Sealing Borders ? Rethinking Border Studies in Hard Times

This working paper is based on a keynote lecture Sandor Mezzadra held on November 5th, 2018 at the international conference “B/ORDERS IN MOTION. Current Challenges and Future Perspectives” at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). The paper begins with a reminder of the influential work of Helmut Dietrich who did research on the Polish-German border in the 1990s, that was influences by the “wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of really existing socialism” (p. 1). Mezzadra describes how after the end of the Cold War, when borders seemed just like “lines drawn on a map”(ibid.) or “frozen and congealed” (p. 2),  border relations suddenly started to change and gave rise to multiple border expressions and borders in motion that became subjects of European border studies.

However, he points to the fact that while European borders seemed to open up internally e.g. through the Maastrich Treaty in 1992, other borders like the US/Mexican border or borders in the former colonial world were still characterized by violent encounters (ibid.)

Following this introduction, Mezzadra goes on to recapitalize his own academic beginnings with border studies that was influenced by European discourses about the external frontiers, by Italy’s transition from a country of emigration to a country of immigration and by first encounters with Moroccan and Senegalese Migrants in Genoa (ibid.). Through this engagement, and theoretically inspired by the work of border scholars Étienne Balibar and Pablo Vila, Mezzadra became interested in the practices of border crossing and border reinforcement, that he perceives as a “conceptual dyad [that] is precisely the tension between the two poles, which leads us to consider the border as always in motion” (p. 3).

Referring to his common work with Brett Neilson and their most recent publications (Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor, 2013; The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, 2019), he summarizes his own interest and perspective on borders that especially focusses on the connections between migrant movements and globalized capitalism and the analysis of “differential and hierarchical inclusion” produced by borders (p. 3-4).

Mezzadra states further that the proliferation and externalization of borders are currently highly debated topics in politics that must be seen in relations to rising nationalism and authoritarian neoliberalism (p. 5) that mark the “hard times” we find ourselves in (p. 6). He urges border scholars to “take sides” in these times and to intervene in the face of border violence and injustice (ibid.) In the following, he describes the border situation in the Mediterranean Sea and Italy’s effort to seal off the liquid border for migrants. He gives an example of his own engagement and activism that involved the purchase of a rescue ship to save migrants from drowning (ibid.). He finishes off the paper, with a short introduction to the logistical turn – the study of global logistics, supply chains and globalized trade across borders that creates borders that function according to Deborah Cowen like seams (p. 7).