Kidnapping migrants as a tactic of border enforcement

Kidnapping as a state tactic of domination

Border regimes everywhere are eminently characterised by a wide heterogeneity of biopolitical and necropolitical mechanisms for getting a hold over migrants’ lives and movements. Migrants’ movements are disrupted, contained, and controlled through diverse tactics of border enforcement, culminating in push-backs at border crossings both over land and on the high seas, or channelling those who succeed to transgress the borders into perilous routes that expose them to heightened risks of death in transit (Davies et al., 2017; De León, 2015; Heller and Pezzani, 2017; Topak, 2014). Notably, Özgün Topak (2014: 816) depicts these biopolitical mechanisms of borderzone containment as, in effect, holding migrants hostage. Migrants’ unauthorised border crossings are likewise subjected to the various forms of ‘legal violence’ (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012) associated with interdiction, apprehension, detention, and deportation. Furthermore, migrants are governed by being intermittently blocked, stranded, and then re-routed and kept on the move, forced into protracted conditions of hyper-mobility (Tazzioli, 2020; cf. Topak, 2014) and prolonged unsettledness (Picozza, 2017). At the same time, particularly once they manage to cross a border, migrants are subjected to enduring conditions of detainability, deportability, and extraordinary forms of exploitation arising from their susceptibility to the recriminations of the law (De Genova, 2002, 2010a, 2017b). Such a heterogeneity of bordering mechanisms cannot be simplified into any single analytical grid. Nonetheless, these heterogenous tactics do not preclude us from identifying techniques of governmentality that are simultaneously at play in different contexts and produce a sort of shared transversal ‘political grammar of mobility’ (Aradau, 2016). Kidnapping migrants at borders or during their extended border-crossing journeys has become one such tactic for governing human mobility.

An important body of research has discussed how migrants are subjected to kidnapping in the customary sense of criminal abductions and extortion, alongside numerous other forms of vicious predation (Alarm Phone, 2019; Bustamante, 2011; Sanchez, 2015, 2017; Slack, 2016, 2019; Slack and Whiteford, 2011; Vogt, 2013, 2018). In contrast, the use of kidnapping as a state tactic is entirely under-theorised. What is the analytical and political purchase of focusing on the widespread and increasing use of kidnapping tactics to discipline migration? According to British criminal law, kidnapping is defined in common law as the ‘taking or carrying away of one person by another, by force or fraud, without the consent of the person taken or carried away and without lawful excuse. It must involve an attack on or loss of that person’s liberty’. ⁵ Similarly, under US federal and state law, kidnapping is commonly defined as the taking of a person from one place to another against his/her will or the confinement of a person to a controlled space. Some kidnapping laws require that the seizing or confinement be for an ‘unlawful’ purpose, such as extortion. Evidently, all forms of incarceration or detention involve some of the defining features of kidnapping, and it is strictly the often dubious distinction regarding what is a ‘lawful’ rather than an ‘unlawful’ purpose that separates the crime of kidnapping from these state practices of coercively taking a person into custody, spatially and temporally confining her, and depriving her of her liberty. Our purpose here is not to reductively equate migrant detention with kidnapping. Rather, we seek to re-purpose the term ‘kidnapping’ to better discern and analyse new tactics deployed by state powers to capture and exert a hold on migrant and refugee mobilities.

Indeed, an apparently ‘lawful’ purpose is precisely what might arguably distinguish common kidnapping (as a criminal act) from the exercise of what Max Weber (1919/1946) famously characterises as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ as the defining feature of the state. Significantly, Weber (1919/1946) adds, ‘the state is a relation of men dominating men … supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence’ (78). It is noteworthy that Weber’s starting point is a classically Marxian proposition that the state is predicated upon armed force. ⁶ Hence, for Weber (1919/1946), the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence should not serve as a preemptive apologetics for the state’s violence as presumptively legitimate (intrinsically ‘lawful’, and therefore not ‘criminal’), but rather an occasion to critically scrutinise the ‘legitimations of domination’ (78; emphasis in original). Much of the state’s violence may indeed conventionally tend to be legitimated; other forms of state violence are decried as ‘excesses’, indeed as ‘abuses’. However, the evaluation and adjudication of the limits of the putative legitimacy of state violence through the demarcation of what may properly be repudiated as an ‘abuse’ of power merely reinscribes the fundamental legitimation at stake in the state’s monopolisation of violence in its exercise of domination. To demarcate an ‘abuse’ of state power is intrinsically to reinstate the scope of what is otherwise counted as the state’s ‘legitimate’ violence. Such endeavours therefore uncritically evade altogether the more fundamental issue of a state’s legitimations of its violence and domination.

