Two RUL members, Dr Evie Papada and Dr Antonis Vradis, have contributed a chapter to The Migration Mobile, an edited volume recently published by Rowman and Littlefield. Book info is here, and the chapter’s introduction follows.
In the aftermath of the European ‘crisis’, policies championing the imperative to protect the most vulnerable refugees have turned vulnerability into a defining marker of asylum policy (Smith and Waite 2018). Even more recently, in the midst of the currently ongoing global pandemic, vulnerability has taken centre stage in shaping policy responses; yet this time round, it is vulnerable populations, not individuals, that seem to drive these. In this chapter we first place vulnerability at the centre of the EC’s hotspot approach for managing migration. We do so in order to address the centrality of the concept in affecting the filtering of migrant populations in and beyond the EU’s territorial margins. Here, we look at the EU’s hotspot approach and the EU-Turkey statement2 in concert, as the new architecture of the border regime. Beyond a focus on deterrence and detention as key spatial strategies in the regulation of migrant mobility, we look instead at immigration controls at borders and the ensuing practices of filtering and caring associated with the humanitarian border (Walters 2011). In this first part of the chapter we draw a relationship between EU reliance on asylum as a tool for migration management and the function of categorical vulnerability as a benchmark of international protection. While the designation ‘vulnerable applicant’ was meant to facilitate the allocation of welfare benefits and provide additional safeguards to those undergoing the asylum process, we point to a shift in practice, whereby vulnerability has occupied an increasingly important role in the administrative decision to grant access to the asylum process on the Aegean islands of Lesbos. Then, we demonstrate how vulnerability came to be assessed at the hotspot in Lesvos and became a weapon both in the hands of the authorities but also for asylum applicants.
In the second part of the chapter, we proceed to explore the notion of vulnerability beyond the migrant mobility context, bringing it into the current pandemic conjuncture. Here, we explain how this notion of the vulnerable body has permeated the European body politic and therefore show, retrospectively, how crucial the vulnerability exercise has been for EC policy – not only for the migrant populations originally affected by this, but now virtually for the continent’s entire population.