POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
Published online 17 October 2010 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/psp.632
De-naturalising Transit Migration.
Theory and Methods of An Ethnographic
Regime Analysis
Sabine Hess1,*
1
Institute for Folklore Studies/European Ethnology, LMU-Munich, Germany
ABSTRACT
Against the background of the research project
entitled ‘Transit Migration’ (2002–2004), on
migration regimes in Turkey, Greece and the
Balkan region, the article will discuss
methodological and conceptual problems and
challenges of qualitative studies of transit
migration. By analysing diverse practices and
conditions of ‘transit migrations’ the article
will argue against attempts to qualitatively
define the phenomena. Rather, it suggests
applying the concept of ‘precarious transit
zone’ in order to grasp the complexity,
unsteadiness, and multi-directionality of many
migrational ‘transit-biographies’. On an
ethnographic level the concept of ‘transit
zone’ allows a consideration of different
figures of transit migrants from those in the
traditional sense of the term, visa-overstayers
or rejected asylum seekers transiting diverse
countries on their way forward and
increasingly also on their difficult way back to
their countries of origin as well as the
increasing number of migrants ‘stuck in
mobility’. Moreover, the concept urges
migration research to adopt an ‘ethnographic
regime approach’, which implies a multi-
dimensional research design. It combines
ethnographic research with discourse analyses
and an analytical focus on the macro level.
This shows that transit migration is not only
shaped by migration related policies by the
EU, nation-states and international/
intergovernmental organisations, but it is
shaped by ‘economies of transit’. Additionally
an ethnographic regime approach also
* Correspondence to: Sabine Hess, Institute for Folklore
Studies/European Ethnology, Ludwigstr. 25, 80539 München.
E-mail: s.hess@vkde.fak12.uni-muenchen.de
analyses the impact of academic research itself
in re-constructing categories used by the
governing bodies. Copyright © 2010 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Accepted 8 August 2010
Keywords: transit migration, knowledge
production, south-eastern Europe, border
regime, international organisations, migration
governance
W
hen we analyse and discuss migration
in the newly constructed geopolitical
and social spaces at the fringes of
Schengen-Europe we can identify a new migra-
tional figure that has dominated the political and
academic debate for some years: the ‘transit
migrant’. The ‘transit migrant’ is mostly por-
trayed as a young single male, most of the time
irregular and more or less trapped by smugglers
and condemned to the informal labour market.
The ‘transit migrants’ are this anonymous mass
of people on the move, heading towards Europe.
With the forward displacement of immigration
control at the outer border of the European Union
it is the ‘transit migrant’ – before being trans-
formed into an ‘immigrant’ – that has come to
occupy a central position in the European Union’s
immigration policy.
This logic of pre-located migration controls is
best described by the ‘Global approach to migra-
tion’ – the new migration policy guideline by the
European Commission (Commission of the Euro-
pean Union, 2007) – and its main governing
concept of ‘migratory routes’, which I will outline
later in more detail. Thereby the main regulative
challenge for the European Union migration
control policy consists in placing, the anonymous
‘transit migrants’ along their routes into the dif-
ferent existing political categories of asylum
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
De-naturalising Transit Migration
seekers, wanted labour migrants, victims of traf-
ficking and irregular migrants – whereas the last
category is equated with illicit migration projects.1
Due to their diffuse (in regard to time and space),
blurred and pre-categorised nature, as well as
their assumed objective to migrate further north
or west in order to become an ‘immigrant’ in the
core European Union countries, the ‘transit
migrant’ seems to be one of the most clearly tar-
geted objects. This covers both academic migra-
tion research on the new European border
regions2 as well as the European Union migration
control apparatus and its will to knowledge, to
cite a Foucauldian insight into the entanglement
of the new modes of governance and knowledge
production (Foucault, 2004). Following the criti-
cal analyses of contemporary political cartogra-
phies and maps of ‘illegal migration’ by the
Canadian political scientist William Walters
(2009), we can even speak ‘of the birth of some-
thing new – a dispositif formed around the time,
space, economy and culture of transit’ (p. 25).
This paper is based on research experience
and results gained in the wake of my last research
project, entitled ‘Transit Migration’, which will
be used to reflect more closely on the production
of this dispositif, its main actors, discourses and
rationalities. By applying a genealogical analysis
to the production of the concept and figure of the
‘transit migrant’, I want to address an epistemo-
logical problem that is written into much migra-
tion research: the problem of naturalisation and
reification of the object to be studied, which is
not a ‘thing’ with a quasi natural existence, but
always already an object of knowledge practices
and technologies: there is no ‘migration’ as such.
Without the political and scientific act of naming
and categorising the cross-border movements of
people there would only be different modes of
mobilities (Karakayali, 2008). In the field of
migration, this basic insight of de-constructivist
social science theories is even more meaningful
since it is a highly politicised field and a lot
research projects develop in close correlation
with political objectives of the European nation
states and the European Union migration poli-
cies – to the extent that the German migration
sociologist Stephan Lanz called migration
research a ‘politicised science’ from its very
origin (Lanz, 2007).
Against this background I want to take up an
analytical perspective, which William Walters
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
429
(2002), in reference to Foucault’s genealogical
studies on power and knowledge, termed
‘de-naturalizing’. Concretely, I want to start with
a reflection on the specific context and conditions
of knowledge production we found in Turkey
when, in 2002, we started our 2-year, ethno-
graphic research project. Turkey, which was
beginning to implement the European Union
migration policy at that time, was a scientific
laboratory to study the main actors and dis-
courses involved in the construction of a power-
knowledge-regime articulated around the notion
of ‘transit migration’. In contrast to the political-
scientific discourse on ‘transit migration’, I will
then turn to a different analytical, conceptual
suggestion: by drawing on our ethnographic
insights into migrants’ strategies3 and also by
drawing on the latest debates in (radical) geogra-
phy of global processes of restructuration of
socio-economic and political-institutional spaces
in the age of globalisation (Brenner, 1997; Wissen
et al., 2008), I will show how highly ‘precarious
transit zones’ emerge at the fringes of EU-Europe
as an effect of migrants practices and of the Euro-
pean border regime alike. Thereby I draw on our
productive understanding of the border regime
developed during the research, opposing all the-
orisations of the border as a solely exclusionist
political mechanism to stop migration. Rather, I
will show how the European border regime pro-
duces mobilities and functions as a catalyst of a
new ‘zoning’ of territories, economies, rights and
subjectivities. Therefore, let me start with the
theoretical as well the methodological interven-
tion of the ‘Transit Migration’ research project.
