Abstract
In 2014 European Urban and Regional Studies is awarding the first Jim Lewis Prize. The prize has been established to mark the contributions of the former Editor, Jim Lewis, and to highlight the most innovative paper published in the previous year in the journal (see editorial announcement in volume 21, number 1, 2014). Following nominations from the journal’s editorial board members and careful consideration of these nominations among the journal’s editors, we are delighted to announce that the 2014 prize should be awarded to Maribel Casas-Cortes, Sebastian Cobarrubias and John Pickles for their paper “Re-bordering the neighbourhood: Europe’s emerging geographies of non-accession integration”.
Adrian Smith
Editor in Chief
This paper arose from our collaboration, which started in 2005 around common interests and questions relating to the intersection of maps, social movements and the political economy of bordering practices. Building upon John’s work in political economy, post-socialist Europe and cartographic theory and Sebastian and Maribel’s research on European social movements, counter-cartographies and precarity, we participated in the founding of the Counter-Cartographies-Collective in 2005 as a research project of the Cultures of Economies Initiative in the UNC University Program in Cultural Studies. In 2010 the three of us began work on a four-year research project –“Reconfiguring EU Borders: Mapping Shifting Jurisdictions and Sovereignties” – funded by the National Science Foundation. This focuses specifically on the role of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Global Approach to Migration (GAM) in shaping the integration model currently being applied in the Euro-Med and West-African regions. In this research, we are interested in the relationship between the twinned foreign policy dimensions of ENP and GAM as they are being applied to the external dimension of migration management or “border externalization”, and to the processes of economic integration, trade facilitation, market access and regional development programs for non-candidate countries.
The predecessors of the Occupy mobilizations in Europe, especially in Spain, had long pointed to the centrality of migration policy and bordering practices in the articulation of current configurations of labour, territory and citizenship, and increasingly scholars of European transformations have become involved with these intersections. In fact, these movements were eloquently enacting one of the main theses of the Autonomy of Migration (AoM) approach, which takes borders as the epistemological and methodological departing point of the analysis. Engaging this proposition seriously, our research seeks to understand the latest bordering practices by the EU – known as “border externalization” – exploring its consequences in geopolitical, jurisdictional and theoretical terms. Border externalization refers to the attempts to manage migrant flows far away from one’s own borders, either by getting other countries “to do the policing work” or by intervening directly in those territories framed by the EU as “source or transit” countries. If border control is moving beyond the fences, our research seeks to explore this disseminated power regime and its attempts to map and delimit mobility. How does it work? Who is involved? And what are the consequences of such transnational attempts to intercept, classify and manage people on the move?
Investigating how the EU is stretching its border management practices to include its neighbours and neighbours of neighbours leads us beyond the conventional sites where borders are normally fenced and patrolled. Trying to understand these changing processes of border design and implementation through externalization led us beyond “the line in the sand” to conduct multi-sited research in Brussels, Vienna, London, Zaragoza, Madrid and Rabat. The variety of institutional actors as well as the transnational character of the policies and operations –in constant movement tracking fluctuating migrant itineraries – led us to conceptualize the phenomenon of border externalization as an itinerant b/ordering assemblage.
At the forefront of the research has been an engagement with an emerging epistemic community around the notion of AoM (De Genova et al., 2014). A founding conversation with one of its main advocates, Sandro Mezzadra, was published in Society and Space in an interview format introducing some of the theses of AoM as well as presenting some of his key works as a prelude to the recent publication of his book with Neilson, Border as Method (2013) (Casas Cortes et al., 2011). Building on those theses, and regionally focusing on the ENP, we identified how border externalization practices are part of a broader shift in regional relations between the EU and its southern neighbours; namely, what we referred to as a logic of “non-accession integration” in the Mediterranean basin. These findings were
published in the paper that has been awarded the Jim Lewis prize. We are honoured to receive this recognition for this collective research endeavor. European Urban and Regional Studies has been a welcoming platform for our research process. Currently, we are working on the intricacies of border externalization as it materializes in concrete operations such as the Seahorse Project in a paper forthcoming in the journal. The paper offers a thick description of a multi-country Spanish-led border guard operation in Western Africa, conceptualizing further the expansive and mobile trends of such off-shoring border practices. Thanks again for supporting our work and keep up the exciting intellectual discussions hosted by this journal!