A talk of interest to COR community…

“A Patchwork of intra Schengen Policing: Border games over national identity and national sovereignty”

Professor Maartje van der Woude, Leiden University

Time: 12-1:15 pm
Day: Friday, January 31
Location: The Jennifer Buher-Kane Conference Room (SSPB 4250)

ABSTRACT: The Schengen Agreement was meant to create a “borderless Europe”. Yet, from the outset on, countries have had a very ambivalent relationship to what Schengen stood for politically –  an enhancement of the economy – and what it meant in practice: not being able to properly monitor the movement of flows of people across intra-Schengen borders. By drawing from the work of Wonders (2008; 2016) on the flexibilization of state power which interlinks with Mofette (2018) and Valverde’s (2009) work on jurisdiction and interlegality as well as with the ideas around conscious incompleteness of agreements and regulation, the talk will discuss how member states of the European Union (EU) as well as national enforcement agencies have been consciously using the interplay between the normative regime on the European level and the normative regime, implementation and execution thereof on the national and local level. By using the discretionary space in rules and regulations to the best advantage of their unique interests, the different national and local actors involved in intra-Schengen cross border monitoring all seem to be involved in a complicated border game evolving around the demarcation of boundaries: the actual creation of boundaries to keep out the “crimmigrant” other and to preserve cultural homogeneity, but also the less visible process of sometimes actively creating and sometimes actively crossing boundaries between different jurisdictions and legal mandates.

BIO: Maartje van der Woude is Professor of Law and Society at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and holds her chair in the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society. She is also affiliated with the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo and the Center for the International Comparative Study of Criminology at the University of Montreal. Her work examines the politics and dialectics of terrorism/crime control, immigration control and border control and the growing merger of all three, also referred to as the process of crimmigration. She is currently working on a 5-year research project – “Getting to the Core of Crimmigration” – that was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).