Bordering Practices Research Articles

When social provision became a bordering practice: The association ‘assistance to redeemed Italy’ and children’s welfare in Italy’s northeastern borderlands, 1919-1939

This article axplores children's welfare in Italy's northeastern borderlands after WWI. Using the case of a semi-public aid association “Assistenza all'Italia Redenta” (Assistance to Redeemed Italy), the author examines children's welfare before and after the installation of the fascist regime. She focuses in particular on preschools as a vital source of sociomedical and educational assistance to children in this mutlilingual and multiethnic region. But this assistance came with a quid pro quo, for children recieved it on condition that they learn the Italian language. The article thus explores how social welfare may be instrumentalized for nationalist purposes in borderland regions marked by cultural and national diversity.

‘A knife with two sides’: naturalization and the ambivalent value of citizenship for Syrians in Turkey

ABSTRACT Different legal citizenships and passports are associated with different sets of status, rights and identities. Through naturalization into a higher-value citizenship, former migrants can improve economic opportunities, transnational mobility, and ease relationships. Building on growing research that questions the migrant-citizen binary, this paper asks how citizenship matters in practice through an exploration of naturalization amongst displaced Syrians in Turkey. Drawing on qualitative research with Syrians, some of whom held temporary protection status while others had naturalized, the paper argues that the rights and status associated with Turkish citizenship are ambivalent, simultaneously beneficial and costly. Naturalization provided some economic and social rights and spatial mobility compared to temporary protection status. But Turkish citizenship also reinforced class-based distinctions and racial discrimination, and shaped new forms of exclusion: Syrians forewent certain mobility and economic strategies that they accessed as refugees. The paper argues to conceive naturalization as a technology of territorialization that fixes people onto a certain territory and forces migrants to make difficult choices when negotiating state practices of bordering and mobility control. Paying attention to the simultaneously mobilizing and territorializing effects of naturalization helps to question linear assumptions of citizenship and status hierarchies.

‘Homes for Ukraine’ and the politics of private humanitarian hospitality

Abstract Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, millions of people had fled to neighbouring countries and across Europe. People throughout Europe were mobilised into action, and from the outset, the response to the unfolding humanitarian emergency in Ukraine was a complex and often messy web of private and public initiatives. In this article, we focus on the unique British humanitarian response to the greatest movement of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, known as ‘Homes for Ukraine’ (HfU). We develop our argument in three steps. First, we situate HfU within existing scholarship on ‘everyday humanitarianism’ and private refugee hosting in Europe, locating these within longer histories of private humanitarian action. Secondly, we show how HfU shifts the humanitarian space into the private and domestic sphere, a move reliant on particular conceptions of the ‘home’ as a space of sanctuary and safety. Finally, we unpack the gendered and racialised conceptions of the home and humanitarian hospitality more broadly, and how HfU sits within and outside of the broader bordering practices of the United Kingdom’s refugee response.

Legal hostilities: Navigating queerness, emotion, and space in asylum law

Asylum laws, policies, and bureaucracies are structured by spatializing logics of emotion such as compassion, sympathy, fear, anxiety, and hostility. For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people who seek asylum, legal recognition as a refugee is contingent on the extent to which receiving states believe they are deserving of compassion and care. This materializes spatially through racialized legal and administrative cartographies of safety and danger that position LGBTIQ people as being at risk of a “well-founded fear” of persecution. Meanwhile, those LGBTIQ people who seek asylum in a “disorderly” manner or present “disrupted” narratives of either their identity or persecution generate administrative anxieties and hostilities as states seek to “guard” the border from disingenuous claims and dangerous bodies. For LGBTIQ people who seek asylum in the United Kingdom (UK), these affective tensions become apparent in the hostile bordering practices of law that seek to narrowly codify sex, gender, sexuality, race, culture, and harm. Drawing on a rich data set of LGBTIQ asylum cases from the UK, this paper adopts hostility as a novel analytic lens to map carefully how: (1) hostility materializes as a substantive object of legal or administrative scrutiny when understanding the nature of LGBTIQ identity and persecution and (2) hostility emerges procedurally through status determination processes as an “emotional grammar” to limit the possibilities of legal recognition. This affective critical work is normatively significant if we (as scholars and lawyers) are to create spaces within law and policy to support LGBTIQ people who seek asylum.

