Border Regime Research Articles

Cutting down and stocking up: how migration brokers negotiate mobility disruptions

ABSTRACT Migration infrastructures are susceptible to disruptions and necessitate ongoing maintenance and repair to ensure the smooth facilitation of mobility flows. While the prevailing notion attributes the mending of infrastructures primarily to state initiatives, this paper seeks to enhance the understanding of how non-state actors execute maintenance and repair, especially in times of unprecedented disruptions. By examining the experiences of labor and education brokers operating within the Vietnam-Japan and Nepal-Malaysia migration corridors during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study explores the ways these intermediaries navigated disruptions in migration infrastructures and devised creative solutions to surmount contextual constraints arising from these disruptions. It argues that migration brokers “make do” by adopting the tactic of cutting down, and the strategy of stocking up. These practices are adopted not only to survive and wait out the infrastructural disruptions but also to anticipate and prepare for a post-pandemic scenario of resumed mobility. With a focus on brokerage practices during times of immobility, the paper shows how migration brokers maintain migration infrastructures and subsequently highlights their crucial roles in the ongoing process of infrastructuring migration. While states and border regimes continue to be highly relevant in how migrants move, the role of the brokers in mending infrastructural disruptions points to the dynamic nature of migration brokerage and challenges the misconception of self-perpetuating migration infrastructures.

COVID capitalism: The contested logistics of migrant labour supply chains in the double crisis

The introduction to the special issue (SI) lays out the agenda and key concepts of the SI ‘COVID Capitalism: The Contested Logistics of Migrant Labour Supply Chains in the Double Crisis’. The contributions to the SI focus on the reconfiguration of the means and methods of the exploitation of migrant labour during the COVID-19 pandemic and the related reorganisation of contemporary border and migration regimes. They all focus, more or less explicitly, on the adaptation and reorganisation of migrant labour supply chains which were disrupted through the ‘double crisis’ of public health and existing border and mobility regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, the SI seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of COVID-capitalism, understood as a form of disaster capitalism, in which fractions of capital try to turn the multiple crises implicated by the pandemic into a source of profit. If and how they succeed with these endeavours is, however, not guaranteed from the outset but an empirical question. The study of migrant labour supply chains does thus not only help to develop a more nuanced understanding of disaster capitalism but also contributes to debates on the logistification of migration management.

Within, beyond, and after citizenship: the interplay between visibility and invisibility among migrants in Patras

ABSTRACT Drawing upon empirical research conducted in Patras in 2015, this paper investigates the multiplicity of visible and invisible practices migrants have employed to challenge, negotiate, or evade the pervasive border regime and (attempt to) claim their freedom of settlement and movement. The paper will make two interrelated contributions. Theoretically, it will critically explore the concepts of ‘acts of citizenship’ and ‘imperceptible politics’ through the lens of visibility to analyse the nuances and differences between them and reinstate their importance in capturing the vitality of migrants’ agency. Empirically, the paper will investigate the interplay of visibility and invisibility both in the development of the European and national border regimes and in the fragmented formation process of a migrant political subjectivity. In capturing and analysing the ever-changing development of migrants’ movements and struggles, as well as their multiple ways of being political through visibility and invisibility within, beyond, and after citizenship, the paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue between two broader bodies of work: Critical Citizenship Studies and Autonomy of Migration.

