But in January 2016 the "European Refugee Crisis" saw the adoption of new border controls between Sweden and Denmark, and between Denmark and Germany. This "temporary" exception -- prolonged until November 2017 so far -- from the Schengen agreement with a sudden reaction to: "an unprecedented influx of refugees and migrants from conflict zones including Syria and Afghanistan". Earlier, migrant friendly policies had been upheld by all parties --except the Sweden Democrats, the new populist and immigrant hostile party.
This paper starts from the metaphor of "the bridge" between nation-state jurisdictions as a site of overlapping networks. Specifically, networks of immigration flows from the periphery toward nodal global city network destinations -- a palpable globalization from below. We lay bare the multiplicity of vulnerable gazes involved in the actual management of flows by border police regimes, so as to accommodate established national policy profiles encompassing "openness" and "free flows'. However, that accommodation is not studied in terms of the totalizing discourse of coordination, but rather in terms of the actual modus operandi of the border regime in processing refugees.
