British Border Research Articles

A Posthuman Approach to BrexLit and Bordering Practices through an Analysis of John Lanchester’s The Wall

Kristen Sandrock (2020) connects John Lanchester’s 2019 Brexit novel The Wall with what she refers to as ‘British border epistemologies’; that is, a radical process of re-bordering due to global warming and its impact on human mobility. The literary phenomenon that is now referred to as ‘BrexLit’ bears witness to the way in which borders and the fear to the other seem to impinge on contemporary British fiction. BrexLit is framed by an increasing global interest in exploring interdisciplinary bordering practices. Primarily, BrexLit manifests through realist and/or speculative long fiction, although there are numerous short stories and poetry that deal with this seismic political event. This article proposes to focus on different samples of speculative long fiction born from Brexit before highlighting Lanchester’s The Wall. Posthuman studies offer a convenient theoretical framework with which to approach this specific text where the British border, refugees and the fear of the other are the drivers of the plot. Thus, this contribution will explore alien configurations of refugees in contemporary British speculative fiction and the way in which these texts question Brexit rhetoric in an eye-opening and thought-provoking way, assisting readers to understand the context and consequences of such a profound political event.

Justice in the Jungle: Litigation and Judicial Violence in Calais Refugee Camps at the French–UK Border

This contribution critically addresses the migration-as-crisis framework by focusing on litigation in the case of camp evictions in Calais, on the French–British border. Courts are spaces of confrontation between actors (judges, lawyers, activists, exiles, etc.) who have different conceptions of migration, of fundamental rights, and of the ways of guaranteeing them. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork methodology (interviews with judges, lawyers, and activist legal supporters of migrants; observations of hearings; and administrative and police archives and documents) and drawing upon socio-legal scholarship, this article underlines how the “migration-public order” nexus influences the way courts address migration by reducing the effectiveness of some basic legal principles and fundamental rights. In particular, I focus on the social construction of judicial decisions and the instrumentalization of justice resulting in creating judicial violence: I argue that this judicial violence at the border is paradigmatic of a “justice crisis” which has direct effects on the agency of legal supporters (lawyers and activist legal experts), who try to defend the rights of exiles through judicial tools, and ultimately on their (lack of) confidence in justice.

Considering the Revolution

Considering the Revolution

British Nationality and Borders Bill and the international protection of refugees in the light of the concept of community interest in international law

The crisis that Europe faced in 2015 has never been resolved and countries have adopted different strategies to deal with the influx of migrants . Some of them raise serious legal doubts for good reason. One of the new national solutions currently in the process of passing is the new migration plan announced by the United Kingdom in the Nationality and Borders Bill last year. The aim of the reform is to improve the British asylum system and to fight effectively illegal immigration and people smuggling.The aim of the article is to present the most important assumptions of the British reform in the field of grant- ing refugee status. The analysis would allow to assess the compliance of the designed solutions with international obligations, the fulfilment of which should form the basis of the asylum policy of each State being a party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. The main aim of the article, however, is to draw attention to the fact that the international protection of refugees should be equated with community interests and referring to the individual interest of the State is an erroneous and dangerous assumption.

Spaces of the local, spaces of the nation: Intersectional bordering practices in post-Brexit Berlin

This article examines the relationship between bordering practices and processes of situated intersectionality by exploring how British migrants encounter and erect borders as they move through Berlin. Through exploring how research participants conceptualise and orientate themselves towards Berlin’s city spaces and how this relates to transnational and translocal processes of classification, I interrogate how processes of racialisation and classification move across European contexts to manifest within localised spaces. The research explores how these intersections work to minimise, accentuate or transfigure one another as inequalities come into being through urban space by placing feminist intersectional approaches in conversation with border studies. By uniquely focusing on a migrant group infrequently considered in European migration literatures, and often regarded as invisible or unproblematic, we can examine how race, class and gender intersect with nationality and how racialised exclusions from European belonging function through everyday processes. I highlight how classification processes have transnational portability and carry intra-European similarities, yet also assuming context-specific features.

"Salus Populi Suprema Lex": Considerations on the Initial Response of the United Kingdom to the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic.