Thinking Palestine, Decolonization and Abolition in Ethnic Studies

What does it mean to produce and engage in liberatory scholarship and teaching pedagogy on Palestine, given the extant forms of policing, surveillance and censorship that continue to target scholars of Palestine within the US academy? Why do these forms of repression appear even within a field of study—ethnic studies—that grew from emancipatory radical student movements seeking to dismantle (settler) colonial and white-supremacist hegemony in scholarship and teaching pedagogy? And how might we, as scholars engaged in the radical work and theory of abolition and decolonization, protect the field of ethnic studies from a mutilation of the pedagogical structure that such repression seeks to accomplish? To be clear about these terms, by abolition, I mean the insurgent praxis of Black rebellion that sought to abolish not only the system of but the foundational logics of racial-chattel-slavery. This insurgent praxis was not only sustained but renewed following the passage of the 13th amendment which abolished slavery except for as a punishment for crime. Since then, abolition continues to forcefully recreate itself as an ethos, school of thought, praxis, and movement, that redefines Blackness, and Black being against white-supremacist state violence codified in multiple liberal and neoliberal reconfigurations. In the contemporary moment abolitionist praxis seeks a dismantlement of the prison-industrial-complex and carceral logic that animates racist-state violence: policing, extrajudicial killing, racial surveillance and captivity of Black bodies (Browne 2015). But abolition also allows for and invites rebellion among all those whose lives are threatened by the white-being character of the state and its carceral logic and structure as well. This carceral logic extends to structures of regulated exclusion, taking form for example in the erection of carceral borders and border regimes to keep refugees and migrants out or contained, and the counter-insurgent war against knowledge curators, artists, and activists that question the fundamental coloniality and whiteness of the US state. I recognize true decolonization as that which has always been an abolitionist worldview and practice as well. Decolonization seeks not only to undue structures and ideologies of coloniality but to foreground Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and understanding in its place. When I refer to decolonization however, I am not referring only to an epistemic, psychological, or discursive project—I quite literally believe in the rematriation of stolen Indigenous lands to its stewards. By speaking and practising decolonization within, to, and against the academy and university, I am concerned with how our work within this space enables this rematriation. Within this framework, I offer this review of Sherene Razack’s Nothing Has to Make Sense (2022), Saree Makdisi’s Tolerance is a Wasteland (2022) and Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (2022) to explore partial causality for the institutionalized repression and absence of Palestinian studies within the field of ethnic studies as an institutional project. I propose that these three texts, when read in conversation with one another and alongside the rich tradition of decolonial and abolitionist thought and practice, offer important insights relevant to protecting the radical potential of the ethnic studies project from Zionist liberal co-optation.

Where Asylum and Austerity Meet: Deservingness and In/Exclusion in Rochdale

AbstractThe UK's asylum and social welfare systems have both been transformed by major organisational changes, funding cuts, and privatisations through a decade of austerity. With this, asylum‐seeker accommodation and the impacts of welfare reform have become increasingly concentrated in already‐impoverished, peripheral urban areas such as Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Despite these parallels, scholarship and commentary in the UK has tended to consider welfare and border regimes in relative isolation. Based on ethnographic work conducted in two charity drop‐centres in the town, this article addresses this gap by exploring how the UK's converging politics and geographies of asylum and welfare governance shape everyday negotiations of deservingness and social in/exclusion.

‘Citizenship as incorporated beyond’ – Challenging national citizen–migrant categorisations with transnational (post)colonial relations of incorporating agrifood

ABSTRACT Migrant activists in Bremen, Germany, challenge classifications of people as national citizens or migrants by highlighting the (post)colonial and capitalist relations that have contributed and continue to contribute to this citizen–migrant divide. Based on ethnographic research and using the relational–ontological tools of material semiotics, I concretise these alternative-knowledge claims by tracing two of many entanglements (1) between the EUropean border regime, the exploitation of migrant labour in the agrifood industry, and the enactment of European citizens and companies and (2) with the (post)colonial histories underpinning these exploitative relations. First, I argue that citizen bodies and migrants’ labouring bodies are intimately related in bodily, fleshy ways. Moreover, corporations that pay taxes for national states are materially related to transnational, (post)colonial migrant labour. Second, I contribute to the literature that challenges the notion of independent individual national citizens or states. Considering citizenship–migrant categorisation based on those agrifood relations, I conceptualise ‘citizenship as incorporated beyond’. This means that national citizens and body politics such as Germany have been and continue to be brought into being by incorporating (i.e. eating, embodying, forming a corporate body, black boxing), among others, (relations of) agrifood from beyond their ‘national’ bodies and borders.

“Sentir su camino”: (Im)mobilities in the return of Venezuelan migrant women during the pandemic in Ecuador

The pandemic exacerbated the already inequitable conditions to which Venezuelan migrants are exposed in Latin America. Influenced by global policies of public health control, the Ecuadorian government imposed numerous constraints on internal and external mobilities to reinforce its restrictive shift of at least the past decade, thereby limiting migrant regularization and curtailing the guarantee of the right to seek refuge. In line with Hyndman and Giles’ concepts of the embodied feminist geopolitics of waiting and (im)mobilities this article examines how, in the context of restrictive state policies, social hostility and nationalism, heightened by a public health discourse emphasizing the threat of contagion embodied in migrants and a new border regime scenario, Venezuelan migrant women have deployed multiple strategies of self-care to preserve their lives. Such strategies including reverse migration to their home country, even when it meant returning to places that are even more precarious but perhaps safer for them. It also explores how Ecuador’s institutional responses to the pandemic affected Venezuelan migrants and their action capacity.

