Seminario The Afterlife of 2015: Reordering Borders of the EU

The 2015 refugee movement marked a critical juncture in EU migration governance, reshaping both Europe’s internal and external political and social landscape. In its first episode, migration and border governance was reorganized through an entanglement of security and humanitarian rationales. At the Union’s southern external borders—particularly in Spain, Italy, and Greece—practices of containment, deportation and deterrence were framed through the language of rescue and crisis management. After 2020, a second phase became discernible. Humanitarian rhetoric receded, while militarized forms of control and overt practices of exclusion and violence intensified and were increasingly normalized. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research at Europe’s borders, this seminar examines these two phases in the “afterlife of 2015” and reflects on their broader political and normative implications.