TRANSIT MIGRATION: THE PERSPECTIVE
OF MIGRATION
‘Transit Migration’ was an interdisciplinary
research and exhibition project as one part of a
national exhibition called ‘Project Migration’
2005 in Cologne, Germany, celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the first guest-worker contract
with Italy (Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2005;
Transit Migration, 2005).4 As a group of political
scientists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists5
and artists, inter-disciplinarity was our curse as
well as our blessing when we started to construct
our multi-sited research project on the Europe-
anisation of migration policy. Concretely, we
wanted to study the new migrational realities at
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
430
the fringes of south Eastern Europe: in Turkey,
in Greece and the Balkans. As cultural anthro-
pologists, with a long disciplinary history in
actor centred research we were convinced that
this methodological approach was best suited to
reveal migrants’ agency and subjectivity – a rep-
resentation we thought necessary against the
hegemonic narrative of plight, victimhood and
dead bodies washed ashore on the Mediterra-
nean coasts, which still dominates the public
debate. The political scientists and sociologists
were bewildered with our ‘nosing around’ in the
inner city areas of Istanbul, Athens or Belgrade
trying to track migrants’ traces (Marcus, 1995).
In line with their disciplinary traditions they
tried instead to focus the analysis on the political
discourses as well as institutional and program-
matic settings in Brussels, Berlin and the Inter-
net. However, due to a number of problems with
the mainstream theorisations of the European
border regime and surprises in the course of our
field research, we tried to combine all of these in
the approach we labelled ‘ethnographic regime
analysis’.
Our theoretical starting point was that the erec-
tion of a ‘wall’ around Europe and elsewhere6
did not seem capable of repressing migration
movements. Despite the massive rebordering by
the European Union and its different member
states, migration still occurred and occurs, alter-
ing the socio-economic geography of border
zones, metropolises and the cultural fabric of
societies. Against this background, our research
project attempted to come to terms with the
Europeanisation of migration policy, and espe-
cially with the formation of the European border
regime, with an approach that examined it as a
social, conflictual process of negotiation on
diverse scales and with a multitude of involved
actors (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe,
2007). In this context, we preferred the concept of
‘migration regime’ instead of the classical system-
theories as it makes it possible to include a mul-
titude of actors whose practices relate to each
other but are not ordered in the form of a central
logic or rationality; that means to speak of a
‘regime’ makes it possible to understand regula-
tion as an effect of social practices and not pre-
suppose it in a functionalist manner. Rather, the
concept of ‘regime’ implies a space of conflict and
negotiation. Thereby we also took the notion of
practice seriously in so far as we were applying
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
S. Hess
a practice orientated understanding of policy not
only in line with neo-Marxist theories of power
relations (Poulantzas, 2002), but also in line with
the latest approaches by an anthropology of the
state (Trouillot, 2001; Sharma and Gupta, 2006).
These constructivist approaches write against
the classical understanding of the state as a
‘coherent, unitary and autonomous’ body
(Mitchell, 2006: 171). Rather, as Aradhana Sharma
and Akhil Gupta put it, the state has to be seen
as an ‘effect of everyday practice, representa-
tional discourses and multiple modalities of
power’ (Sharma and Gupta, 2006: 165). Thereby
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2001) advocates that in
the context of globalisation, an anthropology of
the state should not focus on the ‘state’ but rather
should address ‘state-effects’ and processes of
state-building. He writes, ‘State power is being
redeployed, state effects are appearing in new
sites, and, in almost all cases, this move is one
away from national sites to intra-, supra-, or
transnational ones. An ethnography of the state
can and should capture these effects’ (Trouillot,
2001: 132).
Against this theoretical background and aware
of the gap between theory, policy and implemen-
tation, we were looking for ways to localise the
processes of Europeanisation and transnationali-
sation of migration policy. In so far, we tried to
analyse the actors, practices, technologies and
discourses involved in the process in concrete
social situations, which meant we were applying
some sort of participant observation.7 As we
were working as a team, we were able to apply
a ‘multi-sited ethnography’ (Marcus, 1995) not
only combining different countries in South
Eastern Europe, but also different social and local
settings. Thus, we were able to work with a high
level of cross- and transnational comparison. A
‘multi-sited ethnography’, as George Marcus
defined it was a suitable operationalisation of our
regime-approach as he described it as a radical
constructivist (1995: 105), theoretically driven but
also imaginative ‘exercise in mapping terrain’
(Marcus, 1995: 99). This operationalisation also
implied a diagonal research orientation – as
opposed to the classical dichotomies of micro-
macro, structure-agency or studying down or up
– which the social anthropologists Chris Shore
and Susan Wright called ‘studying through’:
‘tracing the ways in which the different actors,
discourses or technologies create new webs and
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
De-naturalising Transit Migration
relations of power’ (Shore and Wright, 1997:
14).
Thereby we draw on theories of bordering in
line with many other critical researchers who no
longer think of the (European) border in the
sense of a line but rather as fragmented, diffused,
stretched and highly stratified ‘border zones’
(Lahav and Guiraudon, 2000; Guiraudon, 2001;
Walters, 2002; Bigo and Guild, 2005; Rigo, 2005).
For us this also meant abandoning wall-like met-
aphors of the border (Andreas and Snyder, 2000)
in favour of a border, seen as a structurally per-
forated system or regime. However, this post-
national process of border displacement and
externalisation should not be understood as a
sovereign act whereby states extend power or
competence following an abstract claim for hege-
mony and control; rather, it represents a multi-
faceted constitutive plane of struggle, where the
regime of mobility control is itself challenged and
driven by the fluid, clandestine and multidirec-
tional forms of mobility (Sciortino 2004). At first
glance, this may seem like the heroic glorification
of migrant ruses and tactics quite often to be
found in transnational studies on migrant prac-
tices defining them as a ‘counter-hegemonic
space of resistance’ (Appadurai, 2000).8 However,
for us the understanding of migration as a move-
ment ‘that possesses knowledge, follows its own
rules, and collectively organises its own praxis’,
as Yann Moulier Boutang (2002) put it, is a central
epistemological starting point for theorising the
border regime. Herewith we hoped to develop a
theory of the border regime which no longer con-
ceptualises the movement of migration as the
‘other’ of ‘border policies’, but instead as an
immanent central driving and structuring force
(Hess et al., 2009).
For this paper, I now wish to draw on this
theorisation and research experience in three
ways: first, the advantage of the regime analyses
which has shed light on diverse actors, discourses
and practices concerned with governing migra-
tion9 and which highlighted the construction of
what we could call the ‘transit migration man-
agement dispositif’. This approach includes the
condition of its own knowledge production in a
reflexive way, a condition that I turn to in the
next section. Second, it is an ethnographic
approach interested in migrant narratives and
biographies, in their own right but also as a
central source of situated theoretisation of the
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
431
border regime from the perspective of migration.