Entangled Vulnerabilities: Gendered and Racialised Bodies and Borders in EU External Border Security

ABSTRACT The notion of vulnerability is gaining traction in EU border protection. On the one hand, the concept refers to vulnerable migrants and their affectedness by insecurity and violence. On the other, it indicates the susceptibility of borders to irregular crossings and cross-border crime. Both forms of vulnerability are assessed through dedicated procedures under the umbrella of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex. To make sense of these seemingly contradictory conceptual and practical uses of vulnerability, we draw on feminist postcolonial scholarship in security studies and political geography. We argue that a shared colonial matrix of gendered and racialised meanings and problematisations enables analogies between borders and bodies as (un-)deserving of protection. In a discourse-theoretical analysis of Frontex documents, we show how the ambiguous use of vulnerability legitimises the EU border regime and its security practices by constructing EU bordering as neutral and objective and EU borders as objects of care. We conclude that vulnerability becomes increasingly important for normalising the EU’s violent borders in the context of the EU’s broader claims to liberal values of freedom, protection, and human rights.

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Based on the analysis of the experience of operational and service activities of the State border protection units, as well as regulatory and legal documents on the construction of the State border protection, the author summarises the content of the concept "construction of operational and service activities". The practical content of this concept is implemented by the following components: prevention of illegal changes to the State border; ensuring compliance with the State border regime; ensuring control over compliance with the border regime on the example of the content reflection of the main function of the border agency ? protection of the State border. The substantiation of detailing the individual components of the operational and service activities of the State border protection unit reveals the sequence of building this activity with regard to its substantive complexity. A methodology for building operational and service activities at the site of a State border protection unit is proposed. The scientific novelty of the methodology lies in generalising the sequence of work of the head of a State border protection unit on combating offences on border issues. The application of the methodology will create conditions for the expedient use of forces and means of the State border protection unit, will allow to increase the efficiency of the work of the relevant managers and to consider more fully the factors influencing the results of the operational and service activities of the unit.

Borders and Population Growth: Evidence from a Century of Border Regime Changes on the Austrian-Czech Border

Borders and Population Growth: Evidence from a Century of Border Regime Changes on the Austrian-Czech Border

The old man by the waterfall: deep entanglements of culture, state-making and geopolitics in Arunachal Pradesh

Arunachal Pradesh, a state in Northeast India, is going through a phase of rapid infrastructural expansion, a phenomenon intensified due to the state’s geostrategic location. Despite the colonial enterprise of frontier-making and the resulting securitisation of space, the presence of the eastern Himalayan frontier has historically infused the region with elements of both steadfastness and dynamism, as its spatial fluidity persists in one form or the other. Meanwhile, despite being situated in a Himalayan corridor, the region finds itself entangled in the contentious politics in which states in South and Southeast Asia are locked. Drawing on ethnographic experiences from two geopolitically sensitive and spatially significant places, Menchukha and Namsai, situated on the eastern Himalayan slopes at Arunachal Pradesh, this article discusses the paradoxical conditions of ‘selective permeability’ (Popescu 2015: 50) that often informs contemporary border regimes, where factors favouring cross-border mobility are weighed against the demands of maintaining territorial integrity. In this context, this article looks at some prominent sites of pilgrimage and religious tourism to understand the differential attention they receive from the state, revealing a complex assemblage of spatial dynamics, cultural logics and geostrategic rationales that operate in geopolitically charged borderlands.

