Border harm and affective injustice: The politics of anger at the Melilla border, Spain.

Policy Statement on the Incarceration of Undocumented Migrant Families: Society for Community Research and Action Division 27 of the American Psychological Association.

Reviewed by: Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier by Karolina S. Follis Chris Hann Karolina S. Follis, Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 296 pp. Not so long ago, borders in Eastern Europe were relatively impermeable. As Karolina Follis points out in Building Fortress Europe, nominally sovereign states controlled their boundaries with political allies almost as rigorously as the “iron curtain” to the West. Citizens depended on the whims of their officials for passports. The Berlin Wall (to take an extreme instance) was officially described as an anti-fascist protection wall by those who built it. However, few citizens took this rhetoric seriously. The lie was obvious and, in this sense, the border regime was transparent. At the same time, there was a good deal of variation in practical implementation. Poland generally pursued a more liberal passport policy than any of its neighbors, and citizens took grateful advantage of it, even in times of great political and economic turmoil. (This point is overlooked by Karolina Follis, who reports her own migration as a child from Poland to the US without discussing the fact that minor hurdles and all this exemplified the relative openness of her homeland.) Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, states such as Poland found themselves in a quite different situation. The eastern border with Ukraine opened up dramatically after 1990, above all for purposes of petty commerce. The states had become more sovereign, but millions needed the lifeline of the cross-border “gray economy” to survive the chaos of shock therapy in Poland and the collapse of Soviet central planning in Ukraine. Easy permeability prevailed until 2003 when, as a precondition for membership in the European Union and, more specifically, in the Schengen zone of visa-free personal mobility, Warsaw was obliged to introduce new border controls—in other words, to contribute its building blocks to the [End Page 949] Fortress Europe of Follis’ title. In the last decade, Poles have been granted unprecedented freedom to move and seek work in the West. Millions have done so, above all in Britain. They leave behind significant gaps—e.g., in seasonal segments of the labor market and, above all, in the domestic (care) sector. These gaps can be most readily filled by Ukrainian women, who have been colonizing these niches informally since the early 1990s. Schengen norms are designed to suppress this postsocialist mobility. In practice, the flows from western Ukraine continue more or less unabated because the needs of the national economy trump supranational obligations to “Europe.” Officials of Poland’s Border Guard turn a blind eye in their “tacit acknowledgement of illegal labor” (107). The hypocrisy of this aspect of “rebordering” (Follis’ key term) is more subtle and insidious than the lies people were obliged to live under socialism. The author traces the consequences of these morally dubious policies for Ukrainians obliged to “lose” their passports as an alternative to leaving the country at regular intervals to observe the time constraints of their visas. The waiting period before they can re-enter Poland is referred to as a korydor, a metaphor with intimations of oppressive bureaucracy but at the same time a valued opportunity to be with their loved ones at home (64). Migrants and refugees from more remote places, especially the Russian Federation are not deemed welcome as economic migrants and are routinely denied their basic human rights as the EU “externalizes” its immigration dilemmas by cultivating Ukraine as a “buffer zone.” Follis carried out multi-sited fieldwork, primarily in a region that witnessed appalling violence and ethnic cleansing before (and, on a reduced scale, even after) Stalin imposed a new boundary between Poland and Ukraine at the end of World War II. She conceptualizes the present border as “an interface for a range of interactions, encounters, and events” (21). Successive chapters give insight into the precarious lives of female migrants from rural Ukraine, the perspectives of Polish border guards and the technologies at their disposal for “quotidian surveillance,” the mechanisms for classifying self-declared refugees in a highly imperfect Common European Asylum System, and seminars for training the staff of state-of-the-art detention...

