Border abolitionism: Migrants’ containment and the genealogies of struggles and rescue

By Martina Tazzioli

Building on an abolitionist perspective, this book offers an essential critique of migration and border policies, unsettling the distinction between migrants and citizens. This is the only book that brings together carceral abolitionist debates and critical migration literature. It explores the multiplication of modes of migration confinement and detention in Europe, examining how these are justified in the name of migrants’ protection. It argues that the collective memory of past struggles has partly informed current solidarity movements in support of migrants. A grounded critique of migration policies involves challenging the idea that migrants’ rights go to the detriment of citizens. An abolitionist approach to borders entails situating the right to mobility as part of struggle for the commons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526160928

Book preview

Border abolitionism

RETHINKING BORDERS

Series Editors: Sarah Green and Hastings Donnan

Rethinking Borders focuses on what gives borders their qualities across time and space, as well as how such borders are experienced, built, managed, imagined and changed. This involves detailed and often richly ethnographic studies of all aspects of borders: finance and money, bureaucracy, trade, law, new technologies, materiality, infrastructure, gender and sexuality, even the philosophy of what counts as being ‘borderly,’ as well as the more familiar topics of migration, nationalism, politics, conflicts and security.

Previously published

Migrating borders and moving times: Temporality and the crossing of borders in Europe Edited by Hastings Donnan, Madeleine Hurd and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits

The political materialities of borders: New theoretical directions Edited by Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova

Border porosities: Movements of people, objects, and ideas in the southern Balkans Rozita Dimova

Intimacy and mobility in the era of hardening borders: Gender, reproduction, regulation Edited by Haldis Haukanes and Frances Pine

Border images, border narratives: The political aesthetics of boundaries and crossings Edited by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman

Medicalising borders: Selection, containment and quarantine since 1800 Edited by Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer and Paul Weindling

Borders of desire: Gender and sexuality at the Eastern borders of Europe Edited by Elissa Helms and Tuija Pulkkinen

Border abolitionism

Migrants’ containment and the

genealogies of struggles and rescue

Martina Tazzioli

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Martina Tazzioli 2023

The right of Martina Tazzioli to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6093 5 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Introduction

1The zero-sum rights game: border abolitionism as an analytical gaze

2‘Confine to protect’: hybrid spaces of migration containment

3Participatory confinement: extractive humanitarianism and asylum seekers’ unpaid labour

4Towards a genealogy of migrant struggles and border violence

5A history of mountain runaways and rescue: migrants at the Alpine border

Conclusion

References

Index

Introduction

Over the last two decades, the political geography of Europe and its frontiers has been shaken by escalating border violence exercised against women, men and children whose mobility and presence have been labelled by states as undesirable, unauthorised and undeserving. Those women, men and children have been viewed with suspicion not only by states but also by many European citizens who perceive their unapologetic presence as a threat to their own rights to welfare, education and jobs. The same space – Europe – has been simultaneously unsettled by visible as well as silent struggles over mobility and the right to stay. Some of these struggles are still vivid in citizens’ memories; some others have passed unnoticed but, nevertheless, have silently contributed to Europe’s social recomposition and have influenced other collective mobilisations – such as struggles for housing and against precarisation and labour exploitation. The legacies and genealogies of the racialised confinement of mobility and of the struggles against it and for a better life are long-standing; in fact, they have animated and repeatedly reshuffled the European space behind the official scenes of politics. Ultimately, the entangled genealogies of border violence and struggles over mobility are part of a subjugated and minor history yet to be laboriously reconstructed from scattered and partial traces.

It is not through binary opposition of inclusion/exclusion that a critique of bordering mechanisms can be forged. ‘We can enter this world, but we cannot live within it’, argues bell hooks (2000: 23) in her explanation of the meaning of being on the margin. This statement resonates with the experience of many of those who are governed as migrants – that is, the protracted or temporary condition of being physically inside the territory of a nation state, yet subordinated and exploited by it (De Genova, 2013a). Migrants are not expelled often, nor are they fully excluded – physically and legally. Yet their lives are choked, and their infrastructures and collective spaces of liveability are dismantled. In this way, even if they manage to cross national frontiers without being pushed back, migrants encounter multiple and often invisible racialising bordering mechanisms. Throughout this book, racialisation is conceived ‘not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of socio-political relations’ (Wehelye, 2014: 3). That is, racialisation is not fixed once and for all. On the one hand, it is sedimented and constantly reproduced over time, but on the other hand, degrees of racialisation and who is racialised more than others often change.

