Tabea Scharrer

Research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, co-funded by the International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment and the Department “Law and Anthropology” of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

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The governance of mobility has become increasingly sophisticated, advancing in the technological, legal, and border enforcement practices of ordering. The European Union is externalising its migration control into the Mediterranean and to states in Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as to private and international actors. This process entails new forms of technologies and co-operation, creating new configurations of exclusion and criminalisation. So far, few studies have analysed the technicisation of externalisation and its effects on local contexts. For this reason, the research group studies these on-the-ground practices through in-depth, long-term ethnographic fieldwork. 

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Spanning legal, discursive and technological dimensions, our research studies the implementation of exclusionary practices in mobility control and the lifeworlds of the people affected by them. Practices of exclusion consist of legal and bureaucratic ordering tactics that keep people out of the EU, the securitisation of borders and migration routes, encampment and detention, as well as procedures of biometric registration and data gathering, which are part of the humanitarian biopolitics of care and control. Looking at those multiple modes of governance, we aim to analyse the complex relationship between states and law, agency and bureaucracy, spatiotemporal control mechanisms to migrants’ and locals’ imaginaries of future and hope. At the same time, we seek to enrich the discussion about the global condition of excluded populations and their efforts to exert control over criminalisation and uncertain futures. We trace how migrants experience the increasing securitisation and technicisation of mobility control (in Niger, Kenya, Sudan or along the Greek-Turkish border), and compare the various ways in which people on the move negotiate, adapt and react to the disempowering governance tactics.

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Our project critically examines technicisation in relation to EU externalisation in four different sites: Chios island and mainland camps in Greece (Margarita Lipatova); Kakuma and Kalobeyei refugee camps in Kenya (Stefan Millar); refugee management in Sudan (Timm Sureau); and, refugee protection in Niger (Laura Lambert). Each locality represents a unique socio-material and cultural configuration of the EU borderlands. These policies are, however, also stipulated and appropriated by local actors – policy-makers, bureaucrats, security officers, refugees and migrants – and thereby transformed in their local contexts.​​​