Our designation of certain state practices of abduction or sequestration as veritable kidnapping is not merely a matter of rhetorically denouncing the state’s own recourse to ‘illegal’ practices as a matter of the proverbial ‘abuse’ of power. Instead, such acts are precisely how the state’s ongoing and open-ended pursuit of domination requires it to persistently experiment with new tactics for the deployment of violence, and thereby also constantly engage in renewed gambits of legitimation. Here, we are reminded of Charles Tilly’s (1985) famous proposition that states may be likened to ‘protection rackets’. Positing the theoretical challenge of conceiving of states and illegal practices as counterparts, Josiah Heyman and Alan Smart (1999) emphasise ‘the incompleteness of formal states and the unlikelihood that they will master their own and people’s “illegal” maneuvers’ (2). By highlighting these state practices of kidnapping, we therefore want to foreground the indeterminacy, irresolution, ambiguity, and duplicity of these particular state deployments of violence, and thus seek to destabilise the hegemonic claims by which states project their own purportedly definitive authority and legitimacy.

Kidnapping migrants as a tactic of border governmentality

One of Michel Foucault’s (1978/1991) most important insights into ‘governmentality’ is that its end is the employment of tactics, and ‘even of using laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such a way that … such and such ends may be achieved’ (95). With regard to borders and migration, enforcement practices are customarily excised from the purview of ordinary criminal law and border policing and migrant detention are insulated as merely ‘administrative’ and discretionary matters. This introduces a whole gamut of ambiguities and equivocations surrounding precisely the question of whether particular states’ bordering tactics and techniques, indisputably forms of domination, can be understood to operate within the constraints and protections of the rule of law. Yet it is also the deployment of such ‘discretionary’ or indeed ‘lawless’ tactics and techniques of bordering towards the ends of the domination of non-citizens that is widely taken to be inherently ‘legitimate’ as an exercise of the state’s sovereignty. Whereas being juridically designated as a ‘criminal’ is customarily to be subjected to the recriminations of the law, and thus to be inscribed within the law and its punishments, being an ‘irregular’ migrant or refugee apprehended at a border and subjected to migrant detention – on no other grounds than one’s mere status as a non-citizen border crosser – commonly involves being made the object of an ostensibly ‘administrative’ apparatus, and as a consequence, being potentially figured as effectively outside of the purview of the law altogether (De Genova, 2017b).

The various forms of state lawlessness and the concomitant horizon of the ‘state of exception’ (Agamben,2003/2005) – or what Susan Buck-Morss (2000) has memorably called ‘the wild zone of power … a blind spot … in which power is above the law and thus, at least potentially, a terrain of terror’ (2–3) – are especially pronounced in the case of ‘illiberal’ political regimes or contexts of fractured or unresolved sovereignty. Such a fragmentation and pluralisation of competing claims to sovereign power is an apt depiction of the extended situation that prevails in Libya in the aftermath of NATO’s military intervention in 2011 to topple the Gaddafi regime and the subsequent ongoing civil war. Hence, kidnapping in a rather literal sense has become a routine practice on the part of many Libyan state officials. As Maurice Stierl and Sandro Mezzadra (2019) incisively contend:

What plays out off the coast of Libya are forms of mass abduction that are not merely tolerated but strategically organised and orchestrated by European governments and [Libya’s] coastguards […] The Libyan authorities are participants in the ‘smuggling business’ in Libya and beneficiaries of migrant capture at sea, a circuit of exploitation that involves practices of detaining, smuggling and trafficking, abducting at sea, and, again, detaining.

