The faces of human smuggling in Turkey and Greece

The organization of human smuggling from the Middle East and Africa through Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean has become a political concern throughout Europe, attracting intense and polarizing media attention. The timely book Human Smuggling in the Eastern Mediterranean reformulates how we understand human smuggling, challenging popular and political conceptions of the practice in Europe.

The book is written by Theodore Baird and is based on his doctoral dissertation completed under the ‘Migration Industry’ research programme at the Danish Institute for International Studies. In the book, Baird proposes a new theoretical framework for explaining and understanding human smuggling in ‘contingent’ contexts of social transformation. Empirical material for the book was collected through extensive fieldwork among smugglers and migrants who survived the grossing of the Aegean Sea.

Link to the book here: https://www.routledge.com/Human-Smuggling-in-the-Eastern-Mediterranean/Baird/p/book/9781138656352

Theodore Baird is currently a post-doctoral researcher at VU Amsterdam working as team member of the Human Costs of Border Control project (borderdeaths.org). He researches issues of border security in the European Union. His recent work on surveillance design communities can be found in the journal Surveillance and Society. He can be contacted by email at t.e.baird@vu.nl