A Chronotope of Containment Development: Europe's Migrant Crisis and Africa's Reterritorialisation

Europe has taken unprecedented levels of peacetime defensive actions against the perceived demands by African migrants for “absolute hospitality”. In collaboration with politicians across the Mediterranean, European political leaders are authoring a chronotope that removes Africa and Africans from global time. This discursive vision rests on an epistemological reorientation coding all Africans as potential migrants capable of threatening European and African sovereignty and security. This conceptual realignment has seeded a defensive assemblage of coercive controls, sociologies of knowledge, and a campaign to generate sedentary African subjects. Ultimately it is engendering “containment development” aimed at geographically localising Africans’ desires and imaginations. In an era of planetary entanglement and exchange, this discursively and materially excludes Africans from what it means to be fully human.     

Mapping Illegality: The i‐Map and the Cartopolitics of “Migration Management” at a Distance

Cartographies for “migration management” are part and parcel of controversial border practices far from conventional borderlines. Focusing on the i‐Map, this study renders how the European Union's current practices of remote border control are visualised among migration policy circles and expert security actors through a “mapping migration matrix”. The lines portraying migration flows in recurrent maps generate a shared expert language and a common geographical imaginary reinforcing practices of contention and classification of those assumed to move toward the European Union irregularly. It is argued that illegality is constructed in ways that target border crossing long before any border is crossed, making someone illegal at the very moment and place where s/he might decide to migrate. This paper analyses the cartopolitics and limits of cartographic expertise in the production of a “routes thinking” able to legitimise extra‐territorial interceptions and practices of remote border control.