Outsourcing Hotspot Governance within the EU: Cultural Mediators as Humanitarian–Border Workers in Greece

IF 3.5 2区社会学 Q1 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

International Political Sociology Pub Date : 2021-07-29 DOI:10.1093/IPS/OLAB017

A. Spathopoulou, K. P. Kallio, J. Häkli

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引用次数: 6

Abstract

Responding to the self-declared “Mediterranean migration crisis” in 2015, the European Commission launched a Hotspot Approach to speed up the handling of incoming migrants in the “frontline states” of Greece and Italy. A key element in this operation is the identification of those eligible for asylum, which requires effective communication across cultural and linguistic difference between the asylum system and the migrants, facilitated by officially designated “cultural mediators.” We assess the hotspot governance as a form of outsourcing border control within the EU territory. Beyond sorting out and separating migrants into the categories of deservingness and undeservingness, we propose that the hotspot mechanism represents “governing by communication,” with cultural mediators as key players in this humanitarian–bordering strategy. A focus on how cultural mediators provide the precarious human labor for this governance, offers, we argue, a productive inroad into the ways in which the hotspot economies of deterrence, containment, and care sustain inequalities embedded in race, socioeconomic status, and citizenship.

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欧盟内部外包热点治理：作为人道主义者的文化调解员——希腊边境工人

为了应对2015年自封的“地中海移民危机”，欧盟委员会推出了一项热点方法，以加快处理希腊和意大利“前线国家”的入境移民。这项行动的一个关键要素是识别那些有资格获得庇护的人，这需要在官方指定的“文化调解员”的协助下，跨越庇护系统和移民之间的文化和语言差异进行有效沟通。我们将热点治理评估为在欧盟领土内外包边境控制的一种形式。除了将移民分为应得和不应得两类之外，我们还提出热点机制代表着“沟通治理”，文化调解员是这一人道主义边界战略的关键参与者。我们认为，关注文化中介如何为这种治理提供不稳定的人力，为威慑、遏制和关怀的热点经济维持种族、社会经济地位和公民身份中的不平等提供了富有成效的途径。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

International Political Sociology Multiple-

CiteScore

4.80

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： International Political Sociology (IPS), responds to the need for more productive collaboration among political sociologists, international relations specialists and sociopolitical theorists. It is especially concerned with challenges arising from contemporary transformations of social, political, and global orders given the statist forms of traditional sociologies and the marginalization of social processes in many approaches to international relations. IPS is committed to theoretical innovation, new modes of empirical research and the geographical and cultural diversification of research beyond the usual circuits of European and North-American scholarship.