Here I am going to refer to migrant narratives in
order to suggest the concept of ‘precarious transit
zones’. Third, I want to draw on our constructiv-
ist and productive understanding of the Euro-
pean border regime as a territorial and space
making policy par excellence.
THE TRANSIT MIGRATION MANAGEMENT
DISPOSITIF: THE INVENTION OF THE
‘TRANSIT MIGRANT’
Recalling Foucault’s reflexive writings on power
and knowledge, which clearly demonstrate that
the scientific practices of naming and conceptu-
alising are not innocent but have far reaching
objectifying effects, in retrospect we have to say
that, in the context of Transit Migration research,
the situation we encountered in Turkey in the
years 2001/2002 marked a brilliant laboratory for
reflexive science research. During a period of
what can be described as the globalisation of the
‘migration management’ rationality (Ghosh,
1997; Düvell, 2002; IOM, 2010), it was one of the
rare historical moments when cross-border
movements of people had not yet been catego-
rised and hence had not become objects of
governance.
The fact was that in Turkey or Serbia hardly
anybody seemed to understand us when we
started our research in 2001 and tried to explain
what we wanted to accomplish: namely, to do
research on the effects of the European Union
migration control policies on the lives and strate-
gies of international migrants traversing the
countries on their way to Europe.10 We tried to
explain our research interest in many ways until
we almost began to think that we were hunting
a ghost. But we had already seen many of them
in the inner city areas of Istanbul and in the
so-called reception camps on the Greek islands
in the Aegean Sea. Only when we said that we
wanted to do research on refugees, ‘mülteciler’,
did people suddenly become interested in our
project and begin to give us useful advice.
However, it was neither the result of our scien-
tific jargon nor due to a knowledge gap on behalf
of the people we spoke with. Rather it was simply
the fact – and this is epistemologically a highly
interesting point – that the group of people cat-
egorised, codified and nowadays known as
‘transit migrant’ did not exist in the public
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
432
discourse and apparently also only marginally in
the scientific debate current at that time in Turkey.
It was only during the course of our research
and due to a specific political process that this
discursive figure was introduced. It emerged in
the context of Turkey’s EU pre-accession period
that started in 2000 with the ‘Accession Partner-
ship Document’ (APD), which also forced Turkey
to implement the so called Schengen acquis
without knowing if the proper accession negotia-
tions would start at all (Kirişci, 2003: 80). Here, it
was especially the IOM, as one of the globally
leading intergovernmental agencies in the
field of migration management (Düvell, 2002;
MigMap, 2005), which commissioned the first
studies on the subject with estimated figures, sta-
tistical data and the. naming of some central
routes (IOM 1995; Içduygu, 2003; Hess and
Karakayali, 2007). In providing scientific evi-
dence to the European Union, these studies were
a big milestone towards the labelling of Turkey
as a main ‘transit country’.11 On the one hand,
they problematised very vividly the social reali-
ties behind this label, namely the variety of
migrant practices, the smuggling industry, and
the danger of trafficking and the odds of the vast
informal labour market in the western metropo-
lis of Turkey. But there is also an institutional-
power side to the studies. They helped the IOM
to recommend itself to the EU commission, which
was about to introduce the Schengen regulations,
as the only agency with expertise in the field of
irregular migration. Besides the first studies on
‘transit migration’ and ‘trafficking in women’,12
the IOM field mission in Turkey was and still is
offering institutional help as to set up institu-
tions, to codify law and to train Turkish personal
– classical dimensions of ‘capacity building’
under the label of ‘migration management serv-
ices’ (IOM, 2010a).13 With its practical advice as
well as its knowledge production the IOM clearly
managed to set up the national political agenda
in the field of irregular migration and counter-
trafficking-policies in Turkey. The IOM webpage
of the Turkish field mission can proudly state:
‘Within the scope of the close cooperation and
coordination between International Organization
for Migration and the Ministry of Interior of the
Republic of Turkey, IOM’s inclusion in the draft-
ing process of the legislation on managing migra-
tion has been requested by the Bureau in October
2009, since then IOM has been providing
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
S. Hess
assistance to the Bureau in formulating a new
law, and relevant by-laws, on foreigners and in
managing irregular migratory inflows by assist-
ing with the establishment of a working group
made of governmental authorities, academics
and civil society’ (IOM, 2010b). This quotation
not only reveals the central role of the IOM in the
implementation process of the European Union
migration policies in Turkey and its defining role
in the area of irregular migration. It also shows
one of its main governing practices: namely, to
bring together governmental authorities, aca-
demics and civil society in order to establish a
consensual discourse on the subject matter. The
United Nation High Commissioner on Refugees
(UNHCR) has a similar agenda and plays a
similar role in the field of refugee politics.
The UNHCR, with a long history in Turkey,
and a clearly defined mandate on asylum proce-
dures,14 was a ‘natural’ partner organisation for
the EU agencies and Turkish government bodies,
not only in developing concrete training-
programs for border guards and bureaucrats. It
also performed an important discursive task in
sensitising the public discourse to the need to do
something in line with the European regulations
on asylum (see Hess and Karakayali, 2007). And
in fact, with the asylum discourse the UNHCR
was able to find a material basis in the tiny but
none the less existing milieu of human rights
activism in Turkey. In a similar way the IOM
had, to begin with, to build up a consensus on
the ‘problem’ of irregular transit migration. It
did so by trying to code irregular transit migra-
tion as a security-issue focussing on the irregu-
larity of most of the (transit) migrants and on
the smuggling-mafia. The British migration
researcher Richard Black (2003) comes to the
conclusion in his analyses of IOM’s scientific
contributions to the construction of ‘illegal
migration’ that ‘they generally tended to empha-
size the organisation’s public concerns with the
link between migration and organised crime,
drug-running and prostitution’. And this,
‘reflects a wider literature that has placed the
study on illegal migration firmly within a secu-
rity framework – exactly where states themselves
prefer to see it’ (p. 43). However, we had the
impression during the length of our research in
Turkey that the IOM had some problems with
this kind of problematisation as informality was
a central feature of the Turkish labour market
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
De-naturalising Transit Migration
and the right-wing national discourses were
focused on internal security threats. The other
discursive strategy with which the IOM had
more success was the articulation of ‘trafficking’,
especially of trafficking in women and children,
as the ultimate human rights violation in the
field of irregular migration (see Andrijašević,
2004).15 Here, the IOM could also link its policy
to NGO-activism, with two feminist groups
running ‘rest houses’ for trafficked women (see
Bahl et al., 2010). Thereby both discursive fields
are based on and play with the human rights
discourse that confers legitimation and consen-
sual power to them and renders them to the two
leading discourses of the European Union migra-
tion control policy.
