Description
Violence is a regular feature of European migration controls at, within, and beyond state borders. Despite ostensible commitments to human rights and the rule of law, states in Europe (and elsewhere) regularly inflict violence on mobile populations through the direct use of force, practices of abandonment and neglect, as well as externalised modes of enforcement. Systems of protection, such as the global asylum regime, are increasingly hollowed out, leading to what scholars have called the ‘death of asylum’ (Mountz 2020). This panel investigates the violence inherent in liberal migration regimes – its manifold expressions, its in/visibility, and resistance to it. Attention is paid to the legacies of imperialism and colonialism: how they reverberate into the contemporary moment through the violent governing of racialized bodies and the exposure of people precariously ‘on the move’ to premature death - the very definition of racism proposed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007: 247). The panel also explores the challenges and possibilities of acts of resistance by migrants, activists, scholars, and others.
