Violent Border Research Articles

Violent borders, securitization, and criminalization of solidarity

Avtonomijo socialnega dela ogroža varnostnizacija, ki je oblika strukturnega nasilja nad migranti in begunci. Policijska potiskanja na evropskih mejah so kršitev mednarodnih standardov in pravice do pravic ljudi na poti. V takem rasističnem družbenem kontekstu so tudi skupine in posamezniki, ki se solidarizirajo z migranti, preganjani in ustrahovani. Oblast solidarnost prikaže kot zločin. V članku avtorica na podlagi metod opazovanja z udeležbo in avtoetnografije išče mesto socialnega dela, ki neenakosti in nasilja ne bo povečevalo, temveč upoštevalo načela stroke.

Violent borders, securitization, and criminalization of solidarity

Avtonomijo socialnega dela ogroža varnostnizacija, ki je oblika strukturnega nasilja nad migranti in begunci. Policijska potiskanja na evropskih mejah so kršitev mednarodnih standardov in pravice do pravic ljudi na poti. V takem rasističnem družbenem kontekstu so tudi skupine in posamezniki, ki se solidarizirajo z migranti, preganjani in ustrahovani. Oblast solidarnost prikaže kot zločin. V članku avtorica na podlagi metod opazovanja z udeležbo in avtoetnografije išče mesto socialnega dela, ki neenakosti in nasilja ne bo povečevalo, temveč upoštevalo načela stroke.

Violent borders, citizenship and the politics of migration

Violent borders, citizenship and the politics of migration

Evropski mejni režim: Tihotapljenje ljudi in paradoks kriminalizacije solidarnosti

Članek razpravlja o tihotapljenju ljudi v kontekstu evropskega mejnega režima. Oriše teptanje pravice do azila, razčleni demonizacijo tihotapcev in prikaže paradoks kriminalizacije solidarnosti. Kot tržna nelegalna storitev se tihotapljenje ljudi bistveno razlikuje od solidarnosti z ljudmi na poti. Protitihotapska zakonodaja pa ukinja razlike med tihotapljenjem in solidarnostnimi praksami, saj materialna korist ni nujen element kriminalizacije pomoči pri migraciji. Ugotavlja, da »nasilne meje« in državni pregon antagonizem tihotapstvo-solidarnost umeščajo na isti kontinuum in da so solidarnostne prakse upor proti nasilnim mejam, tihotapljenje pa njihov učinek.

Modeling a World City

The question of migration and border control has become a litmus test for governments, democracies, and civil societies around the world in recent years. In our era of highspeed digital connectivity people acquire knowledge about the world primarily as long-distance spectators through moving images flickering on portable screens. The common framing of migrants moving in a caravan or huddled on an overcrowded boat is occasionally punctuated by a photograph gone viral, for example, of the drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish shore or the crying little girl from Honduras at the US-Mexican border, looking up her mother’s legs as a guard is patting her down. These images have made a stronger imprint on the public perception of crisis than any research publication on migration. Meanwhile, the question arises if saddening images of dead or distraught toddlers in red t-shirts are effective in mobilizing affective engagement with the human cost of violent borders. Moreover, it is unclear whether such spectatorial empathy can translate into critique and action. The direct appeal of framed helpless children offers first and foremost a safe outlet for shock and pity that affords no political intervention or systemic change. The victimizing gaze on migrants falls short of imagining possibilities of coexistence, collaboration, and a shared future. Are there alternatives to passively watching the pain of others, the suffering of refugees detained at borders, rescued at sea, or trapped in camps? What might the world look like through the lens of migration? And how can we begin to conceptualize an open city based on participation and interaction?

Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, by Reece Jones

Input abstract

‘Wasting mbeng’: Adventure and Trust Amongst sub-Saharan Migrants in Morocco

ABSTRACTThis article examines how irregular migrants from Central and Western Africa stranded in Morocco forged tenuous but essential relationships in the face of hostile and violent border politics constraining their mobility and resulting in systematic infringement of their rights. I examine the basis of trust amongst migrants in Morocco, who called themselves ‘adventurers’ on a quest for the ‘objective’ (e.g. ‘finding their lives’, usually through getting into Europe). Although most of them had embarked on individual journeys, they regularly needed to cooperate in order to face arduous living conditions and attempt crossing the border into Spain. The article demonstrates how trust was entangled not only with hostile migration politics but with regular moral conundrums as migrants needed to manage a balance between collaborating with other migrants and reaching their own ‘objective’.

The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction by Lorgia García-Peña

Reviewed by: The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction by Lorgia García-Peña Ian Russell García-Peña, Lorgia. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Duke UP, 2016: 288 pp. In The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction, Lorgia García-Peña frames her exploration of Dominican identity with two personal experiences. The book begins with her own interpellation as a racialized subject in the US via a racist comment from a university professor and ends with her reaction to [End Page 223] increasingly visible violence against black and brown bodies in a global context. She acknowledges her particular position—its privileges and potential disruptions—as a discursive manner of linking her own body to the embodied knowledge practices that she traces on and off the island of Hispaniola. The text's principal trajectory follows the production of a racialized and embodied archive of Dominican nationalism and its movements, displacements, and contradictions. Indeed, the author highlights the root of diction as speech act, where normative dictions performatively enact particular histories and identifications and contradictions become a theoretical tool for signaling those speech acts that enunciate or gesture to disruptions, displacements, and silences. The author utilizes performance studies to relate these scholarly negotiations to an island forgotten and excluded by US-centric institutions. She joins in and elaborates on discussions of cultural importance around Dominican and diasporic identities by Caribbean and Latinx-focused scholars such as Silvio Torres-Saillant, Maja Horn, Dixa Ramírez, and Carlos Decena. García-Peña presents her research on a broad corpus of texts, materials, and bodies, spanning the nineteenth century to the present, to destabilize easy conceptions of the Dominican national project through what she calls living in El Nié. El Nié is an in-between space developed by poet and performance artist Josefina Báez that García-Peña theorizes as a bodily negotiation of the borders violently imposed on the racialized subject from the Haiti-Dominican Republic frontier and its resonances in the migratory subject between the Dominican Republic and the US. This body twists and troubles relationships to the Dominican nationalist archive's erasures, injustices, and silencings. As well, it provides García-Peña with a "rayano consciousness"—a borderland (rayano), embodied subjectivity that confronts violence and trauma through performance of "intrasolidarity dialogues" between Haitians and Dominicans (202). García-Peña's rayano consciousness disrupts Dominican nationalism and "creates a transnational, transtemporal interchange" that "encompasses the multiplicity of borders" imposed on and embodied by heterogeneous Dominican subjects (18). Performance proves to be a highly effective site for positing rayano consciousness because it underscores the multiplicity of borderings that García-Peña seeks to explore. Many of the book's objects of analysis are recognizably understood within a performance studies field, particularly the treatment of artists Josefina Báez and David 'Karmadavis' Pérez or writer-musician Rita Indiana. García-Peña juxtaposes such performances with other contradictions that receive similar treatment: quotidian gestures of solidarity at the Haitian border, exiled and diasporic writings against the Trujillo dictatorship (1930-61), Afro-religious spiritual practices, and popular music. The oscillation between diction and contradiction constantly re-directs the text back to a border between hegemonic and marginalized knowledges and uses the site of the border as a similarly performance-based and embodied praxis. Working through El Nié, García-Peña is able to push performance-as-methodology further. Performance demonstrates how El Nié "signifies […] the body that carries the [End Page 224] violent borders that deter them from entering the nation, from access to full citizenship and from public, cultural, historical, and political representation" (4). García-Peña splits her book into two overarching sections entitled "Founding the Archive" and "Diaspora Contradicts." The first three chapters focus on critical moments in Haitian-Dominican relations from the 1800s through the Trujillo regime, with particular emphasis on the ways that performative repetitions of particular national and racial narratives solidified the discursive regimes that would shape the Dominican Republic's identity. She also reads literary works about the Haitian Massacre of 1937...

