scholarly journals Border closures and the externalization of immigration controls in the Mediterranean: a comparative analysis of Morocco and Turkey

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.

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.


Author(s):  
David Mutimer

This chapter provides a partial history of the label ‘Critical Security Studies’ and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It considers the primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. It looks at the 1994 conference held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies, which spawned a book called Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997b), and Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), which was published to serve as a relatively comprehensive statement of ‘securitization studies’, or the Copenhagen School. The chapter argues that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an ‘ethos of critique’ in either the study or refusal of security. Finally, it examines Ken Booth’s views on poststructuralism as part of a broad Critical Security Studies.


Author(s):  
Sara GALLETTI

Stereotomy, the art of cutting stones into particular shapes for the construction of vaulted structures, is an ancient art that has been practiced over a wide chronological and geographical span, from Hellenistic Greece to contemporary Apulia and across the Mediterranean Basin. Yet the history of ancient and medieval stereotomy is little understood, and nineteenth- century theories about the art’s Syrian origins, its introduction into Europe via France and the crusaders, and the intrinsic Frenchness of medieval stereotomy are still largely accepted. In this essay, I question these theories with the help of a work-in-progress database and database-driven maps that consolidate evidence of stereotomic practice from the third century BCE through the eleventh century CE and across the Mediterranean region. I argue that the history of stereotomy is far more complex than what historians have assumed so far and that, for the most part, it has yet to be written.


2019 ◽  
pp. 82-107
Author(s):  
Chris Rossdale

This is the first of two chapters to reflect on how anti-militarists relate to the politics of security. This chapter begins by outlining the intimate relationships between militarism and security, before showing how Critical Security Studies has called for alternative/non-militarised practices of security. The second part of the chapter suggests that anti-militarist direct action could be read as an alternative, anti-hegemonic practice of security where, faced with indifferent or complicit states, activists seek to combat insecurity themselves. The third part of the chapter complicates this story, introducing three more vignettes to reflect on the ways that, even as they seek to ‘do’ security differently, activists remain entangled within hegemonic logics and practices.


Author(s):  
Andrew W. Neal

This book argues that while ‘security’ was once an anti-political ‘exception’ in liberal democracies – a black box of secret intelligence and military decision-making at the dark heart of the state – it has now become normalised in professional political life. This represents a direct challenge to critical security studies and securitisation debates and their core assumption that security is a kind of illiberal and undemocratic ‘anti-politics’. The book investigates security from the perspective of professional political practice - historically, sociologically and theoretically. Using an extended UK case study, including interviews with parliamentarians and former security ministers, it examines security politics from the early 1980s to the present day to show how its meaning and practice have changed over time. It explores the history of legislative/executive relations on security, including the reasons for parliamentary exclusion from security policy making such as executive secrecy and parliamentary deference. The book demonstrates that political activity on security has increased to such an extent that it requires a rethink of the assumed pathological relationship between ‘politics’ and ‘security’. Security has been migrating from the realm of exceptional politics to one of ‘normal politics’.


Author(s):  
David Mutimer

This chapter provides a partial history of the label ‘Critical Security Studies’ and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It considers the primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. It looks at the 1994 conference held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies, which spawned a book called Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997b), and Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), which was published to serve as a relatively comprehensive statement of ‘securitization studies’, or the Copenhagen School. The chapter argues that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an ‘ethos of critique’ in either the study or refusal of security. Finally, it examines Ken Booth’s views on poststructuralism as part of a broad Critical Security Studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Sjoberg

Debates imitates scholarship, which imitates debate. Using perspectives from both my policy debate career and my research career, this article argues that the enterprise of critique, whether in critical security studies or elsewhere, is always and already failing and failed. It proceeds in four sections. The first section sets up my entry into the problems of/with critique. The second section analyzes the types of dissonances inherent in the production of critical security studies scholarship. The third section theorizes those dissonances as failures – arguing that failure itself is a part of in and of critical security studies. The conclusion discusses where to go from, during, and in a world of failed critique in critical security studies.


Antiquity ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (337) ◽  
pp. 746-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evi Margaritis

The author shows how better recovery techniques have allowed the early history of the Mediterranean olive to be rewritten. Small scale exploitation is detectable in the Neolithic, and is widespread by the Early Bronze Age. Users appear to be first attracted by the olive wood, the fruit benefitting from the pruning effect as the olive bush becomes a tree. This process eventually results in domestication—but this is an unintended consequence of a production process driven by demand. The story now aligns better with the model put forward in Colin Renfrew's thesis of 1972.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 1055-1070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuulikki Kurki

This introductory article to the special issue Writing at Borders suggests that cultural studies and the humanist point of view have significant explanatory potential concerning various borders and border crossings in multidisciplinary border studies. Cultural and human understandings of borders and border crossings grow from the research of ethnographic particularities on one hand, and of universal and culturally expressed human experiences of borders and border crossings (however culturally expressed) on the other. In this article, this explanatory potential is made visible by examining the history of cultural anthropology, where borders and border crossings have been recognized in research since the late 19th century. The aim of this concise introductory article is to outline through selected examples how territorial, social, and cultural borders and border crossings have been acknowledged and understood conceptually in the history of Anglo-American and European anthropology. The selected examples illustrate the gradual evolution of the conceptualization of the border from a territorially placed boundary and filter, to a semantically constructed, ritualized and performed symbolic border, and finally to a discursive (textual) construction.


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