African Migrants and Europe Managing the ultimate frontier [Hardcover]

The process of migration control mirrors the trajectories of the people who traverse national boundaries, making todays borders flexible and fluid.

This book explores the transformation of migration control in the post 9/11 era. It looks at how border controls have become more diffuse in the face of increased human flows from Africa and presents a critical analysis of the dispositif of European migration control, including detention without trial, derogation of human rights law, torture, extraordinary rendition , the curtailment of civil liberties and the securitization of migration. By examining the role of Gaddafis Libya in the last ten years as a gendarme of Europe, it argues for a re-visioning of borders and frontiers in ways that can account for their dialectical nature, and for the dialectical nature of political life.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European studies, African studies, security studies, international relations, global studies, comparative politics, cultural geography, migration studies and border theory.

Preface 1 Externalization 2 Frontiers and Lifes 3 The Sand Door 4 The Blue Door 5 Anglers of Men 6 The Virtual Door 7 The Brick Door

Media images of desperate refugees drowning or washing up on the shores of the Italian island of Lampedusa have become all too common. But to European eyes these images mislead as well as they inform. They exoticize and distance immigrants from normal life. So, how to humanize African migrants, whose trajectories seem alien to the experience of metropolitan Europe, without sentimentalizing them? This amazingly acute and timely reflection shows how the marginalized, in the form of African refugees, cast light on the actual norms of the dominant center  Europe, Italy, Rome  that they enter if they survive their arduous journeys. Crucially, migration across borders isnt the exception that normal European life l“p