Scaling rights: the ‘Turkey deal’ and the divided geographies of European responsibility

In this article, Bialasiewicz and Maessen examine how responses of the European Union (EU) to the refugee crisis have been differentially spatialized within and outside the EU’s boundaries, noting how the crisis has operated a geographical sorting, not just of the right to legal and humanitarian protection, but also of the right to be included within the spaces of EUrope’s presumed responsibility. They highlight, in particular, the divided affective geographies delimiting concerns with ensuring the bodily safety of Europeans within the EU’s member states from the need to ensure safe passage for refugees at and beyond the EU’s borders. Such divided geographies made themselves violently visible in the spring of 2016. As EU politicians from the right, centre and left were calling with seemingly one voice for the need to assure ‘the protection of European women’ from what was being presented as an unprecedented surge of sexual attacks perpetrated by newly arrived ‘refugees’, at that very same moment, fundamental legal notions of safety and protection were being rescripted as part of the EU’s ongoing negotiations with Turkey to take on the management of refugee flows at the EU’s external borders. In the current piece, Bialasiewicz and Maessen focus on the ‘Turkey deal’ specifically, but they also locate these events in a broader re-scaling of EU responsibilities over the past decade, noting the effects of such re-scaling on the access to basic rights: within, outside and at the borders of Europe.