For instance, while in 2015 Syrian citizens were depicted in Europe as the prototypes of the ‘good refugees’ – versus ‘undeserving’ or ‘bogus’ asylum seekers – nowadays Syrians as well are targeted by laws and policies that aim at preventively illegalising them. When referring to racialised bordering mechanisms, I draw on E. Tendayi Achiume’s definition: ‘border regimes that variously allocate and curtail mobility and migration on a racial basis, largely relying upon facially race neutral mechanisms’ (2021: 333). Thus, it is key to situate border-making processes in the history of racial capitalism, understood as the ‘role of racism in enabling key moments of capitalism development’ (Bhattacharyya, 2018: ix). A focus on racialising bordering mechanisms is key in highlighting the entanglements and mutual reinforcements between institutional racism and migration governance. Putting carceral abolitionism and critical migration literature in conversation enables us to see such a structural nexus and, relatedly, to put at the forefront struggles which bring together anti-racist mobilisations and claims for freedom of movement. What does it mean to analyse and challenge multiple bordering mechanisms jointly, without (re)producing hierarchies of deservingness? How are claims for freedom of movement intertwined with struggles for social justice?

By asking these two questions, this book develops an abolitionist analytics to craft a critique of the bordering mechanisms which shape the making of migration (Tazzioli, 2019) – that is, the legal, administrative and political production of migrants’ illegality and the multiple degrees of labour subordination. Border abolitionism, as it is conceived here, starts from the twofold assumption that anti-racist and anti-capitalist mobilisations must challenge heterogeneous bordering mechanisms and that, in turn, claims for freedom of movement need to be articulated with struggles for social justice. Thus, as an analytical and political perspective, border abolitionism unsettles the binary opposition between migrants and citizens, foregrounding the instability of these categories, the degrees of migrantisation¹ and the transversal alliances of solidarity that have been built across different sites. An abolitionist approach to migration governmentality involves challenging what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the ‘problem of innocence’, which sustains the reformist critique of the prison system. Indeed, the politics of white innocence that Gilmore challenges ‘establishes as a hard fact that some people should be in cages … and it does so by distinguishing degrees of innocence such that there are people, inevitably, who will become permanently not innocent’; she argues that ‘only [by being] against this desirability or inevitability might some change occur’ (2017: 234).

A similar logic underpins some critiques of the immigration detention system. Indeed, the argument goes that unlike other detainees, migrants have committed no crime apart from their own presence and mobility and are, rather, the object of racialised punishment. That is, those who are labelled and governed as migrants are criminalised and detained for acts (moving or staying) that other people are not sanctioned for. On the one hand, it is certainly important to highlight the distinctive character of immigration detention – that is, the fact that the people detained are there not because their acts are deemed to be illegal by nation states but, rather, because of who they are. On the other hand, such an argument risks strengthening the politics of white innocence as it indirectly legitimises the incarceration of those who are ‘truly criminals’. Instead, a non-reformist critique of the immigration detention system and of migrant detainability should be framed in expansive terms as a critique of the prison as a solution to social insecurity (De Genova, 2017b; Esposito et al., 2019). Abolitionism as a political-analytical approach is not mobilised here as an abstract theory valid across space and time but, rather, as a critique of heterogeneous bordering mechanisms grounded in and stemming from the present European migration conjuncture.

Yet, paying attention to the present conjuncture does not mean flattening the analysis to the present. On the contrary, border abolitionism as a political-analytical perspective excavates the genealogies of struggle over mobility and the continuities and differences in the modes of racialised confinement. Tracing a genealogy of heterogeneous bordering mechanisms and, at the same time, a genealogy of the memory of struggles and rescue is in fact the task of a diagnosis oriented at what Foucault calls a ‘history of the present’. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault asks himself why he writes a history of the prison: ‘Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present’ (1977 [1975]: 31). The goal of a history of the present ‘is to let knowledge of the past work on the experience of the present’ (Foucault, 2008: 130). The function of political genealogies for destabilising the present is connected to the idea that ‘bottom-up history requires that we pay attention to the cranny in the wall’, which means ‘we must attend not to the completeness of the wall but to its chinks’ (Linebaugh, 2010: 25). Exploring ‘the collective memory and histories of struggles’, as radical feminist scholarship has stressed, does not mean just keeping memory of racialised violence and moments of insubordination; rather, it contributes ‘to shape the very possibilities of radical change in our present and near future’ (Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020: 2).

As I will develop in the book, border abolitionism, as I conceive it, is not a placeholder for a call to abolish borders. In fact, this is precisely because of the heterogeneity of bordering mechanisms which determine differential degrees of exploitation and subordination. Rather, an abolitionist approach starts from the assumption that the undoing of bordering mechanisms is not limited to acts of tearing down, but also requires building up and creating new institutions and ways of being in common that prevent the formation of social and economic inequalities and racialised punishment (Davis, 2016a). In this respect, Gilmore’s point that carceral abolitionism is not only about abolishing prisons is highly instructive: ‘abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons’ (2020b). Border abolitionism does not advocate for abolishing borders as such but, rather, for dismantling the material and political conditions under which the multiplication and persistence of borders appear as a condition for people’s safety and economic prosperity.

Similar to abolitionist critiques of the prison-industrial complex according to which the point is less to dismantle jails than ‘to render prisons obsolete’ (Davis, 2005: 92), an abolitionist approach to borders strives for rendering them obsolete for tackling social problems. Border abolitionism as an analytical-political lens for articulating a critical analysis of the border regime requires moving beyond a liberal understanding of the right to mobility. This means problematising the taken-for-granted nexus between freedom and mobility in light of organised displacement and modes of governing migrants by keeping them on the move. More concretely, a transformative politics grounded in struggles over spatial and mobility justice entails, this book argues, articulating this in non-individualistic and non-normative terms. That is, instead of exclusively justifying such claims in the name of everyone’s right to move freely, these can be envisioned as movements that have contributed to the production of a mobile common or processes of commoning. That is, migrant struggles for rights get enriched – and do not steal from – other struggles and mobilisations for social justice.

If abolitionism is about imagining and building up societies not centred on organised displacement and racialised punishment, it is essential to rethink collective practices through what, throughout the book, I refer to as a detractive logics of rights, according to which migrant struggles for rights would take away rights from citizens. This is not an abstract assumption but, on the contrary, a consideration which stems from a scrutiny of what has happened since the early 2000s, with the struggles against border violence and racialised labour exploitation being articulated through expansive claims which have opened new avenues for dissent, contestation and transformative politics also for citizens. Migrant struggles have never been made by migrants only, nor have they been only a matter of migrants. Rather, historically, they have often been intertwined with or part of broader claims and transversal coalitions about housing, labour exploitation, racism and public health. In turn, migrants have inaugurated new practices of struggle and have often articulated political claims in ways that disrupt and exceed the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995).

Indeed, even if many migrant struggles – both as collective mobilisations and as silent individual struggles – are framed in terms of rights claims or concern about rights, they are more expansive than that. What is at stake are world-making practices that unsettle bordering mechanisms and contribute, in articulation with other struggles, to the generation of new political subjectivities. Likewise, the heterogeneous bordering processes that this book is interested in are not a matter solely of migrants; rather, an abolitionist lens enables us to see the recursive production of degrees of non-citizenship and the partial migrantisation of some citizens. The confinement continuum – that is, the ‘continuum of unfreedoms’ (Cassidy, 2019: 48) which chokes migrants’ time beyond their mobility and destructures their life projects – needs to be tackled by carefully studying the entanglements between humanitarian, security and hygienic-sanitary logics. Advancing border abolitionism as an analytical lens requires a dialogue between critical migration scholarship and carceral and Black abolitionism. In fact, it might appear surprising that these two critical streams of work and, at once, political perspectives have only marginally been put in conversation with each other, with notable exceptions (Aiken and Silverman, 2021; Mezzadra, 2020; Paik, 2017, 2020; Walia, 2021). As I retrace in Chapter 1, this partial missed encounter between critical migration scholars and carceral abolitionism appears less surprising if we consider the different political trajectories as well as the slightly different conceptual standpoints.

