Abstract
Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier is a disturbing book. Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering write soberly and analytically about border deaths, about people who die trying to cross international borders, focusing on those who try to enter democratic countries such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. We usually do not think of the borders of democratic countries as the sites of such gruesome deaths: drowning, starvation, exposure, suffocation (p. 40 and p. 99). The goal of the book is to explain these fatalities and identify ‘chains of responsibility’ (p. 6) that go well beyond the arguments that border deaths are random cases of individual misfortune, bad choices or the result of human trafficking or other criminal activity. The authors propose a much more critical explanation: that death at the border is a state crime, the result of structural violence. State policy choices such as restricted entry, the creation of illegality and interdiction at sea, for example, create the dangerous conditions that can—and does—result in the loss of life. This is an ambitious book that brings attention to an understudied phenomenon, and attempts to develop a criminological explanation for deaths at the border. It pushes the emerging fields of the criminology of mobility and border criminologies (Aas and Bosworth, 2013) forward since it develops theoretical and empirical links between migration and crime. But, rather than focus exclusively on the criminalization of migration, the books highlights the crimes of the powerful that produce great social harm, a topic of renewed interest to criminology. As such, the book will appeal to readers in critical criminology, socio-legal studies, migration, human rights, international law and globalization among other related fields.
The book is organized into three main sections: Border Autopsy, Border Inquest and Preventing Border Harm, with a conclusion on ‘preventing death by sovereignty’ (p. 197) that has additional relevance for public policy. The authors challenge us to think about ways criminology can better inform border control. They ask us, in particular, to think about ways to displace the now commonplace state security framework and replace it with a human security imperative. As the preceding chapters show, the securitization of the border has created the conditions under which migrants are more vulnerable to death. This point is illustrated in the first section on Border Autopsy, which investigates border deaths, particularly in the graphic representation of changing migration policies and sites of migrant deaths (Figure 2.2, p. 38). This is a reproduction of Migreurop’s Atlas des Migrants en Europe that links the timing of more restrictive migration policies (e.g. visa policies, refugee restrictions, the externalization of border control to countries outside the EU) with specific localities and increases in border deaths. Despite the difficulty in accurately accounting for death at the borders, including varying methodologies (e.g. counting found bodies or counting departures without arrivals, counting deaths en route or death on site), and no clear government mandate (e.g. there is no EU governing body that takes this responsibility, p. 36), Weber and Pickering make a compelling case that the number of border deaths is probably under-reported, most likely linked to public policies, and is itself a site of contestation—an object of denial on the part of states, an object of activism on the part of NGOs and a site of meaning for family members seeking memorial services for lost loved ones.
In the second section, Border Inquest, Weber and Pickering provide more detailed descriptions of how specific public policies may have led to border deaths either directly or indirectly. For example, they explain how illegality—that is the attribution of illegal status to those who have crossed a border without authorization (see Aliverti, 2012; Dauvergne, 2008)—offshore interdiction (preventing the arrival of migrants, often at sea), the militarization of the border (e.g. US-Mexico border, p. 132) and in some cases deportation, all function as forms of structural violence that create precarious conditions for those seeking to enter the Global North for a better and safer life. In one such example, they describe how in 2005 the Italian coastguard was ordered to return over 200 men, women and children ‘just pulled out of the sea’ back to Libya as the ‘rescue’ agency was instantaneously transformed into a border control agency (p. 179). In another example in 2010, the Australian coastguard had failed to monitor and rescue a sinking ship carrying about 100 asylum seekers. At least 50 people drowned at sea while 40 were rescued from the rocky shore by locals hurling life jackets into the storm (p. 176). In this section, Weber and Pickering also provide detail on other kinds of border deaths, ranging from forced deportations where migrants have sustained brutal and sometimes life-threatening injuries, to self-harm and suicide in migration detention centers (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively).
From here the authors connect border deaths to state crime and state harm perspectives, particularly the work of Ray Michalowski, to claim that specific policies and practices (acts of commission) coupled with a more general failure to protect the human rights of migrants (acts of omission) are ‘wrongful as state actions that are prohibited by law, and should be subject to the same national and international condemnation, as well as criminological scrutiny’ (Michalowski in Weber and Pickering, p. 199). This approach works well as a critique of border control policies and practices and provides a useful foundation for moving forward with future empirical work and possible political and legal action. But, what is still needed is a more general explanation. Weber and Pickering argue, but do not develop in a sustained way, that globalization, specifically neoliberal governance and its economic imperatives, has created this pathological dynamic between the Global North and Global South, a dynamic responsible for increased mobility and its fatal control. It is not clear whether or not the same set of causal processes provokes similar sets of responses across different polities such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, or the extent to which these responses may actually vary. There are important differences by degree, and by quality as well as quantity, in how these countries maintain and reproduce their own borders, even in a globalizing context. Following Saskia Sassen, the authors do suggest, however, that the renationalizing of politics is also at work here as heightened border control becomes a central mechanism to monitor, regulate, classify, separate and segregate those who belong from those who do not—in other words a difference, as this book makes clear, between life and death.
Globalization and Borders asks why people die trying to cross borders and answers that one way out of this unsustainable future is to turn our attention to human security; to replace the current emphasis on state security and national sovereignty with a concern for human security and human well-being, where the right to life and liberty is the highest priority and attainable for all regardless of national origin, citizenship or membership,