Liquid Borders

Migration as Resistance

Mabel Moraña

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367696924
• eBook ISBN: 9781000361445
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Liquid Borders provides a timely and critical analysis of the large-scale migration of people across borders, which has sent shockwaves through the global world order in recent years.

In this book, internationally recognized scholars and activists from a variety of fields analyze key issues related to diasporic movements, displacements, exiles, "illegal" migrants, border crossings, deportations, maritime ventures, and the militarization of borders from political, economic, and cultural perspectives. Ambitious in scope, with cases stretching from the Mediterranean to Australia, the US/Mexico border, Venezuela, and deterritorialized sectors in Colombia and Central America, the various contributions are unified around the notion of freedom of movement, and the recognition of the need to think differently about ideas of citizenship and sovereignty around the world.

Liquid Borders will be of interest to policy makers, and to researchers across the humanities, sociology, area studies, politics, international relations, geography, and of course migration and border studies.

Part I

Migration, (trans)borders, and the freedom of movement

1 Proliferating borders in the battlefield of migration

Rethinking freedom of movement

Sandro Mezzadra

Borders and migration have been for a long time at the center of my research and political agenda. And although the original focus of my work in the early 1990s was Italy, with its peculiar migratory history, I have been relatively quick to expand the scope of my research, in particular through my participation in research and activist networks first in Europe and then in other parts of the world, including North Africa, the United States, Australia, and India. How to make sense of the global dimension of migration, how to let it conceptually and empirically resonate even in the most grounded and local investigations, has been and continues to be a crucial question driving my own work. Latin America has been particularly important for me in this respect, and I am happy to say that a collective book I co-edited with two Mexican friends – Blanca Cordero and Amarela Varela – has just come out in Spanish. In that book, América Latina en movimiento. Migraciones, límites a la movilidad y sus debordamientos (2019), we attempt to take migration as a lens to grasp wider processes that are reshaping Latin America as a whole, focusing in particular on the tensions surrounding its borders and on the proliferation of a set of heterogeneous boundaries within national and metropolitan spaces. This is a project quite close to the concept of this book.

Our purpose here is to discuss “liquid borders,” with a specific focus on the issue of migration. And we are invited by Mabel Moraña to do something more than that, which means “to face our ghosts, name our fears and define, once for all, the world we want.” A quite ambitious program, indeed! And I must say that I like it. But let me start by saying that “liquid borders” is an image with multiple and ambivalent meanings. It definitely points to the mobility and heterogeneity of borders, which has been underscored and investigated in many ways within the field of border studies over the last decades. Far from being encapsulated by the solidity of a wall, which is only one possible instantiation of the border, borders are indeed quite elusive formations. Their multiple components, legal and geographical, political and cultural, linguistic and otherwise, are not necessarily bound together by a “line traced in the sand” (see, for instance, Mezzadra and Neilson). The cartographic representation of geopolitical borders as limits of a specific and discrete “national” territory, marked by a particular color on the world map, has been shattered and challenged by the increasing awareness of the relevance of processes and flows that traverse those limits without necessarily acknowledging their relevance and even legitimacy (see Cowen). Border control, in the United States no less than in the European Union, externalizes the operations of borders, involving neighboring as well as more distant countries and projecting the shadow of the border far away from the territorial limit they are supposed to embody (see for instance De Genova, Mezzadra, and Pickles, 73–77). A wide array of limits and boundaries crisscross national and metropolitan spaces, harnessing and channeling in a selective way the mobility of specific subjects through a variable economy of visibility and invisibility (see Balibar, “Uprisings”). Even more importantly, borders are constitutively contested institutions and fields of struggle; the challenge posited to them by people on the move makes their “solidity” nothing more than a claim (Mezzadra and Neilson).

This is of course not to say that such “solidity” has no real manifestations, be it in the walls that proliferate in the world 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the barbed wire, in the fences, or even in the more sophisticated digital technologies of control that curb, stop, or even destroy the bodily movement of migrants in many parts of the world. We need to carefully map such manifestations, and we need above all to take action against them – with any means necessary. Nevertheless, as Brett Neilson and I write in Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013), from a theoretical point of view, we cannot reduce the border to a wall; we need a more sophisticated framework to make sense of the complex interplay of inclusion and exclusion, of the high selectivity and flexibility that characterize the operations even of the seemingly most “solid” borders. Also, a unilateral focus on traditionally geopolitical borders can be misleading today, if we are to take seriously what Étienne Balibar (“We, the People”, 109) wrote 20 years ago speaking of the fact that borders – far from simply existing “at the edge of territory, marking the point where it ends” – “have been transported into the middle of political space.” This is again a movement that we have to follow, tracking the multiple metamorphoses of the border within the space it should simply circumscribe. The violence that is constitutive of the very concept of the border takes multifarious shapes in that process, as well as the challenges it continuously encounters.

