Hospitability: the communicative architecture of humanitarian securitization at Europe's borders

This paper explores the communicative architecture of the border at the peak of Europe’s 2015-16 “migration crisis”. Drawing on fieldwork at one of Europe’s outer borders – the Greek island of Chios – the paper examines the border as a site where refugee and migrant reception takes place and where the parameters of Europe’s ethico-political response to the “crisis” are set. The paper demonstrates that the continent’s double requirement of security and care produces a new and highly ambivalent moral order, hospitability. Constituted through techno-symbolic networks of mediation, hospitability reaffirms dominant theorizations of the border as an order of power and exclusion but goes beyond these in highlighting micro-connections of solidarity that simultaneously co-exist with and attempt to challenge this order. Keyword