Chapter 1 - Crisis Politics

Summary

This chapter opens the book by critically interrogating the framing of the situation in the Mediterranean during 2015–2016 as a ‘migration crisis’. It creates distance from a politics of crisis by exploring the articulation of the situation as such along various lines: as a crisis of the Schengen Area, as a crisis of solidarity, as a crisis of sovereignty, as a crisis of values or social cohesion, as a crisis of security, as a humanitarian crisis, and as a crisis of international protection. In so doing, the chapter draws attention to the multiple ways in which the crisis has been constituted in such terms, highlighting how each articulation reflects distinctive political concerns and diverse governing authorities rather than representing an uncontestable reality. By contrast to an approach that questions the specific way by which crisis is framed, the chapter goes on to question a politics of crisis and its effects more fundamentally. It draws on scholarship that interrogates the framing of crisis narratives as well as a form of governing through crisis, to highlight the ways in which crisis politics detract from an understanding of the foreseeable and preventable dimensions of the situation in the Mediterranean in 2015–2016. In so doing, the chapter concludes that the framing of the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ in such terms reflects a situation in which death and vulnerability are produced through policies that cut across both security and humanitarian domains and whereby people on the move are abandoned in the face of concerns to maintain the security of home. This, it suggests, can be understood as nothing less than a continued attempt to re/colonise the Mediterranean in a context marked by longer European histories of colonial violence.