Border Violence Research Articles

Dark Web Drug Markets and Cartel Crime

Abstract Recent evidence suggests that legal marijuana markets in several U.S. states have decreased violence in Mexican-U.S. border regions. As legal markets for production and distribution displace drug cartel distribution, the violence associated with cartel trafficking and distribution decreases. Prior analysis has not considered an important emerging innovation for drug distribution: online anonymous marketplaces. The increasing volume of drug trade that has occurred on this “Dark Web” could result in reduced drug cartel violence as production and distribution use this substitute network and turn away from the cartel distribution networks. This paper investigates the relationship between border violence and the volume of drug trade that occurs on the Dark Web using a difference in differences model. We examine differences in crime rates at the U.S.-Mexico border and away from the border during the emergence of the Dark Web. Data on Dark Web transactions, users, and markets allows us to measure changes in Dark Web activity and the subsequent impact on crime. We find evidence that the rise in Dark Web marketplaces results in crime reductions at the border of the U.S., relative to non-border counties.

Border Abolitionism

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

Data Laundering Border Violence: Performance Measures and Immigration Enforcement

On July 8, 2020, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (OAG) tabled its report on immigration removals, finding that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) fails to enforce deportations in a timely manner and has abysmal record-keeping practices. The report concludes that these failings undermine the integrity of Canada’s immigration system and endangers the public. Critical Accounting scholarship problematizes auditing for legitimizing harmful processes through the guise of scrutiny. The OAG audit of the CBSA overlooks the well-documented systemic abuses of the CBSA in administering migrant detention. The article argues “performance audits” are a governmental technology called data laundering that rationalizes the violence inherent in immigration enforcement. Data laundering obscures the fact that policing migration depends on broad discretionary powers, leading to opaque and inconsistent data practices. “Laundering” signals auditing’s inability to be sufficiently adversarial with a sector of law enforcement whose poor data-keeping practices maintains an illusion of recordkeeping as a form of power. Audit dependence on quantitative forms of data increases violence against immigrants; when violent deportation and detention measures are quantified, this presumes an acceptable ledger of force that accounts for, and in so doing legitimizes, state enactment of violence upon vulnerable people.

Ágnostoi: Greece and the forensic bordering of Fortress Europe

This article explores migrant disappearances and border deaths at the Greek borderlands through the notion of forensic bordering. Based on fieldwork in the Evros region, Athens and its surroundings, and on the island of Lesvos, I argue that disappearance and non-identification in the event of death are effectively border violence by other means. Three forms of symbolic and political post-mortem border violence are then explicated: the act of disappearance, the act of non-identification, and the act of denying proper mourning. Crucially, this article unpacks the underlining logic that, if migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are not supposed to cross the border in the first place, their existence and, ultimately, their equal humanity can be similarly denied in death. If the forensic sciences are generally perceived positively as means to provide answers, closure, accountability, and truth, forensic bordering seeks to do the exact opposite, rejecting accountability and employing silence as a deterrence.

Editors' note: Activist anthropology, public engagement, and invasive species

In the Editors' note, we present the texts of this issue, which consists of individual article and research report submissions sent to us. Once again,by fortunate happenstance, the various articles, research reports and essays discuss related topics, lending the issue a sense of internal coherence. The texts discuss common topics such as migration and border violence, activist anthropology and the anthropology of activism, rootedness and displacement. In addition, the essay and conference report engage in debates over public anthropology and contesting hegemonies within the discipline.

The securitisation of immigration through the Tactical Terrorism Response Team

ABSTRACT This article considers a significant stage in the convergence of US counterterrorism policy and immigration enforcement exemplified by the emergence of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit known as the Tactical Terrorism Response Team (TTRT). In my analysis I show: (i) that TTRT agents engage in a process I call social homicide which subjects travellers to a condition of bare life; (ii) that the increasing production of border violence highlights that the convergence of securitisation and immigration enforcement is a praxis of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia; (iii) that securitisation and exclusionary immigration policy have made use of invisibility to create and expand a permanent state of exception; and (iv) that border enforcement through securitisation is used as a mechanism for the surveillance and control of social movements inside the United States. Given the limited public information on TTRT’s operations, this study explores the matter through a case study of Abdikadir Mohamed’s 2017 encounter with the unit, his subsequent immigration proceedings, and the FOIA lawsuit filed against CBP for more information on the TTRT.

