Uncertainty,exhaustion, and abandonment beyond South/North divides: Governing forced migration through strategic ambiguity

Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely assumed differences between migration governance in the Global South and North. It juxtaposes in-depth empirical case-studies of refugee governance in Lebanon, the country with the world's highest per capita number of refugees, with a review of critical research on EUropean governance of forced and irregular migrants. This exploration demonstrates that the rationales and manifestations of the ‘politics of uncertainty’ that refugees are subjected to in Lebanon closely mirror those of the ‘politics of abandonment’ and ‘exhaustion’ that migrants face in EUrope. Under both regimes, strategic forms of ambiguity operate to spatially and temporally marginalize refugees and render them controllable, exploitable, and deportable.     

Borders and bureaucracies of EU mobile citizenship: Polish migrants and the personal identification number in Sweden

This article advances research into the workings and ‘workarounds’ of internal border technologies in migrants' lives. Through a focus on the specific example of tensions between EU mobile citizenship and the Swedish personal identification number, or personnummer, we enhance understandings of the bureaucratisation of state power and the enduring importance of discretion in computerised bureaucratic encounters. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Polish migrants living in Sweden, we analyse the centrality of this personnummer to our participants' working lives and general access to daily amenities and services. We reveal how and why it is so difficult to get this registration, even as EU citizens; explore how this relates to exploitative work practices; consider what happens, or cannot happen, when people are unable to obtain their personnummer and are effectively rendered undocumented; and focus on how these bureaucratic exclusions can nevertheless be managed and mediated. Ultimately we find that while this one example presents significant insights into the specificities of Swedish bordering practices – which go well beyond prevailing interests in welfare bordering – it also offers new insights into how contemporary digitised personal identification bureaucracies work in practice, and how fragile mobile EU citizenship has become.     

Between dependency and engagement: Centring subaltern geopolitics in multiperspectival border studies. Lessons from the Western Sahara

Contributing to the growing interest in multiperspectival border studies, this article advocates for a re-centring of subaltern geopolitics in the debate. Focusing empirically on Morocco's diplomatic dispute with the EU over the application of trade agreements to the Western Sahara (2015–2019), the analysis considers the geopolitical bordering of the controversy through the concepts of dependency and engagement to explain how the disputed territory both structured Morocco's disadvantageous relationship to the EU, while also giving rise to material and symbolic possibilities for the state leadership to subvert these geopolitical asymmetries in the late 2010s. The events are theorised through the combined lenses of critical border studies, subaltern geopolitics, and the politics of space to bring two complementary insights to the fore: (i) to insist that multiperspectival approaches account for the uneven landscape of borders, and the entities that act upon, animate, and transform geopolitical affairs from outside the dominant nodes of power and knowledge; conversely (ii) to destabilize prevailing binaries of geopolitical marginality and centrality through a reading of borders in an irreducibly multiple sense. Together, the analysis demonstrates the value of centring subaltern geopolitics in emerging debates on border multiplicity in the field today, while also avoiding the tendency to reinforce the spectacle of the border itself.     

The Game: Or, ‘the making of migration’ along the Balkan Route

‘The Game’ is how many refugees describe their attempts to informally travel to Western Europe via the so-called Balkan Route. This article conceptualises The Game as a spatial tactic implemented by refugees as a response to the impossibility of legally entering the EU and as a gray area in the governance of informal migrant mobilities. It does so by engaging with the recent literature on the Balkan Route to analyse how The Game has been performed and ‘managed’ in Serbia, a key ‘buffer state’ along this corridor. Drawing from Tazzioli's work on ‘The Making of Migration’, and in particular on her understanding of refugee forced mobility as a form of ‘migrant management’ on the part of the authorities, this article shows how the ambivalent connotations of The Game reveal the troubling configurations of EU border politics and of its formal and informal geopolitical arrangements. At the same time, it argues that the practices related to The Game ultimately reflect the extraordinary determination of the refugees in creating new itineraries, spatial interstices, invisible networks and ‘holes in the border walls’ that allow them, despite all the difficulties, to challenge such border politics. We conclude by proposing to understand The Game as part of the biopolitics of migration and by suggesting that it represents a powerful manifestation of the condition (and the field of possibility) of thousands of refugees along the Balkan Route today.     

