Europe's Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond

By: Nick Vaughan-Williams

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Synopsis: Europe's Border Crisis explores current dynamics in EU border security and migration management. It argues that a crisis point has emerged because 'irregular' migrants are seen as both a security threat to the EU and also as a life threatened and in need of protection. This leads to paradoxical situations whereby humanitarian policies and practices expose 'irregular' migrants to often dehumanizing and sometimes lethal border security mechanisms. The dominant way of understanding these dynamics — one that blames a gap between policy and practice — fails to address the deeper issues at stake and ends up perpetuating the terms of the crisis. Drawing on conceptual resources in biopolitical theory the book offers an alternative diagnosis and sets out a new research agenda for the interdisciplinary field of critical border and migration studies.