This knowledge practice of the IOM in the case
of Turkey again shows that the governance of
migration is deeply bound up with the problem
of knowing and categorising it, and of conceptu-
alising it as a problem. Foucault (2004) and others
have described this problem as a general, central
scheme at the core of the new art of governance,
which he defined as ‘bio-power’, a term that
referred basically to the historical fact that ‘the
population’ was born and seen as an object of
wealth-production (see Pieper et al., 2007).
William Walters as well as the Italian political
scientist Sandro Mezzadra develop this argu-
ment further with respect to the specific mode of
governance by the EU in relation to mobility and
migration, which are both defined as ‘domopoli-
tics’ (Walters, 2004; Mezzadra, 2009). The notion
of domopolitics plays on the Latin verb domare
that means domesticating and taming. And that
is, according to Walters and Mezzadra, what best
defines the rationality of the EU migration policy.
In short, it doesn’t try ‘to arrest mobility, but to
tame it’ (Walters, 2004: 248), to strategically use
mobility and immobility, that means a policy that
aims at a selective and differential inclusion of
migrants. And this kind of policy needs equiva-
lent new modes of knowledge production – new
forms of (global) governance of knowledge about
movements and populations.
In this context, we can observe an increasing
importance of – what I would call ‘intermediary’,
knowledge producing and processing agencies
within the migration management architecture,
agencies such as the IOM or the International
Centre for Policy Development (ICMPD) in
Vienna (Georgi, 2007), and other national think
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
433
tanks such as the BAMF, the German national
office for migration and asylum. The term ‘inter-
mediary’ or ‘transversal’ denotes their specific
self-positioning in terms of their practices, as
well as in terms of their self-image within the
‘multi-level system of governance’ of migration
of the European Union (Beck and Grande, 2004:
83ff.). This qualifies them to advise the European
Commission and national states and to bring
them together in conferences and seminars. But
by the same token they are able to address civil
society and NGOs, to draw on their knowledge
and to link them to state interests, as is the case
in the field of counter-trafficking as well as of
asylum policies (Hess, 2009). In regard of this,
these agencies have another political quality as
they convey a non-security-based side to the
European Union border regime in so far as both
discursive and practical fields are based on and
play with the human rights discourse, which
confers legitimation and a consensual power to
the agencies and hence to the European migra-
tion control policy.
With the new ‘Global Approach on Migration’
from the EU commission (EC 2005, 2007) and its
central governing logic of the ‘migratory routes
concept’, the problematic of knowledge produc-
tion escalates even more as the meaning and
practice of ‘border control’ is externalised and
spatialised to an unprecedented extent by cen-
trally focussing on the routes, the ‘transit’ whose
meaning is stretched over the whole globe. In the
Commission communication of 2007, the greater
need for knowledge production is spelled out as
follows: ‘In applying the Global Approach, a
comprehensive analysis is required of legal and
illegal movements, global labour supply and
demand, labour migration and the management
of economic migration, and the need for interna-
tional protection. Migratory routes, trends and
potential changes of routes also need to be exam-
ined’ (Commission of the European Union, 2007).
The new control focus on ‘the migratory routes’
instead of the crossing of the classical national
borderline leads to a new imperial outreach and
extension of the European Union migration
policy. The Commission communication of 2007
states: ‘However, applying the Global Approach
to the Eastern and South-Eastern regions neigh-
bouring the EU according to the concept of
“migratory route” also requires consideration of
countries of origin and transit further afield”
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
434
(Commission of the European Union, 2007).
Thereby, the definition of a space as ‘transit’ is
coupled with a reduction of state sovereignty
and renders the space as an object of ‘risk analy-
ses’ by diverse agencies like the EU, Europol,
UNODC or FRONTEX, which can ultimately ini-
tiate and legitimise concrete interventions, as the
Frontex operations along the coast of Senegal
show. In this process the definition of ‘risk’
changed. It is no longer the actual deed of border
crossing as the porosity of the border is taken
into account. Rather it is the movement, the ‘tran-
sit’-mobility itself which became the object of
governance as can best be seen in the new so
called ‘i-Map’, a digital cartography of migration
routes originally constructed by the ICMPD,
Europol and Frontex (i-Map, 2009).16
Against this structural background, the pro-
spective research agenda trying to organise itself
around the concept of ‘transit migration’ needs,
at its very origin, to come to terms with this
power-knowledge-regime. In sharp contrast to
this increased political attention on ‘transit migra-
tion’ are the social realities that lie behind this
label, which are very vague, blurred and diffuse.
In the course of our Transit Migration research in
migrational centres of Istanbul where diverse
migrational strategies overlap, we started to
wonder more and more who can be categorised
as a transit migrant at all. Therefore, in the fol-
lowing section I would like to make an alterna-
tive analytical suggestion of how reflexive social
and cultural science research on transit migration
can use its empirical insights into this social phe-
nomenon as well as its context of ‘construction’.
MIGRANTS’ BIOGRAPHIES:
‘CAUGHT IN MOBILITY’
Starting the theorisation from the perspective of
migration means listening carefully to migrants’
narratives and trying to encounter them in their
daily lives. These encounters with numerous
migrants in Istanbul, along the Aegean coast, and
in the Greek and Serbian metropolises shed light
on the sheer impossibility of clearly defining a
‘transit migrant’ in respect of time and space.
What we encountered in our multi-sited ethnog-
raphy and due to our cross-national comparison
were precarious temporary settlement and an
increased circulation in the wider border regions.
In so far the impossibility to define a transit
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
S. Hess
migrant is not only an objection against empirical
attempts by social science research to clearly
define the phenomena of transit migration
(Düvell, 2008). But, it means by the same token
that the notion of ‘immigration’ and ‘settlement’
is increasingly blurred with far reaching effects
on the articulation of legal statuses and rights.
So it was definitely not the crossing of the next
border that makes a transit migrant lose this
label. Most people we got to know in the South-
Eastern European region had to cross several
borders as irregular migrants. And most migrants
we met were impoverished ‘sans papiers’ con-
demned to move over land.17 Some, as with many
migrants who we encountered in Istanbul,
crossed the same border again and again, sent
back by the Greek border guards several times.
Others told us of a bewildering criss-cross trajec-
tory, moving to and fro through the whole region
stretching from Syria to Eastern European and
Caucasian countries further beyond. Many
attempted it repeatedly, months stretching into
years as people got deported or were clandes-
tinely pushed back over one of the countries’
borders at night – as, for instance, seemed to be
a common practice with Turkish border guards
pushing migrants over the Syrian border – but
they still tried it again.
