A steady diet of images. The European migrant crisis, border policy and political aesthetics

This thesis sits at the ever-expanding margins of borders studies, focusing on the cultural and aesthetic significance of border constructions and regimes. Whilst building upon a base of key modern geopolitical literature, it engages with a reflection on whether the ongoing European Crisis is one of migrants, of borders, or of European identity itself. Events since 2015,and the European Union’s (EU)flawed response, challenge its vision of being a normative power in global politics. Through a lack of Union solidarity and ongoing evidence of hypocrisy, it is clear that the (re)fencing of Europe has become a Rorschach test for the continent as much as it has for the individual member states. From this flows a discussion around counter-hegemonic method, employing the concepts of political aesthetics, especially through visual regimes of news media and photojournalism. If political writings traditionally deal with the state and aesthetical writings with art and drama, the blending of the two enable to present new perspectives of the concept of Europe’s crisis. The necroaesthetics discussed deal with both the bodies of migrants, and the teichopolitical spaces of camps and (re)fenced borders. By concentrating on the violence of borders as racialised contact zones in their multiple and expanding manifestations , this approach helps to challenge and critique governmental narratives related to migration and its perceived threat to the political class. This can be seen through the European memento mori of a century of camps and barbed wire which provoke the hallucinatory presence of previous war images, and border barriers of the last century.