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When I moved to Palestine in 2013, one situation, among many, that shocked me was how law and official discourse have been utilised throughout the years to justify, legitimise and normalise occupation, violence, encampment, marginalisation, imprisonment, social exclusion and killings. In the years that followed beyond Palestine, through work and during my Masters’ degree, I extended such interest to the European context. Thus, in my PhD research I explore the EU’s discursive justifications to deport individuals from Europe and to deter them in third countries in the context of asylum seeking. For instance, discourses of crisis, (in)security due to a “wave of illegal migrants”, and the highjacking of human rights and humanitarian discourses, have all been paving the way to the implementation of specific in/actions, which subject individuals to marginalisation, social exclusion, violence and further trauma. Beyond that, I’m also interested in the legal instruments used to legitimise practices such as deportation. One of these is the so-called European Union Readmission Agreements – known as EURAs – and related informal declarations, which include the cooperation and negotiation of non-EU countries to admit deported individuals from Europe into their countries. In this way, I examine EU institutional discourses that, through legal lexicons and the blurring of policy terminology, find their way into legitimacy, subjecting individuals to the violent procedure that is deportation. Instead of considering migration policies as seemingly mundane tools of migration governance designed to tackle “illegal” migration, this study establishes that these policies are in fact powerful mechanisms that render individuals unworthy of protection.
Conceptually, I extended the operationalisation of Achille Mbembe’s theorisation of necropolitics to the analysis of policy and related sources, and propose a framework that allows us to fully understand the brutal derivative of such instruments, which I call necro-policies. In this framework, I claim that those in power make use of a plethora of discursive argumentations and strategies as well as specific terminologies to legitimise, justify and normalise practices such as deportation. From this conceptualisation came my main research question: How can European Union deportation policies’ discourse be understood and explained through a necro-policy lens? To answer this, I broadly employed Carol Bacchi’s ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to critical policy analysis- also known as “WPR approach” - which positions discourse at the centre of analysis. In addition, among the many instances of EURAs and related declarations, I opted for an in-depth single case analysis of the EU-Afghanistan case, where I conducted a critical discourse analysis of official statements, communications, conclusions and law, which was complemented by semi-structure interviews with IO/NGOs workers, members of the former Afghan government and EU officials. For me, the Afghan case appallingly epitomises how individuals seeking protection in Europe are treated: their humanity is obliterated and their names become numbers to be dealt with in policy efficiency sheets; the more that are deported, the better. Such brutality must stop, and alternative, just, and dignified futures must be considered. Currently, these are not on offer and we need to talk about that.