Violent borders: refugees and the right to move

Knjiga Violent borders: refugees and the right to move predstavlja obvezno branje za vse, ki se raziskovalno ukvarjajo s problematiko selitev in migracijskih politik. Zanimiva pa je tudi za širšo javnost. Tako imenovana begunska kriza je v Sloveniji, podobno kot drugod v Evropi, sprožila burno razpravo o selitvah in migrantih. V javnem diskurzu je prevladalo stališče, da begunci/migranti predstavljajo grožnjo, ki jo je treba ustaviti z okrepljenim nadzorom nad mejami in omejitvijo priseljevanja. Knjiga Violent borders nam z umestitvijo selitev v širši kontekst ponuja drugačen pogled in predlaga popolnoma drugačen pristop k reševanju problema.

Violent borders: refugees and the right to move

Knjiga Violent borders: refugees and the right to move predstavlja obvezno branje za vse, ki se raziskovalno ukvarjajo s problematiko selitev in migracijskih politik. Zanimiva pa je tudi za širšo javnost. Tako imenovana begunska kriza je v Sloveniji, podobno kot drugod v Evropi, sprožila burno razpravo o selitvah in migrantih. V javnem diskurzu je prevladalo stališče, da begunci/migranti predstavljajo grožnjo, ki jo je treba ustaviti z okrepljenim nadzorom nad mejami in omejitvijo priseljevanja. Knjiga Violent borders nam z umestitvijo selitev v širši kontekst ponuja drugačen pogled in predlaga popolnoma drugačen pristop k reševanju problema.

Violent borders: refugees and the right to move

Knjiga Violent borders: refugees and the right to move predstavlja obvezno branje za vse, ki se raziskovalno ukvarjajo s problematiko selitev in migracijskih politik. Zanimiva pa je tudi za širšo javnost. Tako imenovana begunska kriza je v Sloveniji, podobno kot drugod v Evropi, sprožila burno razpravo o selitvah in migrantih. V javnem diskurzu je prevladalo stališče, da begunci/migranti predstavljajo grožnjo, ki jo je treba ustaviti z okrepljenim nadzorom nad mejami in omejitvijo priseljevanja. Knjiga Violent borders nam z umestitvijo selitev v širši kontekst ponuja drugačen pogled in predlaga popolnoma drugačen pristop k reševanju problema.

Politics at play: locating human rights, refugees and grassroots humanitarianism in the Calais Jungle

This article examines the political footprint of a new wave of grassroots humanitarian organisations in the informal refugee camp, popularly dubbed ‘The Jungle’, in Calais, northern France. Set against the formal humanitarian void created by the French state barring of international aid agencies, and the abject conditions of camp life, we trace the shifting socio-spatial remit and progressive politicisation of these ‘apolitical’ organisations as they encounter a crisis of human rights in the Jungle, prior to its violent demolition by state decree in October 2016. In foregrounding the organisational perspectives of Play4Calais and the Refugee Youth Service, and their unorthodox deployment of play, sport, cinema and art, we reveal a grassroots humanitarian praxis which offers an alternative to the large-scale ‘professionalised’ registers of aid delivery. By virtue of their relative informality, spatial proximity and volunteer activism, these grassroots organisations not only stand in tension with the violent border sovereignties of neoliberal states, but open up the inchoate possibility for political struggle and refugee-centred claims-making over the right to inhabit the ‘exceptional’ space of the camp.

Sounds of a Modern Nation: From Narcocorridos to Hugo Salcedo's Música de balas

ABSTRACTMúsica de balas, by Hugo Salcedo, revives and humanizes Mexican bodies that often appear only as death toll statistics. Relating experiences from notably violent border cities, such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, the play performs feminicides, decapitations, civilian casualties, and cartel feuds as a way of signaling posttraumatic stressors that hold the nation captive, literally reliving and repeating senseless tragedies. From the title itself, Salcedo suggests that modern-day Mexicans hear gunfire so frequently that it has become a sort of music, a backdrop to life on the border. At the same time, the only references to music in the play are songs associated with the iconic voice of the narcocorrido genre: Chalino Sánchez, himself publicly gunned down. Considered together, the narcocorrido accompaniment and flying bullets are not simply a soundtrack to the play but, rather, stand in as a depiction of the soundscape of the modern nation.

