Project Details
Projekt
(In-)Security issues at the Schengen border. Security practices of state and non-state actors at the German-Polish border
Subject Area
Human Geography
Term
from 2018 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397312088
The European border regime has recently drawn heavy criticism: The refugees plight has contributed to put the spotlight on the external borders of the Union, but the internal borders of the Schengen area and the free-movement principle have also drawn their share of attention. This has notably been the case for the German-Polish border, which the German media often associates with criminal activity. Perceptions vis-à-vis the border are symptomatically often at odds with the objectives of cooperation and integration proclaimed as in European bordering policies. Right-wing parties in Brandenburg and Saxony have been advancing cross-border crime as a major campaigning issue, while other parties are also gradually adopting such discourses. Besides the likely forthcoming debate ideologisation, cross-border crime is being addressed both by state and non-state actors in such a way that it contributes to modify the relation between private actors and government security forces. The project will seek to evaluate the impact of entangled discourses and subjective perceptions regarding borders and security on the relation between security initiatives of state and non-state nature. The goal of the project is to understand how the different actors involved in the field practically articulate the connection between security and border. Our aim is to make an empirically-based contribution to the current debate on the European border regime. The project will follow a three-step approach: 1. The project will retrace the representations of security and border concerning the German-Polish border over the 2006-2016 time-period, with a special focus on expectations regarding control and surveillance as well as emotional backgrounds. 2. The project will analyse, what implicit, commonly shared and/or context specific understandings of spatial orderings of the social the actors refer to, and in what way expectations regarding control and surveillance are argued in connection with spatial and especially scalar orderings. 3. Finally, the project will analyse new security-related forms of collective action or alternative strategies carried out by state or non-state actors (neighbourhood militias, security partnerships, other private measures) in order to derive knowledge on possible re-negotiations of the relation of state and society in border-related practices. With the thematic example of security and fear, the project will face the methodological challenge of advancing knowledge on the combination of discourse analytic and praxis oriented perspectives that is of growing interest within geographical research. In addition, the project seeks to contribute to explain how locality can be understood as an effect within situated practices.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