Conceptual Complexity About Return Migration of Refugees/Asylum Seekers

Return migration is one of the complex categories of migration, which becomes even more complicated in the context of refugees’ return to their country of origin. A plethora of terms is used to describe the return of refugees/asylum seekers, having strong political and policy relevance. To unpack the features and drivers of conceptual complexity, I propose three interrelated arguments. The first is that labelling – the choice of one concept over another – in return migration often depends on who uses the term (e.g. scholars, policymakers, practitioners, migrants) and in which part of the world. The second argument is that return, similar to binaries in other areas of migration, is often associated with binaries, such as voluntary and forced return. Despite policy categories that reiterate the ‘voluntary’ character of return, the actual practices rarely confirm that return is voluntary and often remain in grey areas, as the emerging literature on bordering practices shows. The third argument is that there are multiple levels at which labelling and binaries are constructed in relation to each other. The identifiable scales include the academic level, the policy level and the migrants themselves.

Residing (at) the border: ethnographies of precarious homes and internal borders

ABSTRACT In this paper, I open a discussion on internal bordering practices, starting from an unexpected space: the home. I delve into instances where newly arrived migrants, despite living in the city center, effectively reside (at) the border. My aim is to comprehend borders both as regimes and as technologies of power that manufacture everyday life, even within ostensibly “private” and “secure” spaces. I begin by examining four distinct “homes” of newly arrived migrants in Athens, each representing different configurations of border regimes over the past two decades. However, anchoring the analysis in these different homes does not confine the focus solely to the local or micro scale. Rather, I contend that these “humblest” spaces of everyday life serve as entry points for analyzing bordering practices, power relations, subjugation and subversion across multiple and intertwined sociospatial scales.

Mapping the internal border through the city: an introduction

ABSTRACT This editorial to the Special Issue introduces the concept of the internal border and presents its individual contributions. It discusses the shift from the borderline toward diverse sites and actors within the territory of the state and points to the border’s still neglected turn to city and urban space, and how this is connected to the external border. In doing so, the introduction explores the meanings of the internal border as a crucial mechanism of ordering and othering that represents, enacts, and creates the line between insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens, along with divisions of racialisation, ethnicity, gender, class, and health. This notion assumes that the practices of bordering articulate social differences mapped onto space. Thus, recognizing the city as urban border space, this introduction proposes studying the border through the city, embedded within a multiscalar and relational framework.

Enacting the border multiple in the post-welfare state: Registration of foreign-born persons in Finland

This article analyses border practices that are enacted through an array of migrants’ residence registration procedures in Finland. These practices extend to the country of departure and also take place upon arrival and settlement within a municipality, and they are intimately tied with the person’s access to social rights in the country. Building on critical border studies and Annemarie Mol’s idea of multiple ontologies we examine migrant stories, collected via multi-sited ethnography, that simultaneously testify to being targeted by diverse border practices and of being compelled to take part in doing the border. We address regulatory practices that modify and, indeed, reinforce inequalities between migrants. We argue that residence registration as a scattered border practice not only enacts different statuses for migrants but orders them hierarchically depending, for example, on the person’s migration status and nationality (EU/TCN). Furthermore, multiple regimes of knowledge production such as statistics on migrant population draw on the data recorded in the population register during the municipal registration process, which further extends the impact of this data. We show how the welfare state system, claimed to be universal, is highly conjunctural depending on the information the person receives from different interlocutors, and on the presumably apolitical “policy on the fly” enacted at the registration desk.

