Description
In October 2016, against the backdrop of the so-called “refugee crisis”, the European Union (EU) and the Afghan government signed the Joint Way Forward Declaration (JWF), a document similar to an EU readmission agreement, which aimed to return unlimited numbers of ‘refused’ asylum seekers and ‘irregular’ Afghan migrants from Europe to Afghanistan over four years (2016-2020). In this context, research that investigates removal policies terminology combined with policies’ sub-sequent implementation remains scarce. Hence, by borrowing conceptual tools from the rich literature in post-colonial studies, particularly Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and its constitution of death worlds, otherness and coloniality, I will argue that declarations such as the JWF are a clear example of the EU’s exercise of necropower. As much as necropolitics is about death, I contend that it also captures the allowance of returnees’ social and political deaths. Although different from direct killing and subsequent death, this means that the application of necropolitics to the study of removal policies helps us to think of necropower in terms of what is barely seen, especially when policies such as the JWF are crafted and implemented within the law and orchestrated through policy narratives and terminologies that legitimise operations of removals. Through a necropolitical lens, my paper will analyse the JWF Declaration, where I will argue that the use of narratives and terms such as 'return' to describe deportation deflect attention away from the act of expulsion and its devastating implications for those who are ‘returned’, illustrating the EU’s exercise of necropower.
