ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what migrant struggles reveal about the condition of EUrope in the contemporary moment. Conceiving these struggles as diagnostics of EUrope, it highlights how their contestations bring to light dominant frames through which EUrope narrates and presents itself to the world – namely as a political formation of transborder design, as underpinned by a humanitarian ethos, and as characterised by a post-racial and postcolonial reality. Building on Judith Butler’s concept of framing, the chapter shows how EUrope’s divisionary practices become (discursively) constructed in ways that seek to rationalise, explain, or justify border practices that must inevitably and violently enact who belongs to EUrope’s community and who does not. Acts of migrant resistance not only animate these dominant frames but also distort and de-centre them, and thereby make space for alternative communal imaginaries.
