Making 'EUrope' through Technologised Mobility Control

Schengen, R&D, and the Imagined Community of 'EUrope

Bibliographic Data

ID3948540
AuthorsClemens Binder (0000-0002-9842-0139, University of Copenhagen, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume30
Issue3
Pages1448-1478
Publication date2025-05-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2024.2444633
OpenAlexW4406001566
LanguageEN
References cited99

Starting from the observation that mobility politics in the EU are increasingly shaped by notions of identity, community and values, this article sets out to unpack how EUrope is made as an ‘imagined community’ through specific practices within its mobility regime. Building on analyses of how the perceived ‘free’ mobility in the Schengen area is entangled with imaginations of the EU as space of fundamental rights, the article is interested in how these sel-imaginations are challenged through productions of mobility inequality. Against the backdrop of wide-reaching technological modes of mobility control, this article moves to interrogate how techno-politics of border security ‘make’ the EUropean mobility regime and thereby are a vital part of the ‘imagined community’ of EUrope as such. To this end, the article empirically focuses on practices of Research and Development (R&D) within the Security Research Programme (SRP) of the EU. This programme, embedded within the larger Horizon Research Framework Programmes, funds projects to the end of stabilising the Schengen regime. In this sense, R&D becomes an important site to understand how imaginaries of EUrope and mobility are perpetuated through R&D and how, in consequence, structures of mobility inequality, exclusion and violence are perpetuated. Following this argument, this article seeks to unpack the seeming ‘paradoxes’ of EUrope as a community of free mobility in opposition to producing a non-EUropean ‘Other’ as threatening. It uses the case of R&D to show how imaginaries of integration through free mobility are mutually constitutive of producing mobility inequalities through securitising non-EUropean mobilities. The case of R&D allows for an understanding how these tensions are produced in more mundane practices of border control on two levels. First, it unpacks the construction of the dichotomy through which ‘free’ mobility in Schengen is juxtaposed to securitising and racialising mobilities of the ‘Other’ and how practices of R&D are embedded in a system of mobility inequalities. Second, it delves into the self-imagination of EUrope as space of fundamental rights and how specific notions of ethics and ‘values’ are construed as a justification of exclusionary techno-politics of mobility control

Economics · Economy · Management · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · European Criminal Justice and Data Protection · European Union Policy and Governance · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Tools

Open DOI