Humanitarian Border Research Articles

Facilitator or victim? On punishment for facilitating illegal border crossings during the Polish–Belarusian humanitarian border crisis

Punishing perpetrators for facilitating illegal border crossings or illegal stays is one of the priorities of the European Union’s migration policy. The author decided to take a look at the practice of such criminal proceedings before Podlasie courts (a region bordering Belarus). In this case, does it truly involve organising an illegal procedure – especially when it comes to family members or co-workers? The purpose of this article, therefore, is to examine the criminal case files of those convicted of organising illegal border crossings – individuals whose behaviour consisted solely of picking up migrants who were already in Poland. Law enforcement authorities charged such people, mainly foreigners, with aiding and abetting the organisation of illegal border crossing. The author addresses the question of whether such behaviour fulfils the elements of the crime specified in Article 264 (3) of the Criminal Code, and what scope of freedom the actors have when deciding on the charges and convictions.

Trust in Transit: External Migration Control and Migrants’ Perceptions of Humanitarian Borderwork in the Sahel

The Sahel region has become a focal point for externalisation policies seeking to prevent the onward travel of migrants bound for North Africa and Europe. In this context, humanitarian actors are increasingly called upon to implement migration control policies or to address migrants’ vulnerabilities during journeys characterised by ‘extended temporariness’. This paper builds upon the concepts of the humanitarian border and institutional trust to develop a typology of organisations and to explore how migrants in transit perceive these forms of humanitarian borderwork. By employing the concept of trust as an analytical prism to examine social navigation, risk-assessments and the felt externalisation of migration control, we argue that transit migrants’ mistrust in humanitarian organisations is a ripple effect of the externalisation process. This leads to cumulative ripples, such as protection gaps for individuals travelling from West to North Africa. The article compares two key locations for West African transit migration in Niger and Mali, exhibiting similar characteristics but differing in the extent and visibility of external migration-related programming. Through qualitative content analysis of interviews conducted with 90 transit migrants between 2020 and 2021, we identify the perceived involvement of organisations in migration control and the phase in the migration trajectory as key factors influencing (mis)trust in organisations. We further trace the effects of (mis)trust on migrant strategies, including exit, risk-acceptance, and self-protection. The results highlight the far-reaching impacts of different externalisation environments on migrant safety and strategies, as well as on the ability of humanitarian organisations to provide protection in vulnerable migration situations.

Humanitarian border: Reprise. Anti-human trafficking discourses and security practices at the southern Italian border

Humanitarian border: Reprise. Anti-human trafficking discourses and security practices at the southern Italian border

Humanitarian Borders and Asylum in Mexico: Using Soft Power to Control Mobility

Abstract Drawing on the anthropological debates surrounding humanitarian borders, this article analyses the functioning of the humanitarian border in central Mexico. More specifically, it focuses on the state of Puebla as a case study that casts light on the ways in which the humanitarian border operates in states located far from geographic borders, which are frequently overlooked in discourse and action on migration and asylum in Mexico. Based on ethnographic research in Puebla between 2019 and 2022, we analyse how the state has been incorporated into the international humanitarian circuit by being made responsible for handling asylum seekers and refugees who have been relocated from the south of the country. Against this backdrop, a humanitarian border comprising two dimensions has emerged: a hard border governed by securitarian control measures and a soft border managed by humanitarian actors. In this article, we will analyse the soft humanitarian border.

‘Hybrid war’, military humanitarianism, and epistemic friction. Framing illegalised migration on the Polish-Belarusian border

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of the ‘humanitarian border’ in its specific local context of Polish nationalism and the use of patriotic sentiments to justify violence at the border. The intensification of asylum-seeker migration from Asia and Africa on the EU's eastern border, triggered by the Lukashenka regime since the summer of 2021, was quickly dubbed as ‘hybrid war’, enabling the Polish government to take decisive military action against border crossers. The justification for this violence became both the patriotic duty, expressed in national idioms, and the discursively produced humanitarian concern for refugees whose lives and health were threatened precisely by the harshness of border controls. The labelling of repression and violence as the heroism and care of the Polish uniformed services, present both in the discursive framework of the description of the ‘crisis’ by the government media and in the cooperation of border guards with humanitarian actors, has become a specific form of ‘epistemic borderwork’. The grassroots solidarity movement that opposes these hegemonic discourses seeks to create counter-narratives highlighting the state's illegal actions and the refugees’ right to freedom of movement.

The displaced border

SummaryThis multisited flash ethnography recounts my encounters with a queer asylum seeker from El Salvador trying to move on from a tragedy amid family and legal issues and our observations of the encroaching humanitarian border industry throughout Mexico. It traces events across time and place that are inevitably scarred by the Mexico‐US border, which displaces itself beyond territorial lines.

