The Greek–Turkish land border became the site of a border spectacle in March 2020, following the “opening” of the border by the Turkish government and its simultaneous closure by the Greek government. The ensuing violence was legitimated by narratives of exception and racist discourses hinging on the notions of “invasion” and “asymmetrical threats.” Yet, the spectacular and highly mediatized nature of the events of March 2020 hid the embeddedness and longevity of border violence in Evros, the area named after the river that constitutes the land border between Greece and Turkey. Drawing on qualitative research including fieldwork, interviews and document analysis, we focus on the practice of pushbacks as an enduring feature of the local border regime. We argue that pushbacks and other forms of violence should not be conceived merely as human rights violations and therefore aberrations to the laws and values of Europe and its states, but as normalized technologies of border management embedded in the racialized, violent border regimes of liberal states, exemplifying the inherent and unavoidable violence of borders.

The migrations of 2015 have led to a temporary destabilization of the European border and migration regime. In this contribution, we trace the process of destabilization to its various origins, which we locate around the year 2011, and offer a preliminary assessment of the attempts at re-stabilization. We employ the notion of “border (as) conflict” to emphasize that crisis and exception lies at the very core of the European border and migration regime and its four main dimensions of externalization, techno-scientific borders, an internal mobility regime for asylum seekers, and humanitarization.

The migrations of the year 2015 and the slow and inadequate responses of the European Union has led to a political crisis in the European Union. The institutions and policies of the European Border and Migration Regime that have evolved since the Schengen Treaties of 1985 and 1990 and the inauguration of the Common European Asylum System with the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) were not able to formulate, let alone to implement, a timely and appropriate answer. We argue that despite the current public perception of a "refugee crisis", the EU is indeed dealing with a deep and systemic crisis of its migration and border policies, which is rooted less in the migrations of 2015, but date back to the collapse of the Mediterranean border regime in the wake of the Arab Spring 2011 and the ensuing controversies around issues such as the perceived partiality of the refugee distribution mechanism of the Dublin system as well as the mounting public outcry given the repeated instances of tragedies in the Mediterranean, epitomised by the Mare Nostrum operation launched by the Italian state in late 2013. Currently, we observe heterogeneous approaches to solving this crisis. Not all of them may be compatible with the Schengen system as the re-institution of national border controls is often at their core. Other suggestions involve a -at times- radical move towards a deepened europeanisation of migration and border policies, such as the creation of a European Asylum Office and a European Border and Coast Guard. Based on ethnographic research in the EU's South-East, we will discuss these developments around the ongoing dynamics of de- and restabilisation of Schengen.

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity.

This paper discusses the question of militant research from a perspective of critical knowledge production. In reference to our work on Dublin II and the European border regime, we discuss controversial issues, pitfalls and challenges we have encountered during out research and campaign activities. Among these are the strategic use of courts and a human rights language, differing modes of knowledge production between activism and academia and the issue of wage. The paper includes a discussion of the current place Asylum holds in the European border and migration regime from a historical and governmental perspective.