Border deaths, also referred to as migrant deaths or deaths during migration, are premature deaths of individuals whose movement and/or presence in a certain territory has been irregularised. Data on border deaths, presented separately or alongside figures on border length, the number of border crossings, irregular crossings, asylum seekers, or smugglers, are often part of the repertoire of contemporary media representations of irregularised migration. As such, they can be also mobilised in perpetuating narratives of “crisis” and reinforcing the perception of certain mobilities as illegal and dangerous, and even in normalising death as an inevitable element of irregularised migration. In sharp contrast with the media representations, data on the deceased and disappeared at borders remain invisible in official statistics. Since states do not record in official documents whether a deceased individual was a migrant or if the death is related to migration, deceased refugees and other migrants are “invisibly” included in post-mortem administrative procedures, and thus in official mortality statistics – assuming those statistics even account for non-citizens or unidentified persons. Consequently, local actors, including municipal cemetery services, hospitals, police, and activists, have taken the initiative to document these deaths. Some do so out of professional duty, while others respond to a perceived moral obligation to preserve records. However, motives vary widely, and systematic state-level documentation efforts only emerged in response to heightened media attention. The oldest known initiative for documenting deaths at borders, the List of Refugee Deaths by the United for Intercultural Action (UNITED) network, was initiated in the 1990s in the context of reconfiguring and hardening border controls in post-Cold War Europe, the internationalisation of the European anti-racist movement, and the turn to metrics in the field of human rights. UNITED list is regularly updated and published in a revised edition on an annual basis. The list aims to highlight the systemic failures of European migration policies that endanger lives. It draws attention to a wide range of deaths tied to irregular migration, including those occurring in detention centres, during deportation etc. UNITED’s approach emphasises the importance of acknowledging every death while recognising structural violence, clearly positioning border deaths as lethal outcomes of current migration policies, or deaths by policy. Despite systematic efforts by UNITED to systematically document and disseminate data on border deaths, information from this area seemed to reach the broader public only after the major shipwreck near Lampedusa in October 2013. In response to the shipwreck, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), known for its project-oriented approach and constant search for new operational niches, began collecting and soon distributing data on border deaths. As already highlighted in literature, the methodological focus of the IOM project on deaths in transit, antismuggling advocacy, and its geographic emphasis on the Mediterranean results in selective representations that obscure the state origins of violence i.e. state responsi bilities for border deaths. Unlike the UNITED list, which politicised border deaths by positioning them as a catalyst for a broader struggle against racism, the IOM project, despite shifts in the last ten years of its existence, is inclined towards their naturalisation and humanitarianisation, aligning also in this area with the demands of states and donors. From this perspective, the IOM project could be related to the growing migration industry and its constant demand for new activities and niches, on the one hand, and, on the other, the humanitarianisation of borders, rooted in the fusion of care and control, or the care-control nexus. In spite of their differences, both UNITED’s and IOM’s projects call for reflection and raise questions about the game-changing effects of documenting border deaths and data-driven advocacy. Globally, as well as in Croatia, where the numbers of those killed and displaced in the 1990es war – and even in World War II – remain among the most sensitive (daily) political topics, the numbers of border deaths are not subject to dispute. In fact, the opposite seems to be happening: there is a conflict-free circulation of various, often contradictory, and hard-to-compare numbers from different sources and methodologies that blend in media reports and public statements into an amorphous mass of figures surrounding knowledge of irregular migration and border deaths. Moreover, while even the slightest rise in asylum seeker numbers or irregular crossings readily prompts at least nominal responses like reintroduction of border controls in the Schengen Area, the continuous rise in border deaths does not provoke remotely similar, concrete, and prompt reactions. Starting with this observation, the article brings this discussion to artistic, feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist critical approaches to documenting racially coded violence and border deaths. Is it enough to include the excluded into the existing order? Or is it necessary, as Judith Butler argues, to return to the questions: Whose lives are considered lives? Whose lives are deemed unreal, and whose real? Whose lives are grievable, and whose are not? The question is not simply about the presence or absence of violence, but about whose lives are made to matter. And, what if documentation efforts focused on deaths at borders align with, rather than challenge dominant order, policies, and practices of border control, degradation, and scaling of people? Can practices of documenting violence serve as relevant factors and effective agents of change in a context where border violence is tolerated when racially coded, where it is an integral part of, rather than an aberration from, the border regime? Is documenting and presenting data about violence, especially when decontextualised, reducing victims of violence to objects of the spectacle of violence, while simultaneously reinforcing the superior position of researchers and activists as those who are in a position to condemn and expose that violence? Scarce or almost non-existent socially transformative effects of documentation efforts focused on border deaths – even those that emerged within broader social movements and struggles, like the UNITED List of Refugee Deaths – empirically support the idea that this type of data could align with dominant social relations and administrative procedures. In this vein, the IOM project, as an example of the appropriation and even commodification of activist practices – since it involves the transfer of knowledge and procedures from activist struggles and movements into the migration industry – can be seen as supporting the thesis of the (potentially) active role of documentation efforts in sustaining existing social inequalities, systems of control, and dehumanisation. However, the question remains as to what extent presented problems and perspectives apply to other, more grassroots and vernacular documentation efforts by survivors, families, and activist groups, which emphasise the egalitarian and affective dimensions of documenting border deaths. These efforts and the related affects of grief and resentment could be seen as potential triggers for struggles for alternative values and, in terms of Clare Hemmings, affective solidarity. This solidarity is not based on shared identity or experience, but on a sense of “desire for transformation born out of the experience of discomfort and against all odds” (Hemmings, 2012: 158). It is created from anger and frustration, and sustained through mourning and connection, in which documentation practices can also play a role.