Producing and Embodying the Humanitarian Border: The Gendered Geopolitics of Responding to (and Preventing) Gender-Based Violence Among Burmese Displaced in Thailand

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on forced migration, geopolitics, and the aid industry has built on William Walter’s concept of ‘humanitarian borders’, which refers to the ways in which humanitarian aid delivery becomes entangled with the enforcement of Global South-Global North borders. In this article, I apply a feminist geopolitics lens to expand on this idea, looking at humanitarian action related to the prevention of and response to gender-based violence (GBV) among Burmese who are displaced in Thailand. I ask how humanitarian borders themselves are gendered, produced through gendered violence and implicated in the ways forced migrants navigate exile. Based on ethnographic research conducted on the Thai-Burmese border over a ten-year period, this article analyzes multiple levels of discourse related to GBV intervention, including the perspectives of Global North donors, international aid workers, Thai and Burmese women’s rights advocates, and Burmese forced migrants who work on farms and in the garment industry. Following the work of feminist geographers, I offer a lens that recognises the linkages between multiple forms of violence, especially those between intimate partner violence among Burmese forced migrants in Thailand and the violence of the exploitative living and working conditions faced by Burmese forced migrants outside refugee camps . Through this lens, I show that the humanitarian border operates not only to contain forced migrant mobilities vis-à-vis the Global North, but to affix the border and its insecurities to forced migrants in ways that reinforce gendered geopolitical hierarchies.

Contested promises. Migrants’ material politics vis-à-vis the humanitarian border in Niger

ABSTRACT What promises do humanitarian infrastructures make to encourage migrants to abandon their migration projects? And how do migrants contest these promises? In order to curb EU-bound migration in the transit state Niger, the two UN agencies for migrants and refugees established support and outreach infrastructures that incentivized them to enroll in this humanitarian border and abandon migration. These infrastructural promises prompt their own contestation, because they may not be realized. The International Organization for Migration gave promises of assistance, the voluntariness of the return decision to the country of origin, and reintegration support. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees promised assistance, livelihood, and resettlement to asylum seekers and refugees. When these promises failed, migrants exposed the hidden standards of admission and operation of the humanitarian border infrastructures and the histories and political geographies of border violence and displacement they operated in. Through practices of voice and exit, migrants engaged in material politics that made the absent information visible. They thereby ultimately refused or even altered the services, promises, and actor roles of the humanitarian border. An analysis of such contested promises deepens an understanding of the relationships between humanitarian border infrastructures, their future orientations, and everyday migrant resistance.

Re-producing the Humanitarian Border

ABSTRACT Scholarship dissecting the EU humanitarian border has consistently emphasised its productive nature. The enmeshment of securitarian and humanitarian logics produces new forms of control that transform pre-existing techniques and practices; new geographies of connection and demarcation; new (non)knowledges and realities that discipline migrants. This article builds upon these contributions yet expands their remit to account for the productive relation that articulates the humanitarian border with place-specific social forces and dynamics. It is in this relation, the paper argues, that the border finds the conditions of possibility for its concrete emergence and reproduction. Through the study of asylum seekers’ reception centres in a central Italian province, an important node of the humanitarian border, the paper, first, underscores how borders externalisation connects an amalgam of places designated as both internal and external to the EU, into non-contiguous forms of border control. Second, it highlights how these forms of border control do not operate in a tabula rasa, but rather articulate with place-specific social dynamics cutting across different spheres of social life. The humanitarian border not only produces death and fabricates worlds, but it also constitutes a productive relation with the social context(s) in which it operates. Lest we conceive the relation between border controls and migrants’ subjectivities as a dialectic that is avulsed from the social contexts in which it takes place -lest we conceive it, in other words, as unfolding on an ontological plane of its own- it is crucial to reorient studies of the humanitarian border towards an appreciation of the latter’s place-specific articulations.

Everyday Migrant Accompaniment: Humanitarian Border Diplomacy

Summary This article advances the notion of humanitarian border diplomacy, contributing to current academic discussions on humanitarian diplomacy and on the practice-theory nexus by conceptualising NGOs’ migrant accompaniment at borders as a form of everyday humanitarian diplomacy. The contention is that humanitarian diplomacy is similar to other diplomatic practices. Starting by rethinking humanitarian diplomacy, it discusses the emergence of humanitarian border diplomacy as a key component of everyday migrant accompaniment. Humanitarian border diplomacy focuses on advancing migrants’ rights, seeking to make helpful, empowering and transformational interventions in an attempt to resist and change the contemporary global governance of migration. The article presents the everyday diplomatic practices of the Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes in Melilla, on Spain’s southern border, as an example of humanitarian border diplomacy. At the border, as an alternative space for resistance, difference and otherness, the need for diplomatic culture as the symbolic mediation of estrangement is revealed.

