Introduction
In the years 2015 and 2016, media headlines were dominated by stories about refugees, borders, and violence. In 2015 alone, 1.2 million people applied for asylum in the European Union, up from 197,000 in 2006 (Eurostat 2016). The images of dead children washed up on beaches and millions of people struggling to move to new homes for safety competed with images of new barbed wire fences under construction at borders and stories about the rise of anti-migrant politicians in many countries around the world. In 2015 alone, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia all announced or began the construction of walls and fences on their borders (see also Brian and Laczko 2014). Many European countries reinstated internal border checkpoints after a decade of free movement. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States by promising to build a massive wall on the USâMexico border and to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the USA.
What was often missing from many of these stories was the experience of borders in Asia. How do Asian borders compare to the hardening and militarization of borders in the USA and Europe? Has there been a similar transformation of borderlands across Asia? Of course, the situation varies at different borders and even the same borderlands can be dramatically different in different locations. The IndiaâBangladesh border, for example, is a site of extreme violence in some sections and over 1,000 people have been killed by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) since the year 2000 (Odhikar n.d.). At the same time, on other parts of the border, the BSF allows cross-border market days where traders from both sides come together to sell their wares (Boyle and Rahman 2018). Other contributors to this volume lay out the multitude of different border spaces, but the focus of this chapter is how Asian borderlands are situated within the global trend toward hardened and violent borders.
A number of scholars have begun to analyze the hardening of borders in Asia and the resultant violence including a recent special section of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) newsletter edited by Swargajyoti Gohain (2015). Gohain argues that although borders are the edges of state territories, they are not peripheral to the practice and performance of authority. Instead, âOur focus on militarized borders brings to light the many ways in which militarization aids the nation-state project in the national peripheriesâ (Gohain 2015: 22). The changes at the edge of the state have both discursive and material effects, simultaneously symbolizing the idea of state territory and control while materializing those claims on the ground. âIt has powerful spatial and ideological effects, changing the visual landscape, the language and social norms, and the local and global economyâ by normalizing the idea of the border (Gohain 2015: 22).
Traditionally, scholars have maintained a distinction between different types of violence, using direct violence to refer to intentional actions that result in harm, and structural violence to refer to how systems, rules, and procedures produce violence through neglect, foreclosing safety, or forcing people into dangerous situations (Galtung 1969). At borders, an example of direct violence is when an Indian Border Guard shoots someone in the IndiaâBangladesh borderlands. Structural violence would be the regulations that sends migrants to more dangerous routes and locations, for example the citizenship laws in Myanmar that deny citizenship to Rohingya people and force them to cross the border into Bangladesh or, increasingly, to board a ship in the hopes of finding safety in other more distant Southeast Asian locations.
In recent years, scholars have begun to question these divisions and instead argue that maintaining a distinction hides the intentionality in much of the structural violence. James Tyner and Joshua Inwood (2014: 779) suggest that
Instead of focusing on the uncritical distinction between structural and direct violence, as though each of these forms has its own a prior existence in and of itself, we need to unite these seemingly opposite abstract forms into their historical and geographical totalities.
They continue âif we abstract violence as any action that affects the material conditions of another, thereby reducing oneâs potentiality, the distinction between âdirectâ and âstructuralâ violence collapsesâ (Tyner and Inwood 2014: 779).
This chapter follows Tyner and Inwood by suggesting that the hardening of borders in various locations across Asia demonstrates the violent outcomes of border work that denies people the right to move adversely affects their material conditions, and reduces their potentiality. This violence is evident in both deaths at borders and also restricted life chances for many individuals who are contained by borders and cannot access opportunities in other locations both within Asia and beyond. The next section provides a theoretical background to border studies with a focus on how walls and other security infrastructure have been used to manage movement at the edges of the state. Three global trends at borders are identified: the externalization and internalization of border work away from the border line; the turn to walls as a symbolic and material device; and the militarization of border spaces as technologies, mentalities, and strategies from the military transform how border police work is done. The third section turns to Asian borderlands to analyze the extent of these trends at different borders throughout Asia. The conclusion argues that even while some borders in the region are still relatively open and lightly guarded, many of the global changes are evident at borders in Asia, which have been transformed during the era of globalization as new technologies alter how security is practiced.
Theoretical background
Over the past decade, the field of border studies has matured as scholarly attention to borders and movement restrictions has expanded rapidly (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015; Johnson et al. 2011; Mountz 2015; Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009; Paasi 2011, 2012; Vallet 2014). The traditional view of borders as taken for granted containers of state space is largely obsolete and has been replaced by the view that borders are performative and socially constructed ideas that are reproduced through events, narratives, and performances of state sovereignty and authority. A key aspect of this literature is the expansion of security infrastructure at borders, which has transformed the landscape of the borderlands, the everyday lives of borderland residents, and the experiences of people and goods moving through border spaces. Three prominent trends in the field are research into the externalization of borders as much of the work of borders is done both within and beyond the edge of the state, often quite far from the actual borderland; the return of the wall as a significant tool for states to mark and enforce sovereignty claims at the border; and the militarization of the practice of border enforcement as new technologies and techniques derived from the military are deployed for policing borders.
