New Borders by Antonis Vradis Evie Papada Joe Painter Anna Papoutsi

Author:Antonis Vradis,Evie Papada,Joe Painter,Anna Papoutsi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

CONCLUSION

Lesbos, 22 September 2015. Our very first visit to the island was coming to an end, and we were due to head to London for an initial meeting with our funders. We walked towards the ferry, tired and with our backpacks, ready for the ten-hour journey to the port of Piraeus, seemingly sharing the migrants’ fate for a moment. This sense was immediately interrupted by the sight of the two separate queues of passengers waiting to board the ferry. For some reason, our queue was moving a lot faster than the other. Then we understood why: the second queue was for migrants who were finally able to continue their journey onwards to mainland Greece, and from there on to the rest of Europe. Following a stand-off with a coast guard officer over taking pictures, we boarded the ferry only to notice that there was still some sort of subtle separation between passengers: the staff were directing migrants towards the lower decks of the ferry while the rest of the passengers were shown to the front lounges. Baffled at how they even were able to figure out who was who, we made our way towards the upper deck and settled at one of the available tables.

We couldn’t help but think that this must be what a differentiated mobility regime40 would actually look like on the ground: different queues and different lounges; different identification requirements. We were never asked to provide documentation, while the tickets of the migrants were literally stapled together with their documentation, the police papers they got at registration in the hotspot. While hierarchised access to mobility has been mostly studied through a global perspective, in which some individuals are hypermobile and others immobile,41 our experience described above hinted at the processes that are underway and are internalising this global regime: the hotspot is the spearhead of such processes, swiftly creating and spreading several layers of differentiated mobility well beyond the borders of and throughout EU territory.

Controlling and governing the mobility of both the unwanted and the wanted becomes central to the sovereign state. Mobility raises massive problems for the modern state because a mobile population is hard to monitor and thus control. So, as Urry points out: ‘The security of states increasingly involves complex control systems of recording, measuring and assessing populations that are intermittently moving, beginning in the “west” with the system of the humble passport but now involving many elements of a “digital order”’.42

Thus mobility needs to be reframed in relation to the state, which is the vector of border governmentality, favouring relatively immobilised populations.43 We need to track everyday power geometries,44 hierarchies and practices that create hypermobile individuals while immobilising others,45 unevenly distributing ‘motility’.46 This differentiated access to mobility and the ensuing global mobility regime is predicated upon the construction of specific groups of people and their movement as a threat to social order and national security.47 In this sense, it becomes essential to challenge at the same time place-bound membership48 and existing categorisations between mobile and immobile subjects.

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