The Living Dead: Securing the (Eu)ropean Border : Frontex’s problem representation of migration and its institutional expansion

Abstract: Since the 2015 migration crisis, Frontex has expanded and increased its information-gathering on migrants. This has led to controversial activities post-2015 despite the Agency’s self-perceived humanitarian identity. The aim of this thesis is to analyze Frontex’s problem representation of migration in the Agency’s annual Risk Analysis Reports from 2015-2022 on the basis of postcolonialism and corporeal research to problematize the implicit assumptions that make Frontex’s expansion and increased control of migrants intelligible and how this is justified despite the Agency’s stated humanitarian ambitions. To this end, the thesis adopts a poststructuralist methodological approach based on Bacchi’s (2009) and Bacchi & Goodwin’s (2016) account of the WPR-model. In the analysis and concluding discussion, I argue that postcolonial and patriarchal power relations reinforce gendered and racialized constructions of the migrant body as a Terrorist, Victim, or Liar, which leads to a supposed need for increased information to separate the illegitimate from the legitimate migrant. How this is made intelligible as a “humanitarian” effort can be found in the production of abject bodies, either to be expulsed or transformed, where humanitarianism only applies to the feminized Victim while the masculinized Terrorist must be defeated. By depicting increased information and control as a humanitarian commitment to the saving of Victim lives, the Agency’s expansion is represented as a humanitarian effort.