Migration Control and Securitization on the EU Eastern Border by Witold Klaus

Migration Control and Securitization on the EU Eastern Border by Witold Klaus

This collection responds to the renewed focus on the EU Eastern border and contributes to the developing scholarship on the Global East. The volume aims to understand and conceptualise the recent developments at that border that have so far gathered little academic attention beyond the legal analysis of pushbacks.

The book analyses migratory paths, migration control and bordering practices, as well as responses to discourses, politics, perceptions and imaginations of migration on the Eastern border from legal, social, material, historical and discursive perspectives. It focuses on Eastern EU border countries, particularly those bordering Russia or Belarus. In addition, it examines Germany’s border externalisation policies, and Romania, which has so far been excluded from border studies.

The chapters critically examine the processes leading to border fortification, highlighting post-2021 events that accelerated warfare discourse in media and politics (on “hybrid war”) and the “weaponisation” of people on the move. The main analytical lines include the progressive securitisation and rapid militarisation of the EU’s Eastern border, and the criminalisation not only of migration and people on the move themselves, but also of solidarity, activism, and different forms of resistance to these developments.

This book will be a useful resource for students and scholars of criminology, border studies, migration and asylum law, as well as for policymakers and practitioners working in these areas.

Europe’s Eastern border has long been the EU’s soft belly – a frontier for political struggles with both neighbouring countries and between Member States and EU lawThis volume represents an indispendable ressource for understanding not just contemporary border practices but also their wider significance for the EU project at large.

Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Professor and Director, Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law, University of Copenhagen

An indispensable source on migration on the EU’s Eastern border, a setting that has much to teach us about humanitarian protection. This comprehensive and insightful collection includes first-rate thinking on the topic. It is an essential and unique complement to the attention that southern Europe and the Mediterranean have received.
Hiroshi Motomura, Professor of law at the School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Co-Director of Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy

A landmark contribution to critical border studies, this collection reveals how the EU’s Eastern border has become a laboratory for militarised migration control. Its strength lies in connecting legal analysis with historical depth, empirical detail, and close attention to resistance and solidarity.

Maartje van der Woude, Professor of Law & Society, Leiden Law School

As the center of gravity in European politics once again shifts eastward, this collection offers an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas that the eastern border poses for human rights and the rule of law. We should all know more about the eastern border—and we should all be deeply concerned about what happens there. For these reasons, this book is essential reading for students, academics and other critical observers.

Katja Franko, Professor of Criminology, University of Oslo

This volume fills an important gap in border and migration studies by directing sustained attention to a frontier long overshadowed by the Mediterranean. Combining historical, legal, and ethnographic perspectives, the contributions show how the EU’s Eastern border has become a laboratory of securitisation, militarisation, and the criminalisation of both migrants and solidarity actors. Together, they offer a compelling account of the growing convergence between border control and defence logics, with implications extending far beyond Europe’s Eastern frontier. Essential reading for understanding how contemporary Europe is redrawing the line between migration control and warfare.

Giuseppe Campesi, Professor in Law and Society at "Aldo Moro" University of Bari (Italy)

Witold Klaus is a Professor at the Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (head of the Department of Criminology and of the Migration Law Research Centre). He is a lawyer, criminologist, migration researcher and NGO activist; he was a co-founder and co-president (2022-2026) of the Migration Consortium. His main areas of academic interest include, inter alia, refugee and immigrant rights, deportation, critical border studies, and critical criminology.

Magdalena Kmak is Professor of Public International Law, with a specialisation in Migration and Minority Research at the School of Law, Åbo Akademi University. Her current research focuses on the multifaceted relationship between law and mobility, in particular in the context of global migration and minority regimes. Her research interests encompass new minorities, exile studies and history of migration, mobility studies, border studies, public international law, human rights and international and European refugee and migration law.

Monika Szulecka is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a collaborating researcher at the Centre of Migration Research at the University of Warsaw. She has extensive experience in interdisciplinary research on migration control and asylum policies, irregular migration, borders, and migration-related criminal phenomena.

Marcin Górski is a Professor at the University of Łódź, Poland, Chair of the Department of European Constitutional Law and member of the Migration Law Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences.