Containing the 'bad body' Coloniality, violence, and migration in 'Fortress Europe'

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Parallel to the development of the media-declared 'refugee crisis', the role of Migrant Detention Centres (MDCs) has gained prominence as a fundamental strategy of border governance. Discourses which play upon the need to securitise European borders are often informed by notions of otherness. In fact, these discourses are deeply ingrained within the social, legal, and political identities which constitute European sovereignty, and are intimately linked to the continued presence of colonial imaginaries.Nowadays, these colonial imaginaries manifest themselves in multiple ways. In the proposed PhD research, I explore the relationship between coloniality and political violence in Europe by investigating how MDCs sustain, legitimize, and reproduce colonial notions and worldviews pertaining to the figure of the migrant. By researching this I aim to show how coloniality, that is, the enduring presence of colonial racial worldviews, continues to inform both public and institutional conceptions of migration. Moreover, I propose to consider MDCs as sites demonstrating the relationship between legitimized practices of political violence, and discursive and aesthetic expressions of coloniality; these latter referring to the presence of colonial imaginaries in our speech as well as our field of visibility and sensory perception. Following this, I critically analyse the relationship between public and institutional discourses on European identity and the existence and legitimation of MDCs. Ultimately, this reveals the necessary role that identifying the migrant as a "bad body" - i.e. a 'stranger' who we must contain and dispose of - may play in the construction of European identity.