Ioana Vrabiescu, Assistant Professor at Department of Organization Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam presentes her work on Illiberalism, migration policies and the politics of de-development in Europe. A profile of late capitalism.
Abstract
Debates on illiberalism starting from migration policies rarely have been coupled in the scholarship with the long lasting effects of EU policies of enlargement and integration. In this paper I seek to reveal the outcomes of differential integration in Europe as part of larger political economic project of racial capitalism, and to highlight the price of economic growth predicted on the politics of de-development in Eastern Europe (and beyond). My argument builds on the politics of de-development that under the promise of ‘progress’ and decentralization brings destruction and disorder, dispossession and dislocation to countries ‘in transition’. Discussing mass migration as one of the effects of de-development this paper highlights how migration policies inform illiberalism and contribute to its consolidation rather than the other way around.
Ioana Vrabiesco is an Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam currently developing a project to highlight the role of ethical emotions in enforcing migration control state apparatus. Previously, within her DispoCIT project (University of Warwick), she investigated how transnational police cooperation in targeting Romanian citizens for deportation impacts state sovereignty and citizenship dispossession. She conducted multi-sited fieldwork alongside the deportation apparatus in France and in Romania (University of Amsterdam), and ethnographic research with social services and institutions for migration management in Spain (Open Society Institute), among others.