Keeping migrants at the margins. Governing through ambiguity and the politics of discretion in the post-2015 EUropean migration and border regime

This article deals with the roles of ambiguity and discretion in the governing of migration and how they contribute to the marginalisation of migrants at the borders of EUrope. Building on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in Sicily, it connects legal-institutional ambiguities of two recent policy interventions in the field of migration governance in Italy – the Security Decree-Law and the Hotspot Approach – to the discretionary practices by public officials tasked with their implementation. By theoretically and empirically tracing the co-constitutive relationship of ambiguity and discretion, the article draws on and contributes to recent inquiries into grey areas of governance, particularly in the field of (critical) border regime studies. Based on two distinct cases, it analyses how ambiguity and discretionary local practices are related both to each other and to the contemporary fragmentary reconfiguration processes of the EUropean Migration and Border Regime, and shows how they intersect to form spatio-juridical grey areas that foster the spatial and social marginalisation of migrants in EUrope.     

Post-trafficking bordering practices: Perverse co-production,marking and stretching borders

This paper highlights the significance of post-trafficking scenarios for understanding bordering practices in political geography. In so doing, it addresses two significant research gaps: the lack of attention to trafficking in geography and the failure of wider interdisciplinary debates to engage with post-trafficking specifically. While extensive research in political geography has addressed the related experiences of refugees, asylum seekers and ‘illegals’, much of this work has centred on policies, processes and practices that aim to keep ‘unwanted strangers out’. By contrast, very little research has addressed how the border is configured for and by those who are crossing-back over; those who are ‘returning home’, in this case from diverse trafficking situations. The paper draws on recent empirical research on post-trafficking citizenship and livelihoods in Nepal which examined how women returning from trafficking situations deal with stigma and marginalisation. Our analysis illuminates how bordering practices circumscribe and shape women's lives in powerful ways as they seek to (re)establish a sense of belonging and respect. We examine the interplay of state and non-state actors (national and transnational) in structuring mobility and anti-trafficking advocacy through a range of bordering practices and explore how the border is (co-)produced by varied actors at different border sites. This includes women returning from diverse trafficking situations, who invoke the border to argue that they are ‘not as trafficked’ as other women, and others who perform the border differently as agents for trafficking prevention.     

Death as the border: Managing missing migrants and unidentified bodies at the EU's Mediterranean frontier

The paper explores how the management of migrant bodies by national and EU authorities reflects particular understandings of contemporary borders and how the failure to address such bodies has implications far from the frontier. The study of the management both of the dead and of the data that can serve to identify missing migrants, can benefit our understanding of the contemporary border, and has to date received only limited scholarly attention. To address this gap we draw on field research carried out on the Greek island of Lesbos, one of the key migrant entry points to the EU, that has seen repeated incidents of deadly shipwrecks. Based on interviews with families of migrants and local stakeholders the paper explores how death at the border introduces novel – and often invisible – borders and categories of inclusion and exclusion. By shedding light on the experiences of the families of the dead we aspire to introduce a critical set of actors who have been marginalized from the study of the border. In exploring the remote effects of deaths on such families in migrant countries of origin, the paper shows that bordering practices have transnational impacts at the human level, thereby broadening our conceptualization of the border.     

Policy governance from an autopoietic perspective: revisiting Hungary’s regionalization experience

This perspective on Hungary’s post-socialist regional policy governance is informed by an approach that relates region-building and regional governance to social autopoiesis and the self-referential and self-(re)producing nature of social systems such as states. Following debates in regional studies that reflect tensions between the local constitution and external determination of regional governance, we will demonstrate how Hungary has incorporated European Union (EU) policy frameworks through specific appropriations of territorial politics and regional ideas. These appropriations reflect Hungary’s post-socialist transformation not only in terms of responses to global forces, but also as specific spatial practices and regionalization experiences. As we argue, this has in effect resulted in a regionalism without regions – a strategy of Europeanizing territorial politics without creating institutional structures that directly challenge existing power relations. Autopoiesis thus helps explain the resilience of social systems, not only their resistance to institutional change but also their capability to ‘domesticate’ external influences. While criticisms of Hungary’s technocratic and post-political regionalization projects cannot be ignored, our analysis indicates why externally driven intervention in self-organizing governance processes, for example through EU conditionality, has had less impact than expected.     

Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.     

Intimate bordering: Intimacy,anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border

This article proposes the term Intimate Bordering to explain the role of intimacy and social reproduction in the active process of border-making and statecraft. The concept contributes to understanding daily experiences of bordering among subaltern subjects who make and contest the border every day and yet are often unaccounted for. The concept sheds light on how racialized and gendered relations of power intrinsic to antiblackness and cis-hetero-patriarchy interweave and condition spatial politics and belonging. These arguments are developed by bridging border studies and black and feminist geographies, and by centering the experiences of Haitian women who work as domestic workers in Dominican border towns. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in four Dominican and Haitian border towns, including interviews, focus groups and participant observation focused on the everyday commutes of Haitian domestic workers who live in Haiti and work in the Dominican Republic (DR). It analyzes two sets of intimate border practices that take place at two official border crossings: the first set includes normalized forms of intimate violence and humiliation at the border; the second examines the failed attempt at institutionalizing the transborder mobilities of domestic workers based on colonial entitlements of control over the bodies of black Haitian women. Centering intimacy in bordering brings transnational livelihoods, social reproduction and racialization into the heart of the analysis of statecraft projects in the space of the Afro-Caribbean.     

Bordering through care and control: Policing and sheltering Central American migrant youth in Mexico

Despite rising numbers of unaccompanied child migrants in the Americas, very limited research directly engages with youth as they journey north to seek protection in the United States. In this article, we examine young Central American migrant experiences of bordering, focusing on policing and shelter management. Part of a wider binational, interdisciplinary, and multi-scalar research project along the Mexico-U.S. border, which began on the heels of Programa Frontera Sur, we draw on interviews and a participatory workshop with migrant youth, and complementary interviews with migration officials and shelter workers. Through the uniquely insightful accounts of children themselves, we show how care work in shelters and direct control via policing emerge as powerful and connected techniques of bordering. In these spaces of connected securitization and humanitarian management, children negotiate highly violent, emotional, and extra-legal interactions with officials. These include extortion, apprehension, aggression, confinement and deception, but also disciplinary forms of care and protection. Our findings deepen and complicate extant work on the humanitarian care/control nexus via our focus on, and direct research with, youth from Central America in Mexico. Their narratives make clear that state policies such as Programa Frontera Sur expand the geographies of bordering and bring practices of migrant care and control into deeper relation. This bordering blocks children's access to legal protections like asylum; leaves them more exposed to exploitation and rights abuses; and encourages greater risk-taking in migration journeys.     

Shifting Bordering and Rescue Practices in the Central Mediterranean Sea,October 2013–October 2015

This counter‐mapping project illustrates the areas of intervention of different operations geared toward rescue and enforcement between 2013 and 2015, including the Italian Navy's “Mare Nostrum” search and rescue mission, the EU border agency Frontex's “Triton” enforcement operation, the humanitarian interventions of commercial vessels, and the action of civil‐society rescue vessels such as those operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF—Doctors Without Borders). The project offers a spatial understanding of the Mediterranean border‐scape, the practices of rescue and enforcement that occur within it, and the risk of sea‐crossing at this particular moment. Through these maps, the Central Mediterranean Sea emerges as a striking laboratory from which novel legal arrangements, surveillance technologies, and institutional assemblages converge.     

Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post-racial self-image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings.     

Practices of Illegalisation

This article contributes to theorising the often unrecognised continuities between the illegalisation of migrant and refugee mobilities as an effect of lawmaking or other state practices of border policing and immigration law enforcement and the illegalisation of the rights, claims, and juridical status of minoritised citizens. Against a backdrop of resurgent right-wing nationalisms, we pursue this transversal analysis of state practices of illegalisation to draw attention not only to labour subordination and disposability but also the more fundamental relationship between law and terror. The making of such regimes of citizenship takes place in obvious ways at the ostensible outer edges of nation-state territories. They are also replicated in the various spatial arrangements that ensure racialised dispossession within global cities, cities that are better understood as reconfigurations of settler-colonial cities. We argue that the study of practices of illegalisation allows critical poverty scholarship to better discern how sociopolitical categories and classifications that are central to wider processes of marginalisation and domination may arise or be reinforced as effects of the state’s legal productions of illegality.     

