Europe’s spectacular borderlines: on refugee camps, banlieues and other spaces of exception

Mourning the murder of Nahel Merzouk by the French police and the drowning of 750 human beings by the Greek coastguard's recklessness, we argue that the erosion of human rights at the EU's external borders is being co-constituted by an analogous erosion within its internal borders. To establish this connection, we re-conceptualise the EUropean b/ordering regime as a network of fractal borderscapes characterised by a selective criminalisation of mobility that reproduces longstanding racist prejudice along socio-spatial borderlines. We argue that the proliferation of these spaces of exception is degenerating into a state of exception: a polity's self-destructive tendency to replace the rule of law for legalised despotism. Such autoimmune reaction, we claim, is rooted in borderism: a spectacle that misshapes geography into spurious antagonisms epitomised by national and civilisational dichotomies ("friends" and "foes"), thus creating a hyperreality that breeds racism, spatialises apartheid and exacerbates animosity.