Paper details
| Paper authors | Marta Welander |
| In panel on | Migration, Protracted Crisis and Humanitarianism |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
The past few years have seen the continued hardening of European borders vis-à-vis refugees and displaced people arriving at its shores, oftentimes originating from countries tormented by longstanding humanitarian crises. However, rather than formulating an adequate humanitarian response to the involuntary displacement resulting from such protracted crises, European states appear to have framed their response based on the inadvertent and problematic ‘refugee-migrant dichotomy’ contained within the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Geneva Convention) from 1951, when drivers of cross-border displacement were limited in nature. Thus, based on a loosely defined ‘migrant identity’, a discourse of ‘security threats’ and far-too-narrow definition of who counts as a ‘refugee’, cross-border displacement is framed as unauthorised migration requiring tougher border controls, states of emergency, and costly (yet largely unsuccessful) tackling of trafficking networks.
Drawing on extensive first-hand field research from the violent borderlands of Calais in France, the bottleneck scenario in Ventimiglia in Italy, and the ‘open-air prisons’ on the Greek islands, this paper demonstrates the extent to which securitisation, border policing and criminalisation of humanitarian aid work have impeded the access to universal human rights for those fleeing protracted humanitarian crises across the globe.
