Description
The existing critical literature on the European border regime has highlighted its reliance on systems of state surveillance and neoliberal governmentality in the containment and channelling of displaced populations. We supplement this with a critical political economy perspective which reveals how systems of bordering and migration management are also underpinned by logics of capital accumulation. We draw on two related critical literatures, on Racial Capitalism and Relative Surplus Populations, to explain the ways in which displaced populations are securitised, marginalised, racialised and othered as part of the dominant logics of European capitalism, constituting what we call a ‘migration fix’. Further, we argue in this paper that necropolitical practices witnessed in the Mediterranean can themselves be understood and critiqued as extreme forms of migration fixes. We develop this argument by focusing on the routine practice of ‘pushbacks’ in the Eastern Mediterranean as well as the increasing violence of state and EU border practices responding to irregular crossings. We conclude by exploring the political dilemmas as well as the possibilities opened by this perspective to connect different critiques of European migration management and inform new practices of solidarity.
