Governing asylum seekers : logistics, differentiation, and failure in the European Union’s reception regime

This thesis investigates the complex and heterogeneous regime of government resulting from the failure of the EU attempts to govern asylum seekers through the Dublin system and the harmonisation of reception conditions. Combining the analytical perspective of governmentality with a regime analysis which resembles those proposed by critical migration studies, the thesis aims to identify features and functioning of a possible EU government of asylum seekers, which is defined as EU reception regime. Through a rich empirical study primarily based on semi-structured interviews with a range of different actors in several contexts in Italy and Sweden, three key modes of operation of the regime are identified, which are: logistics, differentiation, and failure. Logistics denotes an increasing importance of operational and organisational concerns in the reception of asylum seekers, which pave the way to the commodification of reception and transform the regime into a reception industry. Differentiation concerns a mode of governing asylum seekers based on the arbitrary multiplication of treatments, conditions, and experiences, across as well as within states, which therefore makes the regime work as a reception roulette. Finally, failure is a key aspect of the regime which is both intrinsic to its functioning and productive, thus making the regime operate as a reception dispositif. In particular, the thesis shows how the failure of the regime to limit movements ends up “illegalising” them and consequently fostering conditions of invisibility, disposability, and vulnerability. In this way, it is argued, the EU reception regime assures an unlimited supply of cheap, precarious, and vulnerable labour for member states’ economies, thus allowing the incorporation of reception into the neoliberal logic of valorisation of mobility which informs the EU politics of migration management