In several countries worldwide, the initial response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been heavily criticized by general public, media, and healthcare professionals, as well as being an acrimonious topic in the political debate. The present article elaborates on some aspects of the United Kingdom (UK) primary reaction to SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; specifically, from February to July 2020. The fact that the UK showed the highest mortality rate in Western Europe following the first wave of COVID-19 certainly has many contributing causes; each deserves an accurate analysis. We focused on three specific points that have been insofar not fully discussed in the UK and not very well known outside the British border: clinical governance, access to hospital care or intensive care unit, and implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions. The considerations herein presented on these fundamental matters will likely contribute to a wider and positive discussion on public health, in the context of an unprecedented crisis.

The Politics of Exhaustion and the Externalization of British Border Control. An Articulation of a Strategy Designed to Deter, Control and Exclude

AbstractIn response to contemporary forms of human mobility, there has been a continued hardening of borders seeking to deter, control and exclude certain groups of people from entering nation states in Europe, North America and Australasia. Within this context, a disconcerting evolution of new and increasingly sophisticated forms of border control measures have emerged, which often play out within bilateral arrangements of “externalised” or “offshore” border controls. Drawing on extensive first‐hand field research among displaced people in Calais, Paris and Brussels in 2016–2019, this paper argues that the externalization of the British border to France is contingent upon a harmful strategy, which can be understood as the “politics of exhaustion.” This is a raft of (micro) practices and methods strategically aimed to deter, control and exclude certain groups of people on the move who have been profiled as “undesirable,” with a detrimental (un)intended impact on human lives.

Restorative Justice, Crime Victims and Penal Welfarism. Mapping and Contextualising Restorative Justice Policy in Scotland

While the criminological literature is abundant in studies on the functioning and effectiveness of restorative justice, there is a lack of engagement with policy on this subject, in spite of the increasing incorporation of restorative justice into policy frameworks. This paper contributes towards addressing this gap by mapping and discussing Scottish policy on restorative justice. The focus is placed on how policy frames restorative justice around certain problems, subjects and objects, reconstructing their underlying assumptions. Additionally, the paper analyses the cultural and political context within which those representations have emerged. From this perspective, it enhances the legibility of the particularly slow and fragmentary development of restorative justice in Scotland, compared to the rest of the UK. More generally, the paper provides an original (and relevant beyond British borders) case study on the interplay between cross-national and local, cultural and political factors in influencing policy change.

The ‘Channel Crossings’ and the borders of Britain

Since November 2018, a small but increased number of migrants have risked their lives attempting to cross the waters of the English Channel from northern France to reach Britain. Throughout and alongside the final protracted phase of the Brexit process, governing politicians, backed by an uncritical media, have framed these crossings as a threat to British border sovereignty that can only be repelled by ramping up border security. This article argues that the construction of the Channel Crossings as a ‘Border Spectacle’ is an ideological operation that deflects attention away from the UK-French border-zone, which constitutes an extended transnational hostile environment that is, in large part, responsible for producing the conditions of the ‘new migrant crisis’ at Britain’s southeastern land-sea border.

1997 and 2016: Referenda, Brexit, and (Re-)bordering at the European Periphery

Abstract 2016 is likely to be recalled – in Europe, at least – as a temporal bordering, after a majority in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The “Brexit” referendum result has been pinned on the rise of populist politics and the revenge of so-called “left behind” places. Regardless of reasons, the referendum left the UK with fraught politics and protracted negotiations, especially over how to re-border with a Europe that has held the dismantling of borders at the heart of its philosophical project. While Brexit has already become a byword, an earlier referendum on British borders has long slipped from international note. In 1997, a majority in Wales (one of the four constituent countries of the UK), voted for devolution from central government in Westminster. Like the Brexit referendum twenty years later, the majority in favor of devolution was slight, exposing uneasy fractures and internal cleavages as it opened fresh questions of governance and geography. By attending to a small country at the periphery of Europe, we seek to destabilize the assumption of shared markers of global bordering (1989, 2001), revealing instead the palimpsests of identity and territoriality across which re-made borders run “all over.”

