Bordering Practices Research Articles

IDENTITARIAN MOVEMENTS IN THE TOURISTIC CITY: The Marketing of Hate in Verona

AbstractVerona is known as the touristic city of Romeo and Juliet, but its position as a strategic node in the rising identitarian movement goes unnoticed to the thousands of tourists visiting the city every day. This article articulates the historical centre of Verona as a public space in which far‐right and populist right groups seek to construct an exclusionary territorial identity that draws on white supremacy, northern pride and Catholic fundamentalism, which manifest themselves in practices of bordering and territorialization. I argue that the city's perfectly preserved heritage and its assumed authenticity are not only utilized to construct the ideal protagonists of city life, but also that such territorial themes of defending the ‘native homeland’ and its traditions are marketed to the outside world by constructing a ‘model’ city for a growing transnational movement. In this study, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in‐depth interviews, I investigate the mechanisms through which certain historical centres are showcased to build an identitarian network through everyday practices of boundary‐drawing and the marketing of a territorial anti‐modernist nostalgia.

Emplacement in hostile spaces: hopeless notes – commentary to van Liempt

In her keynote lecture from the Finnish Geography Days in 2022 Ilse van Liempt offers a hopeful and useful approach to understanding refugees’ processes of belonging and home-making. She focuses on arrival infrastructures, which encompass both the formal and the informal processes and structures that greet migrants as they arrive. Important part of these is emplacement, where the focus can turn into how migrants themselves become part of creating arrival infrastructures and making home in new environments, including the public spaces they inhabit. My commentary draws from my experiences of the United Kingdom (UK) hostile bordering practices, and I am reminded that hostility, policing migration and migrants and bordering practices are not only present, but often framing both the formal and informal infrastructures. Secondly, I reflect on the meaning of home here: the patriarchal and heteronormative home can follow a migrant on their route, as well as become part of the bordering practice for new arrivals. Hence for some, home itself becomes a prison, a site of violence or a place of non-belonging. Finally, the emergence of the techno-borderscape (Godin & Doná 2020) has moved large parts of arrival infrastructures, both the bordering and the support that these represent, and possibilities of home-making online, with many migrants simultaneously having reduced access to the digital spaces.

Migration in the margins: border bureaucracy and barriers to migrants’ rights during Programa Frontera Sur

U.S. support for border enforcement in Mexico has been ongoing for decades, but in 2014, after the arrival of unprecedented numbers of Central American minors and families to the U.S., even greater pressure was placed on Mexico to seal its border with Guatemala. This paper explores the resulting tensions between Mexican border enforcement policies outlined under Programa Frontera Sur, intended to tighten security and surveillance in the south of the country, and Mexico’s 2011 Migration Law, intended to facilitate the protection of migrants’ rights. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how the borders of the Mexican state are maintained through the (il)legibility of administrative rules and procedures in the context of conflicting immigration agendas. Specifically, this paper explores the precarious paths to legal protection via regularización de estancia por razones humanitarias, a temporary legal status granted to victims of grave crimes. It traces applicants’ circuitous trajectories through bureaucratic processes and evolving enforcement landscapes, noting the costs and contingencies involved in making claims ‘legitimate’ and legible in the eyes of the state. This paper also brings attention to the positioning of migrant shelters at the margins of state inclusion, where formal and informal mobilities often intersect. As a feminist geopolitical study of state bordering practices, this research is useful in understanding lived impacts and responses to more recent strategies of administrative border enforcement, including the MPP and Title 42 programs.

Bordering Ladakh, Again: From Ecological Flows to Cartographic Competition

ABSTRACT In August 2019, the Indian government dissolved the state of Jammu and Kashmir, designating its Northern region as the Union Territory of Ladakh. Two months later, it released a new Political Map of India on which Ladakh was drawn as one of India’s largest territories. Like most representations of territory on political maps, the claims made were simplified. India’s rendering did not acknowledge that Pakistan and China administered much of Ladakh’s territory; nor did it represent the region’s intricate, multi-ethnic population, topography, or ecosystems. This article approaches the construction of this political map historically. Rather than using regional history to bolster any state’s claims, we argue that the confusion over the map reflects a disconnect between the abstractions of state territory and the realities of high-altitude socio-ecologies. We compare the socio-ecologically and climatically embedded bordering practices of pre-territorial Tibetan–Ladakhi states outlined in local language sources with the abstract understanding of territorialised borders that the new map represents. The Tibetan–Ladakhi approach, which concentrated on pathways and mountain-pass checkpoints, allowed for social and ecological flows around and through these checkpoints. By contrast, the current bordering regimes have bifurcated communities, demanded fixedness, and required three large armies to defend arbitrary borders.