But it was also the case that people in transit
suddenly heard a rumour that a law had changed
or a new so called ‘reception camp’ or ‘guest
house’ had been built somewhere, which prom-
ised at least rest, food and shelter and perhaps a
legal possibility. And even the Dublin II Regula-
tion18 in combination with the European finger-
print system ‘EURODAC’ or, in the German
case, the so called ‘the safe third country regula-
tion’,19 which were intended to immobilise this
movement, had the opposite effect. For example,
only very few people we met in the reception
camps on the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea
opted for asylum. One of the reasons was that
they knew that if they did so they would have
no chance to travel on and apply for asylum in
the country of intended destination. Without an
alternative, they opted for irregularity, which in
fact meant that, after 3 months at a camp, they
got a ‘release permit’ requiring them to leave the
country within 2 weeks in a ‘direction of their
own choice’. We interpreted this policy not as a
means to stop the movements as the migrants
were even obliged to travel on by the ‘release
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
De-naturalising Transit Migration
permit’. The procedure rather has to be seen as
a catalyst of irregularisation and transit migra-
tion in a highly disfranchised way (Panagiotidis
and Tsianos, 2007).
But neither can settlement and forms of (social
and economic) integration be understood as the
opposite of being in transit, rather the meaning
of being in transit is extended to pending, sus-
pended forms of transit-existence; or, to put it the
other way round, to precarious, provisional
forms of settlement. Nothing hinted at a transit
existence when we spoke with Ali20 from Iran for
example. Since he knew Russian very well, he
sold textile products to Russian shopping or suit-
case migrants in the district of Istanbul called
Laleli. On his transit trip he had fallen in love
with a Moldavian women commuting back and
forth to Turkey as a domestic migrant worker.
Ali and his Moldavian wife decided that Turkey
was the best compromise for both of them for the
meantime. But Ali had not forgotten that in fact
he was still in transit to his uncle’s in Sweden and
if a good chance came up he would take it. So he
lived his life in a constant interim arrangement
– a phenomena we know from the studies on the
early years of the guest worker system in
Germany. It seemed that he was most at home in
the highly globalised context of his textile shop
where he was desperately needed due to his lan-
guage competences, and because of this, although
he was irregular, he felt himself very secure.
Another case of precarious settlement turning
suddenly into a new phase of transit was the case
of Rahman, whom we met at an UNHCR asylum
camp in the outskirts of Belgrade. He, in contrast
to Ali, had thought that he really had settled
down with his Bosnian wife and his little child in
Belgrade. From a legal standpoint they were
highly precarious; however, they both felt
somehow at home until he got arrested in the
context of massive raids following the assassina-
tion of the former President Zoran Djindjic. Not
only were so called terrorists caught but many
migrants without proper papers like Rahman. As
they were not formally married, his only chance
to get out of the deportation prison – which only
recently opened with the help of the IOM – was
to claim asylum, which he actually did not want
to do. When we met him, he had been waiting
for months at the camp for the decision, he told
us that most of his camp colleagues had already
left the camp on their own and moved on as this
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
435
life was no life. He actually considered doing the
same but the only problem was his personal con-
nections in Belgrade.
The third category of precarious sedentary or
pending transit existence is the classical one,
where migrants try again and again to travel on
but end up in some of the South-Eastern metrop-
olises and their informal economies for 10 years
or more (see also Bas, 2005). Mike, one of the
African migrants we met in Istanbul, stayed there
for 11 years after he had lived for a while in
Lebanon. After the civil war broke out there,
Lebanon was getting too ‘rough’ so he and a
friend decided to move on. They came via Syria
to Turkey with 2,000 Euro in their pockets. After
several attempts to get to the North – with false
passports and visas to Poland and Hungary,
which were quite costly – they ran out of money.
As black, irregular migrants, the money they
could earn with the odd jobs in the informal
economy was hardly enough to survive. He was
arrested several times but each time he somehow
managed to get free with good luck, money or
some ruse or other tricks.21 We met him shortly
after he had been released after having been
caught travelling on a minibus close to the
Aegean coast. Even though he seemed to be quite
at home in Istanbul and had just been trying to
start up a small business with reggae music –
using the latest tourism hype about Istanbul – he
described his situation very symbolically as being
‘caught in mobility’. Or as he said another time:
‘Europe is a great prison’.
CONCLUSION: THE PRODUCTION OF
‘PRECARIOUS TRANSIT ZONES’
Against the background of these diverse ethno-
graphic, biographical accounts, we found it very
hard to define who can be conceptualised as a
transit migrant, asylum seeker or labour migrant.
But what the various unsteady, non-linear, flex-
ible and mobile migrational biographies had
shown was the emergence of a highly ‘precarious
transit zone’.22 The production of such a precari-
ous transit zone can be understood partly as the
spatialised social effect of the European Union
border regime, but also as the effect of the
migrants’ own objectives and strategies: to exploit
informal labour markets; to make use of net-
works or nodes of migrational knowledge, com-
munication and transport technologies. In sharp
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
436
contrast to the imagined function of tightened
border control, the European border regime, as
we have seen, does not stop the movements;
rather, it keeps people caught in mobility and
transforms border-regions into zones of height-
ened circulation.
What the border regime does is to reduce the
social, economic and political rights to different
degrees, and in a way irrationalises peoples’
movements as it interrupts their plans and trajec-
tories and re-directs peoples’ routeways. This
description goes hand in hand with theories of
global restructuration and rescaling of economic
and political processes of regulation (Brenner,
1997), which, during the last 200 years,23 have
been mainly materialised in form of the nation-
state. Now, in reaction to the movements and the
trajectories of migration (which cannot be
stopped), the European border regime seems to
accelerate a process of fragmentation and of a
new, stratified zoning of the what was once, in
regard to the application/articulation of rights,
homogenously thought of as the national terri-
tory. This has to be linked with discussion on
new modes of citizenship, whereby Aihwa Ong
(1999) talks of a highly hierarchised form of ‘flex-
ible citizenship’ as corresponding form to this
spatial rationality of neoliberalism, and Etienne
Balibar (2003) foresees a new ‘European
apartheid’.
