ABSTRACT
In the two-year period that I spent writing this book, or roughly between August of 2015 and August of 2017, the world experienced such seismic events and activities involving human migration and state responses of security that it seemed nearly to have entered the realm of dystopian fiction. Perpetuated by a humanitarian crisis in the Middle East marked most notably by a brutal and unrelenting civil war in Syria and the advances of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Europe faced its worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. Over 1 million people applied for asylum within European states in 2015 alone (Connor, 2016). Under intense pressures exerted on their states and asylum systems, in 2016 the 28 heads of state in Europe forged an urgent refugee deal of questionable legality with Turkey (the “EU Turkey Deal”), which aimed at addressing the unprecedented flow of smuggled migrants and asylum seekers traveling across the Aegean from Turkey to the Greek islands (Collett, 2016). This desperation related as much to curbing the flow of refugees into Europe as it did with curbing the tide of rising anti-immigrant populism gripping many European states. On June 23, 2016, egged on by a pro-nationalist platform aimed in part at slowing immigration, citizens in the United Kingdom voted to withdrawal from the European Union. Across the rest of Europe populist parties further to the right gained momentum on aggressive anti-immigrant platforms, including France’s National Front, Austria’s Freedom Party, Germany’s Alternative for Germany, the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, Greece’s Golden Dawn, and Sweden’s Sweden Democrats (New York Times, December 4, 2016). And on January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States. Trump gained wide popular support during his campaign by promising to “build a wall” along the U.S.–Mexican border, and temporarily ban all non-citizen Muslims from entering the country.