“Liquid borders” is therefore an image I feel at ease with, since it conjures up notions such as the mobility, flexibility, heterogeneity, and even elusiveness of borders. As I just said, these are for me important notions for the critical study of borders. But “liquid borders” also reminds me of the title of a video installation by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani (“Liquid Traces”) on the case of the so-called left-to-die boat that they investigated in the framework of the project “Forensic Oceanography” (Heller and Pezzani). A migrant boat sailed from Libya in March 2011 and drifted for 14 days in distress, notwithstanding the presence of NATO military vessels engaged in the strike against Gaddafi, which noticed the boat but did not intervene. Sixty-three migrants died aboard. From this point of view, “liquid borders” immediately refers to the operations of borders at sea, to maritime borders. Coming from Italy and being engaged both as a scholar and as an activist in several projects to support migrants in their travels across the Mediterranean, I am of course acutely aware of the relevance of such a topic. There is a need to stress that, historically, borders are directly connected with the land. The ways in which the sea has been partitioned, legally and politically organized through the establishment of heterogeneous zones, overlapping jurisdictions, and corridors, are a crucially important chapter in the history of European empires. Historian Lauren Benton provides a fascinating account of that chapter in her A Search for Sovereignty (2010), while a recent special issue of the journal Global Networks (2019), edited by David Featherstone, further advances our understanding of the intertwining of maritime networks, oceanic spaces, and transnational class formation. As Heller and Pezzani, along with many others, contend, the liquid space of the sea has been in recent years a crucial field of experimentation with border control, with momentous implications also on land. The complex maritime spatiality composed of territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, search and rescue (SAR) zones, and high sea, as well as the interlacing of heterogeneous legal orders in the maritime space, has been acted upon and manipulated by national and supranational actors of migration control (see Heller, Pezzani, and Stierl). While the Mediterranean is an obvious instance in this regard, one thinks here also of the “Pacific solution” in Australia (see Rajaram). In both cases, legal and political arrangements that target migrants at sea imply shifts in territoriality (apparent in the case of Australia, with the excision of remote territories from the country’s migration zone) and profound transformations in the migration regime. This is a point that should figure prominently in our research agenda on borders and migration.

Mentioning the Mediterranean allows me to come more directly to the main question I want to address in this talk. Our conference takes place in hard times, and this is a circumstance that implies specific responsibilities we cannot escape. In Europe, after the summer of 2015 (the “long summer of migration,” as critical scholars and activists call it), we have been experiencing a hardening of borders and a renationalization of politics across the continent. Even Schengen borders (which means borders within the European zone of “free and unrestricted movement of people”) have been selectively closed from time to time. Border fences and walls proliferate across the so-called Balkan route, where hundreds of thousands of migrants had opened up a way toward freedom in 2015, challenging the European border regime. Viktor Orbán, the hyper-nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister and fetishist worshiper of walls and barbed wire against migrants, is not anymore isolated in Europe. Matteo Salvini, the Deputy Prime Minister in Italy until last August, has, for instance, followed his lead. One of the main slogans of the Brexit campaign, “Take back control of our borders,” is translated onto aggressive campaigns of the far right against migration in several countries, ranging from Spain to France, from Germany to Italy. Images of migrants tortured and detained in camps in Libya as well as of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean rarely spark public outrage and indignation. But such images tell us a lot about the predicament of migration in the current conjuncture, while humanitarian NGOs that operate at sea are criminalized and ports are often closed to ships that perform rescues of people in distress.

Is it simply a European conjuncture? I would definitely not say that. You are all familiar with the situation in the United States, with ICE raids and efforts to further fortify the Southern border, with family separation, attacks on asylum, and bombastic rhetoric against migrants. But even beyond Europe and the United States, we are confronted today with a tendency toward the hardening of borders and the spread of racism and hostility against migrants. Think of South Africa, where racist attacks on migrants multiply and become ever more violent across the country. Think of the dramatic change of attitude toward migrants and refugees in Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro. Think of India, of the wild campaign against Muslim migrants from Bangladesh (dubbed “termites” by Amit Shah, the President of the ruling BJP), a campaign that is particularly virulent in such states as West Bengal and Assam (where the publication of the final version of the National Register of Citizens has recently stripped about 1.9 million people of their citizenship). Unfortunately, the list could easily go on. Is there a connection between such different instances of hardening of borders and criminalization of migration? I think that this is indeed the case, that they are all part – each one with its peculiarity – of the global political conjuncture we are living through. To put it shortly, this is a conjuncture characterized by a surge of nationalism in many parts of the world (including such important powers as Russia and China), and by the emergence of various degrees of combination between nationalism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. Migrants are among the first targets to be attacked in such a conjuncture, which implies the emergence of new formations of racism and sexism (and not by accident, women who refuse to abide by the patriarchal order are also immediately under attack). But precisely for this reason, migration provides us with an effective lens to investigate the weakness and instability of the current global political conjuncture. And it can also contribute in a powerful way to the establishment of political coalitions capable of subverting it. Speaking of migration today necessarily implies speaking of the more general political conjuncture we are living through in the contemporary world.

Such political conjuncture is anyway far from stable, and there is a need to carefully investigate the heterogeneous tensions crisscrossing it. One could say for instance that the surge of nationalism we are currently witnessing does not fit in a smooth way the kind of production of space that is connected with contemporary operations of capital. Borrowing the terms employed by world system theory (see Arrighi), we could even say that we are confronted today with profound contradictions between “territorialism” and “capitalism.” The development of Trump’s “trade wars” with China may be an effective instance of that. Needless to say, the relation between territorialism and capitalism has never been smooth, but today’s capital deploys an unprecedented ability to produce its own spaces in a global perspective. Critical scholars of logistics, like Deborah Cowen and Keller Easterling, have recently emphasized this point, stressing the relevance of the web of supply chains, shipping routes, logistical hubs, infrastructural projects, cables, and data centers that build the skeleton of contemporary global capitalism. Although we know that capitalism is capable of mutating and adapting to completely different political “environments,” there are definitely powerful tensions and contradictions between the logistical operative logic of contemporary capital at the global level and the current surge of nationalism.

This is something that has important implications also for the field of migration. Over the last couple of decades, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Migration, (trans)borders, and the freedom of movement
• PART II Labor, politics, and the question of limits
• PART III Gender, art, memory, and the migrant
• PART IV Colonial crossings/indigenous displacements
• PART V Translocalities in Latin America
• PART VI Global migration/Mediterranean crossings
• Index