The moral geographies of migration maps: spatial order as a normative basis for border control

The politics of migration management is peppered by maps promoting specific spatial imaginaries of human mobility and its control. These maps are key sites where a space to be bordered is constructed and reaffirmed. Building on the insights of critical cartography, this piece examines the development of maps of ‘migratory routes’ on the part of EU-based actors focusing on FRONTEX's maps and their evolution over time. The role of institutional cartographies is understood as prefiguring sites of the border where action must take place and resources allocated. In this regard, this paper engages the literatures on moral geographies and moral economies to analyze the implicit normative plea in these maps. FRONTEX maps serve as a powerful visualization, such that researchers of migration management cannot avoid referring to the spatial imaginaries they enshrine. These maps are imbued with a moral order of the world that has a strong postcolonial legacy. This order, and the action it requires are referred to as an Accepted Moral Spatial Order. Engaging this spatial order requires a self-reflexive perspective by researchers attuned to how norms and values contribute to knowledge production on borders and the longer histories that underlie these maps of purportedly recent events.