A research agenda centring on the new geopo-
litical effects and the space making quality of
Schengen-Europe would need to further scruti-
nise the specific legal, social and economic infra-
structure composing these ‘precarious transit
zones’ of stratified rights. Besides the border
regime and the history of migration, I just want
to mention the following as constitutive ele-
ments: the regulation of the labour market and
the informal economy, the camp topography as
well as the specific, historical and contemporary
connections between countries. Whereby the
new geopolitical labelling of being a ‘transit
country’ triggers a whole set of control technolo-
gies and (financial) programmes from the EU.24
This can even entail the threat of the imposition
of sanctions, as in the case of Turkey during the
yearly summit of the European interior ministers
in 2002 in Seville. The summit was supposed to
give a new impetus to a common European
immigration policy but the discussions mainly
concentrated on measures against trafficking and
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
S. Hess
irregular migration giving the European (im)
migration policy a strong bias on restrictive
politics.25
But, there is meanwhile also another side of the
story, which I would define as the boomerang
effect of the externalisation of the European
migration control policy. Ferruccio Pastore (2008)
demonstrated in a recent paper how the periph-
eral countries themselves learned to use and to
exploit the ‘transit card’ in order to become eligi-
ble for specific EU, IOM, etc. programs and
money, and in order to have a say in the new
global migration management architecture.26 It
seems that the construct of ‘transit migration’ can
now be exploited as a threat against the North
and in this sense as an international bargaining
chip by the global South. This development turns
the picture upside down and reveals the histori-
cal force of migration, a force that migration
research should take much more seriously than
the mostly functionalist or structuralist
approaches have done. An ethnographic regime
analyses starting with a thorough theoretical as
well as an ethnographic understanding and a
consequent inductive approach seems particu-
larly suited to finding an analytical path through
the new social realties.
NOTES
(1) The institutional apparatus to do so are the
so-called ‘screening stations’ along the transit
routes in order to decide on the status.
(2) Thereby the scientific discussion still focuses on
the problem of defining a ‘transit migrant’ as
Frank Düvell put it ‘How long, or short, is transit
in country C supposed to last to be interpreted as
transit migration? After which length of stay does
‘transit’ becomes temporary immigration instead?
What if immigrants have no intention to move on
but change their mind and set off for other migra-
tion projects? What if migrants stay in a country
for some significant length of time, a year or two
and then decide to move to other country. Is that
still ‘transit’ or is it maybe just a separate trajec-
tory?’ (Düvell, 2008: 5)
(3) When I speak here of migrants’ strategies, I am
not interested here in the context of this paper to
apply an in-depth analyses of migrant subjectivi-
ties. Rather I use migrant narratives of their
migration biography to construct typologies of
different modes of being in ‘transit’. Methodo-
logically, we applied different modes of
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
De-naturalising Transit Migration
participant observation and had several unstruc-
tured talks with migrants. Very seldom we were
able to tape an interview with an ‘irregularised’
migrant as they were very suspicious and careful
not to come to the attention to the public. So it
took a long time to gain their trust. But we
managed to get closer contact to some networks
of mainly African migrants in Istanbul, a different
group of people who had arrived by boat in
Greece and a further group of immigrants in
Serbia. We were able to follow some of the
migrants’ routes either in a reconstructive manner
or in real time.
(4) In this article I am not going to discuss in any
more detail the advantages and disadvantages of
this specific research background; namely, the
artistic context. The artistic background and espe-
cially our funding organisation – the German cul-
tural foundation – gave us the relative freedom
not to have to stick rigidly to some disciplinary
canon and research agenda. It enabled us as well
to draw very significantly on theories and meth-
odologies discussed in anthropology, cultural
studies and art in a field, which is, at least in
Germany, in the firm and hegemonic hand of
sociology and political science.
(5) Manuela Bojadzijev, Rutvica Adrijasevic, Serhat
Karakayali, Effthimia Panagiotidis, Vassilis
Tsianos and Sabine Hess
(6) For example, Rio Grande on the US–Mexican
border, between Saudi Arabia and Yemen,
between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, between Costa
Rica and Nicaragua, between India and Pakistan
(through Kashmir), between the Kingdom of
Bhutan and India, between Israel and Palestine.
(7) With this in mind, we went not only to the phys-
ical borders between Turkey and Greece and the
Balkan States. But we also tried to follow the
political actors back to their offices in Istanbul,
Ankara, Izmir, Athens, Thessaloniki or Belgrade
and we tried to follow migrants in their daily lives
in the south eastern European metropolis and in
their attempts to migrate further.
(8) Transnational migration studies were of great
importance for us as they focused on migrants’
trajectories and tactics in coming to terms
with the border realities. But quite often, transna-
tional migration-strategies are theorised as cre-
ative resistance against the odds and obstacles of
the restrictive migration policies of European
Union member states. This implies an under-
standing of the border regime as an exclusionist
project that fails. We think this misses the point
of the productive dimension of the border regime
(Hess, 2005; Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe,
2007).
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
437
(9) These categories were also the organising catego-
ries of our ‘virtual cartographies of European
migration governance’, in short ‘MigMap’, which
contain four analytical artistic maps of the actors,
main discourses, routes/histories and practices of
the European border regime. MigMap was one of
the main products of close cooperation between
art and cultural production and science (http://
www.transitmigration.org/migmap/home_
map1.html)
(10) The annual number of undocumented transit
migrants
. that make their way through
. Turkey
Içduygu estimated (!) at 200.000 (Içduygu, 2003).
(11) For example, the threat, issued during the Seville
Summit 2002, of initiating sanctions against
Turkey should it not control transit more severely.
(12) This study was written by Sema Erder (http://
www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/
shared/shared/mainsite/published_docs/
covers/Irregular_mig_in_turkey.pdf).
(13) The webpage of the IOM field mission in Turkey
lists as ‘program areas’: Labour migration and
economic development; regulating migration:
counter trafficking; technical cooperation on
migration; assisted voluntary return programme;
migration policy, research and communication.
For a critical analysis of the programme and prac-
tice of the IOM, see Fabian Georgi (2009) and
Richard Perruchoud (1992).
(14) This clearly defined mandate legitimated by
international law is distinct from the IOM, which
is an intergovernmental organisation without any
basis in international law. For more on Turkish
asylum policy, see Kirisci (2003).
(15) Rutvica Andrijasevic and other feminist scholars
(see Schwenken) have criticised the IOM counter
trafficking campaigns for instrumentalising
women’s plight in order to legitimate restrictive
migration controls. Andrijasevic comes to the
conclusion in her analyses of the visualisation
strategies of different IOM campaigns in the
Eastern Europe: ‘Since in IOM’s regime of repre-
sentation the most common types of women’s
informal labour migration inevitably lead into
slavery and forced prostitution, my analysis sug-
gests that IOM’s campaigns discourage women’s
(labour) migration and aim at controlling women’s
mobility and sexuality by depicting (movement)
abroad in terms of a threat and by extension
encouraging the perception of home as safe.’
(Andrijašević, 2004: 173)
(16) It is very interesting to analyse the further devel-
opment of the i-Map whereby not only more
organisations are now joining in, such as the
UNODC and the UNHCR, as well as several
countries. But also the geographic scope is about
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
438
to be broadened to also cover Eurasia and South
Eastern Europe.