The Politics of Emotions, Bio-Political Border Practices and the Question of (In)security on the Turkish Political Territorial Borders

ABSTRACT This paper conceptually and analytically delineates the operation and employment of discourses and the political emotions of fear and anxiety in the making, conception, and cartographic imagination of the contours of modern Turkey’s political territorial boundaries. This study posits that the emergence and formation of the Turkish political territorial borders after the traumatic and violent experience of the cataclysmic shrinking, collapse and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire continue to influence discourses, emotions, practices and policies of border security and policing. Borders and borderlands are not only sites where the state performs, exercises and displays its sovereign will and power in protecting national security, dignity, pride and honor, but also sources and harbingers of fears, anxieties and ontological (in)securities. In the context of the highly publicized immigration influx of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis and others into Turkey, this paper argues that discourses and emotions of fear, anxiety and hate regained new currency and have become consequential in the state’s eliciting of consent from the masses in instituting border walls, fences and harsh border policing practices and policies on the borderlands and in cities across the country.

“No Foreigners”: Migrants’ Experiences of Urban Bordering in the City of Zagreb

ABSTRACT This article examines the interplay between non-European migration in the Balkans and the securitization of the European Union’s borders, highlighting the diffusion of bordering practices into urban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Zagreb, Croatia, we explore how migrants’ encounters with urban bordering contribute to their experiences of differentiation and exclusion. The article engages with the narratives of migrants and city residents, focusing on examples from Zagreb’s Dugave neighborhood. We delve into processes surrounding fencing, policing, spatial segregation, and nightclub bans and highlight that encountering the border plays a crucial role in migrants’ urban lives. Ultimately, the article sheds light on the dynamics of urban bordering and social hostility, revealing how the confluence of policies, social attitudes, and physical barriers shapes migrants’ experiences and decisions within the urban context of a new transit and arrival city in the European border regime.

Transgressing Humanitarian Borders in Southern Mexico: Turning Obstacles into Resources

ABSTRACT Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants attempt to travel through Mexico toward the U.S. hoping to claim asylum, but today the Mexican government, supported by international organizations, strongly urges them to seek refuge in Mexico. In this article, based on research on Mexico’s refugee infrastructure and its impact on migrants in Southern Mexico, we portray this form of humanitarianism as a bordering practice to prevent or, at least slow down, this northbound movement. Yet, as we illustrate in this article, despite this and other bordering practices, migrants remain determined to continue their journey. Furthermore, many migrants apply for refugee status in Mexico not in compliance with but in defiance of the bordering regime by turning this bordering practice into a resource to attain their goals. Hence, we demonstrate that migrants effectively merge what critical border and Autonomy of Migration scholars often present as opposing forces: bordering practices and migrants’ defiance.

Hong Kongers and their languages: bordering, scale and identity

Abstract In this paper, we examine discourses about border and scale in the context of Hong Kong’s relationship with mainland China. We argue that, as the physical and political borders between Hong Kong and the mainland are eroding, other forms of bordering practices – such as linguistic borders – become more salient and contested. We draw on selected thematic analyses of a corpus of 70 articles from Hong Kong English media, as well as socio-historical analyses that have widely circulated since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, in order to examine how the construction of “Cantonese” and “Mandarin” is managed against anxieties about Hong Kong’s potential loss of distinction and fears of becoming “just another Chinese city”. In this process, both borders and scales become key terrains of negotiation and function themselves as ideological resources in debates about Hong Kong’s identity and future, as certain distinctions take on reduced or pronounced meaning from particular scalar perspectives. Amid an ongoing reframing of what it means to be “Chinese”, examining language ideologies in Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of how national and linguistic categories achieve or reframe their social meanings.