It is not by chance that in migration literature the reflections of carceral abolitionists have been used mainly by scholars who work on detention, and more precisely on the immigration detention system in the United States (Loyd, 2019; Loyd et al., 2012). However, I do not propose to articulate critical migration scholarship and carceral and Black abolitionism just to bridge a gap in the literature. Rather, if put in dialogue with each other, these two critical approaches equip us with appropriate analytical tools for excavating and challenging heterogeneous racialising bordering mechanisms and the ethical-political justifications that guarantee their reproduction. Relatedly, an abolitionist view on bordering mechanisms moves beyond a debate that pivots around the (il)legitimacy of borders and the extent to which border closure and border violence are acceptable. Both Black and feminist carceral abolitionism works push us to mobilise the deconstructive and critical attitude (against borders) alongside a transformative theoretical-political approach apt at envisioning alternative institutions and ways of being in common.

Articulating these two scholarships and, at once, political perspectives is not a straightforward operation that simply requires bringing abolitionist scholarship into debates on migration. On the contrary, it entails rethinking and rearticulating some conceptual assumptions from both streams of work. On the one hand, abolitionist literature invites us to situate critical analyses on migration governmentality within an intersectional framework that addresses how diverse articulations of gender, race and class shape differential degrees of subordination and exclusion. On the other hand, critical migration debates contribute to abolitionist approaches by putting the figure of the migrant at the core of analyses about detention. In fact, even if many carceral abolitionists speak about the racialised punishment that affects non-citizens, this is rarely taken as the standpoint from which to interrogate carceral mechanisms. The book develops border abolitionism as an analytical-political approach along two main lines, which, I argue, constitute two key aspects of an abolitionist approach: a critical analysis of the economy of confinement and a genealogy of struggles and collective mobilisations.

The book is based around two analytic threads, the first of which concerns an investigation of the confinement continuum, by which I mean interlocking modes and sites of containment not limited to spaces of detention. The confinement continuum includes hybrid logics of confine to protect – in which humanitarian control, hygienic reasons and security measures coalesce – as well as heterogeneous spaces which are used or repurposed for confining migrants and keeping them out of sight (such as vessels, hotspots, accommodation centres and ex-barracks). In doing so, it contends that an abolitionist lens involves excavating invisibilised forms of violence and interlocking modes of illegalisation and racialisation. The second thread that the book centres around is the idea that an abolitionist approach to borders involves tracing the genealogy of migrant struggles and transversal alliances of solidarity, exploring how their sedimented memory has been an important legacy and engine of present mobilisations, informing in part these latter. These two analytical angles around which the book is structured do not follow one from the other. Rather, they are mutually constitutive of an abolitionist approach, as they equip us with the conceptual and political tools for articulating a critique of the border regime which is grounded in the materiality (and genealogy) of struggles for movement.

More precisely, I show how transversal alliances of solidarity and the temporary infrastructures of migration are manifestations of the world-making practices and the building up that carceral abolitionist scholarships put at the core of the analysis. Indeed, as I show later, collective struggles for movement and transversal alliances of solidarity contribute to processes of commoning that disrupt an individualistic understanding of rights. One of the challenges of the book consists in rethinking and mobilising the abolitionist framework with respect to the European context. Indeed, we should be careful not to dehistoricise and decontextualise theories that stem from and are grounded in a specific legacy of struggles. However, as explained in Chapter 1, I do not transpose Black abolitionism into the contemporary European migration context. Rather, first, I draw on it to raise questions and mobilise analytical angles which allow for the articulation of a critique of the border regime not limited to the exposure of the sheer violence enforced by states along national frontiers. Second, the racialised forms of confinement and exploitation that are at play nowadays have a long-standing genealogy which traces back to the multiplication of degrees and forms of labour subordination that followed the abolition of chattel slavery (McKeown, 2008; Mongia, 2018).

A radical critique of borders cannot stop at the act of bringing evidence of state violations, nor can it be limited to claims for abolishing borders. Rather, it entails forging political analytics oriented towards world-making practices grounded in processes of commoning. Abolitionism as an analytical perspective does much more than undoing and dismantling; it is driven by a political imagination apt at sustaining collective political subjectivities that struggle against states’ organised displacement and principles of possessiveness. Far from being a subfield of research or a topic for specialists, migration is a key political terrain for envisioning transversal alliances and ways of being in common. This requires a radical challenge to both visible and invisible racialising bordering mechanisms that reproduce degrees of labour exploitation and non-citizenship. In fact, migration represents a contested ground for building up new internationalisms, precisely because a critical view on migration governance entails dismantling the condition for the reproduction of racialised bordering mechanisms.