Business Improvement Districts and the Discourse of Contractualism

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are increasingly being advanced in a range of national contexts as a new delivery mechanism for securing improvement, regeneration and enhanced service delivery in specifically delineated districts. This paper considers BIDs as an example of a modern institutional design that is reconfiguring existing economic and legal regimes within town centres. Drawing on the theories of new institutional economics and transaction costs, the paper discusses how the contractual turn in urban governance advances our conceptual understanding of the rationale, scope and significance of partnership working. The discussion brings together emerging literatures around new ways of understanding partnership working in government thinking. It contrasts the advocacy and use of BIDs with the (previously established) practices of town centre management. It asserts that BIDs represent a new form of formalized and contractualized partnership working in sub-municipal governance, which has particular spatio-temporal implications for state–market–civil relations.     

A disobedient gaze: strategic interventions in the knowledge(s) of maritime borders

Abstract

This article reflects critically on how forms of militant research that produce knowledge about the border can produce effects in the politics of migration themselves. It does so by looking at Forensic Oceanography, a collaborative research project that we have been conducting since the summer of 2011. We first locate this research among a broader ‘ecology of knowledges’ that are generated at the border and that directly affect way the border regime actually operates, underlining their ‘aesthetic’ dimension. Secondly, we problematise more specifically the knowledge produced by activists who fight against the border regime and attempt to think how these need to position themselves strategically in relation to existing knowledge practices so as to avoid complicity with the same power structures they are seeking to challenge. Finally, since our knowledge production has amongst others been geared towards the legal sphere, we sketch out a critical reflection on the reliance on legal strategy to forward progressive changes within the politics of migration.     

Thick Decisions: Expertise,Advocacy and Reasonableness in the Federal Court of Australia

Drawing from the litigation around the Hindmarsh Island Bridge (especially Chapman v Luminis Pty Ltd 2001) this article provides an analysis of judicial responses to anthropological expertise. Sensitive to the institutional responsibilities of judges, as well as rules of evidence, procedures and legal causes of action, it examines the strategic representation and appropriation of anthropological knowledge and practice. In exploring the relations between law and expertise the article illustrates how their combination shapes outcomes. In the process it explains how the judge could have produced a range of (in)consistent outcomes through the modulation of legal categories and their relations with prevalent images of anthropological expertise. This analysis positions the article to critically reflect on some of the implications for anthropologists working in and around legal or quasi‐legal settings as well as those commenting on that participation.     

Disjointed knowledges,obfuscated visibility. Border controls at the French-Italian Alpine border

This article deals with border controls at the French-Italian Alpine frontier which have been implemented to govern and contain the migrants in transit. It analyses border controls by focusing on the circulation of knowledge and the economy of visibility which are enacted at that frontier. The article illustrates how the French-Italian Alpine area has become a border-zone for migrants, showing that modes of knowledge and forms of visibility are constitutive of bordering processes. It moves on with a section on the production and circulation of knowledge at the border, introducing the notion of “disjointed knowledges” to account for the asymmetries and fragmentariness at play in border control activities. It argues that we need to start from the partial non-circulation of data and local frictions in order to understand bordering practices. Then, it engages with the obfuscated visibility produced on migrant crossing, drawing attention to how migrants’ presence at the border is alternatively visible and concealed by the authorities.     

Delocalization,Humanitarianism, and Human Rights: The Mediterranean Border Between Exclusion and Inclusion

By reflecting on both the exclusionary and the inclusionary role of humanitarian migration and border management in the Central Mediterranean, this paper explores the relationship of humanitarianism with the delocalization of the EU border and with human rights. First, the paper analyses the role of human rights in the institutional humanitarian discourse about migration and border management at the Mediterranean EU border. The paper then analyses the Italian operation Mare Nostrum and, more generally, Italian humanitarianized border management in the Central Mediterranean. In doing this, it shows that humanitarianism contributes to the discursive legitimation and spatial delocalization of exclusionary policies and practices. Moreover, humanitarianism contributes to a symbolically and legally subordinate inclusion of migrants in the European space. While such humanitarian inclusion can be more inclusive than what human rights would require, it is posited as an act of grace rather than an enhancement of human rights. In both its exclusionary and inclusionary dimension, humanitarianism transcends and expands territorial boundaries by outsourcing responsibilities and enhancing delocalized border management.