Performing secrecy: hiding and obfuscation in Frontex’s pushbacks scandal

ABSTRACT In this paper, I investigate how non-knowledge about border violence is maintained through secrecy. I do so by focusing on Frontex's maritime pushback scandal. The first argument I develop is that secrecy takes the form of hiding and obfuscation. Hiding is straightforward. It implies that information about pushback is withheld from oversight bodies and the public to avoid criticism and disciplinary measures. Obfuscation is more complex. It refers to the production of uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion about a policy or practice. Differently from hiding, obfuscation results from the disclosure of contradictory and misleading information about pushback, as well as from attempts to confuse the public debate by raising convoluted arguments that question the very understanding of pushbacks as illegal. The second argument I develop is that transparency can be implicated in the production of secrecy. While transparency and secrecy are typically seen as binary opposites, I will explain how mechanisms implemented to render Frontex's operation more transparent have been used to hide pushbacks and obscure the Agency's responsibility for violations of fundamental rights.

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.

A community psychology for migrant justice: Critically examining border violence and resistance during the COVID-19 syndemic.

This article explores the magnifying lenses of the COVID-19 syndemic to highlight how people racialized as migrants and refugees have been-and continue to be-disproportionally harmed. We use empirical evidence collected in our scholarly/activist work in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the United States to examine migrant injustice as being produced by a combination of power structures and relations working to maintain colonial global orders and inequalities. This is what has been defined as "border imperialism." Our data, complemented by evidence from transnational solidarity groups, show that border imperialism has further intersected with the hygienic-sanitary logics of social control at play during the COVID-19 period. This intersection has resulted in increasingly coercive methods of restraining people on the move, as well as in increased-and new-forms of degradation of their lives, that is, an overall multiplication of border violences. At the same time, however, COVID-19 has provided a unique opportunity for grassroot solidarity initiatives and resistance led by people on the move to be amplified and extended. We conclude by emphasizing the need for community psychologists to take a more vigorous stance against oppressive border imperialist regimes and the related forms of violence they re/enact.

Does a State’s Right to Control Borders Justify Harming Refugees?

Abstract Certain states in the Global North have responded to refugees seeking safety on their territories through harmful practices of border violence, detention, encampment and containment that serve to prevent and deter refugee arrivals. These practices are ostensibly justified through an appeal to a right to control borders. This paper therefore assesses whether these harmful practices can indeed be morally justified by a state’s right to control borders. It analyses whether Christopher Heath Wellman’s account of a state’s right to freedom of association, which represents the most restrictive account of a state’s right to control borders available in the literature, can extend to justify current harmful practices against refugees. If not, then no available justification will be able to do so, and thus contemporary harmful practices used against refugees cannot be justified by a state’s right to control borders.

The ‘War on Terror’ as Primitive Accumulation in Tunisia: US-Led Imperialism and the Post-2010-2011 Revolt/Security Conjuncture

: This article examines the rearticulation and reconfiguration of US-led imperialism vis-à-vis Tunisia in the aftermath of the 2010–2011 popular revolt. Challenging the prevalent economic-military binary in analyses of US-led imperialism in the region, it treats instead economic intervention in Tunisia as linked to and shaped by ‘security’ intervention, with the violence of the War on Terror laying the groundwork for a new wave of primitive accumulation. Employing conjunctural analysis, it considers how the 2015 attacks, largely targeting European tourists at a Sousse beach resort and the Bardo national museum, were mobilized to further Tunisia’s imbrications within imperialist security architecture through legal interventions, border violence, peripheral militarization, increased ‘security’ spending and neocolonial ‘expertise’, debt and racialized financialization. In doing so, the 2015 security conjuncture reinforced Tunisia’s peripheral status in the international system and enabled further surplus value drain, though not without resistance. The article concludes by reflecting on popular struggles and the current conjuncture, which is characterized not only by public health and economic crises, but also by the rise of a multipolar world order that, when combined with working class organization and mobilization, may provide an opening for Tunisia to delink from the imperialist core. Such a transformation would domore than any platitudes about human rights and ‘security sector reform’ to radically transform the nature of the Tunisian security state and the social relations it is designed to uphold.

