No Borders

The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance

Natasha King

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783604685
• eBook ISBN: 9781783604708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the streets of Calais to the borders of Melilla, Evros and the United States, the slogan 'No borders!' is a thread connecting a multitude of different struggles for the freedom to move and to stay. But what does it mean to make this slogan a reality? Drawing on the author's extensive research in Greece and Calais, as well as a decade campaigning for migrant rights, Natasha King explores the different forms of activism that have emerged in the struggle against border controls, and the dilemmas these activists face in translating their principles into practice. Wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, No Borders constitutes vital reading for anyone interested in how we make radical alternatives to the state a genuine possibility for our times, and raises crucial questions on the nature of resistance.

1 | WHAT IS A NO BORDERS POLITICS?

Since the creation of the very first illegalised person, whenever and wherever controls have been placed on people’s movements, they have been rejected … No set of border controls has ever worked to fully contain people’s desire and need to move. In this sense, it can be argued that an everyday practice of refusing the border has existed as long as borders have. (Anderson et al. 2012: 82, emphasis in original)

Migration is a force of nature. (Slogan on a banner at a protest during the Cop 21, 2015)

I really like the quotes above. I like the way they both express a sense of inevitability in human mobility; a sense that mobility is somehow bigger than any of us. I’m generally not a fan of sweeping statements about the human condition. Yet it seems hard to deny that as long as we have walked, we have moved and explored. We spread to cover the whole world, and then we mixed about among each other. We continue to do that. For as long we have existed, we have moved, and our movement expresses so many elements of us; our curiosity, our vulnerability, how we’re at the mercy of our environment, how we’re arrogant enough to think we can control it. We have generally been the main limit to our ability to move in all that time. Humans have mobility in common, and yet it’s perhaps our ability to move that has made us afraid of others and in need to control others’ mobility.

I find both these quotes powerful and hopeful too. They point to our tenacity in acting out plans and strategies regardless of what’s in the way. They speak to that connection between struggles against the border today, and a vast and venerable history of struggle. The first quote also says something about what this struggle is. It doesn’t use the term resistance, which at first glance might seem the more appropriate word, but rather refusal, something that at times has been raucous and at others subtle and hidden. Refusal is a powerful and hopeful term too. It expresses the agency of those who do otherwise but are often seen as powerless. Like resistance, refusal alludes to disobedience, and is a kind of resistance. But there’s something more ambiguous or undecided about refusal. It’s a rejection, but one that hints at the possibility of something else or something incomplete. I would say it’s a more accurate word to describe contemporary struggles for the freedom of movement that can be said to make up a no borders politics.

These quotes are a good place to start in outlining what a no borders politics is (and could be). A number of different lines of scholarship have sought to theorize the struggle for the freedom of movement, in particular the autonomy of migration approach and those approaches that have engaged with and questioned the politics of representation. This chapter lays out the main elements of these theories. In doing this, I draw out what I see as the main dilemma for a no borders politics: how do we seek another way of being from the state while having to navigate our way ‘through’ it?

A no borders politics is a refusal of the border and the state

Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, authors of the quote that opened this chapter, propose that everyday practices that refuse the border are inherent to a no borders politics. I agree. A no borders politics is, first and foremost, a refusal of the border and, ultimately, this book is dedicated to exploring what that refusal does and can look like in practice. A refusal of the border is an uncompromising stance. ‘It doesn’t express a desire for “fairer” immigration laws and policies. To the extent that borders create, perpetuate and reinforce inequalities based on unequal access to movement (and settlement), it demands their total rejection’ (Anderson et al. 2012: 82).

Borders are technologies of the state, in that they operationalize a state’s ability to decide on who can enter and who cannot, who belongs and who does not (Schmitt 2005 [1922]: 1). Because of this intimate connection between borders and states, to refuse the border is also to refuse state sovereignty, in some sense. Indeed, I would argue that a refusal of the border is incompatible with the state, because to think of a world without borders is inherently to imagine a world without states. As Fernandez et al. suggest, ‘“No Borders”, as a demand on the state, would thus effectively be a demand that the nation-state give up its own condition of possibility’ (Fernandez et al. 2006: 473, emphasis in original). In that sense I think it’s necessary to extend Anderson et al.’s definition, and say that a no borders politics is a refusal of the border and the state.

