Paper: Precarious Lives and Laws in European Borderlands

Paper details

Paper authors Nataliya Tchermalykh
In panel on Borders and Subjectivities: Imagination, bodies, and political experiences
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting In-Person / Online

Abstract

--Apologies for a late submission, this paper has been submitted to a different panel due to a technical mistake--

This paper provides an anthropological analysis of life narratives and sinuous legal trajectories of Afghan refugees on the move across Europe. It is based on first-hand ethnographic observations, gathered during two field trips to Calais (France) and to the Chios and Mytilini islands (Greece), conducted by Nataliya Tchermalykh in May-August 2021.
Navigating within the nets of local and global infrastructures of humanitarian aid, this paper will reflect on how refugees negotiate their passage with different individuals - NGO-workers, lawyers, local populations, as well as the agents of law enforcement, cost guards, and asylum case-workers, enforcing the European borders on earth, on sea, and on paper.
Focusing specifically on the access to justice of refugee populations, I gathered their life narratives, opinions and accounts of the recent epidemiological and geopolitical emergencies, such as COVID-19 pandemics, Brexit, recent Franco-British and Greco-Turkish intergovernmental tensions and decisions, as well as the withdrawal of the American troops from Afghanistan. These emergencies directly affected the lives of the inhabitants of the camps and their alentours and added to the fragmentation of the already complex social fabric of the refugee lives across Europe.
By laying the focus on socio-legal trajectories of migrants across and beyond Europe, the aim of this conversation is to come to a deeper understanding of the dynamic relationship between the life narratives, the law and the space, as it is configured in European border zones.

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