Trauma, Home, and Geopolitical Bordering: A Lacanian Approach to the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract In this article, we read the COVID-19 pandemic from a Lacanian perspective, in which trauma and ontological insecurity are at the heart of the analysis. Using a psychoanalytical approach allows us to grasp why the most common response to the pandemic consisted of intensified commitments to home, nationalism, and exclusionary bordering practices and, in effect, a return to geopolitical notions of “sovereignty.” This can be read in light of Lacan’s discussion of memory as a form of repetition, implying that any attempt to construe history in terms of a coherent narrative misses the unconscious, traumatic compulsion to repeat. In light of this, we consider populist responses to the pandemic as well as how the pandemic has worked as a “great unequalizer.” Such developments, we argue, must be read as representing a fragmentation of the national body and as heightening the vulnerabilities and asymmetric structures of power that inhere in what Lacan refers to as the symbolic order. Here, we propose that a postcolonial re-conceptualization of Lacan’s understanding of the mirror image and the Real is necessary if we wish to establish how the pandemic has reinforced existing patterns of abjectification and marginalization.

Between Estrangement at Home and Marginalization by the Host: Tracing Senses of Belonging through Music

This article discusses the twofold role of music as a means to manifest border-induced (cultural) difference and simultaneously foster alternative modes of belonging. The author draws on her ethnographic research, consisting of participant observation, desktop research, and interviews, and reflects on her auto-ethnographic recordings of engaging with refugee musicians. The discussion unfolds around vignettes that exemplify moments of musical encounters among refugees and between refugees and people from the host society. The vignettes are narrated from the refugee interlocutors’ point of view, who are engaged in the musicking instances as listeners and musicians. The article discusses how they devise music to cope with their estrangement from home and to articulate narratives of belonging. It illuminates how refugees challenge stereotyped representations of themselves, reinforcing the terms under which they can become “visible” and “audible.” Finally, the article argues that refugees’ narratives suggest understandings of reality as a continuum in ways that challenge the linear reifications produced by nation-state bordering practices and displacement-induced ruptures These understandings are embedded in music’s mobilities and their intersections with human movement, informal networks, and the cultural industry.

Counter-mapping the mobile border: Racial surveillance and data justice in spaces of disappearance

Following significant social and legal challenges to Australia’s colonial policy of ‘offshoring’ immigration detention, the system has become more mobile and diffuse, expanding through a range of new, ad-hoc, and established detention sites both ‘on’ and ‘offshore’. Refugees, asylum seekers and other non-citizens are frequently transferred and dispersed between these sites, which form ‘spaces of disappearance’. In this article, we draw upon concepts of racial surveillance capitalism and data justice to analyse a work by the Manus Recording Project Collective, titled where are you today, that sought to expose and counter the colonial border’s disappearing effects. The work involved the creation and distribution of audio-recordings from inside detention sites to subscribers. Recordings were distributed via text messages that also plotted individual subscribers in spatiotemporal relation to the detained artists that created them. The Collective thereby appropriated the tools of surveillance capitalism – such as GPS tracking and timestamping – to create dynamic digital cartographies of the mobile-carceral border. Through studying this work, we aim to deepen understandings of colonial bordering practices and highlight possibilities for disrupting the social divisions and exclusions that they reproduce.

Settler colonial bordering and post-pandemic futures: disrupting the nation state in Aotearoa/New Zealand

ABSTRACT In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism. Using bordering practices during the pandemic as a point of departure, this essay draws on scholarship on borders to interrogate settler colonialism in Aotearoa. This allows for four innovations: First, it situates Covid-19 as structure rather than event, one which accentuated historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental engagements. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples; those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at reclassifying nature, economy and society.

