GIC Research Seminar: Crises and Contestations in EUropean Borderlands

18 November 2020, 1.00 PM - 18 November 2020, 2.00 PM

Nina Perkowski, IFSH

In EUropean border governance, crisis narratives have become pervasive: references to a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of border control, a crisis of the asylum system, a Schengen crisis, a human rights crisis, a refugee crisis, and a migrant crisis have become frequent and, to an extent, normalised. One of the actors at the heart of these various ‘crises’ is the European Border and Coast Guard, which is critiqued by humanitarian and human rights-related actors one the one hand and seen as a solution to various ‘crises’ by EU policymakers on the other. The paper examines the role that the agency itself has played in creating a sense of ‘protracted crisis’ in EUropean borderlands over the last 10 years. It shows that the European Border and Coast Guard has been one of the central profiteers of this framing, tracing its institutional and budgetary growth through three different ‘crises.’ In doing so, it argues that even crisis invocations that are critical of current policies and problematise migrant suffering and deaths risk contributing to the continuing securitization of migration, the externalisation of border controls, and the perpetuation of the same dynamics that caused the ‘crisis’ in the first place.

Bio:

Dr Nina Perkowski is working as a Researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Prior to this, she was a Lecturer at the University of Hamburg as well as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Nina studied at the Universiteit Maastricht, University of California in Berkeley, and the University of Oxford, and holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. In her research, she focuses on how borders are drawn, contested, and navigated within and around European societies, critically examining the interplay of border security and border violence in different contexts. Her research has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Security Dialogue, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Journal of Common Market Studies. Her monographs “Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Security: The Case of Frontex” and “Reclaiming Migration: Voices from Europe’s ‘Migrant Crisis’” (written with Vicki Squire, Dallal Stevens, and Nick Vaughan-Williams) will be published by Routledge and Manchester University Press in 2021.

Joining instructions

The seminar will be run as a Zoom webinar but we are planning to duplicate the f2f format as far as possible. What this means is that if you would like to ask a question or make a comment during the Q&A session, you will need to register your interest in doing so in the Q&A box. We will then take questions broadly in order and can unmute you so you can speak and interact rather than just be limited to text based chat and responses from the speaker. The webinar format is limited to 100 participants so we will work on a first come, first served basis.  Beyond that, everybody is welcome!

Please click the link below to join the webinar: 

https://zoom.us/j/96711706269

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