Contested deportation regimes: reconfiguring citizenship, bordering Europe

Deportation is being reshaped amid the consolidation of common European policies and the rise of ethnonationalist and far-right politics. Against this backdrop, this Special Issue offers fine-grained empirical analyses of deportation practices to examine the actual operation, transformation, politics, and effects of contested European deportation regimes. The contributions cover Northern, Central, Eastern, and Southern European contexts. They show how distinct deportation regimes continue to shape migration governance in Europe despite efforts toward coherence and harmonisation, requiring analysis across micro- and macro-levels attentive to historical and contextual specificity. This introduction to the special issue develops the concept of deportation regimes as a lens for analysing how deportation practices operate across and connect different scales, reconfiguring hierarchies of citizenship and fragmenting socio-legal space across Europe.