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This article empirically maps and compares types of knowledge produced about people on the move by the European border security apparatus. Exploring two complementary analytical moments, the article addresses the stabilization of power and contingent practices within such apparatuses. We argue, first, that analyzing classification schemas implemented in data systems used within the European apparatus can reveal assumptions and limitations about people on the move—what we call "scripts of alterity." Second, the comparative mapping of scripts of alterity reveals a de facto division of labor between scales of governance that would otherwise be invisible in policy. Utilizing the new Ontology Explorer software method as well as discursive analysis, we identify four scripts of alterity, which materialize relations in data systems and are thus relatively stabilized. Third, we identify as "de-inscriptions" forms of resistance specific to scripts of alterity. These can still be contested and we account for three contingent practices of de-inscription from scripts of alterity by conducting ethnographic observation of data systems' use. Finally, we summarize three contributions that the "scripts of alterity" concept makes to the science and technology studies and to the critical security studies literature on the securitization of cross-border mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nigeria is in a security quandary. The country's security debacles are impacting its socio-economic and political landscapes. Aside from the protracted Boko Haram terrorism, banditry and kidnapping have taken on momentary dimensions in the country. Many studies have attributed this menace to the porous and ill-manned status of Nigerian borders, which lend ambience to unwholesome intrusions and thus render the borders a national burden. This study unpacks the state of Nigeria's borders vis-à-vis the national security experiences of the country. It argues that, beyond the 'porosity' debates and narratives, the lingering cross-border challenges are the effects of patronage networks and internal crises that have engulfed domestic lives and state politics. It submits further that, notwithstanding the subjective colonial status and the uncoordinated management agenda of Nigeria's borders, they have inherent geo-strategic potentials and advantages capable of transforming national lives and enhancing state security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars acknowledge the importance of morality in joining and shaping social movements. There is less knowledge about the content of morality that keeps social movement participants committed, once in. Moral commitments, I argue, emerge from the work conducted within social movements. By looking at everyday activities in the immigrant rights movement in El Paso, