Paper short abstract:

The paper develops a new critical comparative lens for the study of European borders, which displays bordering processes less as territorialized state-spaces than spatio-temporal assemblages.

Paper long abstract:

In proposing an 'inverted telescope' for border studies, the paper problematizes existing calls to 'see like a border', arguing that such moves, by adopting a choice-based and value-neutral approach to the problem of bordering's inherent violence and exclusion, miss an opportunity to define what is properly political about b/ordering space. Taking the multiplicity and historicity of European borders into account while simultaneously allowing for their continuous re-envisioning through extra-territorial and post-colonial enframings of Europe, the standard horizontal gaze of border studies, it is argued, is dislocated. 'Inverting the telescope' on border studies thus enables a productive space of tension - named Café Europa - in which the negotiations of geopolitical as well as everyday life border practices find expression and take place. Inside this tension of multiple realities and politics, border theory is challenged and charged. Taking Polish labour migration to Denmark in past and present as one illustrative case in point it is the aim of the paper to invite a furthering of ontological border politics in and across such conversations on borders that matter.

Keywords: border studies, border theory, new comparativism, ontological politics, multiplicity, extraterritoriality/deterritorialisation

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore post-colonial discourses present among non-governmental organization workers aiding in the provision of healthcare to refugees as well as the strategies used in making and unmaking of perceptions of borders among refugees and other local actors in Siracusa, Italy.

Paper long abstract:

As a result of political and economic instability in Africa and the Middle East, Europe has experienced an unprecedented influx of refugees. Southern European nations have in particular seen massive numbers of migrants as a result of their geographic proximity to refugees' countries of origin. Sicily, a historically poorer region of Italy, has been a site of sizable immigration and must not only grapple with these refugees but also austerity measures resulting from the Eurozone Crisis. These neoliberal policies encourage privatization at the cost of public services, such as healthcare. Reduction of healthcare has produced involvement of various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which are attempting to aid in healthcare provision to refugees. Perception of refugees plays a powerful role in provision of care among these healthcare workers. Additionally, these perceptions are affected by imaginaries of borders among refugees and NGO workers. This paper will critically analyze the impact of these discourses and perceptions on provision of care to this vulnerable population. This analysis will be contextualized within post-colonial encounters and neoliberal economic policies present in today's Europe, and based on ethnographic research conducted in hospitals and refugee camps in Siracusa as well as through interviews with local actors over the course of several months of fieldwork in early 2015. This paper will contribute to theoretical and ethnographic perspectives of migration in Southern Europe. Simultaneously it will illuminate concerns related to human rights and healthcare policy in the area.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic insights with undocumented migrants and analyses different ways of resisting official and unofficial forms of border control.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on insights gained with people on the move, characterized in official discourse as undocumented migrants or asylum-seekers, this paper examines corporeal forms of resistance. It departs from the frame of smooth functioning of administrative power that seeks to contain individuals in the places assigned to them, and thus regulate and stop irregular forms of global mobilities. The paper highlights mobile persons' potential of disturbing this power, indeed resisting it in different ways. In so doing, they challenge not only the administrative and legal categorizations but also question taken-for-granted assumptions within fluid migrant communities and among solidarity advocates. The paper analyses three acts of resistance targeting different embodiments of power, figured in a young and scrawny body journeying unassisted through various countries, a male body onto which the European quest to Control its borders has carved its marks, and leaders of shadow communities negotiating the access to the people they are to protect.

Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork among bureaucrats and civil-society actors in the Dutch deportation field reveals converging practices in dealing with to-be-deported migrants and shared worldviews on borders and belonging. These hegemonic political subjectivities dismiss alternatives to deportation policies.

Paper long abstract:

In response to normalized practices of deportations of migrants in western liberal states, a solid field of those dealing with the to-be-deported migrants emerged in recent years. In the Netherlands, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork in this deportation field from January 2012 to October 2014 among two distinctive actors - NGO workers and state agents in detention centers - who face illegalized migrants in their daily work. An analysis of their experiences reveals significant convergences between both groups in: (1) usage of terminology and categories; (2) handling of face-to-face interactions with migrants; (3) worldviews on issues like borders, rights, and justice. Given these convergences, the social field in which deportation is being negotiated and practiced can be conceptualized as a deportation continuum, from state to civil society, where hegemonic ideas on the non-belongingness of migrants and the rightfulness of deportations prevail. These ideas and imaginaries legitimize the work of both actors, although their daily experience confronts them with a reality that undermines these imaginaries. The Dutch deportation continuum thus shows the workings of state power through a hegemonic political subjectivity. Consequently, deportations are diminishingly criticized by those who are considered as legitimate political actors. Substantial alternatives are dismissed as radical and the few actors proposing them, for example, the self-organized migrant groups in Amsterdam, are placed beyond the borders of legitimacy and are further marginalized from the dominant political framework.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the intertwine among desire for future and opportunity of mobility of Ethiopian migrants and the barriers built by UE policy. It also shows how local borders can become a capital for transnational mobility putting in place a process of challenging and re-making borders

Paper long abstract:

European migration policy can be considered as part of a border regime that regulates the global mobility and shapes the creative ways through which people handle it well beyond its edge. This paper is based on an ethnographic research carried out in the Ethiopian town of Mekelle, that is the crossroads of multiple borders at symbolic, national (the Ethio-Eritrean frontier) and transnational (the global consequences of the UE border policy) level. The desire of an elsewhere, that represents one of the way through which the young try to reach their expectations for the future shifting the idea of individual progress from a movement through time to a movement through space, is indeed prevented by the obstacles to global mobility. In this perspective, the crossing of transnational borders emerges both as project composed by imaginaries which change according to choices and contingencies, and as strategy used for coping with different times of life. Through a perspective from below, I will firstly focus on the biographical paths of some subjects analyzing the intertwine among their ideas for the future, their opportunities and barriers to mobility. Secondly, I will shed light on local borders, showing how they can become a capital for transnational mobility putting in place a simultaneous process of challenging and re-making borders. Indeed, the interplay of symbolic and institutional borders characterizing Mekelle can be handle by social actors for the over stretching of other borders, particularly those that are raised by European immigration policy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the 'making of invisible borders' as it shows in the case of Iranian asylum-seekers' process of identity construction and subjection. This process is analysed by considering how IOs and NGOs 'force' asylum-seekers into pre-established roles, de facto 'enclosing' their identity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the 'making of invisible borders' as it shows in the case of Iranian asylum-seekers' process of identity construction and subjection. This process is analysed by highlighting how international organisations and politics, personal networks, and civil society organisations in receiving countries (Italy and Turkey) 'force' asylum-seekers into pre-established roles, de facto 'enclosing' their identity.

In this case-study, the central aspects of asylum-seekers' identity are political activism and its performative power. These are considered to be a resource because Iran is a subject of great interest for a number of human rights organisations (NGOs but also organisations such as Open Society Foundation) as well as American semi-governmental organisations and media (VOA, just to name one). Peers and NGOs' pressure builds an invisible border to asylum-seekers's autonomous self-determination, governing their selves and obliging them to follow the 'script of refugeeness' in order to fit pre-established categories such as the one of 'human rights defenders'-- which secures assistance by NGOs and 'benevolence' by international organisations. The result of this multi-sited pressure is the production of invisible borders, as identity is deployed as a mean of differential inclusion and as a device to govern and classify migrant populations, whereby some asylum-seekers perform or fit 'refugeeness' better than others.

This paper is based on fieldwork in Turkey in the cities of Van, Hakkari, Agri, Eskisehir, Kaiseri and Nidge, carried out since 2010; and in Italy, where I have collaborated with a number of organisations assisting asylum-seekers in 2010 and 2011.

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Paper short abstract:

The mechanisms of control of migratory flows are present throughout Serbian territory. One of these – the illegalization and its consequences – will be discussed through the case of a youth hostel in Belgrade, where the state borders are being reproduced and illegalization “contagiously” spread.

Paper long abstract:

Serbia lies on one of the most important land routes for migrants seeking to reach the EU. More than 37,000 people struggled through this route in 2014, according to data from Frontex reports. The mechanisms of control of migratory flows are not only present at the Schengen border with Hungary, or the EU border with Croatia, but throughout Serbian territory. One of such mechanisms involves the classification of migrants into those who arrive and reside "legally" and those who do not - and are therefore rendered "illegal". In the present paper we will discuss this process of illegalization, by examining its consequences and its influences on the people involved in migration processes in Serbia. We focus on the case of a youth hostel in Belgrade, where the state borders are being reproduced and illegalization "contagiously" spread. The demand for the accommodation in the hostel is high due to its location near the police station, where it is possible - in theory and not always in practice - for people to legalize their status temporarily. The need for accommodation exists independently of one's legal status, but the business of the youth hostel - and its legality/illegality - is dependent on the decisions made at the police station. Thus the hostel is not just a neutral space where tired bodies can find some rest, but it is also the polygon for mechanisms of state control and their conflict with the interests of local entrepreneurship.

Paper short abstract:

In recorded narratives of immigrants, bureaucracies are borders demarcating space, time, identity, and societal value. Analysis of contributors’ words provides necessary ground-level context for wider considerations of borders in people’s everyday lives.

Paper long abstract:

Using audio extracts from ethnographic interviews with immigrants in North-East Scotland, I will explore how immigrants interpret the borders created by bureaucratic mechanisms. In these narratives, bureaucracy is a transnational border, reaching out through space and time to separate the desirable and undesirable, the deserving and undeserving. National and individual sovereignty are degraded by extra-national bureaucratic processes in which one's worth and rights are inscrutably calculated and fluidity of identity is restricted. Intra-national processes function to monitor and evaluate immigrants once the initial obstacles of pre-arrival bureaucracies are successfully navigated. Commercial, local, and religious bureaucracies also act as borders, limiting and demarcating what is and is not accessible to landed and would-be immigrants.

But the chroniclers of these narratives do not solely present themselves as disadvantaged victims of a faceless, unreasonable bureaucracy. If some decry immigration policies and their derived bureaucracies, there are those who rationalize the restrictions imposed upon them, and some who even argue for more stringent bureaucratic assessments. Others neither accept victimization nor support these regulatory mechanisms, but rather narrate themselves as coy protagonists, whose very otherness allows them to surprise or dupe the systems meant to keep them in check. By emphasizing the actual words and voices of contributors, this research provides necessary ground-level context for wider considerations of borders in people's everyday lives.