Studying the Absurdity of EU Border Controls

Migration scholars deal with absurd policies and practices in their everyday research. Yet there is little research on the absurd as such or the use of absurdity as an analytical lens to understand those policies and practices. Drawing on my PhD research on the European Border and Coast Guard agency’s (Frontex) securitization of migration, this commentary makes a case for the need to study the absurd and illustrates how this can be done. It argues that focusing on the absurd helps us question the taken for granted and imagine alternatives to the status quo, which is emancipatory for a discipline that is rooted in state-centric perspectives on mobility and has positive effects for refugees and migrants.