The European<i>Dispositif</i>of Border Control in Malta. Migrants’ Experiences of a Securitized Borderland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With its accession to the European Union (EU) in 2004, Malta became a part of a European dispositif of border control. Maltese policy-makers are now charged with preventing migrants from reaching the EU mainland. Malta has thus implemented a mandatory detention policy towards people rescued at sea. When migrants arrive on the island, they are detained in military barracks for a period of up to 18 months. Subsequently, they are released from detention. Some settle in Malta, while others manage to leave the island. This paper combines critical security studies with borderlands studies to examine the construction and reinforcement of a border through social practices and government apparatuses. It explores migrants’ own experiences of what is conceptualized as a securitized borderland. The securitized borderland concept, which simultaneously refers to a space of control, a zone of transit and a place of living, is ambivalent enough to capture the ambiguous situation of migrants in Malta. Empirical data is based on fieldwork carried out in Malta and Brussels, which included observations and interactions with migrants, and interviews with national and European policy-makers, as well as with representatives from international and non-governmental organizations. Finally, this paper offers an ethnography of the social construction of an island-border which epitomizes the concept of a securitized borderland.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".