Tactics of Empathy: The Intimate Geopolitics of Mexican Migrant Detention

ABSTRACT By focusing on the externalisation of US bordering into Mexico, we consider the institutional setting that both limits and channels gestures of care and empathy in migrant detention. Working within a framework that highlights the connections between the global and the intimate, and by proposing to read these connections as they unfold into an intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork, we unpack the effects of Mexico’s recent shift towards humanitarian border politics on the interactions between detained migrants and border agents. Together with the material scarcity in which border officers operate, horrendous detention conditions and increased investments in detention facilities, this shift produces care-control dynamics that are specific to bordering in transit countries. We identify three ‘tactics of empathy’ deployed by Mexican border officers as they attempt to morally legitimise border control in this new environment, while concurrently avoiding legal liabilities and taming migrants under their custody. We argue that these tactics are less a manifestation of an ethics of care than a response to situations occurring in transit migrant detention where morality and instrumental rationality become entangled.

Continuity and Durability of Violent Border Policies and Practices Directed at Undesirable Migrants in Britain and Australia: Some Reflections on the Past–present Continuum

ABSTRACT Using an interdisciplinary approach of critical historical and border criminology, this paper sheds light on the continuity and durability of the violent gendered-racialised border regime impacting ‘undesirable migrants’. With a focus on Britain and Australia, this article argues that border policies and practices have been constructed and maintained since the nineteenth century to the present day (continuity) and able to withstand various pressures for change (durability). The importance of controlling and monitoring ‘un/desirability’ in this way must be understood in the socio-political and temporal context of twentieth-century nation-state design, which entrenches these border mechanisms within a ‘white patriarchal possession logic’, therefore ensuring their durability. The concept of ‘un/desirability’, as this article demonstrates, is an adaptable tool that enables transformative coloniality and is currently actualised through the narrative of a ‘humanitarian border’. This article achieves these aims by presenting multiple historical and contemporary examples. These cases, when read in isolation from each other, do not offer a comprehensive and longitudinal view of the border regime over time. However, when these examples are considered together, they provide evidence of the continuity and durability of the border.

Outsourcing Hotspot Governance within the EU: Cultural Mediators as Humanitarian–Border Workers in Greece

Abstract Responding to the self-declared “Mediterranean migration crisis” in 2015, the European Commission launched a Hotspot Approach to speed up the handling of incoming migrants in the “frontline states” of Greece and Italy. A key element in this operation is the identification of those eligible for asylum, which requires effective communication across cultural and linguistic difference between the asylum system and the migrants, facilitated by officially designated “cultural mediators.” We assess the hotspot governance as a form of outsourcing border control within the EU territory. Beyond sorting out and separating migrants into the categories of deservingness and undeservingness, we propose that the hotspot mechanism represents “governing by communication,” with cultural mediators as key players in this humanitarian–bordering strategy. A focus on how cultural mediators provide the precarious human labor for this governance, offers, we argue, a productive inroad into the ways in which the hotspot economies of deterrence, containment, and care sustain inequalities embedded in race, socioeconomic status, and citizenship.

God will reward you: Muslim practices of caring for precarious migrants in the context of secular suspicion

In recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, this article examines local initiatives to care for precarious others whose lives are neither materially supported nor socially recognized within the current French political regime. Engaging with critical French scholarship on humanitarianism as care for others associated with emergency, suffering and the politics of compassion, I show how food-distribution (maraudes) by Muslim-run humanitarian associations also draw from Islamic ethics of care. While social dynamics related to gender, class, race and generation structure the maraudes, the foregrounding of shared precarity, and of religious duty and piety over pity, challenges the ‘hierarchies of deservingness’ established by humanitarian border regimes. In caring for precarious others, Muslims must navigate both the secular suspicion directed towards Islam and the securitization of migration. Carrying out the religious duty of helping those in need, they are ‘laying claim to public space’ for both Muslims and precarious migrants.

‘The boys from the land don’t get anything’: unaccompanied minors’ experience of child protection environments and the humanitarian border in Greece

ABSTRACT We examine how the changes in migration patterns and humanitarian assistance policies in response to the 2015–2016 migration crisis in Greece affected unaccompanied migrant children’s access to shelters in Greece. Forty-four migrant youth aged 18–21 who arrived in Greece as unaccompanied children were recruited for in-depth interviews regarding their experiences in Greece. Life history calendars were constructed to establish the sequence of events and changes in living situations. We found that after EU-Turkey Statement was signed in March of 2016, unaccompanied minors’ experience of the humanitarian border changed according to the route by which they entered Greece. The policy changes that were implemented in March 2016 created new disparities in access to child protection settings based on minors’ route of entry into Greece.