An abolitionist standpoint on migration coalesces around striving for envisioning transformative politics in the frame of internationalisms from below, informed by the idea that ‘the refugee movement is the movement of the 21st century’ (Davis, 2015). Arguing this does not mean romanticising migrant struggles for movement and stay, nor praising their claims as successful, given that migrant mobilisations are often defeated or violently evicted. It is important not to judge collective mobilisations of migrants in terms of success or failure; rather, it is worth paying attention to how they constantly redefine what it means to struggle for freedom and to the political vocabulary and practices of emancipation they generate and circulate, both across space and over time. As this book highlights in chapters 4 and 5, an abolitionist approach situates current migrant solidarity movements within a historical perspective by investigating how the memory of past mobilisations have partially informed the present ones.

However, a focus on migration pushes us to revisit the very notion of solidarity from the standpoint of the temporary transversal alliances often built between migrants and citizens, showing how these solidarity practices partially unsettle those binary divisions. What might appear as mobilisations in support of migrants reveals something more, since political solidarity involves a community of interests and values to be fought for (Mohanty, 2003). The unauthorised movements and presence of migrants, even if it is not a deliberate but, rather, a de facto challenge of borders, is backed up by people who mobilise for ‘mobility justice’ (Sheller, 2018). Relatedly, an insight into migration foregrounds the feminist abolitionist view on differences according to which political solidarity should productively draw upon differences, not focus on overcoming them. Entangling abolitionism with history from below from the standpoint of a ‘global history of runaways’ (Rediker et al., 2019) and with radical feminist literature, the book draws attention to how some individuals are turned into migrants and, simultaneously, to the degrees of criminalisation of people’s presence and mobility that often exceed the status of foreigners.

Outline of chapters

Chapter 1 explains what I mean by border abolitionism and discusses the theoretical, conceptual and political implications of mobilising abolitionism as a method and way of framing a critical analysis of the border regime. It proposes bridging critical migration literature with scholarship on abolitionism, with the twofold goal of foregrounding the confinement continuum – which multiplies degrees of non-citizenship – and retracing the sedimented memory of struggles and solidarity practices. It contends that an abolitionist view on the border regime requires moving beyond an individualistic understanding of the right to mobility, to instead conceive of the latter as part of processes of commoning. For this reason, the chapter suggests, normative-liberal theories about the legitimacy or opportunities of keeping borders leave intact the socio-economic conditions upon which modes of racialised labour subordination and mobility containment are replicated.

Border abolitionism relies on an understanding of borders as socio-political relations, not as things. Thus, more than focusing on borders per se, it is key to frame border abolitionism as an analytical gaze which focuses on the border regime, conceived as the heterogeneous political technologies, laws and administrative measures through which differential labour subordination and unfreedom of movement for some are enacted.

Chapter 2 deals with the multiple techniques and infrastructures of containment that migrants are subject to across Europe. It starts by focusing on containment of migrants at and through the sea and its imperial legacies. It then sheds light on the current carceral geographies of migration containment in the Mediterranean, stressing how containment is enforced not only by blocking migrants but also by forcing them to move away or by pushing them back. The second part of the chapter investigates how migration confinement is at times justified in the name of migrants’ own protection and is enacted through infrastructures that are often designated for other purposes (ferries, barracks, hotels, shelters). The chapter problematises and elaborates further the notions of ‘confinement’, ‘containment’ and ‘detention’, considering these blurred and ambivalent political technologies of migration control and segregation. It argues that to undermine the very rationale which underpins the confinement of migrants, it is essential to challenge detention as such, without reproducing hierarchies between deserving refugees and threatening migrants. The chapter builds on research fieldwork that I conducted across different sites in Europe: in Italy, France and the United Kingdom.

Chapter 3 analyses the unpaid labour of migrants and refugees that stems from knowledge extraction activities, with a specific focus on Greece. Soon after they land in Europe, migrants and refugees start to be constantly interpellated and asked to give feedback about their experience with digital technologies in the camps, or to provide information about the logistics of crossing and migratory