Push and back: The ripple effect of EU border externalisation from Croatia to Iran

Pushbacks have become a key feature of EU migration controls since 2015. As this article argues, practices of pushbacks stretch from EU spaces, such as Croatia, to its external borders and neighbouring countries, reaching as far as Iran. Although pushback tactics and their consequences are widely discussed in public, activist, policy debates, and by refugees themselves; academic literature has a limited engagement with pushbacks and their effects. To address this gap, we set up the concepts of “push” and “back” to question the ripple effect of informal and violent border controls that occurs transversely in multiple geopolitical contexts and timelines of migratory journeys. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two border locations: the Croatian border with Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Turkey-Iran border. We argue that the EU’s governance of its external border encourages identical practices of “push” to different locations. We show that “pushes” generate multi-layered violence enmeshed in the local security (and at times militarized) contexts when people are “back”; or forcibly returned to their starting locations. The analysis of “push” and “back” contributes to the literature on the EU externalisation of migration governance and border violence, which we examine through informal and violent border practices inside and outside of the EU.

‘Emigrantes, Palestinos, Estamos Unidos’: anticolonial connectivity and resistance along the ‘Palestine-Mexico’ border

ABSTRACT Borders, barriers, and walls separate and divide. The construction of walls, militarization of borders, and confiscation of land can be observed throughout the histories of settler colonialism with violent material and bodily effects, especially as it has been inflected through the logic and structures of racial capitalism. And yet, as borders, barriers, and walls ‘harden’ through new security practices, local struggles emerge that transgress, cross boundaries, and express anticolonial connectivities. This article examines one case of this along the ‘Palestine-Mexico’ border, where we observe both the coordination between the U.S., Israel and global business in the ‘hardening’ of border regimes, and struggles against that border violence seen with protesters in Los Angeles demanding human rights for Latin American migrants and Palestinians or campaigns for a ‘World Without Walls’. It argues that these anticolonial connectivities are examples of boundary-crossing work that bridge gaps and separations maintained by colonial domination and become powerful acts of resistance against those regimes.

A Roundtable on Environmental Injustice and Border Abolition

AbstractThis article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a group of eleven activists, organizers, scholars, practitioners, educators, and storytellers to discuss their work building cross-border solidarities along the US-Mexico border and in US immigration detention, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and the Bengal Delta. Participants provide critical analysis of the origins of environmental injustice and border violence and discuss how a confluence of ecological crisis, environmental racism, and border militarization since the 1980s disproportionately impacts BIPOC and queer/trans communities and exacerbates migrant precarity and displacement worldwide. Participants share ways they have built alternatives to border and ecological violence through migrant accompaniment, legal and policy advocacy, divestment activism, storytelling, education, and sustainability projects. The discussion is organized around three key themes: environmental injustice, racism, and borders; strategies adopted by organizers to build environmental and migrant justice; and visions of border abolition.

“The morgue, the forest and the presbytery”. Interconnections between migration experience and border violence in Northern Morocco

À travers l’observation ethnographique de trois espaces singuliers dans le nord du Maroc – une morgue, une « forêt » et un presbytère – l’article explore les articulations entre expérience migratoire et violence des frontières à partir de la perspective des migrants eux-mêmes. Il démontre que les migrants font l’expérience d’au moins trois formes de violence en frontière, émergeant à la fois du contrôle étatique, des réseaux de la circulation irrégulière, et de l’assistance humanitaire. Cependant, plutôt que de s’articuler dans un rapport cumulatif, ces différentes formes de violence convergent et se renforcent respectivement au sein d’un continuum qui irrigue la trajectoire migrante. Les migrants pour leur part, ne sont pas de simples objets de ce continuum. Non seulement ils définissent des pratiques pour contrer ses effets – quitte à générer ce faisant de la violence à l’égard de leurs pairs – mais de plus, ils réinterprètent l’expérience de la violence dans un registre moral qui valorise le risque en migration, sans pour autant naturaliser leur exposition à la mort en frontière. Ils sont donc des acteurs à part entière de la « fabrique » de la frontière et des violences qui la composent, et ce, qu’ils s’opposent à, ou se réapproprient ses effets.

De/Colonial Boundaries, Cultural Difference and Shared Indigeneity in the Poem “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech” by Maḥmūd Darwīš

Abstract Simultaneously addressing the (Native) American and Palestinian/Israeli context, Maḥmūd Darwīš’s poem Ḫuṭbat al-Hindī al-aḥmar – ma qabla al-aḫīra – amāma al-raǧul al-abyaḍ (The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man), published in 1992 to critically commemorate the ‘discovery’ of ‘America’ by Columbus in 1492, is a deep reflection about the violence of borders and frontiers created by white European invaders. In my article, I aim to answer the question of how the poem’s manifold boundaries (between colonizer and colonized; nature and culture; equality and hierarchization; the living and the dead; identity and otherness) are addressed and re-framed. Although partly essentializing cultural difference by drawing from a romanticized image of the “noble savage” (the “Red Indian”), the poem nevertheless finds a voice to raise crucial questions regarding the self-perception of European/western modernity, anticipating the recently discovered fact that (white) human agency has pushed ‘progress’ so far as to enable humanity to destroy itself, nature, and earth. In intertextual dialogue with key texts of de/coloniality and western modernity, I attempt to show how the poem confronts us with fundamental questions about humanity in the face of self-destruction.

