(Im)moral Borders in Practice

Abstract

This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and nondiscursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots alongside the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope.

Border and im/mobility entanglements in the Mediterranean: Introduction to the special issue

“…The concept of entanglements often refers to the diversity of actors who partake in the construction of border and im/mobility ideas, policies, institutions and practices. Morals, ethics and rights are integral to the everyday governing of im/mobilities (El Qadim et al., 2021). Didier Fassin’s description of the articulation of compassion and repression in the humanitarian government of migration and borders is one example (Fassin, 2011: chapter 5).…”

“…How do we understand entanglements, then, as a starting point for examining Mediterranean im/mobilities and border regimes? As we have argued elsewhere, it is also necessary to look at the “variety of moral underpinnings of policies and practices on all sides of borders ” (El Qadim et al., 2021: 1613) in order to better understand migration and border regimes. A focus on entanglements allows us to do that while at the same time questioning the definition of “sides”.…”

Claiming Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Migrants’ Protests and Border Controls

“…It is especially in the case of state borders, that is, of controlling, crossing, and challenging them -a case that is placed at the centre of recent discussions across disciplines in Europe (El Qadim et al, 2020)-that what we have just called 'the paradox of citizenship' is particularly revealed. To this task the example of the closure of the European borders between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia (former 2 Cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan citizenship occupy an important place in the history of ideas and there is no space here for elaborating on their origins that go back to Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic, Stoicism and, of course, Immanuel Kant; see Heater (1996, pp.…”

The governance and politics of migration: a conceptual-analytical map

“…As Tuhiwai-Smith (1999: 1-20) argues, the inquisition of research can also act as the acquisition of personhood, social practices and value of those being 'researched' (p. 6) and of the 'field' of research. The re-writing and re-presentation of migrants' concepts and knowledge, in order to conform to dominant forms and practices then re-works them in ways that permit the reproduction of iniquitous ways of knowing and governing (El Qadim et al 2020;Mignolo 2012;Mignolo and Walsh 2018;Wynter 2003).…”