Panel 1 - The production of crisis and fragility

Panel Presenters
- Lorenzo Olivieri: The temporal production of fragility: hijacked knowledge and non-knowledge in migration management
- Bernd Kasparek: The Crisis of Schengen, revisited. Intensive Zones of Europeanisation and the Return of Sovereign Violence
- Mariia Shaidrova: How the borders in Ukraine became wide open in light of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine?
- Rocco Bellanova: Infrastructural fragility and/as algorithmic power in European security

Panel Discussant
- Sally Wyatt

Panel Abstract

Border regimes are assemblages of humans and things, policies and institutions subjected to breakdowns, fragility and moments of perceived crisis. For instance, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in the summer 2015 was perceived as the collapse of the European border regime due to overwhelming flux of incoming people on the move. Yet, this representation neglected the long-term external and internal factors which led to that situation, and it conceived of ‘crisis’ as a limited period of time with a clear beginning and ending (Hess and Kasparek 2017). Against this narrative, we might conceive the European border regime as an inherently fragile macro-order, which needs to be constantly and iteratively re-enacted (Lausberg and Pelizza 2021). Yet, the notion of fragility should not be too easily dismissed as it might invite us to consider borders and border-work as a space of more or less acute conflicts shaped by various actors. In this regard, we might think of fragility not as a substantial feature or property of situations, but as a condition emerging from the constantly changing web of relations defining those situations (Hennion 2019).

We might then ask: when do borders become more fragile? What are the factors and actors that make them fragile? Fragility for whom? To make few examples, how did the pandemic – a situation of global ‘crisis’ – affected people trying to enter Europe? How is the European border regime dealing with the war in Ukraine?