From fieldwork to frames: Insights from an auto‐ethnographic comic on the French‐Italian border of Ventimiglia

AbstractThis paper examines The diary from the border: Ventimiglia, an auto‐ethnographic comic based on intensive fieldwork in the Italian border city of Ventimiglia from September to December 2018. The primary objective of my empirical research was to explore the socio‐spatial effects of France's reintroduction of border controls in the area since 2015, mainly targeting irregular mobilities within the European Union (EU). This study presents the auto‐ethnographic comic by delving into two crucial aspects. Firstly, it illuminates the rationale behind utilising an auto‐ethnographic comic as a research output, shedding light on the creative process involved in its conception. Secondly, it explores its composite narrative plot, encompassing three key elements: ‘me’ (the researcher's personal experiences extending beyond the fieldwork), ‘me in Ventimiglia’ (the researcher's encounters during the fieldwork), and ‘Ventimiglia itself’ (the French‐Italian border regime). By fostering a trans‐disciplinary dialogue encompassing migration issues, comics and life course theory, this paper enriches the geographical debate in three significant ways. It recognises the profound impact of the researcher's life events in shaping both research experiences and outcomes within and beyond the fieldwork. Additionally, it underscores the importance of auto‐ethnographic comics in challenging dominant narratives and visually portraying the multifaceted experiences of migration. Lastly, it contributes to the ongoing discussion on visual methods within geography and advocates for using comics as a compelling tool to disseminate research findings, fostering empathy and a comprehensive understanding of migration experiences.

Morphing forms, undermining border regimes: in conversation with Khaled Jarrar

This short piece - written in exchange with Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar - charts his work over the past decade as it deals with borders. In particular, it focuses on a set of linked projects in which the material from the Israeli 'Separation Wall' in the West Bank were transformed into art objects, which then served as the basis for purchasing agricultural land in Palestine. In a new phase for the project, the outputs harvested the land now morph again in order to infiltrate international boundaries under 'false pretences'. It is argued that Jarrar's work uses the specificities of the art market as well as material-bureaucratic conditions of national boundaries to draw attention to and undermine unjust borders.

Framing Entangled Borders in the Baltic States

ABSTRACT The eastern Baltic borders have become more prominent in public debates following the instrumentalized migration crisis orchestrated by Belarus in 2021. This article explores and assesses the discourses related to borders and border barriers emerging in the Baltic states in reaction to the “crisis”. Using a discourse analysis framework, the work engages with the discursive framing concerned with how to define and consolidate the border and the use of border barriers, as interpreted through media frames. The article situates the framing of borders and border barriers within geopolitical identities and the notion of entangled borders in the EU, referring to the overlapping of nation-state border regimes and the EU external border regime that occurs along the EU’s borderlands. The article finds that media frames relate to three primary discourses: increasing securitization, the Baltic states’ positionality within the EU, and the changing geopolitical space. Discourses on borders and border barriers reveal that different types of borders often entangle in each other, which, through this entanglement, contributes to how borders are constructed, conceived, and expressed.

Coercive geographies: Biopower, spatial politics, and the tourist

This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity’s biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a lesser degree, continues to do so. The role that tourism plays in enabling authorities to enact spatial transformations reinforcing state power, while also indicating potential means of resistance, is foregrounded in this symposium. The four empirical contributions extend biopolitical thought by demonstrating that biopower is instrumental in the practices and regimes of mobility, security, in/exclusion of tourism. In Europe, the Dutch government experimented with enclosed “COVID-safe” tourist spaces. In Macao, China’s border regime screened tourists based on their viral threat capacities. On Naoshima Island in Japan, museums have transformed into infrastructures of bodily control. In Taiwan, flight attendants are grappling with newly emerging forms of biopower shaping the sociality of air travel and their own practices of hospitality. These empirically informed contributions interrogate how tourism figures in attempts to govern bodies at the population level, while uncovering the modes of coercion applied to govern tourists and the spaces they inhabit.

Challenging ungrievability for people missing at sea. Search infrastructures, spaces of public mourning, and claims for justice

ABSTRACT Since the so-called refugee crisis, the central Mediterranean Sea has been identified as the deadliest border in the world. As the border studies debate has shown, these deaths reflect the structural violence of border regimes and demand due forms of political accountability and responsibility. However, dominant power structures differentially shape the visibility and grievability of those who are missing and dead at the border. Keeping this complexity as a background, and drawing on examples from Lampedusa and Tunisia, we investigate the politics of challenging Butler’s “ungrievability” – the lack of access to preconditions, spaces and times of private and public mourning and commemoration. We critically discuss the interplay between three components of this political arena: the search infrastructures of the missing and dead at sea; the creation of “spaces of commemoration” through place-making, time-marking and collective actions; the claims for justice and political accountability for those deaths.