Speaking of the bordering tactics of state powers in terms of migrant kidnapping, as we propose here, nonetheless involves stretching and re-purposing the notion of kidnapping beyond the strictly legal domain. Specifically, as far as migration is concerned, what constitutes a particularly ambivalent and slippery terrain is the action of ‘taking’ or of ‘being taken’ which is encapsulated in the legal definition of kidnapping. Many of the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean have indeed been forced by smugglers to make the maritime crossing on unsafe vessels. Indeed, a more comprehensive discussion than is permitted by the scope of this article would imply unpacking the thorny analytical issues surrounding such categories as ‘forced migration’, ‘human trafficking’, and ‘smuggling’ and assessing whether it is feasible to utilise these concepts critically. Nonetheless, insofar as the ‘rescue’ of migrants by border authorities itself is actually a form of capture, haunted always by the horizon of detention and deportation, it is instructive to re-frame such forms of interdiction as kidnapping. ⁷ Thus, rather than casually and uncritically conflating contemporary migration with modern forms of slavery, it is crucial to persistently note the primacy of the autonomy and subjectivity of human mobility that precedes and exceeds the diverse tactics of both border control and border-crossing predation, even as this autonomy often becomes complicit with the smuggling operations and infrastructures that commonly exploit and abuse the illegalised migrants and refugees’ precarity (Stierl, 2020). ⁸ This means that the kidnapping of migrants by criminal organisations intent to extort them for ransom payments (and sometimes by the very smugglers whom they contract to assist their migratory projects) must be recognised as merely one form of border violence alongside many others, and for present purposes, must be seen in a continuum with state practices of kidnapping deployed as a tactic of border enforcement and thus as a mode of domination of migrants (Brambilla and Jones, 2019).

Importantly, we are strategically adapting the term ‘kidnapping’ by moving beyond a narrowly legalistic, criminological perspective. While scholars have understandably tended to associate kidnapping with non-state criminal activities, we underscore how kidnapping is deployed as a state tactic. Indeed, various state practices – notably including political disappearances or torture during interrogation for the extraction of ‘useful’ information – could likewise be analysed productively as analogous scenarios of ‘kidnapping’ as a state tactic of domination. Our interest is in how states are resorting to kidnapping to reassert control over ‘unruly’ migrations.

Hence, we may also reconsider how extortion is implicitly understood to generally be the premier motive for kidnapping. When migrants who have been ‘rescued’ in the Mediterranean Sea are kidnapped and forcibly returned to detention in Libya, they and their loved ones are often literally extorted by the prison authorities for ransom payments in exchange for their release. In fact, the temporary but more or less protracted detention of migrants in Libyan prisons is therefore not only a form of arbitrary prolonged captivity. It is also intertwined with modes of value extraction that stem from the transformation of the migrant into a commodity (cf. Vogt, 2013). Indeed, in the Libyan prisons, migrants are usually blackmailed with casual brutality and torture and compelled to pay for their own emancipation from captivity, whereby detention starkly enacts kidnapping for ransom. ⁹ The migrants are also commonly farmed out as veritable slave labour, which itself may sometimes be framed as a form of indenture that provides a surrogate for payment. In another sense, when Trump callously blames his political rivals for the suffering that he himself has deliberately and deviously inflicted upon migrants/refugees and their children at the U.S.–Mexico border, he engages in a more figurative variety of extortion, cynically hoping to deploy the precarious lives and traumatised bodies of migrant children as a kind of bargaining chip to be exchanged for his own political advantage. Moreover, it is worth noting how migrants have been glaringly held hostage to the inter-state politics of the EU border and asylum regime. In January 2019, after being rescued by the NGO Sea-Watch, 47 migrants were not allowed to disembark for 13 days by the Italian authorities. On 31 January, they were finally allowed to land in Sicily, only after representatives from eight EU member states had convened in Brussels to decide how to distribute the migrants across Europe. Hence, a migrant multiplicity made of relatively few people (47 persons) triggered a European diplomatic incident. In such contexts, to paraphrase Brett Neilson (2018), shipwrecked migrants can be understood to constitute a biopolitical ‘currency’ that states may use to negotiate, barter, and exchange. In the European context, this specifically consists in a state enforcing the protracted unofficial detention at sea of Black and Brown migrant lives for the purpose of retreating from and abdicating as much as possible its own responsibility to host refugees or adjudicate asylum petitions, while exploiting their precarious lives as a bargaining chip when negotiating with other states the asylum seekers’ relocation and prospective resettlement elsewhere in the EU. All of these examples expand how we might conceive of extortion as a feature of kidnapping when deployed as a state tactic of bordering.

