Mathieu Asselin
War as an economic project
For an armamentist economy, perfect war is the one that never ends. Peace and stability are not goals, but threats.
Two crises, one matrix
Since 2015, Europe has faced two related crises: the massive displacement of populations fleeing wars and the accelerated militarization of its borders. At the heart of these dynamics is the European arms industry, which has battlefields in Yemen, Gaza and Libya to the Frontex command posts and the fences in Melilla, Greece and Calais.
European arms and wars moving
According to SIPRI, the EU member states accounted for more than 26 per cent of world arms exports between 2015 and 2022, providing technologies, information, aircraft, missiles, monitoring systems, tanks, ammunition, the list is long, to countries involved, among other things, in the conflicts of Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Libya and many others around the world. These transfers are not abstract: European weapons have been used by the Saudi coalition in Yemen, which the UN Human Rights Council describes as “general and systematic violations of international humanitarian law” (UNHRC, 2020).
More recently, the genocide in Gaza illustrates the lack of moral compass in this sector. Even when regulations exist, these companies find faults and pursue an indifferent business as usual at the human cost.
When the war feeds the walls
At the same time, these actors benefit from EU security migration policies. According to the Transnational Institute (TNI), Airbus, Leonardo, Thales, Indra and BAE Systems dominate the European border security market (Akkerman, 2022). Frontex’s budget rose from 6.3 million euros in 2005 to over 750 million in 2022, with a projection of 1.2 billion by 2027.
This growth reflects a strategy: making migration a threat, thanks to an active lobbying that imposes technological control and repression solutions to a deeply human crisis.
A self-sustained cycle
What the TNI describes as a “self-sustained cycle of crisis and security”: European weapons fuel wars, provoke exile, and then these migrations are presented as a “threat” justifying an undeclared European war — carried out within its borders and for the benefit of arms dealers.
A human and moral crisis
Since 2014, more than 63,000 people have died or disappeared by trying to reach Europe by the Mediterranean, according to the IOM Missing Migrants Project. These figures recall that the so-called “migration crisis” is above all a human crisis and the manifestation of a deep European moral crisis, unable to apply the rights it proclaims to non-European people.
This situation reactivates a colonial past in which Europe had the right to prioritize lives and exploit peoples. As Achille Mbembe writes, “European borders reactivate the noise of colonialism”. These logics persist in globalized capitalism that outsources borders, pactizes with authoritarian regimes and criminalizes “other” mobility.
Behind the story of a “migration crisis” is, as Étienne Balibar points out, “Europe of the Borders” reveals itself: a Europe more concerned with protecting itself than incarnating the values it proclaims.
This artistic research could not have been carried out without the contribution of the reports produced by non-governmental organizations, researchers, public institutions and activists who, often at the cost of adverse conditions, try to highlight the systemic dimensions of this human crisis. Let them be thanked for the quality of their work, which constituted not only an indispensable source of information, but also a framework for reflection and a major inspiration in the development of this artistic and photographic approach.
I also express my deep gratitude to the National Centre for Plastic Arts (CNAP) for its support for this project, underlining the crucial importance of the public sector’s role in supporting the creation and defence of freedom of artistic expression.
Mathieu Asselin (FR/VEN) lives in Arles, France. He began his career working on film productions in Caracas, Venezuela, but shaped his photography practice in the United States. He obtained his Master of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP, Arles) in 2017. His work consists mainly of long-term documentary projects of investigation, such as his last book ‘Monsanto: A Photographic Survey’, which received international recognition, winning the Dummy Award of the FotoBook Festival in Kassel in 2016, the Prize of the First Book of the Aperture Foundation in 2017, and Photographer was pre-selected for the Prize of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in 2018, Les Rencontres d’Arles Since 2018, he has been a member of the editorial committee at Disclose, the first NGO dedicated to investigative journalism in France. He is currently a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts KASK, Ghent, Belgium, and co-founder of dummy studio, a platform that creates a space to produce and present critical reflections on documentary photography.