Bodies as territories of exception: the coloniality and gendered necropolitics of state and intimate border violence against migrant women in England

ABSTRACT Based on research with Latin American women in England, this paper explores how coloniality and gendered necropower is structurally embedded into the UK immigration regime, enabling multi-scalar (re)configurations of border violence. I build on the everyday bordering literature to uncover the under-theorised intimate and embodied dimensions of border violence. Intimate border violence is coined to refer to specific forms of state-sponsored interpersonal violence stemming from immigration policies and practices. Abusive men exploit the hostile environment's logic of deputisation to perform bordering against their migrant partners through threats of deportation, destitution, criminalization and homelessness. The embodied politics of coloniality reproduces hierarchies of (in)humanity and informs the state's necropolitical management of its territory. From within the national space, border violence re-territorializes migrant women's bodies as annexed territories of exception reduced to bare-life. Legal abandonment enables sovereign power to be exerted not only by the state but also by abusive partners.

Disorienting empathy: Reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

AbstractThis article explores how literature can sensitise us to our potential implication in the injustice and violence of the global border regime. The violence of borders today sustains a large economic and political system that “produces precarity and disposability, exposes migrants and refugees to harm and exploitation, and reinforces global inequalities”. While it manifests itself in direct events, policies, and actions, the violence produced by the global border regime is structural, widespread, and racially charged. Citizens of the global North are not precisely perpetrators of border violence, yet they bear a certain kind of political responsibility for the experiences of trauma, death, impoverishment, and discrimination that borders generate and institutionalise. Reading Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), I investigate how we can recognise ourselves in the position of the ‘implicated subject’ (Michael Rothberg) through a process of what I call ‘disorienting empathy’. This form of expanded and self‐aware perspective‐taking elicits our concern for others, but simultaneously de‐centres our self, leading us to reflect critically on our subject position and on our potential indirect involvement in systemic violence. By examining Exit West's literary strategies, I argue that empathy, non‐appropriative identification, and disorientation can generate a self‐reflexivity about our responsibility in relation to the global border regime. Drawing on affect theory, literary theory, migration studies, and critical race theory, the article highlights contemporary fiction's capacity to represent diasporic experiences and reimagine the freedom of movement in the twenty‐first century.

Deaths, disappearances, borders: Migrant disappearability as a technology of deterrence

This paper analyses migrant disappearances in connection to EU bordering practices and techniques. Drawing on fieldwork in various localities at Greek borderlands, I argue that death or disappearance, due to drowning, hypothermia, exhaustion, violence, deprivation of medical care, and road accidents, to name but a few examples, has become an integral part of border enforcement in the Global North. To engage analytically with such an instantiation of border violence, I propose to utilise the notion of migrant disappearability. This disappearability is a produced condition (as opposed to accidently or randomly appearing) of everyday existence that does not necessarily lead to death or disappearance but, nevertheless, exerts pressure towards certain kind of precarities and threats by limiting the horizon of possibilities racialised migrants from the Global South have ahead of them. Furthermore, the state of being disappearable is a social space one constantly enters, leaves, re-enters and leaves again; rather than being at the forefront at all times, it looms above like a ghost.

Weaponizing rescue: Law and the materiality of migration management in the Aegean

AbstractLooking at the migration management policies at Europe’s external Aegean border, this article examines how and why infrastructures of protection come to function as technologies of border violence. The repurposing of rescue rafts for extreme border violence in the Aegean Sea reveals a little-examined dark side of European ‘migration management’ as a process purportedly aimed to ‘civilize’ Greek coastguard operations. In transforming life-saving materials into life-threatening ones, patterns of border violence tell an alarming story about the relationship between law, politics, and the materiality of physical objects: absent concrete political and moral commitments to international protection, rescue’s physical infrastructure has been weaponized. The weaponized life raft further challenges the assumptions underpinning European ‘migration management’: the idea that technocratic solutions can fix structural injustices, or that ‘neutral assistance can ensure human rights compliance. The case study thus demonstrates the incompatibility of managerialism with human rights protection in the context of contemporary migration.