State tactics of kidnapping migrants may not necessarily be motivated by any such interests in extortion, however. Instead, these tactics often operate as a kind of seizure/capture and hold/sequestration over migrants that replicate many aspects of detention, and are clearly punitive deprivations of liberty, but are exercised precisely as unofficial punishments, largely outside of the purview of the law, and enforced as retribution for no other ‘offense’ than unauthorised border crossing itself. Thus, state tactics of migrant kidnapping often have the ostensible character of ‘non-punishment punishments’ – punitive measures that are officially unacknowledged as such, enacted against what are often officially non-criminal ‘offenses’, administered as border enforcement ‘policies’ that are not even stipulated or regulated by the law (Price, 2020). A focus on kidnapping also enables us to politicise the analysis of migration controls and securitarian–humanitarian assemblages by framing these as political technologies aimed at hunting for and chasing unruly mobile subjects, in exercises of what Gregoire Chamayou (2012) defines as ‘cynegetic power’. In other words, while the protracted entrapment and confinement of migrants serve as disciplinary modes for temporarily blocking or decelerating mobility, they should also be seen as more direct and proactive techniques of capture and containment, which aim at repeatedly disrupting and regaining control over autonomous movements.

Ultimately, the kidnapping of migrants by state powers is a method intended to reassert control over ‘unruly’ mobilities. Several scholars have analysed the significance of mobility control for state formation, historically (Anderson, 2013; Jones, 2016; Mongia, 2018). ¹⁰ Contemporary research investigating carceral geographies has specifically examined the economy of migrant detention as a political technology of governmentality (De Genova, 2017b; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009; Moran, 2013; Moran et al., 2013; Oliver, 2017). Furthermore, noteworthy insights into the forced mobility of migrant detainees (Gill, 2009; Hiemstra, 2013) have unsettled the presumable nexus between detention and immobility. This article builds upon those insights by drawing attention to the heterogeneity of modes of migrant confinement, which are not reducible to detention as such, and may entail coercive forms of mobilisation rather than immobilisation as measures that serve the ends of governing the lives of border crossers. Another important and growing literature in the critical geography of borders identifies the enactment of temporal borders as regulatory tools for multiplying exclusionary boundaries and sorting migration (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013a; Moran, 2012; Tazzioli, 2018). In this article, we underscore that the biopolitical effects of kidnapping migrants similarly operate on both the spatial and temporal levels: migrants are hampered in their movements, and not only are their bodies subjected to spatial sequestration but so also is their life-time held captive. Indeed, kidnapping not only decelerates migrant mobilities and forces migrants into conditions of indefinite waiting, but also more fundamentally contributes to disrupting migrants’ lives and seizing their autonomous time. Shahram Khosravi (2018) has convincingly characterised this as the ‘stolen time’ of migration.

