Hotspot politics―or, when the EU state gets real

Abstract

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Containment beyond detention: The hotspot system and disrupted migration movements across Europe

“…This approach proved particularly important to understand the functioning of the Lampedusa and Lesbos hotspot as chokepoints in which migrants are partitioned, identified and sometimes preventively excluded from the channels of asylum, and to specify the outcomes of migrants’ immobilisation beyond the strict definition of incarceration. In this sense, the hotspot has been rightly defined as a ‘highly flexible informal mechanism for governing diverse migrant population’ (Painter et al., 2017). In other words, the hotspot responds less to a disciplinary and punitive rationale than to a ‘border tactic’ (De Genova, 2017a) for temporarily disrupting and channelling mobility.…”

Processing Alterity, Enacting Europe: Migrant Registration and Identification as Co-construction of Individuals and Polities

“…Accounts of the more and more strategic role of nonstate actors in migration management are proliferating. 6 Most of them concentrate on humanitarian actors and international organizations taking over state functions (Painter et al 2017; Pallister-Wilkins 2015, 2018). Even when we adopt the alterity processing knowledge lens, the key role of nonstate organizations in collecting and interpreting data for subsequent policy-making is unquestionable.…”

“…Less attention has been given to deterritorialized spatialities allowed by data infrastructures that constitute the backbone of the Hotspot approach and connect member states’ peripheral bureaucracies to national and European centers of calculation. Even when Hotspots are acknowledged as experimental building blocks of an emergent European superstate (Painter et al 2017), the bureaucratic and informational dimension through which such alleged Europeanization would be enacted is rarely investigated.…”

“…Similar evidence questions binary arguments about the construction of a European superstate at the expenses of member states, as suggested by the emerging literature on Hotspots. Painter et al (2017, 259), for example, have hypothesized that: “[i]f successful, the hotspot approach will then be pointing at a model of territorial administration and governance that supersedes the national in favour of hybrid, super-national governance: a model whereby security and population management are dealt with above the national level.” Differently, with Sassen (2006), we suggest that, if any, seeds of nation-state disassembling are sown inside national bureaucracies, for example, in adapting and controlling internal procedures for population management, rather than despite them.…”

The neoliberal location of asylum

“…Rather, D.Lgs 142/2015 connects and reinforces nodes of governance (see Papoutsi et al, 2018), it re-works the relative significance of national and sub-national agencies, authorities and centres of power, while confirming the territorially nested nature of these jurisdictions and sources of law. Rather than a space of law/lawlessness, the location of CAS seems to be an expression of the 'contested geographies' that the political transformations associated to the migration crisis have engendered (Painter et al, 2017).…”