In‐Between Places: Trans‐Saharan Transit Migrants in Morocco and the Fragmented Journey to Europe

Abstract: As undocumented migration becomes more difficult, migrants' journeys become longer and more fragmented. This is a response to new spatialities of migration control which are continually reconfigured in an effort to eliminate clandestine movement. In the trans‐Saharan region, this pattern of fragmented journeys also arises from a network of transnational social organisations that depend upon newly available technologies. Migrants' social networks provide both the means and the motivation for continued movement, even as destinations become more elusive. This paper investigates the imbalanced conflict between the social organisation of Sahara transit migrants and the developing spatial logic of control. It is based on recent research with undocumented migrants in Morocco.     

Nationalizing international relief: Romanian responses to American aid for children in the Great War era

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interactions between American humanitarian agendas and initiatives and domestic efforts for child relief in Romania in the aftermath of the Great War. While focusing on the presence of the European Children’s Fund (ECF) in post-war Romania, the article traces the domestic organization of relief, the Romanian elites’ turn to American humanitarian assistance, and their active responses to this external aid on behalf of war-suffering children. The article argues that Romanian leadership of child welfare initiatives nationalized American humanitarian aid by integrating ECF’s institutional efforts into domestically established philanthropic associations. This nationalization was sustained in three key ways: (1) American humanitarians’ own engagement of local channels in aid diffusion; (2) the growing network of national associations of child welfare in post-war Romania; (3) the competing political agendas of both donors and recipients. The case of Romanian responses to American aid for children, and its eventual domestic institutionalization, challenges the seemingly unequal relationship between Western donors and East-Central European recipients during a period of post-war reconstruction and sociopolitical transformation. It sheds light on the transnational dimension of the humanitarian process, driven by the dual agency of foreign humanitarians and domestic interlocutors in the country of aid reception.     

Urban atmospheres of terror

This essay advances an affective agenda in urban geopolitics that studies the everyday felt experience of urban terrorism. It takes as examples the relations between the spatial politics and affective atmospheres of Place de la République (Paris) and Place de la Bourse/Beursplein (Brussels) in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. Intersecting feminist geopolitics and non-representational geographies, the essay bridges geographical studies of experience and affective atmospheres with experiential accounts in urban geopolitics. It argues for a renewed conceptual engagement and scholarly focus on the affective dimensions of urban geopolitics and security, that highlights the contested and unequal topographies of everyday experience in the aftermath of terrorism in urban Europe.     

Neoliberalizing state spaces in postwar Western Europe: The emergence of a new integrative regime of sovereignty

Contrary to recurrent statements that neoliberalism was implemented from the late 1970s in the United Kingdom and United States, this article shows how in fact, this political ideology was rolled out in Western Europe much earlier, in the years following World War II. The experiences of Italy, West Germany and France reveal how some neoliberal reformers took advantage of postwar geopolitical crises to impulse a new spatial regime of sovereignty based on macroregional economic integration and submission of domestic policies to international economic competition. Far from being hegemonic, this neoliberal opening up of state spaces is implemented within the framework of a composite, flexible and ever evolving policy regime. A multifactorial and complex explanatory framework is used to show how neoliberalization in Western Europe takes the shape of a systemic process of macro-regional economic integration.