In this respect, it is noteworthy to recall the genealogy of confinement that Foucault traces in The Punitive Society (1972–1973/2015), in which he focuses on the central importance of seizing workers to fix them to the apparatuses of production during the 19th century (2015: 208). Foucault discerns a ‘kind of arbitral authority that seizes something, withdraws it from free circulation, and keeps it fixed at a certain point, for a certain time’ (208–209). Notably, Foucault emphasises that these modes of seizure and fixation were not only spatial but also forms of ‘temporal sequestration’ that subjugated ‘the time of life’ to ‘the time of production’ (211). Plainly, kidnapping as a tactic of bordering does not resemble the coercive fixing of workers to the site of production, as depicted by Foucault. The relation of migrant kidnapping to the ultimately disciplinary productive effects of bordering is surely indirect and attenuated, inasmuch as this, like other forms of border violence, operates as yet another feature of an obstacle course that unauthorised migrants must navigate in the extended endurance test that finally shapes an indefinite career as illegalised migrant labour (De Genova, 2002, 2013). For present purposes, however, Foucault’s widening of the notions of seizure and sequestration beyond mere physical capture and detention is particularly salient, highlighting temporality as an important dimension upon which acts of seizure and spatial confinement are enacted.

A focus on kidnapping enables us not only to analyse the reconfiguration of the spatial tactics of migration containment but also to grasp the biopolitical mechanisms that target and racialise migrants. By focusing on the mutual intertwining of geopolitical and spatial tactics on the one hand and biopolitical ones on the other, we conceive of the production of space as ‘always implicated in the production of subjectivity’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013b: 333). That is, a critical analysis of the restructuring of the border regime involves investigating bordering technologies together with the modes of subjection and subjectivation by which some mobile subjects are racialised and governed as ‘illegal migrants’ or as shipwrecked lives, or how some migrants’ or refugees’ children are forcibly abducted from their parents and then racialised and governed as ‘unaccompanied minors’. As we have already seen with the Trump administration’s rationalisations for the ‘family separation’ policy, kidnapping is sometimes justified as a biopolitical and spatial tactic of ‘deterrence’, a mode used for punishing, exhausting, and thereby supposedly discouraging migrants and refugees from pursuing their mobility projects. Remarkably, the numbers of asylum seekers from Central America newly arriving at the U.S.–Mexico border continued to burgeon in the aftermath of this vicious and sadistic tactic, exposing the logic of deterrence to be a fallacy at best that nevertheless always serves the ends of gratuitous cruelty. The inevitable and irreconcilable conflicts between the subjectivity of the migrants/refugees and the state tactics devised for their subjection have thus generated new grounds for border struggles.

Border struggles

27 March 2019: After being rescued by a Turkish merchant ship called the El Hiblu in the central Mediterranean, 108 migrants hijacked the vessel in order to impede the crew from taking them back to Libya against their wishes. Salvini declared that under no circumstances would the migrants be permitted to disembark in Italy, and derisively depicted them as ‘pirates’ (Schwartz, 2019). Having campaigned on the contention that Italy must cease to serve as ‘the refugee camp of Europe’, Salvini was quick to discursively convert people seeking asylum into opportunistic criminals. The disparagement of migrants’ practices of resistance belongs to a longstanding criminalisation of racially subjugated subjectivities, inasmuch as, in Elsa Dorlin’s (2017) poignant observation, ‘every act, as long as it is made by a slave, an indigenous person, a colonised subject, or a Black person … becomes a criminal act’ (28). Hence, when migrants on the El Hiblu took action in their own self-defence, they were readily depicted as riotous subjects. Indeed, when Maltese authorities eventually took control of the ship and allowed the migrants to disembark, three of the migrants on board were summarily arrested for diverting the vessel and were accused of ‘terrorism’.

