The Gendered and Racialized Politics of Risk Analysis. The Case of Frontex

Autor(en)
Saskia Stachowitsch-Clar, Julia Sachseder
Abstrakt

This article develops a feminist postcolonial approach to risk analysis as an increasingly central security practice in the EU's emerging border management and security regime. For this purpose, we theorize risk analysis as a sense-making practice embedded within colonial power relations. As such, risk analysis problematizes migrants and migration in gendered and racialized ways that make them amenable to border management and other, potentially violent security practices, such as detentions, returns, surveillance, and Search and Rescue. In an exemplary frame analysis of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency's (Frontex) risk analysis report 2016, we show how conceptualizations of risks and solutions by this key actor are informed by gendered and racialized framings of 1) chaos and violence, 2) exploitation of the EU economic and welfare system, and 3) humanitarianism towards 'vulnerable' migrants. With this study, we seek to strengthen feminist and postcolonial interventions into critical security studies on knowledge, power, and expertise. By conceptualizing risk analysis as political, this article pushes critical security theory beyond understandings of security as socially constructed and towards systematically unpacking the meanings of (in)security as implicated in the reproduction of gendered and racialized power relations.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Politikwissenschaft
Journal
Critical Studies on Security
Band
7
Seiten
107-123
Anzahl der Seiten
17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2019.1644050
Publikationsdatum
2019
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
506016 Migrationspolitik, 506007 Internationale Beziehungen
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Political Science and International Relations
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG 10 – Weniger Ungleichheiten
Link zum Portal
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/the-gendered-and-racialized-politics-of-risk-analysis-the-case-of-frontex(799fc9cc-7064-47a0-ada6-9e54bf8274a0).html