par Jeandesboz, Julien
Editeur scientifique Caballero Vélez, Diego ;Cusumano, Eugenio;Loschi, Chiara;Raineri, Luca
Référence Varieties of securitization: Governing migration along the Central Mediterranean Route, Routledge, London
Publication A Paraître, 2026
Partie d'ouvrage collectif
Résumé : European Union (EU) border and migration enforcement along the Central Mediterranean Route (CMR) and in the Mediterranean in general is largely reliant on a range of technical objects. These include sensors deployed on land, at sea, in the air and in space, various devices such as computers, phones or tablets and a range of input implements such as card readers or biometric readers operated by border and migration officials, or the telecommunication and computer infrastructure that enables those objects to be interconnected, and many more. For the best part of the early 21st century, in fact, EU efforts to make the Mediterranean into “a controlled space, at least from a European perspective” have relied both symbolically and materially on the deployment of various technological systems and infrastructure (Bellanova and Duez, 2016: 23).Students of security politics are familiar with the notion that security is a sociospatial practice, which is not only inscribed in particular social and physical spaces, but more importantly produces sociospatial settings (Adamson, 2016), an insight that also applies to EU security policies (Jeandesboz, 2020). The CMR is arguably one such setting. It does not exist independently from practices of categorization and classification, surveillance and detection, interception and reporting aimed at movements of persons across the Mediterranean (Walters, 2021: 244). These practices bind together geophysical features, human action, and objects into a meaningful pattern of space and movement that eventually makes the CMR a reality in the context of EU border and migration enforcement as well as that of other activities and organisations.Insofar as these practices are highly mediated by technical objects, it is logical to consider security as a sociotechnical practice as well as a sociospatial one, that is as a practice situated in a specific sociomaterial setting and entangled with various artifacts (Fayard and Weeks, 2014; Orlikowski, 2000). The main question explored in this chapter is therefore how technical objects make the CMR and more broadly the Mediterranean possible as a “controlled space”, or at least as a space that ought to be controlled. To this end, the chapter consists of two parts. I first sketch how a variety of contributions propose to approach (in)security as a sociotechnical practice, including in relation to (EU) border and migration enforcement. I then endeavour to outline how such perspectives can be deployed to support a sociotechnical analytics of border and migration enforcement in the Central Mediterranean.

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