The British Labour Party and the Establishment of the Irish Free State 1918-1924 by Ivan Gibbons (review)

Review Article The British Labour Party and the Establishment of the Irish Free State 1918– 1924, Ivan Gibbons (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), ix+263 pages. ‘The task of the present government is greatly facilitated by the fact that it has merely to give effect to the policy outlined by our predecessors with whom we are in perfect agreement. To us, as to them, the Treaty embodies a final settlement of Anglo-Irish relations and once and for all, with no ulterior motives’ (Ramsay MacDonald, first Labour Prime Minister, June, 1924). For an Irish reader, a particular merit of Gibbons’s work is that much of the Irish revolutionary period is reviewed not from an Irish perspective but as seen by the British political parties in Westminster. While the focus is on the Labour Party, there is good coverage also of the Liberals (bothAsquithian and Lloyd Georgian) and the Conservatives (‘Die-hard’ and more moderate). This angle of approach is salutary. Some instinctive British attitudes to Ireland, as manifested by their political parties, the media (and not only the tabloids) and by academia have not altered much in the past century; in certain respects, the British landscape of the 1920s is depressingly familiar. An occasional reference, then and now, to the ‘British-Irish border’, or even to the ‘British border’, would not come amiss. Professor Gibbons is a former Programme Director of Irish Studies, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. He is also the author of a ninetypage extended pamphlet, Drawing the Line – the Irish Border in British Politics, which was published by Haus Curiosities in October 2018 in the context of the current Brexit debate; he clearly believes that a primer of this sort is sorely needed for the basic education of especially the English public. It repeats much of the historical material in the earlier study but it does not cover the details of the current EU–UK negotiations. Its provocative and highly readable final chapter is entitled ‘Don’t Mention the Irish Border’. The study under review contains interesting perspectives on the Irish centenary period now being celebrated and a wealth of apt quotation and fascinating factual nuggets. Its bibliography is extensive (close to 150 secondary sources), and it has a dependable index and footnotes. It is more detailed and more insightful on the British-party context than on the Irish Summer 2019: Review Article Studies • volume 108 • number 430 212 background. The kernel of the volume is contained in the second, third, fourth and fifth chapters; these cover in turn Labour policy on Ireland between 1918 and 1921, Labour and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, the establishment of the Free State while Labour was the principal opposition party at Westminster, 1921–23, and Labour as a minority government, June to October, 1924. To the extent that the present-day British Labour Party has the capacity to offer potential alternative strategies to existing UK dilemmas in respect of both of our islands, its earlier history now possesses a special interest. But the book is not particularly well-organised. For example, I found the introduction and the first chapter somewhat over-lengthy and repetitive; the final chapter and conclusion add little. The principal theme is straightforward and convincing. It is that the closer the Labour Party got to taking power as the governing party in London, the more inclined it was to hedge its bets on its traditional interest in and commitment to Ireland and its interests. In its earliest years, up to late 1918, the Labour Party functioned mainly as the progressive wing of the Liberals; as such, it possessed an instinctive and general sympathy with Irish nationalism as articulated by John Redmond. But under the influence especially of the Representation of the People Act, which greatly expanded the franchise, and due to the breakup of the Liberal Party, Labour moved towards becoming the principal opposition party in Westminster; by 1922, it had more seats in the House of Commons than the Liberals. As the party in particular of unionised male industrial workers, the core interest of which was to improve working conditions and increase wages, and faced with serious economic decline, red revolution in Russia...

The Entanglements of Europe: History, Geography, Identity

Europe is a continent of extraordinary variety and diversity geographically, ethnically, nationally, culturally, economically and politically. Yet at the same time all its parts are and always have been so deeply linked by their destiny that this continent can accurately be described as a single albeit complex political entity. Anything crucial in any area of human endeavour occurring anywhere in Europe always has had both direct and indirect consequences for our continent as a whole. The history of Europe is, in fact, the history of a constant searching and reshaping of its internal structures and the relationship of its parts. Today, if we talk about a single European civilization or about common European values, history, traditions, and destiny, what we are referring to is more the fruit of this tendency toward integration than its cause.

