Introduction: Conceptualizing the Mediterranean Global South to Understand Border Crises and Human Mobility Across Borders

Author(s):  
Stefania Panebianco
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 179-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayşen Üstübici ◽  
Ahmet İçduygu

AbstractThis article traces the recent history of border closures in Turkey and Morocco and their impact on human mobility at the two ends of the Mediterranean. Border closures in the Mediterranean have produced new spaces where borders are often fenced, immigration securitized, and border crossings and those facilitating border crossings criminalized. Here, bordering practices are conceptualized as physical bordering practices, border controls, and legal measures. Turkey and Morocco constitute comparable cases for an analysis of border closures insofar as they utilize similar mechanisms of closure, despite having quite different outcomes in terms of numbers. The article’s findings are based on fieldwork conducted at both locations between 2012 and 2014, as well as on analysis of Frontex Risk Assessment Reports from 2010 to 2016. The first part of the article reflects on the concepts of border closure and securitization, together with their implications, and draws for its argument on critical security studies and critical border studies. The second part of the article is an overview of controls over mobility exercised in the Mediterranean from the 1990s onward. Then, in the third and fourth parts, we turn to the particular cases—respectively, Turkey and Morocco—in order to discuss their processes of border closure and the various implications thereof. Through analysis of the two country cases, we show that border closures are neither linear nor irreversible.


Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110370
Author(s):  
Giulia Marchetti ◽  
Loretta Baldassar ◽  
Anita Harris ◽  
Shanthi Robertson

This article seeks to advance our understanding of contemporary transnational youth mobility, drawing on the concept ‘mobile transitions’ to explore scholarly approaches to the mobility practices of young Italians moving abroad. We present a critical literature review of the intersections of migration, youth and transition studies to argue that the literature on youth transnational mobility currently features two contrasting models comprising a ‘transitions-focused’ Global South model and an ‘experiential-focused’ Global North model. This bifurcation fails to account for emergent regional models of mobility that may help to sharpen scholarly understandings of a new generation of youth ‘on the move’. We propose an alternative model positioned somewhere along the spectrum between the Global North and Global South models, which we define as the Mediterranean model of ‘family-centred’ transnational youth mobility. This model reflects aspects of both privileged, experiential youth migrations, which tend to undervalue the impact on transitions to adulthood, and economically driven youth migrations, which tend to focus more directly on the economic dimensions of youth to adulthood transitions. The Mediterranean model highlights more broadly how mobility enables and shapes transitions, which are simultaneously driven by both economic imperatives and individual experiential desires, and mediated through family and culture.


2018 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 7-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayşen Üstübici ◽  
Ahmet İçduygu

AbstractThis article traces the recent history of border closures in Turkey and Morocco and their impact on human mobility at the two ends of the Mediterranean. Border closures in the Mediterranean have produced new spaces where borders are often fenced, immigration securitized, and border crossings and those facilitating border crossings criminalized. Here, bordering practices are conceptualized as physical bordering practices, border controls, and legal measures. Turkey and Morocco constitute comparable cases for an analysis of border closures insofar as they utilize similar mechanisms of closure, despite having quite different outcomes in terms of numbers. The article’s findings are based on fieldwork conducted at both locations between 2012 and 2014, as well as on analysis of Frontex Risk Assessment Reports from 2010 to 2016. The first part of the article reflects on the concepts of border closure and securitization, together with their implications, and draws for its argument on critical security studies and critical border studies. The second part of the article is an overview of controls over mobility exercised in the Mediterranean from the 1990s onward. Then, in the third and fourth parts, we turn to the particular cases—respectively, Turkey and Morocco—in order to discuss their processes of border closure and the various implications thereof. Through analysis of the two country cases, we show that border closures are neither linear nor irreversible.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-241
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Leppard ◽  
Carmen Esposito ◽  
Massimiliano Esposito

The Mediterranean is often regarded as characterized by high levels of human mobility and migration, which are in turn considered to have driven large-scale cultural effects. However, this supposition is problematic, in that it relies on various types of proxy for human movement, rather than on direct bioarchaeological evidence. Accordingly, in this study we attempt to quantify diachronic Mediterranean mobility and migration by undertaking the first meta-analysis of the burgeoning radiogenic isotope datasets now available from the Mediterranean. We gathered 87Sr/ 86Sr data derived from funerary populations from the Neolithic to the late Roman period. We imposed a data-hygiene regime, discarding low-quality, methodologically idiosyncratic, or other potentially erroneous data; this resulted in a cleansed and trimmed dataset (n = 899). Within this dataset, we find that mean rates of post-juvenile migration are relatively low. Utilizing the methodologies specific to individual studies, the mean nonlocal rate is 9.57%. Imposing a standard methodology on the most statistically robust data (resulting in n = 702) allows us to recompute a mean nonlocal rate of 5.84%. In both the data as originally reported and as recomputed, we detect comparatively higher levels of migration in the period 7000–3500 BC, followed by decreasing levels of migration in the later Holocene. We discuss the implications of these results for how we understand longterm cultural and behavioral change in the Mediterranean.


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