In this event, the co-editors and contributors of the Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Special Issue, “Border and im/mobility entanglements in the Mediterranean”, will offer short introductions to their respective articles. Using the concept of ‘entanglement’, each piece in the Special Issue invites to rethink critical work on border and migration policies and practices across the Mediterranean.
During the event, the co-editors, Beste İşleyen (University of Amsterdam, ACES ‘Europe in the World’ co-leader) and Nora El Qadim (Paris 8) will introduce the rationale and scope of the Special Issue. This will be followed by interventions by the author(s) of Special Issue each article who will discuss how they used the concept of entanglement, theoretically, methodologically and empirically. Taken together, the speakers will emphasize the need to acknowledge context-specific actors, dynamics, events and interactions in ways that are attentive to the histories of imperialism and capitalism as well as to the local, national and international histories of borders and borderlands. The event will continue with the comments by Polly Pallister-Wilkins as discussant.
This Special Issue is the product of the 2019 ACES workshop “The Governance of Borders and Migration in the (Southern) Mediterranean: Entanglements of the Domestic, the Regional and the International,” convened by Beste İşleyen. The editors and authors would like to thank ACES for the generous funding of this workshop, which served as a first step for bringing together this special issue.
Polly Pallister-Wilkins is an Associate Professor in political science at the University of Amsterdam working across Political Geography and International Relations. Her research has focused on humanitarian responses to border violence and mobility injustice and more recently on race and racism in humanitarianism and the possibilities of decolonisation.
Beste İşleyen is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Her research addresses conceptual and empirical questions of border security, territoriality, technology and practices.
Nora El Qadim is an Associate Professor of political science at Paris 8 University-CRESPPA-Labtop and a member of the Institut universitaire de France. She is also a fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations and an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch. Her research has primarily focused on public policy and international studies, especially postcolonial approaches of migration.
Zeynep Kaşlı is an Assistant Professor in Migration and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is an interdisciplinary scholar specialized in state-society relations with a regional focus on Turkey, Europe, and the Middle East. Her research focuses on three strands: interplay between (im)mobility, borders and citizenship; politics of migration and diversity; and extraterritorial state power, diaspora politics and transnationalism. Her work appeared in journals such as Political Geography, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Refugee Studies, and Alternatives: Global, Local, Political as well as other scholarly and non-scholarly periodicals and edited volumes.
Noemi Bergesio is a PhD candidate in the Global Histories, Cultures and Politics Programme at the University of Bologna. Positioned within the field of Political Geography and Critical Border Studies, her PhD project aims to contribute to the vernacular study of borders by looking at everyday experiences and re-configurations of the border between Italy and Slovenia, with a specific focus on the city of Trieste. Her research interests also include the informal migration corridor of the Balkan Route and the intersections between humanitarianism and securitisation in policy narratives of the migration “crisis”.
Luiza Bialasiewicz is a political geographer and Professor of European Governance at the University of Amsterdam, where she is also Academic Director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES). Her research examines the intersections of EU foreign policy and external relations and migration management.
Hassan Ould Moctar is a Fellow in International Development at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on the relationship between migration, borders, and development processes, with a regional focus on Mauritania, the West African Sahel, and the Sahara. In particular, he is interested in how the illegalisation of migration interacts with the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, contemporary uneven development processes, and conflict and displacement dynamics. He is currently preparing a monograph based on his PhD thesis, which details how the EU border externalisation processes intervenes within social relations and structures in Mauritania. Prior to joining LSE, Hassan was an ESRC postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he also obtained his PhD in May 2021. He holds an MSc in Migration and Ethnic Studies, which he obtained from the University of Amsterdam.
Nick Dines is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His research interests include international migration, agricultural change and urban development in the Mediterranean region with a particular focus on southern Italy and Morocco.
Anissa Maâ holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ULB and an Affiliated Research Fellow at Oxford Department of International Development (University of Oxford). Her research locates at the crossroads of international politics and socio-anthropology of migrations. It explores dynamics of appropriation and intermediation in border and migration control, drawing on ethnographic fieldworks conducted in North and West Africa (Morocco, Mali). Anissa Maâ has published several articles in international peer-reviewed journals. She is also the author of an academic book based on her PhD thesis, to be published in 2023 at Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles (“Signer la deportation”. Migrations africaines et retours volontaires depuis le Maroc).