“Always they look at you as a stranger”: affective encounters with the border among irregularised African migrants in Israel

Abstract

ABSTRACT From 2005-2013, migrants travelled through Egypt’s Sinai Desert to cross into Israel in search of asylum. The first were Sudanese people escaping conflict in Darfur, with Eritreans arriving subsequently. With no established legal framework for processing asylum claims, Israel’s government prevented these migrants from making formal asylum applications, granting temporary collective protection, and began to use language of infiltration and policies of detention and deportation. In response, irregularised Africans organized a protest movement, claiming the right to a fair asylum process, the contours of which illustrated the complex entanglements of collective affects that were central to making a new political subject. The article asks how experiences of Israel’s border regime disclosed a particular world, how the border was felt in affective encounters and relations through which migrants were hailed as infiltrators. The violence of bordering led to despair, stuckness, and dissipating hopes, but migrants’ shared suffering also produced inter-connection and solidarity in ways that reflected the valuing of established identities as well as being together in difference. Positive and negative affects coexisted, the latter leading not to political inaction but demonstrating the generative potential of loss when it shapes shared affective spaces and expressions of collectivity.