Abstract
Martina Tazzioli's Border Abolitionism offers readers a perspective that extends beyond the halls of academia—presenting border abolitionism as living praxis carried out on a daily basis both by criminalized border crossers and by the individuals and organizations that act in solidarity with them. Tazzioli envisions a border abolitionism that focuses on “…dismantling the condition for the reproduction of racialised bordering mechanisms” (p. 7). Such an approach transcends the approaches to border abolitionism that focus on the illegitimate enforcement of borders or on the violations of human rights that occur at scenes of pushback given that, the book argues, these approaches could create a false dichotomy in which some forms of border violence are “legitimate.” Border Abolitionism argues that abolitionism movements must go beyond the existing “no borders” and “open borders” debates to encompass abolishing the social, political, and economic conditions that induce individuals to believe that the perseverance, reinforcement, and expansion of borders enhance their own individual prosperity.
To make these arguments, Border Abolitionism takes stock of theoretical scholarship within a broad pantheon of critical border studies and border abolitionist thought and action. The research draws from fieldwork at sites of reception and containment in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom, analyses the use of technology for extractive humanitarian work, and delves into print media and correspondence archives. The book provides historical context for what is left behind by these border abolitionist movements, creating a continuum of resistance that continues to the present. The ambitious genealogy of runaways that Tazzioli constructs, with special attention paid to the French–Italian border, draws parallels to the experiences of migrants in contemporary Europe and European states’ efforts to contain their immigrant populations.
Border Abolitionism challenges a liberal understanding of human rights as endowed to the individual, such as the right to mobility. Tazzioli argues that such an approach would still locate individual rights as emanating from the nation-state, whereas a non-normative approach to rights would move beyond the state's centrality. Recognizing the autonomy of migration entails acknowledging the way in which migration movements do not seek to directly challenge state control—they simply operate based on social interactions that are beyond the purview of direct state control. The result of these rejections is to provincialize the nation-state's role in enforcing borders, exerting sovereignty, and selectively doling out individual rights. Similarly, drawing on radical feminist scholarship, Border Abolitionism rejects that some individuals exercising a right would detract from the rights of others, which Tazzioli terms the “zero-sum rights game”; instead, certain individuals not having the ability to exercise a right might also jeopardize the ability of all other individuals to exercise that same right.
By refusing to situate the state as the primary actor endowing individuals with a right to mobility, Tazzioli's theoretical framework for border abolitionism avoids the “…risk of superimposing a pre-given political grammar” (p. 119), and instead emphasizes the autonomy of migration. Tazzioli criticizes how observations of border violence and expulsion may risk overemphasizing states’ efficacy in enforcing artificial borders, thereby presenting borders as immutable and impermeable. People reach their destinations, yet the borders they must surpass are both spatial and temporal. The periods of stagnancy and compulsory waiting times associated with contemporary bordering mechanisms are not an unintentional outgrowth of inefficient bureaucracies; they are a constituent part of borders’ violence. While Tazzioli delimits the scope of the examples she uses, the temporal lens on borders’ carcerality would benefit from attention to the enforced precarity, technical errors within online forms and applications, and the weaponization of the protracted waiting times resulting from new digital bordering mechanisms implemented by the United States (Flores 2023).
Throughout Border Abolitionism's five chapters, the role of the decentralized bodies of social knowledge and precarious infrastructures that support people's movement in unsettling states’ bordering mechanisms serves as a unifying thread, linking Tazzioli's theoretical and empirical contributions. Avoiding an exclusive focus on heroic white European rescuers and transversal solidarity alliances, Tazzioli also highlights the way in which the counter-knowledges created by people on the move are integral to border abolitionism. The intersection of physical migration movements and the counter-knowledges produced through such movement is reminiscent of Sarah Ahmed's phenomenology of “use” in What's the Use, indicating that counter-knowledges with a greater history of use themselves generates greater utility for those using them (Ahmed 2019).
Martina Tazzioli's Border Abolitionism will serve as a durable resource for scholars interested in introducing an abolitionist lens to their policy recommendations and teaching, and for those who wish to understand the long genealogies of contemporary movements advancing the rights of people on the move. Understanding human mobility outside of the shackles of state bordering mechanisms allows readers to envision a future free of the violence that enforcing such borders invokes. Tazzioli constructs mobility as a common good, and Border Abolitionism contributes to the advancement of that good's global accessibility.