Violent Border Research Articles

Complex Hybrid Governance in the South American Borderlands: The Agency of Grassroots Actors in Transforming Violent Conflicts

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of grassroots actors in regions of violent conflict where competing governance systems exists. Specifically, it focuses on those living in the borderlands of South America, where alternative forms of governance may be created in response to violence between state and criminal organizations. In this context, how can grassroots actors overcome protracted armed violence and establish new, legitimate forms of social governance? To explore this question, our methodology employs data triangulation, combining literature, news reports, and fieldwork data collected in two violence‐prone territories: the borderlands of Cúcuta (Colombia)/Táchira state (Venezuela) and Pedro Juan Caballero (Paraguay)/Ponta Porã (Brazil). We argue that grassroots actors can develop innovative and alternative governance structures that differ from those of the state and criminal groups. This research also contributes to the ongoing discussion about the agency of local actors in violent conflicts between nonstate actors and the state. The findings demonstrate that grassroots actors in violent border regions can actively transform conflicts and build peace, particularly in areas such as migration, security, health, and education.

Conducting Research with Migrant Children Impacted by Humanitarian Violence at the U.S.–Mexico Border

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the implications of conducting research in, with, and through border institutions tasked with the care of migrant populations, while simultaneously upholding the violent border regime that prioritizes security and migration restriction. We draw from our individual and collective experiences in these spaces of “conflicted care,” where “humanitarian violence,” including dehumanization and harmful rights violations, is normalized. Focusing on the Mexican State Institutions and Programs (MSIP) responsible for unaccompanied migrant children, and shaped by U.S. externalized border policies, we explore the methodological and ethical complexities of working with these vulnerable populations while in their custody. We reflect on the politics, dilemmas, and ethics involved in navigating state strategies to restrict researcher access such as “soft gatekeeping,” selective modulation, ambiguity, and control. The article concludes with potential strategies for change, informed by our engagements with various state and non-governmental organizations across the Mexico—U.S. border and Latin America. Keywords: border, child migration, fieldwork, humanitarian violence, Mexico.

Violent Ends for Violent Devices? Non-Knowledge and the ‘Unreflexive’ Practices of EU’s Border Security Design

ABSTRACT Since the early 2000s, the EU has funded many R&D projects on border security. However, devices developed through these programmes have met ‘violent ends’: firstly, by appearing to face abrupt ends after EU funding ceased; secondly, by materialising to serve as violent border devices. This article traces the fate of devices funded by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for managing human and non-human movements. Theoretically, it adds to the literature on ignorance by approaching debates on non-knowledge through a Bourdieusian analytical lens, and methodologically, it proposes to mobilise the concept of ‘symbolic violence’ to investigate and compare what is acknowledged and what is not, what is obscured or obfuscated in and through R&D projects. Empirically, the paper examines several projects that aim to manage people and things on the move, and which have materialised in more or less overt ways. The article argues that projects focused on border security play a precursory role in the enactment of violent devices, and simultaneously obfuscate the non-knowledge of ‘violent ends’ that shape the future of the EU’s border governance. It shows that even if these projects do not apparently materialise, they nevertheless find ways of achieving their violent ends.

The End of Feminized Migration?: Gendering Violent Borders and Geographies of North Korean Migration from the Arduous March to the COVID-19 Era

The End of Feminized Migration?: Gendering Violent Borders and Geographies of North Korean Migration from the Arduous March to the COVID-19 Era

Entangled Vulnerabilities: Gendered and Racialised Bodies and Borders in EU External Border Security

ABSTRACT The notion of vulnerability is gaining traction in EU border protection. On the one hand, the concept refers to vulnerable migrants and their affectedness by insecurity and violence. On the other, it indicates the susceptibility of borders to irregular crossings and cross-border crime. Both forms of vulnerability are assessed through dedicated procedures under the umbrella of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex. To make sense of these seemingly contradictory conceptual and practical uses of vulnerability, we draw on feminist postcolonial scholarship in security studies and political geography. We argue that a shared colonial matrix of gendered and racialised meanings and problematisations enables analogies between borders and bodies as (un-)deserving of protection. In a discourse-theoretical analysis of Frontex documents, we show how the ambiguous use of vulnerability legitimises the EU border regime and its security practices by constructing EU bordering as neutral and objective and EU borders as objects of care. We conclude that vulnerability becomes increasingly important for normalising the EU’s violent borders in the context of the EU’s broader claims to liberal values of freedom, protection, and human rights.