Border externalization
A growing debate in border studies is over how to situate border lines within the broadening zone of where border work is done (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015; Johnson et al. 2011; Jones and Johnson 2014). Contemporary borders are the product of negotiations between state authorities over the territorial extent of the sovereignty and most borders begin first as lines on the map that are later located on the ground through surveys and then inscribed into the landscape with boundary markers, patrols, and more recently walls and fences (Harley and Woodward 1987). Consequently, border work is predicted on the existence of the line on a map and the corresponding line on the ground (Reeves 2014; Rumford 2008). However, it is increasingly clear that much of the work that goes into protecting the border happens far away from the actual line. A number of states have put in place policies that externalize the border by transferring much of the work of border enforcement to neighbouring states who patrol for migrants and smugglers to prevent them from even reaching the actual border (Collyer and King 2015). This externalization has been closely studied in the European Union and the United States. The European Union and individual member states signed agreements with neighbouring states such as Turkey and Morocco to cooperate on border enforcement. In practice, this means that these states round up migrants, detain them, destroy smuggling infrastructure, and even build border fences, like Moroccoâs new barbed wire fence around the Spanish enclave of Melilla (European Commission 2013).
A second way that border enforcement has become externalized is through patrols in ocean spaces, often beyond the 12 nautical mile territorial waters or even the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone of the state as defined by the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention. Frontex, the European Union-wide border agency, has implemented over a dozen operations in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean that push border enforcement away from the coastline into these liquid spaces of the sea (Heller and Pezzani 2014). In Asia and the Pacific, Australia is at the forefront of maritime border enforcement and island detention, as is described in depth below (Coddington and Mountz 2014).
The work of border enforcement has also been internalized in many states as borders are enforced in zones that can stretch from meters to hundreds of kilometers away from the border line. In the United States, for example, the border zone is defined as within 100 miles (161 km) from borders and coastlines. In this area, the Border Patrol has special authority to conduct searches and seizures without warrants if the agent has âarticulable factsâ that justify a search. In the 1975 Brignoni-Ponce decision, the US Supreme Court established what qualifies as an articulable fact, which included being near the border, driving a station wagon, and having a Mexican-style haircut (Jones 2014). In the European Union the internalization of border enforcement has meant a reversal of the Schengen Agreementâs open internal borders. For almost a decade there had been individual cases of EU states reinstating internal border controls in response to specific events. However, in 2015 many states, including Germany and France, began to check documents at the borders to screen for migrants and filter out people making asylum claims from countries other than Syria, a practice that targets migrants from Asia, particularly Afghanistan.
For Stuart Elden (2013a, 2013b) the changing geography of security means that the focus should be less on territory as a two dimensional plane and more as a three dimensional zone. Thinking of security in a volumetric rather than a territorial sense allows for a broader understanding of the scope of new infrastructure that includes walls and fences on the ground, but also drones in the air and ground penetrating radar that can detect tunnels under borders. The volumetric approach also emphasizes the zone of the borderlands that stretches away from the actual line in both directions, in some ways mirroring the concept of frontier in the past.
Finally, much of the sorting of people moving across borders, whether at checkpoints or at airport passport controls, is done through computer algorithms housed in facilities far from the border itself (Amoore 2013; Popescu 2012).This data driven migration policing means that the work of security is often taken out of the hands of people and placed in the sphere of artificial intelligence that looks for patterns of trusted travellers in order to identify people who could be perceived as a threat to the state.
With so much of the work of bordering being done away from the border itself and by computers, private security contractors, and other non-state actors, the significance of the border line is under question. However, it is critical not to lose sight of the fact that all of these other bordering practices are based on the existence of a line-on-the-ground border. Indeed, the border line is a symbolic space to project the actions of the state to secure its territory and people. The border line is where the performance of sovereignty is most evident and the border line is also where migrants come into contact with the material consequences of border enforcement, which often means violence, detention, and death. It is also at the border line where the most visible symbolic object of border exclusion is built: the wall.
Border walls
Walls are important objects for the study of borders and border violence. Although walls themselves do not stop movement or cause violence, they are material objects that symbolize the desire of a group of people to protect a piece of land or a particular resource (Brown 2010; Jones 2012; Till et al. 2013; Vallet 2014). They territorialize the claim of authority and control over a space and they reify the line on the map by materializing it as a visual marker on the landscape (Sack 1986). Although there has been a rapid expansion in the construction of walls globally in the past 30 years, walls are also one of the oldest technologies used to control access to resources and protect privileges that have accrued in a particular place.
For many people, the Great Wall of China represents the fact that countries have built border walls for thousands of years. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly used the Chinese wall as an example of how easy it would be to build a wall on the USâMexico border. On 2 March 2016 he stated âThe Great Wall of China, built 2,000 years ago, is 13,000 miles, folks, and they didnât have Caterpillar tractorsâ (Beckwith 2016). As with many Trump claims, this version of the Great Wall turns out to be false. The most familiar sections of stone walls snaking through mountains are only about four hundred years old and a few hundred kilometres long. Earlier Chinese states did built multiple walls over a 1,500 ...