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

Vulnerability-Making at Europe’s Edge: How Policies, Documents, and Spatiality Intra-Act in the Context of Young Refugees

When young refugees who arrive in the European Union (EU) are categorized as “unaccompanied minors,” an implicit assumption and ascription coincides with their categorization, namely that they are vulnerable. Being underage and being vulnerable are inextricably linked and often equated. Thus, vulnerability is understood as a bodily fact linked to a person’s age, and discourse consequently overlooks how vulnerability is enacted in the EU’s border regime. To demonstrate how vulnerability is produced and stabilized through entangled practices of human and nonhuman agencies, I examine vulnerability-making in the context of young refugees who were classified as “unaccompanied minors” in Malta. I pay specific attention to policies, documents, and spatiality and ask: How is vulnerability of young refugees in the EU’s border regime produced and stabilized? And, how are nonhuman agencies implicated in these dynamics? The article, on one hand, makes an important empirical contribution to understanding the construction of vulnerability in respect to unaccompanied minors. The theoretical contribution of the article, on the other hand, lies in offering a new way of conceptualizing vulnerability in the border regime and within bordering practices in the EU by examining it through the epistemic lens of intra-action.

The “Who is Who” of Migration Information Campaigns on Social Media

ABSTRACT This article investigates online campaigns targeting potential migrants to inform them about and dissuade them from irregular migration to the EU. By focusing on social media networks, this article traces the different actors who circulate such campaigns online and asks how they relate to each other. Applying social network analysis on three different campaigns on Facebook and Twitter respectively, we analyze both overall network structures across social media platforms and the actor types engaged in sharing campaign content. Based on Critical Border Studies, we suggest that migration information campaigns should be understood as bordering practices, and empirically investigate them in terms of their informal performance of borders. By shedding light on the ways in which informal performance takes place in such campaigns, our article highlights how migration governance actors construct borders in their own interest, and so contributes to shedding light on migration campaigns as one of the most evasive tools in migration governance.

Bordering human rights: displaced peoples’ experiences of containment and human rights violations

ABSTRACT Contributing to debates in human rights and critical migration and border studies, this article focuses on how certain bordering practices limit displaced people from accessing universally recognised human rights. Specifically, it draws attention to some key bordering practices that restrict the physical mobility of displaced people in Turkey and Mexico. These two countries have become responsible for offering protection to many displaced people while simultaneously containing their mobility towards desired destinations. The analysis draws on extensive policy, program, and scholarly documents, and the testimonials of displaced people in these two regions. We contend that human rights violations are not merely an outcome of protection gaps for non-citizens in the international human rights regime; they can also result from deliberate containment and regulatory practices rooted in historic and contemporary hostile attitudes towards displaced people. We coin these practices ‘bordering human rights’. We further argue that these practices normalise the exclusion of displaced people from avenues of permanent protection in countries that migrants view as having the potential to provide them with safety and access to social services.

When the Home Is Also the Workplace: Women migrant domestic workers’ experiences with the ‘live-in’ policy in Singapore and Hong Kong

This article examines the link between the mandatory live-in policy and the unsafe working and living conditions of women migrant domestic workers. This policy has been rationalised on the principles of the inviolability of the private home and challenges around regulating and enforcing labour protections in the home-workplace but has, in practice, increased migrant domestic workers’ precarity and exploitation. Drawing on empirical research in Singapore and Hong Kong, the article demonstrates how the live-in policy operates in tandem with inadequate labour and migration regulations to produce a situation where poor working and living conditions are an enduring part of workers’ employment and everyday lives. It contributes to research that has highlighted the gendered dynamics and exclusionary bordering practices that shape waged domestic labour, and considers the implications this may have for the well-being and security of women migrant domestic workers.

Bordering the GDR: Everyday Transnationalism, Global Entanglements and Regimes of Mobility at the Edges of East Germany

AbstractNo state has ever been as identified with its borders as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The guest editors’ introduction to this special issue analyzes the development of the historiography of the borders of the GDR, showing how new approaches to the country's history have also impacted scholarship on the everyday history of the border. We argue for approaches that understand the border simultaneously as a site of conflict and cooperation and that situate the border not just alongside its geographical neighbors, but within broader flows of natural resources, pollution, narcotics, migration, and disease. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of border studies, we argue that global approaches can help contextualize the exceptional and encourage scholars to ask new questions about which elements of GDR bordering practices were part of the globally emerging normalcy of border regimes, and which were unique to East Germany. In these ways, this special issue seeks to reveal new aspects of East German history and, in turn, make the GDR more legible within border studies.