(17) This social fact has produced a specific bias in our
sample. But on the other hand, we could ask if
only those migrants are ‘transit migrants’ in the
pure sense of the word who have papers or can
afford well-falsified papers and thus can get a
visa and fly. But there are also many people
migrating by airplane with accounts of criss-
cross-routes.
(18) Dublin II regulates the country which is supposed
to handle a prospective asylum claim. It decides
that the first EU-country a migrant enters, has to
examine the asylum claim. The EURODAC
system, which is supposed to store all finger-
prints of migrants entering ‘Schengenland’,
should make it easy for the national bureaucra-
cies to discover violations of Dublin II
(19) The cut of the right of asylum in 1992 by the
German parliament was accompanied by a couple
of regulations minimising the legal possibility to
be eligible for an asylum claim. The ‘safe third
country regulation’ says that all migrants passing
through a ‘safe third country’ are no longer eli-
gible. All EU and all EU accession countries, are
defined as safe, meaning all countries surround-
ing Germany.
(20) All names are aliases.
(21) A few examples: Once, the whole group of
arrested migrants pretended to be seriously ill.
After an ill migrant had already died in police
arrest all others were freed. Another time, he was
married to a pregnant migrant woman – and the
police did not want to keep pregnant women in
custody.
(22) This interpretation is in line with the notion of the
construction of a ‘buffer zone’ (Wallace and Sido-
renko, 1999) as transit countries turn into indefi-
nite waiting rooms for migrants due to the
externalisation of the European border regime.
But the term buffer zone again implies the immo-
bilisation of the movements, which, as I wish to
demonstrate, is not the fact the case.
(23) Brenner talks as well of a new ‘global state’ as an
effect of these processes of reterritorialisation.
The state does not vanish; rather, it is
re-dimensioned, re-territorialised on various
scales that no longer convert to the national frame
and that no longer form a homogenous enclosed
national totality (Brenner 1997: 17)
(24) The Rabat Action Plan, the ‘Mediterranean
Union’ launched by the French president Sarkozy
in 2008, or the newly celebrated ‘Partnership to
the East’ from the Czechoslovakian EU presi-
dency in 2009 have to be interpreted in this
direction.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
S. Hess
(25) The Seville Summit was expected to give new
impetus to the plans to create a common EU asylum
and immigration policy, which was first announced
at the 1999 Tampere Summit, based on the 1997
Amsterdam Treaty. However, there has been little
progress in this area since 1999 due to high national
sensitivities. Measures against human trafficking 50
proposals to cut the number of illegal immigrants
entering the EU dominated the discussion (http://
www.euractiv.com/en/future-eu/immigration-
tops-agenda-eu-seville-summit/article-115268).
(26) The new importance of the ‘migration and devel-
opment’ agenda, and also the importance of the
question of remittances and brain waste in, for
instance, such documents as the ‘Rabat Action
Plan’ can be interpreted as a new power wielded
by the southern countries. The recent signing of
the Italian-Libyan contract where the question of
transit migration and cooperation with Frontex
operations plays a big part as well as Italy’s dec-
laration of its historical guilt of colonialisation is
another hint of this new power (see Hess, 2008).
REFERENCES
Andreas P, Snyder T (eds). 2000. The Wall around the
West. Roman & Littlefield: New York/Oxford.
Andrijašević R. 2004. Trafficking in Women and the
Politics of Mobility in Europe. Unpublished PhD
Thesis, University of Utrecht. Available at: http://
www.igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/
2005-0314-013009/full.pdf [accessed 29 September
2010].
Appadurai A. 2000. Grassroots Globalization and the
Research Imagination. Public Culture 12: 1–19.
Bahl E, Ginal M, Hess S. 2010. Unheimliche Arbeits-
bündnisse. Zum Funktionieren des Anti-Trafficking-
Diskurses auf lokaler und europäischer Ebene. In
Europäisches Grenzregime. Akteure, Diskurse, Prak-
tiken, Hess S, Kasparek B (eds). Assoziation A:
Berlin; 161–178.
Balibar E. 2003. Sind wir Bürger Europas? Politische
Integration, soziale Ausgrenzung und die Zukunft
des Nationalen. Edition Hamburg: Hamburg.
Bas B. 2005. In Transit. In Self Service City: Istanbul, Esen
O, Lanz S (eds). b.books: Berlin; 96–102.
Beck U, Grande E. 2004. Das kosmopolitische Europa.
Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main.
Bigo D, Guild E. 2005. Policing in the name of freedom.
In Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within
Europe, Bigo D, Guild E (eds). Ashgate: Aldershot;
1–13.
Black R. 2003. Breaking the convention: researching
the ‘Illegal’ migration of refugees to Europe.
Antipode 35: 34–54.
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
De-naturalising Transit Migration
Brenner N. 1997. Globalisierung und Reterritorialisier-
ung: Städte, Staaten und die Politik der räumlichen
Redimensinierung im heutigen Europa. WeltTrends
17: 7–29.
Commission of the European Union. 2007. Applying the
global approach to the Eastern and South-Eastern regions
neighbouring the EU, Co(2007)247. Available at:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.
do?uri=CELEX:52007DC0247:EN:NOT, visited
[accessed 16 May 2007].
Düvell F. 2002. Die Globalisierung des Migrationsregimes.
Assoziation A: Berlin/ Hamburg/Göttingen.
Düvell F. 2008. Transit migration in Europe. Presenta-
tion at the ‘First Conference on Irregular Migration’,
Tripoli, 18–19 June 2008. Available at: http://
www.cespi.it/PDF/Libia-D%C3%BCvell.pdf
[accessed 12 May 2010].
Foucault M. 2004. Geschichte der Gouvernementalität 1.
Sicherheit. Territorium, Bevölkerung, Suhrkamp:
Frankfurt am Main.
Georgi F. 2007. Migration management in Europa. Eine
kritische Studie am Beispiel des Centers for Migra-
tion Policy Development: Saarbrücken.
Georgi F. 2009. Handlanger und Störenfriede. NGOs
und internationale Organisationen in der Migration-
skontrolle. In Jenseits der Menschenrechte. Das
europäische Verwaltungsregime von Flucht und Migra-
tion, Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie
(ed.). Westfälisches Dampfboot: Münster; 76–87.
Ghosh B. 1997. Bevölkerungsbewegungen: Die Suche
nach einem neuen internationalen Regime. In Migra-
tion und Flucht, Angenendt S (ed.). Bundeszentrale
für politische Bildung: München; 264–271.
Guiraudon V. 2001. De-nationalising control. Analys-
ing state responses to restraints on migration control.
In Controlling a New Migration World, Guiraudon V,
Joppke C (eds). Routledge: London; 29–64.
Hess S. 2005. Globalisierte Hausarbeit. Au-pair als
Migrationsstrategie von Frauen aus Osteuropa:
Wiesbaden.