The criminalising discourse of piracy unwittingly evokes a much longer history of maritime rebellion against exploitation, deprivation, degradation, and cruelty (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000). In this respect, Salvini’s recourse to the rhetoric of piracy also revealed a deeper anxiety about the prospect of defiant self-assertion on the part of the asylum seekers whose mutiny signalled a readiness to exercise their freedom of movement by any means necessary. The heterogenous group of migrants and refugees, representing multiple nationalities, hijacked the merchant vessel in desperation to subvert the prospect of being coercively returned to Libya and subjected to renewed detention in prisons where they were assured of being tortured or blackmailed. At the same time, the collective hijacking of the El Hiblu was also a way for the migrants to prevent a standoff at sea, which would have been tantamount to being kidnapped, detained, and stranded for days aboard the ship with the grim prospect that no European member state would allow them to disembark. This mutinous group of migrants, first ‘rescued’ and then immediately confronted with the border regime’s tactic of kidnapping, therefore engaged in a collective act of what we might call counter-kidnapping, refusing both to be dragged back and dumped once again in Libyan prisons and likewise refusing to be detained at sea indefinitely. While the critical migration literature and legal scholars have begun to focus on citizen-led counter-kidnapping activities (O’Reilly, 2019), however, we draw attention here to how migrants themselves have also been the agents of their own liberation – through refusals, mutinies, and hijacking. Their putative ‘piracy’ was arguably a repudiation of being objectified in the role of shipwrecked and helpless victims, presumptively relegated to the ‘protection’ of others, and thus rendered captives: even if only temporarily and tentatively, they thereby exercised what may be designated as the ‘autonomy of asylum’ (cf. De Genova et al., 2018).

Remarkably, the increasing criminalisation by European states of independent search-and-rescue actors, whether motivated by humanitarianism or a politics of solidarity (Cuttitta, 2018; Stierl, 2018, 2020; Tazzioli and Walters, 2019), has notably been enforced politically and legally by equating acts of rescue with the rhetorical and juridical figures of ‘kidnapping’, as well as ‘smuggling’ and ‘human trafficking’. When Salvini was accused of ‘aggravated kidnapping’ for delaying migrants’ disembarkation in August 2018, he turned the accusation back against Sea-Watch, cynically declaring that the humanitarian NGO was exposing migrants to protracted suffering – by not returning them to Libya (Globalist, 2019). Similarly, the U.S. Attorney General Sessions insinuated that migrant and refugee parents were culpable of ‘smuggling’ their own children across the U.S.–Mexico border. Likewise, Trump turns every criticism of his border and immigration policies into an occasion either to deny the demonstrable truth of what his administration is doing, or to dissimulate his own responsibility by pretending that he is merely enforcing laws that he insists, in disregard of any historical facts, were proposed and passed by his political opponents, and blaming Democratic Party lawmakers currently in the U.S. Congress for failing to pass new or different laws.

The notorious ‘zero tolerance’ diktat that initiated the reckless campaign of state-mandated kidnapping at the U.S.–Mexico border was issued following Trump’s furious reaction to news media reports of a caravan of approximately 1200 migrants and refugees (mainly Honduran and other Central American women, children, unaccompanied minors, and LGBT persons). This migrant and refugee caravan was one of a series of such mobilisations over the preceding decade – organised annually by the transnational migrant solidarity organisation Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) – as a model of collective, organised migrant/refugee self-protection against the predations of the migratory journey as well as an affirmative protest mobilisation against unjust border and immigration policies. Indeed, upon its arrival at the U.S.–Mexico border on 23 April 2018, the caravan, having ultimately dwindled to fewer than 300 people, culminated with some of the migrants and refugees triumphantly scaling and perching atop the border fence in a joyous celebration of what, at least at that moment, appeared to be the success of their journey and their defiance and subversion of the barricaded border. Sessions denounced the caravan as ‘a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system’ (Semple, 2018). Thus, what had provoked Trump’s reaction and his excoriation of this and subsequent caravans as an ‘invasion’ – replete with repeated unfounded allegations that the caravan was host to countless violent gang members and even terrorists from the Middle East – was precisely the sort of diminutive but nonetheless audacious refugee self-assertion and self-organisation that we have elsewhere called the autonomy of asylum (De Genova et al., 2018). Later, after hundreds if not thousands of asylum-seeker parents who had had their children kidnapped upon crossing the U.S.–Mexico border were deported without their children, in a memorable manifestation of what De Genova (2017a) has designated the ‘autonomy of deportation’, a group of 29 deportees collectively organised to return together to the U.S.–Mexico border, demand reunification with their children, and petition for asylum once more, now directly linking their asylum claims to the kidnapping perpetrated by the U.S. border authorities themselves (Sieff and Kiniosian, 2019).

