The gendered and racialized politics of risk analysis. The case of Frontex

Abstract

This article develops a feminist postcolonial approach to risk analysis as an increasingly central security practice in the EU's emerging border management and security regime. For this purpose, we theorize risk analysis as a sense-making practice embedded within colonial power relations. As such, risk analysis problematizes migrants and migration in gendered and racialized ways that make them amenable to border management and other, potentially violent security practices, such as detentions, returns, surveillance, and Search and Rescue. In an exemplary frame analysis of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency's (Frontex) risk analysis report 2016, we show how conceptualizations of risks and solutions by this key actor are informed by gendered and racialized framings of 1) chaos and violence, 2) exploitation of the EU economic and welfare system, and 3) humanitarianism towards 'vulnerable' migrants. With this study, we seek to strengthen feminist and postcolonial interventions into critical security studies on knowledge, power, and expertise. By conceptualizing risk analysis as political, this article pushes critical security theory beyond understandings of security as socially constructed and towards systematically unpacking the meanings of (in) security as implicated in the reproduction of gendered and racialized power relations.

Cleared for investment? The intersections of transnational capital, gender, and race in the production of sexual violence and internal displacement in Colombia’s armed conflict

“…Racialization is understood as the process of differentiation, categorization, and meaning-making. It constructs hierarchy and differential value on the basis of perceived dichotomiesrational/irrational, civilized/barbarian, us/them, and European/non-Europeanand builds upon and reaffirms hierarchical power relations embedded within the context of (post)coloniality (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019). Hierarchy is constructed and relational: those who are disadvantaged by race, including Afro-descendant and Indigenous women in Colombia, are racialized as inferior, deviant, and negative, whereas those who are advantaged by race are racialized as superior, the norm, and positive.…”

Protecting Refugees Inside, Protecting Borders Abroad? Gender in the EU’s Responses to the ‘Refugee Crisis’

“…Although feminist research has shown how constructions of protection and security are highly gendered (Muehlenhoff, 2017;Shepherd, 2007Shepherd, , 2009Tickner, 1992), feminist analyses of the EU's refugee and asylum policies remain scarce. Stachowitsch and Sachseder (2019) demonstrate the potential of such analytical approaches: analysing how FRONTEX mobilizes gendered and racialized frames, they show how the EU agency constructs and legitimizes itself as a protector of Europe against the migrant 'other' (see also Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff, this issue). In a similar vein and in line with the rationale of this Special Issue, this article seeks to understand how gender considerations differ in EU internal and external policies.…”

The Migrant Other: Exclusion without Nationalism?

“…These analyses start with the use of emergency measures and securitized discourses central to early definitions of securitization (Ferreira 2018), then show how the language of crisis is not only to justify policy choices but also to flatten distinctions between migrants that might be hardworking, those that seek the social services of European states, and terrorists or criminals. Some findings suggest these securitized frames are additionally cast in gendered and racialized terms (Gray and Franck 2019;Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019).…”