Nepal’s Quest for Secured Boundaries and International Border Regime

Nepal’s quest for secure and tranquil border assumes boundary diplomacy operating boundaries on the existing geostrategic settings conditioned by neighboring states India and China. It has yet to resolve several boundary problems with its neighboring states in its entirety though it has addressed many. So, it has to incorporate all the legal precisions and norms of border management system as practiced globally. This study revisits the essence of boundary diplomacy of Nepal in reference to international border regimes. The study primarily focuses on boundary delineation diplomacy along the Nepal-India and Nepal-China frontiers. It discusses Nepal’s border issues and boundary diplomacy with India and China with reference to the international border regime.

COVID-19 Responses and the European Border Regime in Croatia and Serbia: Spectacularizing Borders and Sovereignties

This article focuses on multiple bordering practices introduced in the context of the initial COVID -19 responses in Croatia and Serbia. These practices, often focused on the imposition of mobility control, were differently framed, executed and challenged in these two contexts and demonstrated a long-term restructuring of the European border regime at the gates of the EU . The paper outlines and contextualizes constant interplay and mutual stimulation of movement suppression and movement resilience in response to the new virus, blurring and sharpening borders, as seen from these two states at the political and geographical peripheries of Europe. Croatia and Serbia employed spectacularization and invisibilization of movement control, which steadily fostered the further compartmentalization of the population in both countries but with notable differences, especially regarding the control over unwanted migration toward the EU . In the period under discussion, borders were activated, imposed and challenged, exposing the changeability of relations between the EU border regime and the sovereign-nation states which comprise it. Different positions of Serbia and Croatia in the EU border regime also led to differences with regard to movement control, bordering, encampment and the repression exhibited toward people on the move. Old and new typologies of movement repression were tested and employed within the COVID -19 crisis framework, resulting in the further compartmentalization of societies and exclusions

A Museum of Human Hunting: Thomas Bellinck’s Speculative Documentary

Abstract: This essay explores the performance series Simple as ABC (2016 - ongoing) by Belgian film and theatre director and activist Thomas Bellinck as an exemplary artistic reflection on border regimes and the technological apparatus of mobility management. Based on extensive research into the most acute forms of human-hunting today, the mechanisms of border control and migration, Bellinck claims the speculative documentary as a counter-genre to “documentary taxidermy.” The speculative documentary investigates the objectification and de-humanization of the Other as an undesirable data-subject by interrelating the ethics of the “sovereign” gaze and looking-from-above management with the looking-from-below perspective of criminalized bodies and borderland communities. By questioning the interweaving of documentary forms with hegemonic representations of the Other, I argue that statements of truth in documentary theatre need to become unsettled, so that the genre avoids becoming complicit in the solidification of essentialist identity politics and the regulative production of narrative protocols.

Border Abolitionism

AbstractThis article proposes border abolitionism as both a political and an analytical framework for deepening critiques of border, migration, and asylum regimes worldwide. Abolitionist perspectives have been associated primarily with questions of criminalization and mass incarceration and thus articulated as a project of prison abolitionism. Importantly, migrant detention and deportation comprise another major pillar of the entrenchment of the carceral state. While critical migration scholarship and No Borders activism have been confronted with the increasing criminalization of immigration and a more general punitive turn in immigration enforcement, engagements with carceral abolitionist perspectives have largely been quite recent. Seemingly disparate struggles increasingly bring into sharper focus a multifaceted critique of what we call the confinement continuum. Not reducible to detention in migrant jails, the confinement continuum is the nexus of heterogeneous modes of confinement that migrants experience, from the fundamental condition of being stuck or trapped in a border zone to the consequent forms of border violence, as well as other forms of coercion that characterize the more general racialized sociopolitical condition of migrant subordination far beyond any physical border site and encompassing the full spectrum of migrant everyday life. Thus, migrants’ and refugees’ struggles and demands exceed a narrow focus on borders alone and frequently enact an incipient politics of abolitionism: migrants and refugees challenge the interlocking bordering mechanisms affecting them while always also repudiating and resisting the biopolitical constrictions that confine them to degraded conditions of life and articulating broader claims for social justice and visions of new and better ways of life.