Conference Program

Over the last decade, the European Union has increasingly adopted migration governance tools based on the externalization of border control that, while presented as emergency responses to migration flows, have produced systemic effects on the fundamental rights of people on the move. Among these effects, the erosion of the right to education for migrant and refugee children stands out as a particularly severe form of institutional carelessness: a structural failure to recognize and respond to the needs, vulnerabilities, and aspirations of the most fragile subjects caught within these governance regimes.

This paper analyzes the impact of these policies in the Euro-Mediterranean context, understood as a social and political border space, where access to educational contexts – understood here as the full continuum of educational participation, whether formal schooling or broader learning environments – is fragmented, conditioned by security logics, and often relegated to parallel and marginal measures. Drawing on the ethics of care literature and adopting an intersectional perspective, it is going to be examined how the spread of the hotspot approach has institutionalized a form of “care-less governance” that operates as a sorting and confinement mechanism at landing points, rendering children systematically invisible to regular educational systems.

In Greece and Italy, in particular, minors remain excluded from schooling for months due to infrastructural, linguistic, and organizational shortcomings. In third-country partner states, the situation is even more severe, as children are held in informal detention conditions incompatible with any form of education and access to schooling is conditioned by legal status, spatial segregation, and child labor. These conditions generate structural forms of educational segregation that are not incidental but are reproduced by design – the predictable outcome of policies that prioritize containment over care.

Framing these dynamics through the lens of the politics of care, this contribution argues that the normalization of educational exclusion in border zones constitutes a specific form of structural injustice, based on the systematic withdrawal of care from those who need it most. Care, in this reading, is not merely a relational or affective practice but a political and institutional responsibility. The absence of care in migration management and its consequences on access to education – be it deliberate or a result of negligence – reproduce cycles of intergenerational poverty, instability, and exclusion.

This paper calls for a radical rethinking of migration governance, one that moves beyond the logics of emergency and containment and recenters care as a foundational political principle, capable of protecting the right to education and, ultimately, the full spectrum of human rights for all people on the move.