The geopolitics of fear: Pro-refugee resistance to Europe's racial security

This article explores pro-migrant resistance in the most vulnerable, yet understudied, spot of anti-immigrant regimes, the border city on major refugee routes. This piece is part of my multi-sited ethnography tracing gateway cities of Europe's Southern borders with the Middle East. Against the background of existing scholarship on the shrinking spaces of pro-migrant resistance, my findings expose an everyday urbanity that is inclusive and protective of refugees in the frontier city. However, rather than displaying festive snapshots of sanctuaries, the evidence shows that the pro-refugee resistance dwells in a highly contested and politicized urban space. Having received the main refugee flow from outside of Europe, the European Union tightened external borders following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. As the Mediterranean Sea gradually turned into a graveyard, Athens, the main gateway city in Eastern Mediterranean, was deeply affected. The in-depth analysis of a defiant neighborhood of Athens, Exarchia, uncovers the leverage of the border city to resist the taken-for-granted “global fear” of the Muslim refugee – a legacy of post-September 11 war on terror. Revealing intense emotions shaped by the geography of violent borders, my research points to the widely shared aversion to government-led fear. The article analyzes the dialectics between top-down securitization sustained by fear and bottom-up resistance empowered by feelings of trust, safety, and belonging. While civic disobedience is routinely attacked and repressed by the security regime, I document how the geopolitics of emotion persist in everyday sociability and empower locals with differing political agendas in their pro-refugee resistance. Accordingly, my main argument is that the geopolitics of emotion are integral in forming, transforming, contesting, interrupting, and even evading securitization of migration in the least expected geographies, Europe's racial borders with the Middle East.

The (inter)visual politics of border security: Co-constituting gender and race through Frontex's Risk Analysis.

Visuals, including photographs and data visualizations, play a crucial role in the politics of EU border security, both as an internal governance tool (e.g. in surveillance) and as an external means of communication/representation (e.g. in photojournalism). Combining scholarship on photographic representations of migration with literature on surveillance technologies and data visualizations, we argue that these visuals interact to reproduce gendered and racialized meanings of migration and border security. Using a feminist postcolonial lens, we develop an intervisual framework for studying how processes of gendering and racialization render subjects, practices and spaces knowable at the intersection between these visuals. We apply this framework to a case study of Frontex's Risk Analysis Reports (2010-2021) and demonstrate how it is applicable to other security institutions. The intervisual analysis reveals how the migrant Other and (white) European are visually reproduced through: 1) the (in)visibilization of bodies; 2) the ascription and denial of agency; and 3) the spatialization of borders as 'frontier imaginings' that oscillate between fortification and expansionism. The intersectional co-constitution of gender and race, we conclude, is central to the visual politics of Frontex, contributing to problematizing migrants and migration and legitimizing violent border practices.

China in India's Eastern Neighborhood: Emerging Dynamics and Policy Options

After the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the continued hostility of Pakistan and the violent border showdown with the Chinese in Ladakh, India's option for meaningful diplomacy in the West appears limited and its efforts seems focused on damage control. But despite a largely friendly government in Dhaka, India needs to worry about developments in its eastern neighborhood, where Delhi has been endowed with more positive options in the last decade. Growing Chinese influence in Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Himalayan countries of Nepal and Bhutan is cause for worry and the emerging dynamics in the region need to carefully be monitored and balanced with appropriate counter action. This paper will focus on recent developments in India's eastern neighborhood and suggest a way forward for Delhi to handle the merging dynamics.

“At Least, at the Border, I Am Killing Myself by My Own Will”: Migration Aspirations and Risk Perceptions among Syrian and Afghan Communities

It is well-documented that border controls make migration journeys riskier for people on the move. Policymakers construe deaths in migration journeys as resulting from the individual risk-taking attitudes of migrants. However, risks involved in migration journeys are not only related to border control measures. Based on the analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian and Afghan migrants in Turkey, we embrace a social constructionist approach to unpack how migrants form their aspirations based on their risk perceptions. Our findings explain why some migrants would still move onwards despite violent borders while others stay or search for “safer” ways for onward migration.

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.

Beyond queer liberalism: marginal mobilities and the future of queer politics

ABSTRACT In this afterword, the author revisits and highlights some of the main arguments and analyses raised throughout the special issue. To do that, he focuses on an incident that took place during World Pride 2021, which was held in both Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmö, Sweden. As two gay Ugandan activists with refugee status in Germany were on their way from Copenhagen to Malmö to take part in the LGBT Refugees Summit, they were detained for two hours by Swedish police for not having their passports on them. In light of this incident and thinking alongside the various critiques and analyses in this special issue, the author highlights the structural and lingering contradictions inherent in queer liberal politics, their complicity in reproducing violent border and migration policies, and the need for different analytical frameworks that foreground intersectionality, constantly revise their political efficacy, and maintain the radical potential of queer politics.

