Description
In 2015 one million migrants arrived in Europe via Mediterranean maritime routes with Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans accounting for the largest share of those who crossed the Mediterranean in that year. Despite being a destination of migration for many decades, the European Union (EU) has deliberately transformed the Mediterranean into a space of crisis in need of urgent measures to deter what it categorised as ‘irregular migrants’ from arriving in Europe. In this context, the EU reinforced and/or edited existing EU readmission agreements (EURAs) with non-EU countries, and new ones were also agreed. Essentially, these agreements are policy instruments that aim to return undocumented migrants and refused asylum-seekers to their countries of origin or transit. Most academic literature in EURAs takes a Eurocentric approach, which fails to explore non-EU states’ perspectives and, importantly, the implications of such agreements for migrants in any significant depth, overlooking those at the centre of such policies. Thus, by borrowing some conceptual tools from the rich literature in post-colonial studies, particularly Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, I will argue that the implications of such agreements are a clear example of states’ necropower in action which suggests that some human bodies are worth less than others. My argument will be based on the analysis on the Joint Way Forward Declaration between the EU and Afghanistan. I will focus on the EU’s narratives of safeness in Afghanistan and on the implications of such return policy for those who are returned, Afghans themselves.