In a world where racism runs riot, what is the role of international law? Human rights instruments like the United Nations’ International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are paradigmatic of the conventional response, directing states to avoid racially discriminatory behavior and promote policies in keeping with colorblind diversity. Is it possible, however, that in its reproduction of the twentieth century’s fight for civil rights and cultural pluralism, the contemporary understanding of global racism has become outdated? As counterintuitive as it might seem, might international law be a part of the problem? In The Right to Exclude: A Critical Race Approach to Sovereignty, Borders, and International Law, Justin Desautels-Stein offers a historical account of how certain rules of international law produce structures of racial hierarchy, rather than simply limit them. The intellectual fulcrum for this production, Desautels-Stein argues, is not the proverbial villain hiding behind the curtain. It lies instead in the ideological structures of sovereignty and property, and more specifically, in the right to exclude that is shared in those twinned precincts, and the border regimes that result. Applying critical race theory to contemporary problems of migration, nationalism, multiculturalism, decolonization, and self-determination, Desautels-Stein expounds a theory of “postracial xenophobia,” a structure of racial ideology that justifies and legitimates a pragmatic account of racialized foreignness, a racial xenos.

Running a Team for Disabled Children and Their Families

Labor problems both nationally and internationally in various countries are a common problem that has never been resolved properly, this happens both in developing and developed countries. Employment problems that occur in various developed and developing countries have different characteristics, this can be influenced by various fields of life in the association of human life in society and influenced by ideology, politics, law, social economy, and culture as well as the influence of the development of globalization which is very increasing and fast. The development of globalization in the field of technology and information as one that contributes to the field of employment. One of them is seen in the rapid development of globalization today in the life of society nationally and internationally, which has a major influence on the continuous association of human life and has an impact in all fields of activity in the fields of religion, economy, politics, law, social culture, and other activities nationally and internationally. The relationship between employer and employee in Islamic law is based on equal humanity. Although the structure of the company shows a hierarchy between capital owners, shareholders, and workers, Islam emphasizes that both parties are on the same level of humanity. The relationship between employer and employee is seen as a family relationship, partnership, and symbiotic mutualism. However, at present, the implementation of Law No. 6 of 2023 concerning Job Creation, especially in the field of employment, has not been able to fully answer complex problems related to wages. Therefore, alternative solutions are needed that are in accordance with the principles of wages and consider the conditions and needs of workers/laborers in Indonesia. This research aims to apply policy politics, especially related to the concept of implementing Law Number 6 of 2023 concerning Manpower from the perspective of Social Justice and Humanitarian Ethics. The implementation of the labor wage system must pay attention to the principles of justice and balance. The wages provided must be adequate to meet the needs of workers and their families, as well as provide security and protection for labor. The results show that the implementation of the Job Creation Law requires policy adjustments at the regional level through Regional Regulations that consider the economic capabilities of local companies. In the context of policy politics, the imbalance between the number of workers received and the ability of companies to fulfill wage obligations has the potential to trigger structural conflicts between companies and workers. In the perspective of Islamic politics, the relationship between employers and workers is built on the principles of social justice and human equality. Islam asserts that although there is a structural hierarchy within the company - such as capital owners, shareholders and workers - all parties are morally equal as human beings. This relationship is ideally based on the values of partnership, solidarity and symbiotic mutualism, which are in line with the principles of social justice. Therefore, wage system policies must ensure that no party is disadvantaged or feels disadvantaged, but rather create harmony and balance of interests between stakeholders. Society is politically viewed as an interconnected entity, where the common welfare becomes a collective responsibility to realize social stability and justice.