Reece Jones, Violent Borders. Refugees and the Right to Move (London, UK & Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2016), pp. 212, ISBN 978-1-78478-471-3

----- Bibliography: Simonneau, Damien: Reece Jones, Violent Borders. Refugees and the Right to Move, ERIS, 1-2017, pp. 97-99. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v4i1.10

‘Volunteer Humanitarianism’: volunteers and humanitarian aid in the Jungle refugee camp of Calais

ABSTRACTThe informal refugee camp in Calais, dubbed the ‘new Jungle’, reached an approximate population of ten thousand people in 2016. The settlement, despite these high numbers, did not receive aid from the French government or international aid agencies. As a response to the lack of institutional support, and given the squalid conditions of the camp, hundreds of volunteers and grassroots organisations took on the burden of delivering humanitarian aid and basic services in the Jungle. This grassroots humanitarian aid, which I call ‘volunteer humanitarianism’, has particular characteristics that will be explored. The article argues that volunteer humanitarianism can be interpreted as a symbol against the violent border practices across Europe and, because of its informality, provides an alternative to formal humanitarian aid. The article also shows that volunteer humanitarianism formed a connection between humanitarianism and activism that stands in tension with neoliberal governmentality. As the Jungle was demolished in October 2016, this article is a contribution to the history of the camp as well as a testimony of the volunteers’ work there.

Humanitarian Rescue/Sovereign Capture and the Policing of Possible Responses to Violent Borders

AbstractPractices of rescue and assistance based on humanitarian concerns for life have increasingly come to shape both state and non‐state action that responds to the mobility of people on the move at the borders of Europe. These processes of rescue are presented as counter to processes of border control concerned with preventing and policing migratory flows. Presented and articulated as an alternative response to the increasingly restrictive and militarised practices that make‐up ‘Fortress Europe’, this humanitarian intervention concerned with saving lives both masks the violence of the border that renders people vulnerable in the first instance and masks the intimate relationship practices of rescue have with processes of capture more traditionally associated with border policing. The ascendancy of rescue as the primary response to irregular mobility also works to police the boundaries of what is considered ethical politics and the possible responses that result. Rescue does this through framing such events as unforeseen tragedies, erasing the structures of the violent border in the process and rendering counter‐narratives mute.

Long-distance communication facilitates cooperation among wild spotted hyaenas, Crocuta crocuta

Calls that catalyse group defence, as in the mobbing of predators, appear to facilitate cooperation by recruiting receivers to act collectively. However, even when such signals reliably precede cooperative behaviour, the extent to which the calls function as recruitment signals is unclear. Calls might simply arouse listeners' attention, setting off a cascade of independent responses to the threat. By contrast, they might convey information, for example, about signaller identity and the nature of a threat that affects receivers' decisions to participate. We explored this distinction by investigating a possible long-distance recruitment call used by spotted hyaenas. These social carnivores live in fission-fusion clans and individuals disperse widely within their territories. Putative recruitment calls must therefore attract receivers that are distant from the inciting threat and free to opt out of risky collective aggression. Hyaenas compete with lions over food, and neighbouring clans sometimes engage in violent border clashes. These high-stakes contests are decided based on numerical asymmetries, so hyaenas can only protect critical resources if the dispersed clan can converge quickly at conflict sites. We recorded and analysed whoop bouts produced in multiple contexts and found that bouts produced in response to signs of lion-hyaena conflict had shorter inter-whoop intervals than spontaneous 'display' bouts. In subsequent field playback experiments, resting hyaenas were significantly more likely to move in response to 'recruitment' bouts with shortened intervals than to otherwise identical 'display' bouts. Whereas only stimulus type predicted movement, lower-ranked subjects responded most quickly, perhaps because their feeding opportunities depend on arriving early at any kill site. Results demonstrate that hyaenas possess a signal that can reliably recruit allies across long distances, despite moderating effects of individual circumstances on the strength of receivers' responses.