Engaging the Geopolitics of Asylum Seeking: The Care/control Function of Vulnerability Assessments in the Context of the EU–Turkey Agreement

ABSTRACT This article explores vulnerability assessments as practices of filtering, caring and border enforcement. Following the EU-Turkish Agreement which came to force March 2016, migrants crossing from the Turkish coast onto the Greek Aegean islands are subject to a set of administrative procedures which assess the country responsible for processing their asylum claim. As I demonstrate their chances of accessing the asylum process or risk being returned to Turkey are shaped by the outcome of vulnerability assessments. Drawing together feminist approaches on vulnerability and geopolitics with recent work that addresses hotspots and the humanitarian border, the article suggest that vulnerability assessments are is crucial for understanding the ways in which state strategies to discourage mobility are woven into protection practices and the ways in which exclusions are authorised through the strategic deployment of vulnerability. The study is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted on the island of Lesbos during three separate periods between the summer of 2017 and December 2018. By interrogating processes of documentation and the role of state and non-state actors in the operationalising vulnerability, I demonstrate how mobile bodies are governed through vulnerability, medical knowledge and trauma. As a result, vulnerability assessments privilege certain, often gendered mobilities as opposed to others while in parallel contribute to enhancing a mode of care and control at the border that justifies the perpetuation of forms of violence.

‘Wir schaffen das’: Hope and hospitality beyond the humanitarian border

This article examines how hope for a different culture of hospitality has been articulated during the long summer of migration of 2015 in Germany by juxtaposing Angela Merkel’s ‘Wir schaffen das’ speeches with the cross-border migrant March of Hope. The article suggests that while Merkel’s rhetoric opens the horizon to a more hospitable Europe, her policies of humanitarian securitisation ultimately redistribute hope away from migrants and towards a German nation imagined to be in need of protection from them. Subsequently, the article turns to the March of Hope to see how the gesture of hospitality embedded in Merkel’s rhetoric was reinterpreted and resisted. It shows that cross-border marches reveal affective infrastructures of care and hospitality that extend beyond the humanitarian border enacted by the state. These infrastructures provide the space for intimate negotiations of citizenship in which the relationality of social life is not framed through the racialised emergency logics of biopolitical control.

Migration Struggles along the Humanitarian Border: Syrian Displacement in Lebanon and Ways to Travel to Europe

This article explores migration struggles along Europe’s humanitarian border in the context of Syrian displacement in Lebanon. Based on ethnographic field research it traces how humanitarian government is negotiated, appropriated and resisted in the daily struggles of individuals seeking to leave the region towards Europe. In this respect it sheds light on Syrian activism in Lebanon’s humanitarian sector, strategies to get a place in a humanitarian admission programme, projects to leave the country towards Europe and decisions to stay in Lebanon. The article shows how the arbitrariness of humanitarian government is not limited to institutions or campsites but penetrates as a ruling logic the everyday of social life and contributes to zones where access to human rights is not a given, but a daily struggle.

Gendering the care/control nexus of the humanitarian border: Women’s bodies and gendered control of mobility in a EUropean borderland

Building upon and contributing to a feminist geography of borders, the chosen methodological approach examines women’s bodily experiences at a Southern EUropean border, the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article scrutinises the care interactions unfolding in a Centre for Immigrants between medical humanitarians and women residing there in their position as both migrants and patients. The analysis foregrounds the gendered forms of domination that the care function of the humanitarian border entails. I argue that medical humanitarians are vested with the power to decide over women’s mobility in the name of care on the basis of an entanglement of administrative and medical procedures in this border context. While women are subject to greater humanitarian intervention due to the association of their embodied states with vulnerability, the biopolitical migration management of the border grants medical humanitarians a decision-making authority. The article uncovers how medical humanitarianism, enmeshed in the border regime, yields gendered constraints from practices of immobilisation to imposed practices of mothering. It traces the rationale for these practices to racialised and gendered processes of othering that usher in perceptions of undeservingness and sustain a humanitarian claim for biopolitical responsibility over these women’s mobility.

The Care/Security Nexus of the Humanitarian Border: Assisted Return in Norway

AbstractWhile Assisted Return and deportation are frequently viewed as two different return policies, the first represented as humanitarian and the latter as enforcement, this article argues that there is a continuum between these policies and that they form part of humanitarian border enforcement. Drawing on policy document analysis and interviews with NGOs and with irregular migrants, the article provides a two‐level analysis by examining how AR is presented from the Norwegian governmental perspective and how it is experienced from the Afghan migrant perspectives. The article argues that the government bases its AR policy on the need to maintain the credibility and sustainability of the asylum system, as part of fighting crime, while presenting it as a humanitarian solution. For irregular migrants, however, the experienced lack of proper asylum procedures delegitimizes return policies. Overall, the performative aspects of humanitarianism in return policies contribute to depoliticizing return.