Nick Vaughan-Williams, Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond – forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Europe’s Border Crisis investigates dynamics in EU border security and migration management and advances a path-breaking framework for thought, judgment, and action in this context. It argues that a crisis point has emerged whereby irregular migrants are treated as both a security threat to the EU and as a life that is threatened and in need of saving. This leads to paradoxical situations such that humanitarian policies and practices often expose irregular migrants to dehumanizing and lethal border security mechanisms. The dominant way of understanding these dynamics, one that blames a gap between policy and practice, fails to address the deeper political issues at stake and ends up perpetuating the terms of the crisis.

Drawing on conceptual resources in biopolitical theory, particularly the work of Roberto Esposito, the book offers an alternative diagnosis of the…