Introduction

Violence, crisis, borders

Precarious migration, border enforcement and violence seem to have become inextricably linked in our contemporary world. People on the move and those displaced are particularly vulnerable to diverse forms of violence. As the contributions in this theme issue highlight, examples range from experiences of injurious and deadly violence, ‘slow’ violence, ‘masculinist’ violence, psychological violence leading to self-harm or suicide and to domestic, ‘everyday’, and intimate forms of violence. While diverse in nature and context, our contributors link many of these experiences of violence to the effects of restrictive migration policies and repressive border enforcement practices that have further curtailed possibilities to migrate and escape along safe paths, to find protection in places of transit and arrival, and to build stable and sustainable livelihoods at desired destinations.

In her contribution, Suzan Ilcan shows how Syrians escaping the disastrous security situation in Syria, where the government instigated a regime of terror and fear to quell anti-government protests (starting in 2011), often found themselves exposed to states of insecurity, uncertainty, and extended periods of protracted waiting. In their search for protection, as Maissaa Almustafa examines, many Syrians fleeing to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey or Egypt encountered a ‘crisis of protection’ instead, being made vulnerable by a lack of access to resources and rights, which prompted some to move on toward Europe and along risky migration routes. As legal and safe corridors of migration and escape have diminished significantly over recent years due to ever-more restrictive and harmful migration policies, which Maurice Stierl outlines, tens of thousands of people on the move have succumbed in necropolitical border zones such as the Saharan desert and the Mediterranean Sea.

In her contribution, Vicki Squire discusses the ‘hidden geographies’ of migratory movements, which often also invisibilise the violence that occurs in these spaces, making it difficult, even impossible, to accurately establish migratory death tolls and disappearances. In turn, Anne McNevin highlights how ‘images of gendered and racialized black and brown bodies – desperate and out-of-control men, suffering women and children’ underpin both violent border enforcement practices today and past cycles of colonial violence, rationalised as humanitarian efforts to ‘save lives’ or as ‘civilising missions’. Escaping or surviving forms of border violence that people on the move are subjected to during risky journeys does not necessarily mean the end of encounters with violence but frequently translates into experiences of detainment in camps or centres, subjection to prolonged states of deportability, and exploitative labour conditions. Masaya Llavaneras Blanco’s contribution shows how ‘people who have moved’, including Haitian domestic workers in the Dominican Republic, would find themselves exposed to gendered and racialised forms of violence in ‘intimate labour’ relationships.

Despite these varied experiences of violence, people on the move and the displaced have regularly been turned into figures and sources of violence, threat, and conflict themselves. Indeed, as several contributions highlight, the dominant portrayal and rhetoric of migration as a crisis has prompted or reinforced migrant deterrence and containment practices, thereby exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and further curtailing access to rights and resources. The migration crisis nexus that turns migrant subjects into security risks has seemingly legitimised a range of novel bordering practices and technologies of surveillance and control that make it increasingly hard to reach particular territories, especially those of the ‘Global North’, and to remain there without fearing to be expelled. Indeed, the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015 in Europe has prompted a series of political, legal, administrative and security measures aimed at reducing the number of arrivals, restricting access to asylum or citizenship, and facilitating deportations and ‘voluntary’ returns.

Our contributors’ diverse reflections on experiences of blatant or more insidious forms of violence that people encounter during and after migratory journeys, invite us to account for the ways in which contemporary borders and migration policies are productive of suffering, injury, harm and death that can take place far beyond geographical edges of nation-states, where the nominal border is commonly thought to exist. Indeed, the contributions point to the ways in which borders are being reshaped, becoming increasingly diffused, externalised, deterritorialised, virtual, biometric and ‘smart’. With the transformation and proliferation of borders, we can observe a vast but diffuse repertoire of border violence at work in the international policing and regulation of human mobilities. In view of forms of border violence both multiplying and becoming increasingly normalised, it is even more important to listen closely to migratory experiences and testimonies.

