Border Policing and Security Technologies

Mobility and Proliferation of Borders in the Western Balkans

Sanja Milivojevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317510574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a unique and original examination of borders and bordering practices in the Western Balkans prior to, during, and after the migrant "crisis" of the 2010s. Based on extensive, mixed-method, exploratory research in Serbia, Croatia, FYR Macedonia, and Kosovo, the book charts technological and human interventions deployed in this region that simultaneously enable and hinder the mobility projects of border crossers.

Within the rich historical context of the Balkan Wars and subsequent displacement of many people from the region and beyond, this book discusses the types and locations of borders as well as their development, transformation, and impact on people on the move. These border crossers fall into three distinct categories: people from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia transiting the region; citizens of the Western Balkans seeking asylum and access to labour markets in the EU; and women border crossers. This book also maps border struggles that follow these processes, analyses the creation of labour "reserves" in the region, and examines the role that technology – in particular smartphones and social media - play in regulating mobility and creating social change. This volume also explores the role of the EU in, and the impact of the aforementioned processes on nation-states of the Western Balkans, their European future, and mobility in the region.

Whilst the book focusses on a particular region in Southeast Europe, its findings can be easily applied to other social contexts and settings. It will be particularly useful to academics and postgraduate students studying social sciences such as criminology, sociology, legal studies, law, international relations, political science, and gender studies. It will also be useful for legal practitioners, NGO activists, and government officials.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Transnational mobility and multiplicity of borders

Can you see borders on Google Earth? No, you can’t. From [space], we are all equal. God made us that way. But when you zoom in, you see borders. We created them. If you mix in colours it looks nice, doesn’t it? (“Amooz” from Afghanistan, field notes from Bogovađa centre for asylum seekers, Serbia, 10 October 2013)

Introduction

Borders as geographic boundaries of political identities, nations, and legal jurisdictions are the product of human endeavours. As “Amooz”, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan who I met in the Bogovađa centre for asylum seekers in Serbia poignantly remind us, nature does not warrant the formation of such borders. Human-made borders sometimes follow natural borders; often, however, they are entirely arbitrary. Borders fascinate and excite us. For many, crossing borders means an adventure, a holiday, and a journey of new discoveries. Borders can also be confronting: think, for example, of visual representations of border guards, often dressed in black or dark navy uniforms, equipped with military-style paraphernalia and weaponry, and an attitude that suggests impoliteness is essentially a job requirement. Or one could reflect on ever-expanding barbwire fences and concrete walls that separate states in North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. There are more international borders in the world today than ever before. The proliferation of borders has been followed by their volatility; many of us in our lifetime experienced radical changes in border regimes, following the demise of states of which we were citizens. The year was 1995. I still remember a feeling of utter despair when I found myself at a border crossing in Višegrad, dividing Serbia and Republic of Srpska (a Serbian entity of a newly formed state of Bosnia and Herzegovina) after the disintegration of the Socialist Yugoslavia. The river Drina that I had crossed with my parents many times before on our way to the Adriatic coast was not just a river anymore. It was now a border that parted people, families, friends, and co-workers who spoke the same language. In the distance I could see the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge, which had been connecting communities in this part of the world for centuries, the very bridge that was the main character of Ivo Andrić’s novel that landed him a Nobel Prize in literature in 1961. Bridges were no longer hinges but barriers that were increasingly difficult to clear. More than 5,000 km of international borders that popped up seemingly overnight in the Western Balkans¹ (Hills 2004) after the breakup of Yugoslavia, converted a symbolic demise of my homeland into a palpable reality.

One of the key features of borders is a function they play for sovereign states: they are a formal representation of state power and its ability to enforce social, economic, political, and cultural inclusion and exclusion within its territory by deciding what and whom is in – what and who belongs – and what and who is out. Yet borders are no longer simply the lines that separate nations; they are political, philosophical, socio-legal constructs, fluid, flexible, and often erratic. Borders, as Popescu (2011, pp. 10–11) reminds us, ‘play central role in peoples’ lives irrespective of their geographical location’. They are anything but static; borders penetrate deeply into the territory of sovereign nations and extend to digital spaces. Thus, borders and bordering practices as a complex assortment of socio-political processes associated with borders (Cooper and Perkins 2014) ebb and flow to and from countries of origin, transit and destination, through a range of border security technologies. Importantly, we experience borders differently, subject to our citizenship, race, nationality, gender, religion, and social status. It comes as no surprise, then, that border scholarship has been one of the fastest growing multi-disciplinary areas of academic inquiry (for an extensive literature review and the development of border studies see Wilson and Donnan 2012; Pickering et al. 2014; Vaughan-Williams 2015). Scholars from a range of disciplines – criminology, international relations, political science, legal studies, law, sociology, anthropology, geography, ethnography, and many others – have been drawn to studying borders; their nature, character, and location; connections to global and local processes and actors; border struggles; and the impact of bordering practices on people in both the Global North and the Global South. Yet, while borders have been in the focus of academic inquiry for quite some time, a unified theory of borders and bordering remains elusive.

Border Policing and Security Technologies builds on this burgeoning scholarship, some of which I will introduce later in this chapter. The book aims to shed (however partial) light on this under-researched part of Europe, in which political instability, powerful gatekeepers, limited access, language restrictions, lack of funding opportunities, and other obstacles have kept researchers at bay for a long time (see Milivojevic 2018a). This theoretical and empirical study examines a myriad of techno-social installations and interventions, deployed to identify and govern mobile populations; it sketches and analyses the migration machine installed in the region prior, during, and after the migrant “crisis”² of the 2010s. In the book I focus on redesigned borders of the Western Balkans that simultaneously enable and hinder the passage of three categories of border crossers: non-citizens transiting the region, citizens of the Western Balkans seeking asylum and access to labour markets in the EU (often referred to as “bogus” asylum seekers), and women border crossers.

The crux of this book is in four key points of inquiry. I investigate the nature and formation of borders (processes of proliferation, heterogenisation, and externalisation of borders) and the location of physical, internal, and digital borders in the region. I also analyse performance of borders: a development of what Bigo (2014) called “solid”, “liquid”, and “gaseous” (or, as I call them, “cloudy”) borders in this part of Europe that restrain or enable mobility. Finally, I look at the impact of borders and bordering practices on people on the move as they are classified as “green-”, “grey-”, and “black”-listers of transnational mobility (Broeders and Hampshire 2013). I map border struggles that follow these processes; analyse the creation of labour “reserves” in the region; and examine the role that technology plays in restraining and enabling mobility, and creating social change through the development of what I call counter-security technologies.

Border performativity is a good starting point from which I will outline the central contributions of this volume. Over a decade ago, Nancy Wonders suggested that border performativity

takes as its theoretical starting point the idea that borders are not only geographically constituted, but are socially constructed via the performance of various state actors in an elaborate dance with ordinary people who seek freedom of movement and identification.

(2006, p. 64)

As such, borders are performed through a range of measures and interventions by various actors that simultaneously include and exclude citizens and non-citizens. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s work, in Border Policing and Security Technologies I map three types of borders that play this important function in the Western Balkans: “solid”, “liquid”, and “cloudy” borders.

“Solid” borders are those conceptualised as a line of demarcation. They are borders in the most traditional sense, often located at physical borders as walls of segregation that have to be defended by the use of force. They aim to stop and prevent the dangerous “Other” from entering the territory of sovereign states. In the following chapters I outline the development of solid borders as a complex array of fences, military-style pushbacks, and violence that immobilised and restrained people along physical, internal, and digital borders in the Western Balkans. Importantly, solid borders are complemented with “liquid” borders. Resembling “rivers full of locks” (Bigo 2014, p. 213), they regulate and filter human mobility. Contemporary states, Bigo argues, are more concerned with the development and management of liquid borders than with defending solid borders. As Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, p. 3) eloquently put it, contemporary borders, ‘far from serving simply to block or obstruct global flows, have become essential devices for their articulation’. In the book, I map external and internal pressures that resulted in the development and expansion of liquid borders in the region, and their impact on peoples’ mobility projects. Finally, I also look into the development of “gaseous”, or, as I call them, “cloudy”, borders. These borders are located and defended in the digital sphere, in computer systems, databases and servers, and within the satellite and drone surveillance systems of the Global South. The endeavour to map the location and performance, and the overall process of the proliferation and externalisation of borders in the Western Balkans, is the key contribution of this volume.