Biosocial borders: Affective debilitation and resilience among women living in a violently bordered favela

AbstractWithin emerging fields of research focusing on neuro‐urbanism, neuro‐geographies, and biosociality, which experiment with using emerging mobile biosensor methods, few if any have used them to research socio‐spatial life in communities that suffer high levels of violence and other socio‐spatial injustices. Extending non‐representational accounts of the body, emotions, and affect, this paper discusses an experimental geography–neuroscience collaboration, working in a favela of Rio de Janeiro to explore the embodied urban emotions and affects of violently bordered urban communities. Emphasising non‐representational, corporeal spatial practices in a study of women living in Brazil's favelas, we use electrodermal activity biosensors to propose a novel methodological and analytical approach that focuses on forms of affective debilitation and resilience. Theoretically, we draw on biopolitical theory and border theory to propose a method that avoids oppositions between biopolitical and necropolitical accounts of borders. The aim of the research, conducted in June 2016, is to understand levels of affective debilitation or resilience among women living in the Maré Complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Using a wearable biosensor, we took measures of electrodermal activity of eight women as they undertook one of their routine, everyday journeys within the favela. We also conducted an hour‐long qualitative interview with each participant. We find that for all our participants, navigating the favela's violent border spaces subjects their bodies to very high levels of affective and cognitive demand. While some women responded to this with stress reactions that created acute levels of affective debilitation, others responded very strongly, showing exceptionally high levels of affective resilience. Our research highlights the affective labour required of women to co‐construct urban borders, and emphasizes their agency and forms of everyday resistance in shaping the favela's affective atmospheres. Combined biosensing (electrodermal activity/galvanic skin response) data and interview data reveal that women living in the favela experience high levels of stress and fear. For one resident this results in affective debilitation (a wounding of the capacity to affect and to be affected). However, other women showed exceptionally high levels of affective resilience and resistance. The research points to the important role of women in co‐constructing the embodied borders of the favela.

Resignation and Resistance: How do Undocumented Central American Migrants View Detention in Mexico?

In this article I show the variety of perspectives that migrants in Mexico adopt toward detention, a procedure that criminalizes undocumented migration and justifies violence against migrants. Based on interviews, freedom of information requests, and case studies, I argue that migrants oscillate and sometimes stay in the middle between two contrasting positions about detention: resignation and resistance. While those in the resignation group accept the notion that they have committed a crime and deserve to be detained, those in the resistance group refuse to be regarded as criminals and question the existence of detention. I show how frequently migrant illegality is created and reinforced even among migrant populations. I also illustrate how many migrants make persuasive arguments against the violent border control policies that they experience.

Disjunctive writing in the urban skinscape: Bodies, borders and the physiology of attention in a Rio de Janeiro favela

This article offers a creative disjunctive feminist analysis of affective rhythms within a complexly bordered complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It explores the gendered atmospheric constitution of authority in the favela’s violent border spaces, arguing that authority is partly embodied through a channelling of attention. Attention is conceptualised as involving not just conscious intentions, perceptions and emotions, but also non-conscious rhythms of autonomous affective self-regulation. The article is structured through a tripartite disjunctive form that expresses the bordering of city, body and experience. Drawing on qualitative interview data, quantitative electrodermal activity physiological data and creative writing, the article dwells with the materiality of words and the forms of affects to express material and physiological aspects of emotion and affect in journeys around the internal border-spaces of the city. Adapting the modernist tradition of ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, we style a ‘stream of attention’ form of writing that expresses multiple modes of embodied, conscious and preconscious attention.

A close look at the EU–Turkey deal: The language of border externalisation

The article discusses the language of border externalisation processes by examining the knowledge that stands as the basis of the EU–Turkey deal and reports on its implementation, placing them in the context of the transformation of the EU border regime. It is the result of a study addressing the language and key concepts that organise border externalisation and its geographic and biopolitical episteme. Our interest lies in the production of knowledge emerging from the EU–Turkey deal, and its effects on both the mainstream discourse on migration and the legitimation and acceptance of violent border management practices. To do this, we offer an interpretation of the textual materials composing the deal as promoting a discourse on migrants that strictly categorises territories and peoples, and establishes geographies of control and hierarchies of deserving and undeserving subjects, by asserting new forms of biopolitical control and care over their bodies. The presentation of research results combines the extraction of keywords and sentences from the documents analysed with an interpretation of their epistemic strength in producing and promoting specific biased Eurocentric narratives on migrants and migration. At the core of the agreement’s texts we find the category of the ‘deserving migrant’ as increasingly defining and circumscribing mobility, and realised in the one-for-one swap policy.

