European migration governance of, for, and against crisis: Andrew Geddes in conversation with Michaela Benson and Nando Sigona

We are delighted to host Professor Andrew Geddes, director of Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute, at IRiS. He has contributed seminal work on migration governance and the politics of immigration in Europe and globally and is uniquely positioned to reflect on the nexus between migration policy and governance in the age of ‘crises’.

In his talk, Professor Geddes will show that the notion of crisis and its bastardised mutations such as polycrisis, permacrisis and metacrisis have become constitutive of European migration governance. Political actors mobilise for crisis and an intellectual agenda is supporting mutations in ways that are flawed at a conceptual level and end up catastrophising migration. It will be shown how crisis thinking became normalised in European migration governance and also its projection into neighbouring countries and regions through its mutations. To develop this point, the links between migration and climate change, which are often seen as emblematic of ‘poly’ or ‘perma’ crisis will be shown to possess conceptual flaws that amplify the systemic breakdowns against which these ideas ostensibly warn. Extracting migration from this mutant thinking can illustrate how migration is and will continue to be a solution to the deep-seated problems in social and natural systems that various notions of crisis profess to address.

Professor Michaela Benson (Lancaster University) and Professor Nando Sigona will act as discussants.