The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning

Working from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on the social sciences, legal studies, and the humanities, this book investigates the causes and effects of the extremities experienced by migrants.

Firstly, the volume analyses the development and political-cultural conditions of current practices and discourses of “bordering,” “illegality,” and “irregularization.” Secondly, it focuses on the varieties of irregularization and on the diversity of the fields, techniques and effects involved in this variegation. Thirdly, the book examines examples of resistance that migrants and migratory cultures have developed in order to deal with the predicaments they face. The book uses the European Union as its case study, exploring practices and discourses of bordering, border control, and migration regulation. But the significance of this field extends well beyond the European context as the monitoring of Europe’s borders increasingly takes place on a global scale and reflects an internationally increasing trend.

Joost de Bloois is assistant professor in the departments of Cultural Analysis and Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the nexus between contemporary culture and politics. He has co-authored two introductions in Cultural Studies (2009, 2010) as well as a volume on the thought of Alain Badiou (with Ernst van den Hemel, 2012). His book on contemporary communisms is forthcoming (2014).

Robin Celikates is associate professor of political and social philosophy and vice-director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Kritik als soziale Praxis (Campus, 2009), the co-author of Einführung in die politische Philosophie (Reclam, 2013) and the co-editor of Socialité et reconnaissance (L’Harmattan, 2007), Philosophie der Mo-ral (Suhrkamp, 2009) and of Transformations of Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014).

Yolande Jansen is a senior researcher at the department of philosophy and the ACGS (Amsterdam Center for Globalisation Studies) of the University of Amsterdam. She is also a special professor for the Dutch Socrates Foundation, holding the chair of humanism in relation to religion and secularity at the VU University Amsterdam. She is the author of several journal articles and of Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of Multiculturalism: French Modernist Legacies (AUP, 2013).