Studium Generale | Lezing, Engelstalig - The Politics of Humanitarianism (or Afrophobia?): The EU Migration Deals and Africa

The EU migration deals with Africa are a humanitarian intervention to curb unregulated migration to Western Europe, on the level of international politics. However, the danger of political incentives is that they impose a misrecognition of the actual socio-political economic conditions of the immigrants for whom these deals have been made. This lecture will examine the socio-political and economic implications of these deals. How have they been contested, recognised or even legitimated within the affected countries and beyond? What are the benefits, challenges and fallacies of these deals? Are there ways in which the political deals could be transformed to embody moral and ethical imperatives that could be contingent and yet universalised? This lecture is organised in connection with the exhibition I Believe | the World in a Suburb, which opens on 16 March at Centre Ceramique, Maastricht.

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