Vulnerability as a technology of EU migration management in the Aegean: From humanitarian exceptions to border violence

This thesis conceptualises vulnerability as a technology of migration management in order to reveal the relationship between international law, and the production and normalisation of border violence. It sheds light on an exclusionary logic of humanitarian exceptionalism that structures racialised migrants’ access to territory and protection in international and European law. On land and at sea, access to protection for the world’s ‘unwanted’ migrants, whose right to cross national borders is unrecognised, and who lack the necessary passport and financial means to travel freely, is, in practice, increasingly contingent on the logic of humanitarian exceptionalism. In the context of the EU border and migration management policies in Greece, this logic plays out in the way that two parallel concepts of vulnerability determine access to asylum: increasingly, we see that in order to gain admission, asylum seekers must be recognised as ‘vulnerable’ on land or ‘in distress’ at sea. Both function as criteria for protection and have been employed through migration management policies in a way that is, in practice, limiting the core right to seek and enjoy asylum at the external borders of the EU. By demonstrating the role of vulnerability as a technology of migration management, this thesis advances an understanding of the relationship between the paradigm of European migration management, the erosion of the right to seek asylum and the increasing forms of violence, both ‘slow’ and ‘spectacular,’ against irregularised migrants at external borders of the EU.

Publisher

University of Galway

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)