Beyond Europe, Borders Adrift

As Italian and European Union authorities seek to contain unauthorized immigrants—including would-be asylum seekers and refugees—far from their shores, they have yet again intensified policing cooperation with their African counterparts. In particular, Europe’s expansively mobile borders stretch themselves into a volatile network of potentially indefinite migrant detention in Libya. Liberal democracies might tell themselves that such shifting borders mitigate death at sea and unauthorized immigration. Migrants’ stranded embodiments of time and space summon instead the contradictions of polities that fortify their borders by pushing them further adrift.