In November 2018, 95 migrants who had been intercepted in the Mediterranean by a merchant vessel refused for 10 days to be disembarked in Libya and transferred to the notorious detention centres. The protracted standoff in the port of Misrata ended with the Libyan authorities resorting to tear gas and rubber bullets to force the migrants off the ship. Whereas Italy has refused to allow migrants to enter the ports and disembark, which we are characterising as one kind of kidnapping at sea, Libya has refused to allow migrants not to disembark, and has used force to compel migrants off the boats. This remarkable bifurcation in fact signals a divergent economy of power corresponding to different state actors’ attempts to capitalise upon the migrants as currency, which nonetheless must be understood to operate as a complementarity within the larger European border regime.

The migrants’ collective refusal to disembark in Libya was succinctly explained by their repeated proclamations from the boat: ‘We would rather die than return to Libyan detention centres’. In this manner, the migrants effectively turned on its head the minimalistic biopolitics that bifurcates between ‘letting die’ (abandoning migrants on unseaworthy boats to drowning and death) or ‘making live’ (i.e. ‘rescuing’ migrants in distress at sea and saving their lives) (Doty, 2011; Topak, 2014). ¹¹ They highlighted that if the price of being ‘rescued’ consists of Libyan detention, this is ultimately tantamount to deliberately sending them to their deaths and cynically letting them die. Demands for the urgent evacuation of migrants from the proverbial ‘Libyan hell’ must nonetheless not be disconnected from a critical analysis of the multiple and intersecting forms of kidnapping and entrapment to which migrants are subjected, not only in Libyan prisons, but also at sea, in Europe, as well as in other countries. This means that humanitarian pleas for migrant rescue cannot be reduced to a movement from the putatively barbarous ‘South’ to the presumptively civilised ‘North’. Disrupting the larger economy of migrant kidnapping involves considering how heterogenous modes of kidnapping, detention, and other forms of border violence cohere and operate as corresponding facets of a larger postcolonial global border regime. Indeed, even migrants who cross the Mediterranean from Tunisia and elsewhere, who do not fear for their lives if returned, have often engaged in acts of collective refusal against rescue as capture (cf. Moreno-Lax, 2018): they repudiate the prospect of being ‘rescued’ and thereby disembarked by state authorities or even by humanitarian NGOs, which for them is amounts to being interdicted and eventually registered in a manner that would likely culminate in their rejection as mere ‘migrants’. Under these circumstances, even ‘rescue’ comes to resemble being kidnapped inasmuch as it involves migrants being apprehended and turned over to authorities against their will and under conditions not of their choosing, which would almost inevitably defeat their migratory projects.

Rethinking violence: Beyond the biopolitical/necropolitical binary

Drawing attention to the various operations of migrant kidnapping enables rethinking border violence beyond the spectacular scenes of death and rescue. Indeed, migrants are violently obstructed, confined, cramped, entrapped, and injured in numerous ways (Altin and Minca, 2017; Coutin, 2010; De Genova, 2017b; Tazzioli and Garelli, 2018; Walters and Lüthi, 2016). Such a heterogeneity of political technologies highlights the inadequacy of a conceit of violence developed in exclusively necropolitical terms, focused narrowly on migrants’ deaths while crossing borders, or according to the minimalist biopolitical opposition of ‘making live/letting die’. The pervasive images of migrant/refugee victimisation and passivity that are relentlessly generated by border spectacles of desperation and death contribute inordinately to the migrants and refugees’ racialisation as Black or Brown bodies, even as the dominant discourses of border ‘crisis’ dissimulate the specifically postcolonial racial dimensions of these human subjectivities and their heterogenous formations of mobility.

