Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The contours of the geography of the crisis I am proposing here are written down  by names and places: Lesvos, Calais, Ventimiglia, Lampedusa, Paris, Molenbeek ( Belgium), Nice, but also Brexit, Syria, Turkey and Libya. I believe there is an important  historical matter at work beneath this “imaginary geography”. This geography  interpellates us a “geography of war”: war against migrants and asylum seekers and to  their desire of mobility and welfare; but also, and usually forgotten, war against “post- migrants” or postcolonial Europeans, that is against European sons of decades of a  racist state management of European territories and populations. This specific geography is showing a Europe gripped into what can be called a “manichean securitarian delirium." Policing the Refugee Crisis: Neoliberalism between Biopolitics and Necropolitics (You might need only a free account to access this analysis)

"It is also important to recognise that the stories we consume are, for the most part, commodities produced by profit-making companies. Like other commodities, their production, value and demand are driven by market forces. This can harm those at the centre of the stories, distort our understanding of a crisis and even contribute to a sense of panic – which, in turn, provokes panicked responses from the authorities." Rather than seeing European racism as a thing of the past, the recognition of its persistence is essential if we are to understand the refugee crisis and some of the responses to it. Thousands of people from former European colonies, whose grandparents were treated as less than human by their European rulers, have drowned in the Mediterranean in the past two decades, yet this only became a “crisis” when the scale of the disaster was impossible for Europeans to ignore. 5 myths about the refugee crisis

"Syria and the crisis of global liberal democracy"