Children's Resilience to Ongoing Border Attacks: The Role of Father, Mother, and Child Resources.

To understand children's resilience to ongoing violent border attacks (low PTSD symptoms and internalizing/externalizing behavior problems, and high sense of coherence-SOC), this study examined a multidimensional model of protective resources. This model comprised factors at the family level (fathers'/mothers' coping strategies and SOC) and at the individual level (children's coping strategies and attachments with father/mother). Participants were 251 Israeli father-mother-child triads living near the border with Gaza (children ages 9-12years). Preliminary analyses indicated children's prevalence of clinical PTSD was 6%. SEM analyses revealed the theoretical model's high fit with empirical data, χ2(1) = .00, p = .99, CFI = 1, TLI = 1, SRMR = .00, RMSEA = .00 [90% CI (.00, .00)]. More significant paths emerged between fathers' coping resources and children's resilience measures than for mothers' coping resources. Results also pinpointed the significant role of children's parental attachments and coping strategies. Discussion focused on the unique value of father, mother, and child risk/protective factors for explaining well-adjusted functioning among children living in conflict areas.

From Exception to Extra-Legal Normality: Pushbacks and Racist State Violence against People Crossing the Greek–Turkish Land Border

The Greek–Turkish land border became the site of a border spectacle in March 2020, following the “opening” of the border by the Turkish government and its simultaneous closure by the Greek government. The ensuing violence was legitimated by narratives of exception and racist discourses hinging on the notions of “invasion” and “asymmetrical threats.” Yet, the spectacular and highly mediatized nature of the events of March 2020 hid the embeddedness and longevity of border violence in Evros, the area named after the river that constitutes the land border between Greece and Turkey. Drawing on qualitative research including fieldwork, interviews and document analysis, we focus on the practice of pushbacks as an enduring feature of the local border regime. We argue that pushbacks and other forms of violence should not be conceived merely as human rights violations and therefore aberrations to the laws and values of Europe and its states, but as normalized technologies of border management embedded in the racialized, violent border regimes of liberal states, exemplifying the inherent and unavoidable violence of borders.

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.

Becoming a Smuggler: Migration and Violence at EU External Borders

ABSTRACT Migrants’ involvement in smuggling increases alongside restricted cross-border movement and violent borders, yet this dynamic is usually examined from migrants’ position as clients. In this article, we move away from migrants and smugglers as two separate roles and question migrants’ aspirations to and experiences of resorting to smuggling networks as workers in the context of EU land borders, where direct violence is used daily to fight cross-border crime. By doing so, we move further the examination of fluid relations in smuggling provisions and the way they are intertwined with care and exploitation, as shaped and circumscribed by violent borders. The article illustrates the intersections between border violence and migrants’ active involvement in smuggling by drawing on the case study of an anonymised Border Town and multi-site, multi-author fieldwork from Serbia and Bosnia. By questioning migrants’ experiences of shifting roles from clients to service providers, and by taking into account their work in smuggling provision, we show that, in a situation of protracted vulnerability orchestrated by border violence, state and law enforcement, the categories – “migrant” and “smugglers” – can blur.

Against the wall

In the imaginary of nation-states, and in much (forced) migration and border studies, the wall is the metaphor par excellence of ‘hardened, securitised’ and, ultimately, ‘violent borders’ (Jones 2016). It is not incidental that the previous US President’s attempts to further institutionalise virulent anti-immigrant racism found purchase in the rallying cry ‘Build a Wall.’ While they function to restrict movement, walls, fences, and other border barriers are much more than a physical infrastructure separating the interior from the exterior of nationalised space. Although they appear to be a visual synecdoche for national sovereignty, Wendy Brown has argued that the frenzied construction of walls actually coincides with the ‘waning’ of national sovereignty in light of the penetration of neoliberal capitalist globalisation (2010, 23-24). In this introduction, we approach the ‘instability’ of walls (and state power) from another direction: we underscore the ways in which walls, in times of crisis, are repurposed as canvases of resistance, which communicate, amplify, and incite embodied resistance to authoritarianism and state violence. Not only walls built on borders—such as the wall at the Evros/Meriç border built by the Greek government—but walls inside nation-states proliferate, which form part of the hard fabric of our daily bordered reality.