A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest by William deBuys (review)

Reviewed by: A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest by William deBuys Sharman Apt Russell William deBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 351 pp. $19.95. If, as some cheerful souls like to say, there are winners and losers in the accelerating warming of our planet, then the American Southwest is clearly a loser. Midway in his timely and important book William deBuys compares the problems confronting this region to river rafting through the Grand Canyon, using his explosive plunge down Lava Falls Rapid, rated ten in difficulty on a scale of ten, as a central image. De Buys describes how members of his paddleboat contemplated the churning, rock-strewn stretch of white water minutes before the descent: “The new folks turned a shade paler under their sunburns,” while the old hands had the “set-jaw look of a rider about to mount a horse known for nasty habits” (130). Spoiler alert: the author’s boat has a perfect run. The larger point, however, is that the equivalent of Lava Falls Rapid lies ahead for those of us living comfortably in the desert cities and pretty rural places of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and parts of surrounding states. We are drifting in the flat water now just above those rapids, relatively unalarmed by some of the early effects of climate change. Importantly, our own imminent plunge will be without a guide. No one has scouted these hazards before. No one can tell us when to paddle fast and which rocks to avoid. To some extent, however, the scientists and policy makers deBuys [End Page 317] interviews for A Great Aridness are trying to fill that role; looking downstream, they hope to calculate what is going to happen next. Their answers—another spoiler alert—are neither comprehensive nor optimistic. But for the moment this is the best forecast we have. Most obviously, increasing temperatures will mean more evaporation and general aridity. In a land already characterized by little rain, there will likely be less of that and certainly less snow. Runoff from winter snowpack will come earlier and more often as flash floods. We’ll see more dust in the air, less moisture in the trees, more tree-devouring insects, and many more forests burning down. Ecosystems will shift, ponderosa pine to scrubby oak, grassland to mesquite and shrub. People will need to make changes as well. Growth-oriented cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas will have to adopt new strategies. Politicians must learn how to put aside regional agendas in order to create a long-term, big-picture plan for the diminishing Colorado River, on whose water some thirty million people now depend. We will all have to rethink what is already one of the world’s most dangerous and violent borders—the line between the United States and Mexico. Across the board global warming in the Southwest will challenge us morally, artistically, economically, politically, and socially. De-Buys’s triumph is to summarize, in clear and elegant prose, those challenges as they appear today. Our triumph will be to meet them. [End Page 318] Sharman Apt Russell Western New Mexico University Copyright © 2014 Western Literature Association

Cold War along the Emerald Curtain: rural boundaries in a contested border zone

This paper examines how anxieties about ethnic identity proliferate as state borders begin to shift and open in response to accelerating possibilities of cross-border co-operation. As the border becomes more porous, social and cultural boundaries become marked in other ways, spatially re-scaled to reflect new uncertainties consequent upon border change. Using an example from the Irish land border, the paper traces how national space is reimagined and re-placed in the everyday practices of residents in a violent border zone from which the state is ostensibly receding. It shows that communal division is as sharply drawn as ever at a time when the 'visibility' of the state border itself is beginning to diminish.

The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State

Dans cet article, l'A s'interesse a l'ideologie de genre concernant la securite de l'Etat. En se basant sur les ecrits de Thomas Hobbes a propos de l'autorite, l'A revient sur le concept patriarcal de protection de la femme et de l'enfant, les subordonnant ainsi a des citoyens de seconde zone. L'A met en relation le comportement masulin traditionnel avec l'engouement pour les conflits armes internationaux, et les appels et mouvements feministes pour la paix, en s'intorrgeant sur l'avenir de la democratie aux Etats-Unis depuis les evenements du 11 septembre 2001