested models in collective decision-making and work. And it wasnt always easy tensions are an inevitable, but a valuable part of the learning curve. But in all honesty, we couldnt quite see another way of going about this. Put simply, the ramifications of the management of the migration crisis by the powers that be are sure to affect all of us in ways that we might for the time being not be able to fully understand, or even imagine. And so it seemed apt, necessary even, to apply and combine our collective knowledge, our experience and our skills to grapple with what was coming our way. New borders, after all, new barriers drawn, mean we will find unexpected and previously distant allies standing next to us as they or we join the armies of the excluded. To practice collective decision-making and acting, to learn how to work alongside one another despite, through and thanks to our differences is most probably one of the most valuable things that we discovered in this project.