SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter explores the aporias of the European Union’s attempts to prevent migrants from arriving on its shores whilst encouraging them to sedentarise in transit countries like Sudan. The first part employs an expansive notion of technology to explore the range of practices through which borders are performed and the migrant is produced as an object of policy. It traces how EU policies have constructed, in several institutional spaces, a discourse around migration which variously frames the migrant as victim and entrepreneur—a potential victim of human trafficking and an actual victim of inadequate skill. In doing so, it explores the entanglements between violence, humanitarianism and neoliberal development. The second part of this chapter argues that European amnesia notwithstanding, an analysis of neoliberal restructurings of the political economies of the Global South since the structural adjustment programmes of the 1970s is critical for understanding the current impetus for migration to Europe. This also draws our attention to the recapitulation of the figure of entrepreneur in neoliberal discourse—once the African peasant, now recast as the migrant.