ABSTRACT

Our times are characterized not only by the rapid, global flow of goods, services, and technology, but also by human mobility on an unprecedented scale; Frontex, the EU border agency, reported that during the first nine months of 2015, nearly 710,000 people crossed the European Union’s borders, an amount more than doubled, compared to last year.1 Millions worldwide are now forcibly displaced due to war, persecution, the expulsion of minorities, land expropriation, natural disaster, or economic collapse. As this happens, national borders loosen and tighten, accommodating finance and trade while warding off mass movements of people. In this process the refugee has become a symbol for a new political consciousness, in fact, to some, “the only thinkable figure” (Agamben, 2000:14) in the process of dissolution of the nation-state and the plasticity of borders. While “state,” “place,” “territory,” “space,” and “country” imply a degree of permanence and embeddedness (Hyndman and Giles, 2011), refugee mobility seems to unhinge these categories and to re-construct the historically and geographically delineated sites of departure, journey, and arrival. Consequently, the refugee condition tests the limits of fundamental political categories like the cosmopolitan subject, citizenship, sovereignty, and human rights (Benhabib, 2001); it has become an emergent domain for scholarship in (feminist) geography, anthropology, and conflict and security studies.