This talk investigates how the security-humanitarian rationale that underpins migration governmentality has been restructured by and inflected in light of hygienic-sanitary borders which enforce racialised confinement in the name of both migrants and citizens’ safety from infection by the Covid-19 virus. Focusing on the politics of migration containment along EUrope’s external frontiers, examining in particular border reinforcements carried out by Italy and Greece, I interrogate how the pandemic has been exploited to enact deterrence through hygienic-sanitary border enforcements. These enforcements are underpinned by an ambivalent security-humanitarian narrative that crafts migrants as subjects who cannot be protected by EU member states from the pandemic if allowed inside, and, at the same time, as potential vehicles of contagion - ‘Corona spreaders’ - and thus as dangers on a bacterial-hygienic level. In the talk I show how the pandemic has been seized as an opportunity to strengthen existing deterrence measures and hamper migrants’ access to asylum through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime in the long-term. While emphasising the historical trajectories and continuities underwriting these current developments, I contend that the pandemic functions as an accelerator of dynamics of migrant incarceration and containment.

Our presentation introduces a theoretical approach on embodied encounters that we have found characteristic to situations of asylum seeking in the context of transnational migration control; including both the eventful coming into contact by bodily subjects and the broader contextual forces that mediate and shape these encounters. Building on existing work that looks at the role of embodiment in the political struggles of refugees, our approach draws from Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology of social embodiment. In this political dynamic, we have identified different modes of ‘struggle for personhood’ by exploring two logics of governing: ‘objectivization’ and ‘subjectivization’ that work to contain the personhood of refugees and render them more governable subjects, in specific ways. To conceptualize the role of human embodiment in these power-laden encounters, we turn to empathy – the human capacity to understand the point of view of the other – to show how it opens up a force field between asylum seekers who stand there in person as bodily subjects, and the truth-seeking migration regime exposed to this power. To conclude we take up some examples from our recent research with asylum seekers to discuss how this perspective may be helpful in making better sense of refugee governance as well as the (latent) resistance involved in it.