Why, and how exactly, Europe and the United States have so deftly managed to convert the precarious lives (and distinctly racialised bodies) of migrants and refugees into overtly de-racialised ‘migrant’ lives are pertinent and urgent concerns (De Genova, 2018a: 1767). That these migrant and refugee lives can be systematically exposed to countless perils and rendered exceedingly vulnerable to premature death (abandoned and left to die, in other words), much as they may likewise be made to live in extraordinarily degraded and abusive circumstances, are both fundamentally sociopolitical effects of their (post)coloniality, and thus deeply racial facts. The necropolitical proclivity to render these migrant and refugee lives expendable has a deeply biopolitical ramification, just as the biopolitical recourse to regulating these lives in a manner that is oriented to the maximum extraction of their vital force and productive power is likewise inextricable from the compulsion to render them disposable (De Genova, 2015, 2018b). Thus, we need to apprehend economies of violence that are simultaneously necropolitical and biopolitical (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020; Brambilla and Jones, 2019; De Genova, 2015). Both of these manifestations of a power over life and death, overwhelmingly perpetrated against racially subordinate populations, are inextricable from the centuries-old sociopolitical order predicated upon a global post/colonial regime of white supremacy.

The susceptibility of migrants to state tactics of kidnapping, then, presents simply one form of the enduring coloniality of contemporary border regimes. Kidnapping as a tactic used for containing and disrupting migration movements must therefore be situated in relation to its continuities with other historical modes of racialised subjugation that have entailed capture and coercive dislocation.

Life itself comes to resemble an unrelenting kind of entrapment within the continuum of modes of containment that have been historically at play against racially subjugated and colonised populations. Likewise, kidnapping migrants emerges as simply the latest innovation in the state’s efforts to persistently refine and revise its tactics of domination in the ever-unfinished business of legitimating its monopoly on violence.

Conclusion

Migrant kidnapping is a spatial, temporal, and biopolitical tactic increasingly used for regaining control over ‘unruly’ mobilities. Both along the U.S.–Mexico border and across the European borderzone in the Mediterranean Sea, kidnapping is enacted in various ways – as outright abduction, physical constriction, arbitrary detention, and holding people hostage as a political weapon. The violence of kidnapping may be exercised through direct physical force. However, in other instances, it may eschew the exercise of direct physical violence in favour of tactical arrangements that compel migrants to remain confined against their will indefinitely in spaces not of their choosing. As in the cases of abduction in the Mediterranean Sea, migrant kidnapping can take the form of proactive measures for obstructing, diverting, returning, and thereby temporarily detaining migrants during their transit, for the purposes of ‘disrupting journeys en route’ (Mountz, 2010: 136). In all of these instances, kidnapping nonetheless involves the coercive suppression of migrants’ freedom of movement and the deprivation of other liberties. Notably, tactics of migrant kidnapping are mobilised not only to spatially confine migrants but also to disrupt and contain the autonomous movements of migrants who remain at large, by interrupting the temporalities of such movements by obstructing, diverting, and exhausting migrants in transit, accompanied by a multiplication of the mechanisms of de facto detention through various forms of abduction. Migrant kidnapping therefore cannot be adequately comprehended through the reductive biopolitical formula: ‘make live/let die’.

The heterogeneity of spatiotemporal and biopolitical tactics through which migrants are seized, held, and contained, abducted or obstructed in their movements, is analysed here in light of political technologies of bordering that may be differently enacted but which nevertheless resonate and travel across distinct sites and border regimes. Such a transversality of the tactics and technologies of bordering is mirrored in the collective struggles in which kidnapped migrants engage. The multiplication of episodes of refusals, mutiny, and hijacking foregrounds the resistant practices of migrants liberating themselves from kidnapping and protracted situations of captivity in unofficial detention. At the same time, when migrants take such actions, they are often criminalised as riotous or criminal subjects. Thus, from having first been portrayed as trafficked or shipwrecked lives in need of rescue and protection, migrants and refugees – when they struggle – are converted into ‘bogus’ refugees and criminalised as socially dangerous subjects: pirates, smugglers, traffickers, gang members, terrorists. Conversely, the continuum of criminalised migrant subjectivities highlights the transversality of those migrants’ struggles against diverse modes of kidnapping, at sea and on land, through which states try to tame the incorrigible autonomy and subjectivity of migration.