Managing migration: scaling sovereignty on islands

Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over human migration and re-articulations of state sovereignty. Islands, the very sites where land meets water, are among the contested sites of struggle over entry and exclusion. In this paper, the Mediterranean is our main area of geographical inquiry. We explore the connections between crises of sovereignty, migration and islands, seeking to enhance connections between scholarship on migration and sovereignty. We argue that migration management and its geographical articulation on islands involve persistent reconfigurations of sovereignty, particularly evident during times of crisis over human migration. Such crises and re-articulations of sovereignty are creative uses of geography that repeatedly lead to a failure to protect human rights. To develop this argument, we bring feminist theorists of state sovereignty into conversation with political geographers. We move across scales of governance and political mobilization to show how a reconfiguration of sovereignty through regional and national management regimes leads to complex legal geographies and sovereign entanglements that migrants and advocates must navigate to claim rights.