Categories and labels in emergency governance

Recently there has been a lot of political and social tumult about the growing number of people trying to enter Europe. This current crisis not only puts pressure on Mediterranean countries as they struggle to handle with the extreme numbers of newcomers, it is also a useful starting point for an examination into the ways in which different categories concerning humans are employed in everyday practices of governance. Even a cursory glance at the language used to talk about the events taking place in the Mediterranean right now, shows the different labels attached to human beings. We see discussions about refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, talk of smugglers and traffickers and differentiation between border control and search and rescue. A discussion about these different categories and their usage is not an academic discussion alone because these distinctions, these differences, have real-world consequences and come to affect people's lives—their presents and their futures. These categories come to tell us something about the world we have constructed for ourselves as it is concerned with producing social order from the complexity and potential chaos of human experience.