In the following chapters I argue that the EU has been impacting significantly on the region’s legal and political systems of mobility management. In doing so, the West has commenced a peculiar process of converting the states of the Western Balkans from the “bad boys” of Europe to the wardens of the EU border regime (De Genova 2017a). Serbia, Croatia, FYR Macedonia, and Kosovo’s role in reconciling a free flow of capital, money, goods, and services, while at the same time ensuring that mobility is properly governed, is at the core of this volume. I analyse the development of bordering practices installed along the redesigned physical borders of the Western Balkans, within states’ territory, and in the digital realm, and their role in governing mobility. I look at the impact of such processes and argue that, through a range of states’ interventions, transiting non-citizens, citizens of the Western Balkans, and women have been labelled as black-, grey-, or green-listers of transnational mobility. Black-listing, as Broeders and Hampshire (2013) note, follows a security logic by excluding known threats (wanted criminals, terror suspects, immigration offenders). Green-listing aims to facilitate mobility through biometrics and automated border controls, while grey-listing sorts out suspicious travellers through the collection of data and risk profiling but also, as I argue in the book, an assessment of their suitability for labour markets and/or asylum systems in countries of destination. As people move on through countries of origin or transit, they are constantly assessed and re-assessed through a range of bordering interventions. Through externalisation of bordering practices, the Global North creates “labour reserves” (Cross 2013): buffer zones where such assessment, as well as border struggles, takes place. Countries of origin and transit are also spaces where mobile bodies reclaim technology in order to enhance their migratory projects, record abusive bordering practices, and create a counter-narrative of migration, one that can potentially deconstruct the idea of migrants as a collective dangerous force (Huysmans 2006, p. 56).

This chapter commences our journey with an overview of contemporary border scholarship pertinent to this inquiry. The literature in what is now called border studies is ‘so vast and diverse that covering it all would be futile’ (Popescu 2011, p. 12), if not impossible. Instead, in this chapter I introduce some of the works that represent the foundation on which this volume is built, while a more extensive review of relevant literature is interwoven throughout the book. This chapter also maps the recent development of borders and bordering practices in the developed world, in particular the EU. It outlines how, under the rubric of co-operation with non-EU and/or potential and candidate countries, the Union ‘essentially externalize[d] traditional tools of domestic EU migration control’ (Boswell 2003, p. 619). Recognising that there has been little critical engagement with such practices in the Global South, the chapter sketches an ongoing process of “offshoring” (Pickering 2011) of borders, “Europeanisation” (Zimmerman and Jakir 2015) of the Western Balkan, and their impact on border crossers. Key terminology and methodology are also canvassed, as well as some issues pertinent to access to data and gatekeepers in researching migration and mobility. Finally, the chapter ends with the overall structure of this book.

Border accounts: from border theory to everyday borders

We live in times of the border paradox. It has never been easier, or more difficult, to cross borders, depending on one’s identity, citizenship, race, and gender, but also the nature and location of borders. Borders, it seems, have never been more complex in terms of their location and character. On the one hand, they are more than just physical edges of states or transnational unions. As Wonders (2006) reminds us, borders exist wherever border control is performed. They are complex social institutions, ‘marked by tensions between practices of border reinforcement and border crossing’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 3). Contemporary borders are commonly defined as borderlands, border zones, borderscapes (see Donnan and Wilson 1999; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Hess and Kasparek 2017), or even deathscapes (De Genova 2017a). They are described as ‘mobile, bio-political and virtual apparatuses of control’ (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2013, p. 509), and sophisticated systems through which people, goods, capital, and money are inspected, classified, filtered, or (temporarily or permanently) immobilised. Borders are also, as Bigo (2014, p. 217) argues, ‘series of disconnected geographical points, linked through speed of information and data sharing’. Similar to our understanding of the nature of borders, the importance of borders as boundaries of social segregation, exclusion and inclusion, division and stratification, is also changing. As Walker (2006, p. 57) points out, ‘[a]lmost all the hard questions of our time … converge on the status of borders’.