Solidifying sovereign power in liquid space: The making and breaking of ‘island chains’ and ‘walls’ at sea

As new visions of international order emerged among major actors of the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions, calls for freedom and openness intensified. Yet, in maritime space, the strategies for implementing these competing visions produced contradictory outcomes. The increasing sense of urgency—especially among Chinese, Japanese, and US leaders—to strengthen their defences against dangers from the other has led to the creation of militarized ‘walls’ at sea. How did the seemingly oxymoronic walls come into being, and what significance do these bordering practices have for the conduct of international, regional, and national politics? Drawing from research on the social construction of boundaries and of maritime space, this study uses the cases of the Ryukyu Islands in the East China Sea and the Spratly area of the South China Sea to show how Sino-Japanese/US antagonisms mobilized the imagery of ‘island chains’ and ‘sea lanes’ for fixing meaning amid profound socio-economic transformations. However, despite temporarily stabilizing foreign- and security-policy ideas and solidifying sovereign power in the liquid space of the oceans, the long-term consequences of these precarious divisions can be seen only when looking beyond the erected walls at sea.

Leaving home: Using videogames to help students understand forced migration

The representation of human mobility has depicted refugees in very different ways, from passive victims to threats to the economy, security, and national order in the receiving countries. This article presents a study conducted with graduate students with the aim of analyzing how this kind of geopolitical ideas about forced migration can be confronted by virtually approaching the situation of refugees in different settings. This study presents an innovative active learning methodology centered on the use of videogames to approach graduate students to the everyday life and practices of border crossing. The study uses quantitative and qualitative information provided by the students to explore the usefulness of the educational activity. This research shows how graduates through this method can use critical geopolitical lenses to examine their own biases, reflect beyond the established categories, adopt a problem-solving approach as reflexive thinkers and geopolitical actors regarding forced migration, and acquire key cognitive, skill-based, and affective learning outcomes. University students symbolize a segment of society that is eager to challenge dominant geopolitical representations and produce counter-hegemonic discourses to that end. In this context, their agency and emotional understanding can assist others in advancing towards a greater humanization of how global migration processes are comprehended.

Border hotels: Spaces of detention and quarantine

‘Border hotels’ have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about ‘border hotels’, closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of ‘border hotels’, this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the ‘hotel geopolitics’ agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

Strategic mothering in a hostile environment: how hostile immigration policies shape mothering, belonging and citizenship in the UK

ABSTRACT Immigration and citizenship policies in the UK have long been experienced as hostile and restrictive, particularly by groups who are racially minoritized. Since 2012, “Hostile Environment” policies have further restricted access to residency rights and citizenship status, generating legal and financial precarity for many families. Whilst research on state bordering practices is growing, little is known about their impact on mothering. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a London neighbourhood, I show that hostile policies marginalize mothers with insecure immigration statuses and constrain experiences of mothering. Mothers face challenges and relational tensions which play out in ways specific to their structural positioning. I argue that mothers undertake strategic mothering work to address these tensions, enacting relational belonging and citizenship as mothers, for themselves and their children. This article contributes to sociological understandings of strategic mothering as a form of relational belonging and active citizenship in the context of hostile policies.

GemThe Correspondence Between the German Socialist Joseph Bloch and the American Socialist Morris Hillquit on the Issue of International Labour Migration

Abstract In this contribution to the JMH’s series on ‘Gems’, the correspondence from 1908 between the German socialist Joseph Bloch and the American socialist Morris Hillquit on the issue of international labour migration is central. As both men were part of the international socialist community – at the time organised in the Second International (1889-1914) – the source provides an insight into how international migration was discussed within the Left in this period. Though officially, the Second International took in an ‘internationalist’ position on migration, the correspondence between Bloch and Hillquit demonstrates that there were also nativist currents present within the organisation. Furthermore, the source in exemplary for the broader international exchange of migration-related ideas taking place at the time, which contributed to the worldwide standardization of border practices.

Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination, by Vincent W. Lloyd

Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination, by Vincent W. Lloyd