Lines, cuts and engrams: comparing contemporary partition narratives from (Northern) Ireland and Upper Silesia

ABSTRACT This essay offers a comparative perspective on several narrative representations of two partitions that were established in Europe in the 1920s. Partitions of Ireland and of Upper Silesia had markedly different consequences and political vicissitudes but there are also significant parallels when it comes to selected bordering practices as well as patterns and modes of remembering partition that have been exploited in contemporary writings from either region/country. The principal focus of the essay is on how partition narratives and other representations of bordering have reflected and perpetuated tropes and images connected with social and political divisions in either society. Of particular significance is the persistence of geopolitical lines that may have disappeared from maps and territories and yet they have continued to inspire contemporary identity projects that are informed by stories and memories of the past in borderland areas. The two borders – and their narrative representations – are discussed with reference to Anna Bernard’s concept of ‘partition literature’, Tim Ingold’s ‘ghostly lines’ as well as Astrid Erll’s notion of ‘travelling memory’ and its effects on the nexus of territory and identity in recent writings from Northern Ireland and Upper Silesia.

‘They must know their rights’– reflecting on privacy, informed consent and the digital agency of asylum seekers and refugees in border contexts

AbstractThe article questions digital agency as a subjective experience of refugees when crossing Europe's external and internal borders. More concretely, the article asks how refugees experience digital agency, and how this concrete experience is constituted in specific border practices. In doing so, it examines the contradictions that arise between European laws and human rights in the context of border practices. The analysis of the data of this paper reflects two important components of digital agency: the sense of ownership and control of one's body and actions, and the capacity to think independently and thus make considered choices. This study is based on a qualitative research approach based on narrative interviews. The data was imported to MAXQDA, a software package that allows data to be efficiently collected, organised, analysed and visualised electronically. The article shows how refugees and asylum seekers, when crossing the border to Europe, do not simply enter another country, but a (powerful) institutional system. In having their biometric and digital data collected, they are confronted with several practices of border and risk management that have become routinised and thus ‘normalised’ on an institutional level. Thus, their digital agency must be understood as precarious, underscored by an installed coercive environment.

Bordering and status-harms

ABSTRACT This paper examines how everyday practices of ‘bordering’, as conceived by Yuval- Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2019) as the ongoing proliferation of border sites where migrants are assessed to be fit for inclusion or exclusion, may violate moral respect by subjecting migrants to a wide array of discriminatory treatment, leading to what I call ‘status-harms’. Section II begins by providing an overview of bordering and the various forms it has taken, such as internal immigration checkpoints or even online visa application processes. Section III develops an account of comparative and non-comparative status-harms and why they constitute violations of moral respect. There, I pay special attention to comparative status-harms by proposing three conditions under which a comparative status-harm can be said to have occurred: (a) if an individual or group is singled out for disadvantageous treatment that others are not subjected to on the basis of a socially salient attribute, (b) if the attribute marks them out as inferior relative to those who are not affected thus, and (c) ascriptions of inferior status occur within a morally objectionable social hierarchy where they are targeted by hostile norms and practices centred around that attribute. I then consider how discriminatory practices of bordering routinely imposes status-harms on migrants. Section IV draws a distinction between two types of discrimination that migrants may be subjected to at border sites, which I term policy-based discrimination and procedure-based discrimination, and explores their relationship to the comparative and non-comparative status-harms suffered by migrants. I conclude in Section V.

Resilience and Domination: Resonances of Racial Slavery in Refugee Exclusion

Abstract We are encouraged to think of refugees as resilient people with agency and capacity for flourishing, rather than passive victims needing help. This framing purports to uphold and celebrate refugees’ humanity. But some scholars worry that it problematically serves to demand resilience from refugees, normalize their displacement, and legitimate state bordering practices. This article builds on this critique by examining how powerful actors have long attributed resilience to vulnerable others to legitimate domination and control. I focus on the deployment of resilience-talk by white enslavers and their supporters to justify Black enslavement in the American South. Their philosophical, climatological, and epidemiological arguments about the resilient Black slave were supplemented with a claim that Black people could not survive liberation in the American North. I probe the resonances of this resilience-talk with contemporary invocations of the resilience of refugees in the Global South, and their supposed non-resilience in the Global North.

