Outsourcing Asylum and the Advent of 'Protection Lite'

The new volume Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the Making of European Space (Ashgate, 2011) provides an innovative contribution to the debate on contemporary European geopolitics by tracing some of the new political geographies and geographical imaginations emergent within - and made possible by - the EU's actions in the international arena.

Drawing on case studies that range from the Arctic to East Africa, the nine empirical chapters provide a critical geopolitical reading of the ways in which particular places, countries, and regions are brought into the EU's orbit and the ways in which they are made to work for 'EU'rope. The analyses look at how the spaces of 'EU'ropean power and actorness are narrated and created, but also at how 'EU'rope's discursive (and material) strategies of incorporation are differently appropriated by local and regional elites, from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

In his chapter, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen analyses how EU's asylum policy is increasingly being outsourced through legal and political constructions of pre-frontier borders that risk fundamentally challenging the current refugee protection regime and replace it with a notion of 'protection lite'. The question of EU border management is a particularly important concern of several contributions, highlighting some of the ways in which the Union's border-work is actively (re)making the European space.

Review: 'Through a wide-ranging set of theoretically and empirically rich case studies, this fascinating volume shows how Europe's changing role in the world is shaped by concrete territorial discourses and practices that are rooted in a particular conception of Europe as a historical and geographical construct. The book offers important insights into the complicated, multifaceted ways in which Europe functions as a geopolitical actor, even as it opens up new ways of doing “critical geopolitics”.'
Alexander B. Murphy, University of Oregon, USA

The book can be ordered here.