Abstract
Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering, Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier, Palgrave Macmillan: Hampshire, 2011; 284 pp. (including index): 0230247342, £58
Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering’s book Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier focuses on the relationship between deaths of illegalized immigrants attempting to cross borders between the Global North and Global South and border control policies in Europe and the Anglophone West. Leanne Weber is Senior Research Fellow at Monash University Australia, specializing in migration policing. Sharon Pickering is Professor of Criminology also at Monash University, researching irregular border crossing. The main question posed by the authors in Globalization and Borders refers to who is responsible for the risks faced by those who irregularly cross the borders and consequently for their deaths (p. 164). In order to answer this question Weber and Pickering analyse available information concerning deaths at key border zones in the USA, Australia and the European Union, as well as each area’s migration policies. According to the main argument outlined in the book, immigrants die because of the way that the borders are controlled (p. 1). The authors go beyond individual conditions or aspects of border crossings in order to uncover the structural ones, and in consequence point out the accountability of the states for the deaths.
Weber and Pickering undertake a very challenging task of gathering and analysing information about the number of deaths at borders. Their understanding of border however goes beyond the traditional idea of borders as geographical boundaries between nation states or other political entities. It is rather based on the concept of a global frontier – a ‘set of geographical sites and politico-legal status of these sites’ (p. 2). Consequently, they show how contemporary borders proliferate and are increasingly detached from sovereign territories, and how they are embodied in immigrants who carry them wherever they go. For this reason border-related deaths have to be understood not only as encompassing those who die at the geographical boundary, trying to cross the Arizona desert or swim in a dinghy from Morocco to Spain, but they also encompass deaths resulting from hate crime, labour exploitation or withholding of social benefits. Despite the difficulty of counting deaths at such multiplied and mobile borders, this vast definition is crucial for understanding the broad relationship between states’ migration policies and migrants’ deaths, and consequently for determining state accountability. In Chapter 3 Weber and Pickering indeed conduct a substantive analysis of accountability of states for border deaths based on the concept of degrees of states’ culpability and ‘complicity continuum’ of state crime (p. 84). This approach allows them to reveal that, despite hegemonic discourses attributing primary responsibility for deaths either to personal choices of migrants or to the greed and ruthlessness of smugglers (p. 163), those deaths are rather effects of particular ideological underpinnings of concrete migration policies. As a result, the authors are able to attribute to the states not only deaths at geographical boundaries or in detention facilities, but also the deadly effects of deportations, death at the hands of criminal gangs or as a consequence of citizens’ patrols and even death as a result of suicide and self-harm.
Yet revealing state accountability constitutes only a necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding the structural causes of border-related deaths. Tackling the issue effectively requires going beyond the conventional notion of a sovereign nation state as being based on effective control of population in a given territory. This notion is inherent in dominant legal discourses and also acts as the backbone in states’ sovereign right in deciding upon their migration policies and justifying them by increasingly appealing to the need to protect their security. According to Weber and Pickering this sovereign right forms the main barrier in imagining and designing new ways of thinking about migration and in consequence in preventing the violence associated with border controls. For this reason they call for rethinking the concept of sovereignty and turn to the notion of ‘human security’ as a counter-narrative to national security (p. 210). This new approach requires decoupling the individual from the nation state. The authors draw here on arguments posed by Catherine Dauvergne (2008), in Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law, where she advocates creation of broader ethical community based on the rule of law, and ‘unhinged from the nation itself’ (p. 214). For Weber and Pickering, membership in this community would be unconditional and based solely on the humanity of immigrants (p. 212). Even though this approach raises many questions, including to whom such sovereignty will be accounted, or how to guarantee protection of rights of immigrants on the international level inhabited by the nation states, it challenges the hegemonic discourses based on binary division between citizen and non-citizen and forces the reader to reflect on alternative ways of management of migration on a global level. For this and other reasons mentioned above Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier is a must-read for anyone interested in rethinking the problem of policing migration beyond traditional approaches to migration, border controls and sovereignty.