ABSTRACT
This book is dated and grounded in work I conducted primarily between 2010 and 2014. History has moved swiftly, however, and the many new developments which have occurred between 2014 and 2016 are largely absent from the current analysis. News coverage of migrant smuggling in Europe has exploded, with various new actors in the fi eld providing commentary and reporting on developments on the ground. A major new development in the Mediterranean has been a shift from a ‘defensive’ state of migration control to an ‘off ensive’ state of border control, with the beginning of Operation Sophia in the central Mediterranean in June 2015 1 and the deployment of NATO boats in the Aegean Sea in February 2016 2 to counteract migrant smuggling practices in Libya and Turkey respectively. By excluding these developments from the book, I have partly side-stepped the over-mediatized and dramatized spectacle which has encapsulated Europe in the rhetoric of contemporary ‘crisis’. My intent has been to understand and explicate the main contingencies which give rise to current events, and to make a critical analytic intervention in the increasingly hostile circus of journalism and politics in Europe.
