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two principle forms: one concerns the imbrication of care, protection and vulnerability with
access to mobility and the other concerns the need to provide order and security (in all its
forms) within the hotspots themselves.
Eyal Weizman (2012) has elucidated how humanitarian practice comes to calibrate life
itself through the regulation of access to the necessary conditions for life. Meanwhile Didier
Fassin (2012) has shown how hierarchies of humanity or a politics of life come to be produced through humanitarian practices that regulate and determine who has access to care.
These calibrations and categorisations seem to stand in contrast to the forms of categorisation we witness for example in the border regime (see Jones, 2009) that predominantly
categorise according to citizenship. However, in the hotspots, the border regime, biopolitical
need, a politics of life and access to mobility become intertwined. Hierarchies of mobility, or
‘border triage’ as described to me by one humanitarian practitioner with a medical background, are created in the hotspot around logics of protection and what we could call a
politics of vulnerability (Statewatch, 2015).
Within the hotspots life seekers’ relationship to particular hierarchies of vulnerability
determine under the current EU-Turkey Statement their ability to escape the confines of the
hotspot system. Currently under Greek law vulnerable people are exempted from the
‘admissibility procedure’ governing returns to Turkey and have been eligible for transfer
to mainland Greece where they can access adequate services and await the outcome of their
asylum claim (MSF, 2017: 17). Vulnerable people are categorised as belonging to one or
more of the following: pregnant women, unaccompanied children single parents with children, victims of torture, and people with disabilities (HRW, 2017). As a report to the LIBE
Committee of the European Parliament has iterated ‘great care needs to be taken to ensure
that the categorising of migrants at hotspots is carried out in full respect for the rights of all
migrants, while proper identification of applicants for international protection at the point
of first arrival in the Union should help facilitate the overall functioning of a reformed
Common European Asylum System’ (Neville et al., 2016: 42). Here we see clearly, even in a
report designed to aid parliamentarians in the scrutiny of current EU implementation of
legislation, the presence of logics of care and/or protection alongside and within logics of
control and the effective management of disaster.
The effective management of disaster through care and control is practiced in the hotspots in other ways through a focus on the provision of security and the policing of life
within the hotspot space. As discussed in the introduction, hotspots are ‘machines of many
moving parts’ (Khalili, 2012: 239). They copy the techniques of the refugee camp discussed
in the previous section while spatially expanding such techniques beyond the carceral space
itself. The hotspot approach forms a network of support and (pre)registration facilities
made up of not only the ‘spots’ themselves but a network of transit points, transport infrastructure and reception facilities including satellite facilities used for vulnerable cases and to
relieve overcrowding and with each designed to – supposedly – offer protection. Such a
description echoes that of Tom Corsellis and Antonella Vitale’s description of the systems of
control of refugee populations that has emerged as a form of pre-emptive risk management
designed to govern the mobility of refugee movements (2005: 258). Here, practices designed
to govern populations, from the initial production of the population itself through registration, aggregation and calculation (Bulley, 2014: 70) to enable the efficient provision of the
necessary conditions for life, to the actual provision of WaSH (water, sanitation, hygiene)
facilities, food and physical security themselves are intended to occur within the hotspot
machine of many moving parts. The hotspots then function to keep life seekers alive ‘while
forming them as a “displaced population” – a known, calculated mass’ (Bulley, 2014: 71).
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