Migratory experiences and testimonies

Views of people on the move are often framed through exclusionary discourses and practices that homogenise and categorize them as geopolitical threats, non-citizens or victims. While the analysis of such views is crucial to understanding and assessing diverse border and migration relations, it is also imperative to focus on the experiences and testimonies of people on the move as they confront border regimes that aim to govern their movements, limit their access to rights and position them in precarious situations. The contributions in this theme issue bring attention to the voices and lived experiences of diverse groups of people, including asylum seekers, domestic labourers, migrants and those who have residency rights based on refugee status or humanitarian protection. Such experiences highlight the transitional effects that cross-border movements and harmful border policies and practices have on peoples’ lives. By focusing on migratory experiences and testimonies, the theme issue draws attention to diverging issues that range from dangerous journeys, labour practices, social and political inequities and racialization to shrinking rights and protection. It also provides insights into how borders are not merely territorial boundary lines but involve practices of bordering that can generate different kinds of legal status, social conditions and political dynamics and struggles.

The geographically and politically diverse cases, policies, situations and events that the contributors analyse in this collection show how migratory experiences and testimonies foreground bordering practices in specific spatial and temporal contexts through processes of inclusion and exclusion and relations of mobility/immobility, and across levels and scales of interactions and power relations. For example, in her contribution, Llavaneras Blanco shows that, in the Haitian and Dominican Republic territories, intimate labour can be a driver of movement, a strategy to stay and access rights, and a way to produce bordered subjects and racialized experiences of inclusion and exclusion within and beyond border regimes. Other migratory experiences are telling of the ways the distinction between inclusion and exclusion are being reworked; a reworking that can emerge though changing political landscapes and volatile, precarious or dangerous cross-border movements. In this regard, Almustafa’s examination of Syrians fleeing from Syria to nearby host states and to Europe emphasises that many displaced Syrians have faced interruptions and harsh border restrictions during fragmented journeys to seek protection. As part of shifting itineraries, she demonstrates that enduring precariousness and persistent exclusions from rights are largely fostered by the reluctance of states of the Global North to honour their international commitments towards refugees. These and other similar movements transpire across particular spaces and during particular border temporalities (including delay, acceleration, disruption or perpetual turmoil), showing how experiences of mobility and immobility are not in a binary opposition to one another and are not grounded in linear and anticipated movements in time.

Migratory experiences and testimonies surface through a diversity of contexts. In Stierl’s contribution, these are manifest in encounters with border controls, attempts to cross specific borders and confrontations with various forms of border violence. In the face of the intensification of spatial-temporal border management practices, people on the move do challenge border controls and policies as is evident in the struggles and testimonies to which this issue draws attention. For example, Ilcan highlights that some engage in everyday practices of invisibility to exercise a right to stay and to contest the discourses of ‘illegality’ that create new spaces of enforcement and thereby render visible the deportable. Squire’s contribution shows how others advance testimonies that not only counter assumptions of victimhood but also enable and underline the right to escape and the ways that people on the move speak back to European politicians and policy makers.

In this theme issue, migratory experiences and testimonies are not engaged in terms that assume mobility as obvious, uniform or without political effects. Indeed, migratory experiences and testimonies in this edited collection frequently convey complex relationships and political dynamics about bordering practices that filter, redirect, funnel, slow down, or accelerate movements in ways that are not always or easily observable or homogeneous. Overall, people’s immobilities, transitions and aspirations, which are often reminiscent of other relations, alliances and struggles, may offer the potential for diverse groups to build alternative forms of participation and belonging and to move toward alternative horizons.

Alternative horizons

The articles in this issue highlight the violence and harms of contemporary bordering practices and crisis politics, while collectively centring migrant perspectives and experiences within the analysis of such processes. Yet, they also go further, to draw attention to the multiple contestations, solidarities and resistances through which alternative horizons of possibility are enacted. In her opening article, McNevin emphasises a ‘failure of imagination’ in ‘the bulk of scholarly, policy and popular debate in relation to human mobility’. She asks what alternative starting points we might work from to create a different kind of future in which the ‘hierarchies that currently structure human mobility’ stop making sense. The answers provided to this question by the authors are diverse and of course are by no means unified. Nevertheless, collectively they offer a rich set of reflections by which to foster the type of critical imagination that McNevin advocates.

