flagship ISA journal International Political Sociology. She is author of The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (2009), The Contested Politics of Mobility (2011), Post/Humanitarian Border Politics Between Mexico and the US (2015), and Reclaiming Migration (co-authored with Perkowski, Stevens and Vaughan-Williams, 2020).
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Europe's Migration Crisis at the Cambridge University Press website.…modern European tradition of humanism as it comes to terms with the ‘radical independence’ of nature. In this regard, the ocean represents a multiplication of unruly forces, all of which are unmasterable on multiple counts.The page 99 test provides an important insight into one of the key structuring arguments of Europe’s Migration Crisis. However, a reader would miss key aspects of the book if they were to read this page in isolation and would find a rather complex argument that requires further explanation.
Yet there is an irony in all this, which is that while biophysical violence raises the spectre of unruly oceanic forces that tap into fears which have a long history in modern European humanist thought, in effect such violence might be understood to represent little more than the instrumentalisation of the sea for the purposes of migration control (Heller and Pezzani, 2016). Indeed, Philip Steinberg (2001) has importantly mapped the ways in which oceans, far from ungovernable sites, are places of extensive regulation and instrumental mobilisation. This raises a critical question: does biophysical violence in this regard simply point to the partial success of a humanist impulse to master nature, through the mobilisation of the sea in terms that ‘vanish’ those lives which are perceived as the “toxic refuse” of “global ‘civilisation’” (Brown, 2017: 36)? It is here that the tensions of a longer-standing humanist tradition emerge again, and not simply in terms of the tension between rendering the dignity of human life universal and the tendency to limit dignity to the privileged few. What we also face is a tension related to what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as the difference between “the human-human and the nonhuman-human” (cited in Brown, 2017: 29). Translated for our purposes, this tension might be understood in terms of the difference between a humanist ideal of ‘the human’ and the reality of the ‘nonhuman-human’, the latter of which emerges as a force that is beyond the capacity of people to fully comprehend or control. To put it another way, if modernist and humanist assumptions about the radical independence of nature as a physical entity are under erasure as the social enactment of ‘nature’ becomes increasingly evident (e.g. in the face of crises such as climate change or the washing up of bodies on various sea shores), then conversely what might have previously been understood as social forces (e.g. the production of consumer waste or border management operations) are increasingly understood as physical forces that inevitably exceed human mastery. On this reading, if biophysical violence can be understood as a success, then it becomes so in terms that are simply out of human control.
Reflecting again on biophysical violence in light of this, we might say that despite the ocean being mobilised through social forces in terms that are effectively lethal or even ‘murderous’ (Heller and Pezzani, 2016), such unruly forces can never be fully mastered. Indeed, this may well be a good thing, since it has been suggested that such attempts at total mastery ultimately bely the “uniquely human capability of wreaking horror, holocaust,…
Europe’s Migration Crisis provides a critical diagnosis of the EU’s policy response to precarious migration across the Mediterranean during the period of so-called ‘crisis’ from 2015-16. The book also explores how solidarity activist interventions in Italy and Malta challenge the dynamics of power and violence embedded within such policies. It situates this analysis in relation to debates over human dignity, suggesting that tensions in the modern European formation of the concept are pivotal in understanding struggles over migration today.
Page 99 comes toward the end of Part I of the book, which shows how the EU’s policy agenda bridges humanitarian and security concerns. The analysis emphasises the material as well as the symbolic violence of the EU’s response to migration, to argue that contemporary border deaths reflect an emergent mode of biophysical violence in which environmental forces operate directly on the biological bodies of those migrating.
It is here that page 99 reflects a broader argument: that 2015-16 was a moment in which the EU was forced to confront what the book calls its ‘double failure of mastery’. On the one hand, the period was marked by fears over the ‘unruly forces’ of migration – people on the move without authorisation. On the other, border deaths resulting from the abandonment of people at sea also provoked deep-reaching fears about the power of ‘unruly’ non-human forces.
Page 99 points to the complexities of this situation. While oceanic forces play a key role in EU efforts to prevent unwanted migration, the deaths to which these give rise highlight both the conceits of human mastery and the inequities of human dignity. This means that lethal dimensions of contemporary governing practices are “put beyond the capacity of humans to address” and “beyond human responsibility” (page 100).
The book does not stop there, however. Part II develops another key argument, that the concept of dignity has been characterised over time by tensions between its hierarchical and egalitarian dimensions. From page 105, Europe’s Migration Crisis goes on to highlight the ways the concept is engaged by solidarity activists in contestations over what it means to be ‘human’.
--Marshal Zeringue
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