Page - 208 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

208 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe mobility divide in this case is not so much one separating who can enter from who cannot (as in the metaphor of the “fortress”) but rather the one modulating velocities of access and imposing obstacles or not, thus reproducing a system of stratified rights (Buckel and Wissel 2010.). As Bigo and Guild point out drawing upon Virilio, we live in a kind of ‘dromocracy’ determined by technologies, remote control policies, virtualization and “anticipation through morphing of the future of the persons who are on the move”: in this context, beyond the question of rights it is speed that becomes relevant, and “against speed, slowness never wins.” (Bigo & Guild 2005, 9). This “dromocratic” system, however, is not fixed and stable and it is object of negotiations, disputes and resistance by the actors involved. It is not only about crossing borders, but also about a system of regulation of the velocity of access. Insofar as travellers are categorized as eit- her “legal” or “illegal”, the border acts like a sieve (Wonders, 2006), separating legitimate from suspect mobilities (Weber & Bowling, 2008). This filtering produces transnational systems of social stratification based on mobility entitlements (Bauman, 1998, referred in Weber and Pickering 2011, 25). Rather than being localized exclusively in the geographic periphery, the EU borders are becoming dispersed and dislocated, thus increasingly expanding in time and space (Balibar 2009, Walters 2002). Bureaucratic decisions, which begin in third countries through the acqui- sition or denial of a passport, visa or asylum, are therefore considered part of the border crossing process. Mobility entitlements or impediments start way before travelers reach EU territory since the primary focus of authorities’ attention is to seek ways of ensuring that unwanted migrants or asylum seekers arrive at the border at all (Guild 2005, 35). Therefore, border control begins long before the actual physical border check point (for instance, when border enforce- ment authorities receive the passengers’ booking information from the airlines in the case of air borders), and continue inside the EU territory through the control of irregularities or ‘overstays’. This complexity, which turns the border into a sophisticated and continuous filtering device, makes rather inexact the –otherwise politically eloquent– metaphor of the “fortress”. Mobility entitlements and conditionings start long before the unwanted travelers reach EU territory. In my case of study, by forcing them to take longer routes and spend much more hours on the water. A certain mobility regime and a particular speed modulation are being produced by the border surveillance and control long before arrival. for Agamben, the juridical political structure where the bio-political relation between sove- reign and bare life takes place is the camp. however, diverse studies have shown how this structure shall be considered also and in particular in relation to borders and mobility (Salter 2008, Vaughn William 2009 and 2012). Marc Salter calls it “a governmental mobile bio-politics that comes to manage circulation through the security techniques of inclusion, facilitation, and acceleration as well as exclusion, detention, and imprisonment,” with both mobility and immo- bility thus being techniques of the same assemblage and “essential parts of the international biopolitical regime” (Salter 2013, 6). In accord with Salter’s understanding of the assemblages, I propose to think of the push back operations as biopolitical assemblages: a conflation of scientific-technological, political, and discursive elements that demand to be discerned and understood. I claim that both technology and nature, in their apparent neutrality, are playing a role in these deaths and what we can under- stand as a form of displaced or mediated agency. Nature, however, is not a given, pre-existent