The American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) was founded in 1973 and has since its inception has been the flagship journal for the Society of Community Research and Action. AJCP publishes leading scholarship in community psychology and social action research. This special issue celebrates the 50 years of scholarship in AJCP by curating and assembling previously published articles in virtual special issues (VSIs) with accompanying commentaries. Nine VSIs were compiled as part of this special issue. Each of these VSIs were organized around themes that are of critical importance to community psychology and each VSI summarizes what has been learned from their included articles and future directions for the field. In this paper, we introduce this special issue on this collection of VSIs, discussing how each of these VSIs endeavor to push the field forward.

Although anti-racist and decolonial scholars in community psychology have shared valuable ways professionals can promote racial justice and contend with potential barriers (e.g., Lykes et al., 2019; Makkawi, 2017), little consideration has been given to graduate students’ resistance to institutional oppression. This paper explores the experiences of five graduate student activists resisting institutional racism at their institution. Through co-constructed autoethnography, it provides narratives addressing three central themes: (1) isolation, racism, and community-building; (2) direct actions and institutional pushback; and (3) internal conflicts and endurance. It considers how graduate students, as individuals who are structurally disempowered in higher education, persist in the face of oppressive institutional structures to challenge them, risks they experience in doing so, and techniques and resources that aid them. It concludes with a discussion of the importance of embracing graduate student activism to advance anti-racist praxis in community psychology.

This chapter explores the legacies and memories of forced migration, borders and violence, focusing on Greece and Lesvos in particular. It begins by looking at the Greek Genocide (1914-1923) and theAsia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and the violence and humiliation that Asia Minor refugees experienced when they settled in Greece, which were similar, if not identical, to contemporary border crossers’ experiences in refugee camps, hotspots, detention centres and the local community of Lesvos. The chapter focuses on the intergenerational harms that remain in collective memory, time and space. It then discusses the ‘violence continuum’ across time and space – that is, the existence and operation of past border policies and practices in the present and future. The chapter argues that past developments and security/military responses to unauthorized border crossings across time and space have generated a ‘border harm’ precedent that has been passed on to the present. This border harm precedent operates as part of the ‘generational’ effect (Arango, 2012) from preceding border regimes, which has affected migration policies and practices across generations. The deficiencies, bureaucracy, inconsistency and chaos surrounding policies and practices of migration governance in each phase of irregular migration in Greece have been passed on from one phase to the next by formulating a genealogy, routine and ritual of cumulative misery, violence and harm in time and space.

Dominant narratives tend to conceive refugees either as victims or as impostors. Drawing from ethnographic research in Patras, the chapter explores the counter-narratives of settlement and mobility that refugees create and enact for their everyday survival and escape. It will do so by investigating (1) the general process of building of the commons that allows refugees to escape the dominant attempts of containing them in reception and detention centers, and (2) the specific process of production of knowledge that refugees contrive to evade or challenge the European border regime. Far from reproducing the dominant representation of victimization and criminalization, these counter-narratives continuously intertwine with and challenge the dominant ones, allowing refugees to enact their—real or imagined—freedom of settlement and movement.

This paper explores the consequences of the necropolitical border regime on border crossers’ lives on the Greek island of Lesvos. It focuses on the manifold abandonments (left-to-die practices) that border crossers experience inside and beyond the refugee camps and detention centres, arguing that this inhuman and degrading treatment inflicts, normalises and naturalises disposability, humiliation, and social death. The paper combines a social harm approach, critical migration and border studies, and insights from anthropology to analyse border crossers’ lived experiences of violence. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing literature on the politics of abandonment and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance. It also expands on social harm typologies by introducing a new conceptual category of harm which I term ‘necroharms’.

