Vulnerability-Making at Europe’s Edge: How Policies, Documents, and Spatiality Intra-Act in the Context of Young Refugees

When young refugees who arrive in the European Union (EU) are categorized as “unaccompanied minors,” an implicit assumption and ascription coincides with their categorization, namely that they are vulnerable. Being underage and being vulnerable are inextricably linked and often equated. Thus, vulnerability is understood as a bodily fact linked to a person’s age, and discourse consequently overlooks how vulnerability is enacted in the EU’s border regime. To demonstrate how vulnerability is produced and stabilized through entangled practices of human and nonhuman agencies, I examine vulnerability-making in the context of young refugees who were classified as “unaccompanied minors” in Malta. I pay specific attention to policies, documents, and spatiality and ask: How is vulnerability of young refugees in the EU’s border regime produced and stabilized? And, how are nonhuman agencies implicated in these dynamics? The article, on one hand, makes an important empirical contribution to understanding the construction of vulnerability in respect to unaccompanied minors. The theoretical contribution of the article, on the other hand, lies in offering a new way of conceptualizing vulnerability in the border regime and within bordering practices in the EU by examining it through the epistemic lens of intra-action.