Vicki Squire, Europe’s Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity – Cambridge University Press, September 2020

Rejecting claims that migration is a crisis for Europe, this book instead suggests that the ‘migration crisis’ reflects a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European tradition of humanism. Squire provides a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of the EU’s response to the ‘crisis’, highlighting the centrality of practices of governing migration through death and precarity. Furthermore, she unpacks a series of pro-migration activist interventions that emerge from the lived experiences of those regularly confronting the consequences of the EU’s response. By showing how these advance alternative horizons of solidarity and hope, Squire draws attention to a renewed humanism that is grounded both in a deepened respect for the lives and dignity of people on the move, and an appreciation of longer histories of violence and dispossession. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers working on migration in political science, international relations, European studies, law and sociology.

‘This book masterfully documents how the barbarians appearing at the frontiers of Europe are none other than the European governments themselves and how the European licence to dictate the measure of a human is being revoked by acts of hope and solidarity.’

Engin Isin – Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London