The political rationality of restorative justice

This article investigates the political conditions that have enabled the development of restorative justice, in England and Wales, over the last 40 years. By applying a governmentality approach, it conceptualizes the emergence of restorative justice as a response to distinctive political problematics, enacted by a range of governmental technologies and driven by a combination of competing political rationalities. In so doing, the article seeks to shed light on the assemblage of ambivalent principles and values that constitute restorative justice by linking them to conflicting political contingencies. This could have implications in understanding both the fragmentary growth of restorative justice in England and Wales, and, more generally, the political roots of restorative justice policies, programmes and practices beyond the British borders.

Detention and Destitution

For many seeking safety in the UK, the challenges of their journey do not end at the British border. Having been forced to flee their home and then surviving a journey that claims the lives of thou...

Entanglement and transnational transfer in the history of infant schools in Great Britain and salles d’asile in France, 1816–1881

The historical developments of infant schools in Great Britain and salles d’asile in France – both precursors of present-day preschools – were interconnected. However, historians have not yet analysed specifically how transnational exchange influenced the growth and nature of these institutions. Drawing on archival data and secondary sources, and using a combined comparative and transnational approach, this study aims to remedy this omission. It traces the evolution of British infant schools and French salles d’asile from their beginnings to their affiliation with the education systems in their respective countries – i.e. from 1816, when Robert Owen founded the first infant school in Britain, to 1881, when the salle d’asile was incorporated as an integral part of the French education system (renamed école maternelle). The study also shows how ideas about infant education and the motives and experiences of educators and social reformers spread across British borders and influenced the development of salles d’asile.

Evading Colonial Authority. Rebels and Outlaws in the Borderlands of Dutch West Borneo 1850s–1920s

Borderlands in Southeast Asia are frequently portrayed as being outside state influence, as zones of anarchy where identities are flexible, loyalties ephemeral and state authority largely avoided. Depicted by shifting state administrators as rebels and outlaws roaming the border hills the populations inhabiting these edges of states further seem especially resistant towards officialdom through their engagement in law-bending practices and a heightened sense of autonomy. This paper examines these dynamics as they unravel on the island of Borneo during the Dutch colonial administration in the mid-19th century and thus aims to contribute to the growing historiography of Southeast Asian borderlands and the more localized dynamics of state formation. By contrasting local Iban narratives and discourses with colonial records in the border regency of Boven-Kapoeas in Dutch West Borneo I show how renowned rebel leaders did their best to take advantage of the differing terms and conditions that colonial rule offered on either side of the border and thus openly challenged colonial state authority. The rebel defiance of colonial authority forced the colonial administrators to impose strict control along the Dutch and British border of Borneo. It is argued that the rebellions and consequent Dutch attempt to establish law and order, largely contributed to the territorial demarcation of the colonial state.

Jude McCullough and Sharon Pickering, eds., Borders and Crime: Pre-Crime, Mobility and Serious Harm in an Age of Globalization.