Several articles provide conceptual and methodological insights that facilitate an analysis that moves beyond the assumptions of what McNevin refers to as ‘international space’ and ‘progressive time’. For example, Ilcan explores the temporality of bordering practices in terms of the ‘borderisation of waiting’. This approach is important because it pays attention to the relation between mobility and immobility, rather than privileging one over the other. It also involves engaging ‘stillness’ in dynamic terms, as ‘an unfolding and a condition of possibility replete with agency’. Focusing on Syrian experiences of displacement, Ilcan shows how the interplay between dynamics of border control and expressions of agency-in-displacement give rise to a range of struggles across multiple sites and at various stages of the migratory journey. These range from street protests in Syria through to the construction of alternative infrastructures of support, the refusal of expulsion and camp protests in Lebanon and Jordan.

Another way of moving the conceptual and methodological analysis of bordering practices in new directions is developed in Llavaneras Blanco’s article, which focuses on the intimate everyday politics involved in migrant trajectories. Blanco engages in a detailed reflection on the experiences of Marie, a Haitian woman whose migration trajectories have been shaped by the navigation of legal abjection and of gendered and racialised forms of violence in the Haitian-Dominican Republic borderlands. The analysis highlights the intimacies and affective relations that are central to the experiences of violence and exclusions Marie has had to navigate. Yet, it also does more, to show how Marie’s experiences involve struggles over ‘the sustenance of life’. In this regard, Blanco draws on her own engagement with Marie to invite the reader to ‘imagine a political subjectivity that engages with quotidian struggles in relations of subalternity’.

Squire’s article also turns to migrant testimonies, though in this case, the analysis is based on a larger-scale project with people making various journeys across the Mediterranean to Europe. Squire speaks to debates surrounding the ‘autonomy of migration’, to emphasise the importance of exploring how migration involves claims to justice that need to be understood in contextualised terms as challenges to wider spatial inequalities and histories of power and violence. In so doing, she points to two transformative movements (or ‘nonmovements’) that emerge from the claims of those migrating in 2015 and 2016: an anti-war and an anti-colonial movement. Squire suggests that these provide substantive alternative horizons of orientation in contrast to those characterised by longer histories of masculinist violence and colonial dispossession and exploitation.

Almustafa focuses on Syrian displacement to provide a penetrating analysis of the failure of the global refugee regime over the past years. Importantly, she sets her examination of the response of states in the Global North in relation to the responses of those in the Global South. Almustafa shows how the shrinking space of asylum in the Global North relies on practices of containment, a preference for regional protection, the development of non-entrée regimes and deterrent border controls. Yet, she also shows how states in the Global South do not fall in line with the pressure to contain protection within regions of origin, focusing on Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt as a means to highlight the fractures within the global refugee regime.

Stierl closes the theme issue by coming back to the problems of research on migration that is driven by ‘policy categories, assumptions and needs’. He asks how researchers producing and disseminating knowledge about migration can avoid becoming implicated in the harmful consequences of policy, in particular by avoiding the reproduction of migrant and refugee figures, the reinforcement of a state-centric gaze and the creation of statistical spectacles. In emphasising the growing intimacy between policy and research in the European context since 2015, Stierl points to the importance of epistemic interventions, counter-empirics and activist engagement, to propose that: ‘Do harm could be the motto for a critical and impactful scholarship of migration that locates, and expands, ruptures in the EUropean border regime’.

Since early 2020, regimes of migration control and restrictive bordering practices have become increasingly pervasive with the global COVID-19 pandemic. Measures of migrant confinement, exclusion and deterrence are increasingly justified in the name of safeguarding society’s health from potential ‘Corona spreaders’. While the different contributors to this issue wrote their articles before the global pandemic unfolded, they highlight mechanisms of control and subjugation that have become hardened since, often targeting already vulnerable populations particularly gravely, thereby exacerbating already existing political, economic or social global disparities and inequalities. The manifold issues raised by our contributors have thus only become more pressing over time.