Anderson et al.’s notion of a no borders politics as a refusal emphasizes rejection, but in practice I think it means more than this. Refusal of the border (and the state) is a negative assertion, but it’s also a positive assertion of the freedom of movement and settlement. A no borders politics is a rejection – No borders! – but it’s also an assertion – Freedom of movement! In that sense refusal is a kind of resistance that is both destructive and creative. What kind of resistance is that?

Theorizing refusal

Social movement studies Social movement studies has been the main field of scholarship to specialize in the issue of what resistance is, who does it and how, so would appear to be a good place to start. If we look within this field, resistance has generally been defined as a collective practice that engages in a power play or dialogue with the state (as I mentioned in the Introduction). Resistance as contestation challenges the status quo.

But struggles like the civil rights movement in the USA, or the struggle for LGBT (and now LGBTQI) rights, or the autonomous movements in Germany and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, did more than just contest the status quo. They also constructed a different future, based around the reappropriation of social relationships, symbolic systems and information (Melucci 1989; Offe 1985). They demonstrated another way of being to the system, to some degree. Yet this often gets sidelined in social movement studies in favour of describing the ‘what’ of resistance and producing a ‘theory of movements’ (Stierl 2012). Put another way, it has focused on social movement as a noun, rather than a verb. In doing this, that part of social movement that affects change within the political system as it is is overemphasized and that part that expresses how things could be is underemphasized. As a result, social movement studies remains weak in exploring movements that refuse established ways of being – the frameworks of identity, rights and self-determination – or that feature people who are largely excluded from politics, as people/travellers without papers invariably are (Flacks 2004; Stierl 2012). What is most powerful about practices that refuse the border is that they do something other than contest dominant power. As I have said already, a refusal of the border is also a refusal of the state. Refusal doesn’t express a desire to change those political structures that make up our existing dominant social reality so much as a desire to turn one’s back on them and create a different reality. As such, a definition of resistance that prioritizes contestation over creativity is not enough, and this field of scholarship has been criticized for being weak in exploring movements for liberation that go beyond this definition (Coleman and Tucker 2011; Flacks 2004; Stierl 2012). In writing this book I had doubts that social movement studies provided what felt like useful frameworks or lenses for grappling with a diverse movement that breaks many of the existing understandings of what resistance or social movement is. For that reason I largely leave social movement studies here.

Foucault and power/resistance For me, parts of the work of French post-structuralist thinker Michel Foucault offer a much more useful way of thinking about resistance. Despite scholars’ focus on power within his work, Foucault suggested that power could not be thought of separately from resistance. For him, power and resistance constituted each other (Foucault 1982: 223). Foucault saw power as multiple, diffuse and present in all social relations (Foucault 1998 [1978]), from a relationship between two people, up to institutionalized power structures like the state. In seeing power in this way, he rejected any sense that power could be held exclusively by any single force (such as the state). With this in mind, he said that ‘there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case’ (ibid.: 96, emphasis added).

Foucault posited that power could also not be thought of as a ‘thing’ in and of itself, but an effect that comes about when it’s enacted upon someone/something. In other words power exists as a relation between things or people (Foucault 1982). As a relation, Foucault saw power as neither inherently ‘positive’ and liberating nor ‘negative’ and dominating, but rather as a force capable of being either (ibid.). So, although all domination expresses an asymmetrical distribution of power, not all expressions of power are dominating (Hoy 2004).

Taking all this into consideration, what Foucault means by power is broader than domination. It is, in essence, simply the ability for structures, things or people to do. It is the assertion of will. In relation, people or structures or things come up against other forces. This relation acts as an e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for No Borders
• About the author
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1 | What is a no borders politics?
• 2 | No borders politics in practice: the no borders movement as a spectrum of action
• 3 | The struggle for mobility in Athens
• 4 | The struggle for mobility in Calais
• Conclusions: so what is a no borders politics?
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index