This article explores forms of ‘grief-activism’ commemorating those who have perished on the move, in the waters surrounding EUrope, at physical border barriers or on EUrope’s streets and in its detention centres. Contestations in death protest the differential distribution of vulnerability and a politics of division, abandonment and necropolitical violence on which EUrope’s border regime thrives. Mobilising both Judith Butler’s notion of grievability and Jacques Rancière’s proposition of an ‘impossible identification’ as a heterological form of politics, this article examines what occurs in attempts to form solidarities in precarious moments of collective mourning. While a politics that seeks to include lost others must always be replete with impossibilities, it is argued that grief-activist practices that counter-perform exclusions in transformative political encounters engender imaginaries of what it might mean to create community ‘beyond borders’.

Critical realism can unsettle a number of orthodoxies that surround the study of community violence within community psychology. This is to say, because critical realism is embraced so rarely by community psychologists, it can institute a parallax shift within the discipline, whereby we are granted alternative ways of perceiving violence within community contexts. Drawing on transdisciplinary thought, we offer in this article a retroductive framework for studying community violence. This framework, we argue, can facilitate an understanding of structurally violent causal mechanisms through interrogating how direct-or observable-violence intersects with epistemic violence (i.e., harmful and inaccurate representation). Demonstrating the efficacy of this framework, we provide an example from our work, where participants from a low-income South African community produced and screened a documentary film on community violence and collective resistance. Reflecting on the ways by which this film engaged xenophobic violence in particular, we examine how community members used the film to trouble perceptions of community violence and advance a multifaceted antiviolence agenda. By way of conclusion, we consider how our framework can be used to inform a critical realist community psychology, wherein violent social structures are analyzed against the agentic community-driven initiatives which oppose these structures.

Although community psychology claims to have a social justice‐oriented value base, archival studies of publications in the field have identified deficits in marginalized group representation and a tendency for published work to perpetuate social exclusion. This disjuncture has implications for our understanding of power relations in community psychology scholarship. In this article, I analyze who is included and excluded in the participant choices of 895 empirical studies published in 4 international community psychology journals over a decade. The analysis shows that studies largely report on minority world populations that signify privileged social groups or fail to foreground groups affected by processes of social exclusion. I argue that understanding how knowledge creation may perpetuate social exclusion is fundamental to the role of community psychologists. The article highlights the consequences for the field of the choices of groups we choose to study and report on, as well as those we neglect, in knowledge‐making enterprises.

Community Psychology research that seeks to disrupt oppressive systems is fraught with ethical complexities, more so when it involves people with non-normative sexual/gender identities in contexts such as South Africa. The field demands researchers to negotiate the quagmires resulting from the inadequacy of ‘principlesim’ (Onuoha C, Bioethics Across Borders: An African Perspective. Uppsala University, Uppsala, 2007) and the ‘Regulatory Ethics’ favoured by institutional Research Ethics Committees to guide research (von Unger, H. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(2), 87–98, 2016). Similarly, research with marginalised populations that employs liberatory methodological approaches demands the creation of space for queer visibilities, and the privileging of local epistemes and subjectivities (Turker, A. Queer Visibilities: Space, identity and interaction in Cape Town. Chichester, West Sussex: John Willey & Sons, 2009). Given that the regulatory approach to ethics is problematised in Community Psychology scholarship for its inadequacy to respond to differential power dynamics; the history of research institutions vis-a-vis the communities we do research with, often experienced as epistemic violence; and the discordant conceptualisations of consent, beneficence, and harm – this chapter considers the position of ethics in research with marginalized populations as ongoing, critical, and dialogical. Reflecting on a study with non-gay identifying men who have sex with men, I embrace the decolonial feminist research agenda, seeing it as an opportunity to reconsider ethics in research and attend to the unjust erasure of marginalised sexual/gender subjectivities. The chapter frames the issue of ethics not from a perspective of a 'regulatory enterprise', but rather as intrinsically aligned to reflexivity; working against the affinity between research and epistemic violence. I discuss the means I adopted to navigate across epistemic (dis)articulations resulting from incompatible research frameworks and methods. To counter potential epistemic violence, I argue for a reflexive ethics anchored in decolonial feminist perspectives, and a methodological promiscuity that reconsiders ethics in practice.