Hess S. 2008. Migration and Development: A Governmen-
tal Twist of the EU Migration Management Policy.
Available at: http://www.pol.ed.ac.uk/migration/
events/esrc_seminars/migration_management_
and_development [accessed 14 May 2009].
Hess S. 2009. ‘Man schickt doch auch nicht eine Ersatz-
braut zum Altar’. Zur Konfliktualiät der neuen
Formen des Regierens in und von Europa. In Projekte
der Europäisierung, Welz G (ed.). Notizen Bd. 78,
Institut für Kulturanthropologie: Frankfurt; 181–
196.
Hess S, Karakayali S. 2007. New Governance oder die
imperiale Kunst des Regierens. In Turbulente Ränder.
Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen
Europas, Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (ed.).
transcript: Bielefeld; 39–56.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
439
Hess S, Karakayali S, Tsianos V. 2009. Transnational
migration: Theory and method of an ethnographic
analysis of border regimes. In Le confinement des
étrangers en Europe: perspectives de terrain, Kobelinsky
C, Makaremi C (eds). Editions du Croquant: Paris;
. 299–316.
Içduygu A. 2003. Irregular Migration in Turkey. IOM
Migration Research Series No. 12. IOM Publications:
Genf.
i-Map. 2009. Available at: https://www.imap-
migration.org/index2.html [accessed 14 May 2009].
International Organisation for Migration (IOM). 1995.
Transit Migration in Turkey. Genf.
IOM. 2010. A Model for Comprehensive Migration
Management. Available at: http://www.iom.int/
jahia/Jahia/model-comprehensive-migration-
management [accessed 29 September 2010].
IOM. 2010a. IOM Mission to Turkey. Available at:
http://www.turkey.iom.int/ [accessed 29 Septem-
ber 2010].
IOM. 2010b. Program Areas. Available at: http://
www.turkey.iom.int/pa5.htm [accessed 29 Septem-
ber 2010].
Karakayali S. 2008. Gespenster der Migration. tran-
script: Bielfeld.
Kirişci K. 2003. The question of asylum at: illegal
migration in European Union- Turkish relations. In
Turkey and the European Union, Carkoglu A, Rubin B
(eds). Cass UK: London; 79–106.
Kölnischer Kunstverein (ed.). 2005. Projekt Migration.
Dumont Verlag: Köln.
Lahav G, Guiradon V. 2000. Comparative perspectives
on border control: away from the border and outside
the state. In The Wall around the West, Andreas P,
Snyder T (eds). Roman & Littlefield: New York/
Oxford; 55–77.
Lanz S. 2007. Berlin aufgemischt. abendländisch-multikul-
turell – kosmopolitisch? Die politische. Konstruktion
einer Einwanderungsstadt: Bielefeld.
Marcus GE. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system.
The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual
Review of Anthropology 117: 95–117.
Mezzadra S. 2009. Citizen and subject. A postcolonial
constitution for the European Union? In No
integration?! In Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu
Fragen von Migration und Integration in Europa, Hess
S, Binder J (eds). Transcript: Bielefeld; 207–224.
MigMap. 2005. Mapping European Politics on Migra-
tion. Available at: http://www.transitmigration.
org/migmap/home_map1.html [accessed 14 May
2009].
Mitchell T. 2006. Society, Economy and the State Effect.
In The Anthropology of the State, Sharma A, Gupta A
(eds). Blackwell: Malden/Oxford; 169–186.
Moulier Boutang Y. 2002. Nicht länger Reservearmee.
Thesen zur Autonomie der Migration und zum
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
440
notwendigem Ende des Regimes der Arbeitsmigra-
tion. Subtropen No.12, Jungle World, 15 February 2002.
Ong A. 1999. Flexible Citizenship. Duke University
Press: Durham.
Panagiotidis E, Tsianos V. 2007. Denaturalizing
‘Camps’: Überwachen und Entschleunigen in der
Schengener Ägäis-Zone. In Turbulente Ränder. Neue
Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas,
Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (ed.). Tran-
script: Bielefeld; 57–86.
Pastore F. 2008. Core-Periphery Relations in the European
Migration Control System. Available at: http://
www.cespi.it/powerpoint/Pastore-Istanbul%20
18-20%20April%202008.ppt [14 May 2009].
Perruchoud R. 1992. IOM and its Mandate. Interna-
tional Journal for Refugee Law 2: 206–215.
Pieper M, Karakayali S, Tsianos V (eds). 2007. Empire
und die biopolitische. Wende: Frankfurt.
Poulantzas N. 2002. Staatstheorie. Politischer Überbau,
Ideologie, Autoritärer Etatismus: Hamburg.
Rigo E. 2005. Citizenship at Europe’s Borders: Some
Reflections on the Post-colonial Condition of Europe
in the Context of EU Enlargement. Citizenship Studies
1: 3–22.
Sciortino G. 2004. Between phantoms and necessary
evils. Some critical points in the study of irregular
migrations to Western Europe. In Migration and the
Regulation of Social Integration, IMIS-Beiträge (ed.).
IMIS: Osnabrück; 17–43.
Sharma A, Gupta A (eds). 2006. The Anthropology of the
State. Blackwell: Malden/Oxford.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
S. Hess
Shore C, Wright S. 1997. Policy. A new field of anthro-
pology. In Anthropology of Policy, Shore C, Wright S
(eds). Routledge: London; 3–42.
Transit Migration. 2005. Available at: http://www.
transitmigration.org [accessed 14 May 2009].
Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (ed.). 2007. Tur-
bulente Ränder. Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an
den Grenzen Europas, transcript: Bielefeld.
Trouillot M. 2001. The anthropology of the state in
the age of globalization. Current Anthropology 42:
125–138.
Wallace C, Sidorenko E. 1999. The central European
buffer zone. In Europäische Ethnologie – Ethnologie
Europas, Giordano C (ed.). Universitätsverlag:
Fribourg; 123–169.
Walters W. 2002. Mapping Schengenland: denatural-
izing the border. Environment & Planning D: Society
& Space 20(5): 561–580.
Walters W. 2004. Secure borders, safe haven, domo-
politics. Citizenship Studies 3: 237–260.
Walters W. 2009. Anti-political economy: cartogra-
phies of ‘illegal immigration’ and the ‘displacement
of the economy’. In Cultural Political Economy, Best J,
Paterson M (eds). Routledge: London; 113–138.
Wissen M, Röttger B, Heeg S (eds). 2008. Politics of
scale. Räume der Globalisierung und Perspektiven eman-
zipatorischer Politik (Raumproduktionen: Theorie und
gesellschaftliche Praxis Band 3). Westfälisches Dampf-
boot: Münster.
Popul. Space Place 18, 428–440 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/psp