Hi,

Please find below details about my new ethnography on border controls and irregular migration in southern Europe that may be of interest to list members.

Many thanks and best regards,

Ruben Andersson
Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics and Political Science

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ILLEGALITY, INC.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe
by Ruben Andersson (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Now available from the University of California Press. To order a copy or request an inspection copy, visit http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520282520

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Despite the mass investments in advanced border controls, irregular migrants keep arriving along southern European shores under increasingly desperate circumstances. Outside Italy, hardly a week passes without news of boat tragedies at sea; in Greece, refugees launch hunger strikes in crammed detention camps; and in Spain, migrants cling on to border fences or drown while trying to swim into the country's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

What has gone wrong at Europe's frontiers – and who is responsible for the mess? asks the anthropologist Ruben Andersson in his new book, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. Based on mobile fieldwork, the book gives a rare ethnographic account of Europe's border control landscape, showing how the "fight against illegal migration" has created absurd incentives and devastating consequences. At the continent's southern frontiers, an "illegality industry" has in recent years emerged to halt the migrant boats, involving a large number of sectors: European and African border forces, defence conglomerates and intelligence agencies, international and humanitarian organisations, research institutes and media outlets. When another tragedy occurs, when another boat sinks, the industry grows yet again. But the illegality industry is not the "solution" to the crisis at the borders, the book argues - it is a fundamental part of the problem.

Illegality, Inc. spans a wide geographical field, travelling between deportation sites in West Africa and Europe's latest control centres, between migrant camps in southern Spain and border protests in Mali, between the anti-migration barriers around the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and the largest barrier of them all, the Sahara desert. Here, in the emerging Euro-African borderlands, the book shows how the illegality industry has created precisely what it purports to control - more migrant illegality, in increasingly distressing forms.

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From the back cover:

"Illegality, Inc. is a rollercoaster ride through the emerging Euro-African borderlands, and at the same time a clever, timely and sometimes disturbing look at the actors who inhabit these borderlands. I know of no other monograph that explores the phenomenon of international migration from inside the heavily funded European border police forces, while at the same time casting such a critical and sarcastic view on journalists, academics and well-meaning NGOs that make up a growing 'illegality industry' with far-reaching consequences for people on the move. A must-read for anyone interested in one of the major challenges of the late modern world."—Hans Lucht, author of Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today

"Illegality, Inc. is breathtaking in its originality and scope. Extending across the vast expanses of the Sahara desert and the perilous journeys of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, from Senegal and Mali to the Warsaw headquarters of the EU’s border police, Ruben Andersson deftly escorts his readers on a remarkable journey. Andersson's methodologically innovative ethnography is truly refreshing and inspiring. Engaging creatively with a bewilderingly diverse range of actors, sites, and settings, this study helps us to comprehend a complex constellation of the often absurd features of the European border regime and the multifarious subjects and projects constituted thereby. This book reveals numerous intriguing linkages across space and time in its exploration of the intricate workings of "the illegality industry." Illegality, Inc. is a very rewarding work of scholarship and intellectual creativity, as well as a rare literary achievement."—Nicholas De Genova, co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement

"This beautifully written and politically powerful book is as compelling and moving as a novel but has the intent and theoretical depth of serious scholarship. A must read for anyone interested in migration and the borders that are constructed to restrain it, Illegality Inc focuses our attention not so much on the African migrants who attempt to reach Southern Europe but on the ways in which 'illegality' is both discursively and practically brought into being and the industry of prevention, control and humanitarianism that has grown up around it."—Katy Gardner, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science



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