The spatial repercussions of Russia’s war in Ukraine: Region(alism)s, borders, insecurities

Russia’s war on Ukraine has generated a new chain of insecurities in Europe: energy and food crises, new migration flows from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, military threats sharpened by Russia’s invasion are triggering a spatial and territorial reshuffling of Europe’s Eastern flank. In this context, regional dynamics within and across the Eastern frontiers of Europe have undergone a succession of path-breaking transformations ranging from overt support to the Ukrainian war effort to decoupling from the Russian economy and an unprecedented boost to expanding the European Union’s security architecture. However, one of the most important effects of the war is the growing gap between two regional models which might be dubbed normative (Europeanization within the EU- and NATO-led European normative space) and post-colonial (exemplified by different Russia-centric projects within the post-Soviet space). The original contribution of this special issue is to address the conceptual connections between security, borders and national identity to discuss the evolving European landscape. While we do not explore the military side of the war, we focus on the nexus of (in)security and bordering practices to capture how a combination of geopolitical changes, economic dynamics and human dimensions of war has created new borders and reshaped existing ones.

“Maybe We Should Start Paying the Hours Properly”: State Violence and Ambivalent Moments of Enforced Emancipation of Refugee Women

Abstract Within integration programs and practices, refugee women are repeatedly offered rescue and emancipation. This article explores how emancipation intersects with material and social injustices of integration practices, and how refugee women in particular become subjects for emancipation. It examines the bordering practices of integration and emancipation, and identifies how integration practices symbolize refugee women as, here called, “oppressed,” “spoiled,” “willing,” “surprisingly productive,” or “familiar.” It investigates how these symbolizations circulate in emancipatory practices that are steeped in national imaginaries, as well as in welfare state work ethics. Emancipation is confined to submission to exploitative reproductive work and tied to consumerism. But it also has ambivalent moments around regularizing refugee women’s strategically needed care-work. The article suggests that differential emancipation reproduces complex and violent logics of gendered racial capitalism and coloniality of the Danish welfare state.

The Bordering Practices of Canadian Newspapers (2011-2022): “Canada is the Hope of the World”

This paper is based on a frame analysis of the media portrayal of Syrian refugees in the three highest circulating Canadian newspapers from 2011 to 2022. From 2011 to 2013 the focus was on the conflict being far away, confusing and complicated but not Canada’s concern. From 2014 to 2016, the conflict became urgent to Canadians and their politicians. From 2017 to 2022, as policy changed to actively soliciting refugees to come to Canada, the focus emphasized the inadequacies of resources available to refugees and bureaucratic snafus. There was little reporting about Syrian refugees as people, but when given a voice they were portrayed as grateful and heroic.

Encounters with kindness: everyday and extraordinary kind interventions in the lives of forced migrant survivors of SGBV

ABSTRACT While much attention is given to understanding the nature of the sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) encountered by forced migrants, far less focus is placed on the actions and experiences that enable them to cope with violence. In this paper, we adopt a novel perspective examining forced migrants’ accounts of kind encounters with strangers who are not obligated to offer assistance. We draw on 166 semi-structured interviews with forced migrant SGBV survivors to examine the nature of kind encounters, the contexts in which they occur, and their reported outcomes. Our analysis reveals that kind encounters manifest across forced migration journeys and range from the extraordinary to the everyday. Kind encounters offer vital help and support and can connect people across cleavages while fostering resistance against degrading heteropatriarchal and bordering practices. The significance that respondents attach to such encounters underscores gaps in humanitarian protection and the normalization of cruelty towards forced migrants. We argue that kind encounters are inherently micropolitical, influencing social relations, and confronting gendered and racialized hierarchies. By uncovering the importance of kind encounters, we present a fresh perspective on the experiences of SGBV in forced migration with much potential in the study of migration.