Europe's Border Crisis

Roberto Esposito, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa Europe's Border Crisis is a work of great interest, which integrates socio-political and philosophical analysis. Drawing on biopolitical paradigms in contemporary political philosophy, it finds keys for interpreting current dynamics within immigration policies and their antinomic consequences. It is a useful and original book that progresses research in this field of study.

Daniel Trilling, Times Literary Supplement Since the second half of 2015, Europe's focus has been on closing the borders, striking a deal with Turkey to take back refugees from Greece, and shutting down the Balkan route that many thousands took to Northern Europe beforehand. Is there any way to understand these developments, beyond emotional judgements such as callous and deadly or harsh but necessary? Vaughan-Williams, whose book is aimed at broadening the scope of academic research on borders and migration, argues for a new way of seeing the problem.

Julien Brachet, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography Europe's Border Crisis is a dense, provocative and timely reflection on the debate on border security and migration management in Europe and beyond. The remarkable and innovative work of Nick Vaughan-Williams constitutes a step forward in migration and border studies.

Sergei Prozorov, University of Helsinki Europe's Border Crisis is essential reading for students of political theory and International Relations. Nick Vaughan-Williams skillfully combines a sophisticated interpretation of the main paradigms of biopolitics with a rich empirical analysis of EU border security policies in a powerful critique of the very foundations of contemporary European politics. He also articulates an affirmative politics of the border, in which the encounter between self and other does not take the exclusionary and violent forms that we observe all around us today.

Beste Isleyen, University of Amsterdam Nick Vaughan-Williams' book offers an intellectually stimulating and conceptually challenging and rich discussion of what he terms 'Europe's border crisis.' In view of tragic deaths and human suffering at European/ EU external borders, this book makes a timely intervention in academic and non-academic debates on the controversial politics and paradoxical effects of EU border and migration policies and practices at diverse scales and spaces.

Nick Vaughan-Williams is Reader in International Security at the University of Warwick, UK. His research, supported by the British Academy and ESRC, focuses on the relationship between sovereignty, subjectivity, and the spatial dimensions of security - particularly the changing nature and location of borders in global politics. His first monograph, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (2009, 2012) was Gold Winner of the Association for Borderlands Studies Book Award. He is co-author of Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (2010, 2014), co-editor of five books including Critical Theorists and International Relations (2009), and founding co-editor of the Routledge 'Interventions' book series.

1. Borders, crises, critique ; 2. Biopolitical borders ; 3. Thanatopolitical borders ; 4. Zoopolitical borders ; 5. Immunitary borders ; 6. Affirmative borders