Against the backdrop of globalisation in which processes of debordering and re-bordering are simultaneous (Popescu 2011), instead of the predicted weakening of states in a seemingly ever-smaller world (see Wilson and Donnan 2012) we are witnessing an ever-growing debate on borders – where are they, how secure are they, and how can we make them more secure. Underpinned by populist narratives of porous, weak, penetrable borders, border debates have arguably reached their pinnacle in the 21st century. It is hard if not impossible to remember a single election in Europe, the United States, or Australia in the last few decades that has not been fought, and won, on a border security platform. Whether it is building or maintaining walls to stop migration (the infamous 2016 US presidential elections; the 2018 Hungarian elections) or stopping immigration “floods” through border control measures (personified in the “Breaking Point” poster by the UK Independence Party in the 2016 Brexit campaign), clamping down on the “immigration problem” has been the platform for conservative, right-wing politics across the Global North. As Hungary’s foreign affairs and trade minister told the media in June 2018, ‘[i]t’s obvious that migration became the key factor of deciding the outcome of national parliamentary elections’ (Turak 2018). Contemporary borders are, thus, seen as crucial in delineating between ‘inside and outside, us and them, safe and dangerous, known and unknown’ (Amoore et al. 2008, p. 96).

The regulatory nature of borders has been extensively documented in border scholarship (Mau et al. 2012; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Cooper and Perkins 2015; for a literature review see Pickering et al. 2014; Andersson 2016; Newell et al. 2016). Transnational mobility is undoubtedly ‘an intensely stratified phenomenon’ (Aas 2007, p. 31) as people are constantly assessed against the global hierarchy of mobility (Bauman 1998). Indeed, as Katja Franko (Aas 2007, p. 98) observed over a decade ago, ‘[r]ather than creating “citizens of the world”, the globalising process seems to be dividing the world; creating and even deepening the “us” and “them” mentality – the national from the foreign’. In the world where the freedom of movement is bound to national boundaries, and where the right to leave refers to one’s own country (Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; see also Weber 2015b) but not to a right to mobility (Milivojevic et al. 2017), the social sorting of the mobile population – classification of people that leads to their differential treatment (Lyon 2007a) – is largely based on their risk assessment and desirability in globalised labour markets. Risk associated with migration and mobility refers not only to national security but also to “the fabric of the nation” in cultural, social, and economic contexts (see Sassen 1999; Cornelisse 2015; Vasilev 2015). In what is commonly called a “world in motion”, the limited mobility of those who need it most is a commonplace. Those from the least “desirable” nations and races, who have little social or economic capital, have been barred or discouraged from pursuing mobility (Bauman 1998; Kaufmann 2002; Adey 2009) and constructed as ‘scapegoats for globalization-induced fears’ (Popescu 2011, p. 84). The excluded encompass a broad category of “Other”: from members of organized crime networks, potential terrorists, and paedophiles to illegalised non-citizens, refugees, asylum seekers, unskilled migrants, and migrant sex workers. A crisis over boundaries (Berman 2003) underpinned by an ever-growing cata...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of table
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations/acronyms
• 1 Introduction: transnational mobility and multiplicity of borders
• 2 Borders, security technologies, and mobility
• 3 Social sorting of non-citizens: transiting ‘Other’, multiplicity of borders, and strategies of control
• 4 Social sorting of citizens: ‘Bogus’ asylum seekers and proliferation of borders in the Western Balkans
• 5 Bordering women, via trafficking: gender and mobility of non-citizens
• 6 “Stealing the fire”, 2.0 style?: counter-security technology, mobility, and de-securitisation of migration
• 7 Conclusion: security technologies, mobility, and countering bordering practices in the Global South
• Bibliography
• Index