Jude McCulloch and Sharon Pickering, eds, Borders and Crime: Pre-Crime, Mobility and Serious Harm in an Age of Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2012, 202 pp. $ 85.00 hardcover (978-0-230-30029-3) This edited volume contributes to critical scholarship on transnational crime control, mobility, citizenship, and border governance. The chapters marshal primary research to reveal dynamics that operate to foster or disallow transnational human mobility. Each chapter provides an account of how international border is configured as a zone of negotiation and contact where issues of citizenship and identity, race, gender, and mobility are at stake. Borders and Crime will be of interest to sociologists, critical criminologists, and critical security scholars who study migration and its control, flows of capital and commodities, globalization of criminal justice initiatives, biosecurity, geographies of global war on terror, and international crime and its construction. Borders and Crime begins with an introduction by volume editors, Jude McCulloch and Sharon Pickering, who describe contradiction at heart of border: it is at once foremost site where forces of criminalization and crime control operate on a transnational scale as well as a threshold crisscrossed by state actors, entrepreneurs, corporations and other powerful stakeholders that cause widespread harm. This contradiction is positioned as an incongruity between what authors describe as hyperactivity and hypoactivity at border. McCulloch and Pickering situate border as a site of contact and negotiation where coercive power is concentrated and where demands of effective control and regulation inevitably exceed capacity of border to deal with them. The volume is organized in two parts that in turn address production and construction of crime and organized responses to it, as well as notable failures in addressing transnational criminal activity. The bipartite organization of volume mirrors another contradiction identified by border studies literature: namely, that borders are significant for forms of policing undertaken at them as well precrime measures that operate across them. The first part of volume addresses hyperactivity at border, and offers a series of detailed accounts of role of border in defining and addressing crime, threat, and unease. This focus implicitly acknowledges that powerful actors coalesce at border to come to terms with mobility of goods and people by making determinations concerning their licit or illicit status; but it also recognizes that border itself is mobile. For example, second chapter of volume--by Leanne Weber--is a rich empirical account of how policing in New South Wales transcends border as a geographically fixed and singular entity by intercepting unlawfuls at multiple and mobile points within state. Weber shows how a great number of Australia's so called unlawfuls are identified not by Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) agents at border, but through other forms of contact with agencies within country--and often as victims of crime. Weber's contribution contrasts with critical security literature that notes how algorithmic risk assessments and international data-mining constitute a pushing out of border. DIAC interdiction of unlawful non-citizens is often achieved at infranational (rather than transnational) scales, and in a manner that constitutes an inward movement wherein detection and expulsion result when the world, in effect, comes to police (p. 35) rather than other way around. In a preceding chapter, Dario Melossi analyses EU imprisonment rates to locate exclusionary practices of border in EU prisons, where (im)migrants are disproportionally present. Through their analysis of internal Foreign and Commonwealth and Home Office documents, Marinella Marmo and Evan Smith view present immigration control through a historical lens by juxtaposing present-day trafficked to woman subjected to virginity testing at British borders from late 1960s to late 1970s. …

‘Red Lines on Maps’ Revisited: The Role of Maps in Negotiating and Defending the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty

ABSTRACT Daniel Webster said it was knowledge of the Sparks and Steuben maps (both apparently confirming British border claims) that brought the state of Maine to concur in his 1842 treaty settlement with Lord Ashburton. His statement is well known, but most historians have felt inhibited by lack of evidence from examining the way in which Webster used the maps in the negotiation and from assessing the true extent (and limits) of their influence. Using a wider range of sources, the present article seeks to remedy this lacuna through detailed analysis of the sequence of negotiation. It discusses the ‘Battle of the Maps’ that followed the revelation of their importance in securing the treaty's conclusion, the 1843 search in the Paris archives to which this impelled the British government, and the unearthing (in the Foreign Office) of the King George Map that enabled Sir Robert Peel to destroy Lord Palmerston's attack and conclude the controversy. The article also illustrates the propensity of participants to explain points by dashing off sketch maps, and it adds to the uncertainty as to the precise source from which Jared Sparks copied his ‘red line’ onto the map of Maine.

Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Future in Alfonso Cuar�n's Children of Men

Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Future in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men Samuel Amago (bio) Ethics are the aesthetics of the future. —V. I. Lenin1 What is that sound high in the airMurmur of maternal lamentationWho are those hooded hordes swarmingOver endless plains, stumbling in cracked earthRinged by the flat horizon onlyWhat is the city over the mountainsCracks and reforms and bursts in the violet airFalling towersJerusalem Athens AlexandriaVienna London —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land2 The DVD release of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) may herald the first global blockbuster marketed as a teaching text. Both the director's statements in interviews for the popular press and the DVD's extra features offering commentary and analysis from Slavoj Žižek, Naomi Klein, Tzvetan Todorov, Fabrizio Eva, Saskia Sassen, John Gray, and James Lovelock suggest a film ready-made for cultural studies analysis. Moreover, the film, with its numerous allusions to contemporary geopolitics and dense network of [End Page 212] high-culture and popular cultural citations, offers a doubly coded model of this type of analysis, combining an ideological critique of post-9/11 global politics with a meditation on cinematic aesthetics and their interpretation. As this essay will elaborate, Cuarón's film organizes its generic take on the dystopian science fiction film—responding in particular to the strain that Fred Glass conceptualizes as the "New Bad Future Film"3—through a critical reading of the themes and referential aesthetics of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Expanding on the diverse interpenetrations of the film's ideological and aesthetic critiques, I argue that Cuarón's film provides a compelling response to the aphorism attributed to Lenin: that ethics are the aesthetics of the future. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust":4 Visualizing the Dystopian Present The movie is loosely adapted from P. D. James's novel Children of Men (1992), which, according to the author, sprang from the question "If there were no future, how would we behave?"5 The film, which links its vision of the future to contemporary political, economic, and environmental concerns that did not yet exist when James wrote her novel, intimates that we would behave very badly indeed; Cuarón portrays a dreary future after the nuclear and environmental destruction of the entire world outside of England. Public service announcements and news programs provide much of the expository information, so that the viewer's knowledge of the dystopian world of Children of Men is delineated by what appears via its omnipresent audiovisual media. As co-viewers (along with the film's characters) of the various audiovisual stimuli that saturate the film's mise-en-scène, we are drawn into the dystopian world envisioned, so that our own perspective on events resembles that of the characters. This self-reflexive emphasis on media and representation can be related to the director's overarching concern with the politics of the present and how they inform the way we imagine the future. Children of Men opens with a black screen while a series of voices belonging to television announcers recite the day's lead stories: "The Homeland Security Bill is ratified. After eight years, British borders will remain closed. The deportation of illegal immigrants will continue." Whereas most viewers will be prepared for a sci-fi film set in a future United Kingdom, the mention of the term "Homeland Security" in this opening sequence actually links the narrative on several levels to the sociopolitical reality of the [End Page 213] present-day United States. The establishing shot that emerges from the initial blackness is a coffee shop interior in which a transfixed public gazes at a television monitor off-screen; thus, as the film opens we view another audience who, at the same time, watches another screen. In this way, Cuarón establishes a formal parallel between the fictional world of the diegesis and the real world of the spectator while emphasizing the omnipresence of the media in the global age. The film's opening introduces the central thematic and structural elements that form the entire...

Tectonic terranes, metallogeny and regional geochemical surveys: an example from northern British Columbia

Abstract This study utilizes three major data sources: distribution of geological units; density, type, age and distribution of mineral deposits; and elemental analyses from regional geochemical stream sediment surveys to define parameters that ‘characterize’ tectonic terranes in northern British Columbia. A similar approach could be applied anywhere in the Canadian Cordillera. This area, NTS map sheets 104N, 104O and 104P along the British Columbia-Yukon border, forms a transect through allochthonous terranes into North American rocks. These are: the allochthonous island-arc Stikine, oceanic Cache Creek, cataclastic Yukon/Tanana, and island-arc Quensel terranes, the pericratonic Dorsey terrane; the parautochthonous oceanic Sylvester allochthon; and the autochthonous miogeoclinal North American Cassiar terrane. Plutonic rocks of Jurassic-Cretaceous to Tertiary age intrude all terranes. Data sources used in the study are geological base maps and reports, the Ministry of Energy Mines and Petroleum Resources' mineral deposit database (MINFILE) and analytical data from the National Regional Geochemical Survey stream sediment and water sampling program. Geological maps were compiled from various sources and plotted to act as bases for geochemical and mineral deposit overlays for analysis and interpretation. Geochemical samples were separated into background and anomalous populations and compared according to their source terranes. We found that mean concentrations from background sample populations for some elements are statistically distinctive for different terranes. Unfortunately, elemental correlation coefficients for the terranes are similar so cannot be used to characterize each terrane. Data on mineral deposits and occurrences were compiled from minfile and other sources. Particular attention was paid to deposits with histories of production or significant reported reserves. Deposits were sorted by type and commodity to produce synoptic metallogenic maps. The combined data from geological, geochemical and mineral deposit databases form a strong tool for interpreting and predicting patterns of mineralization.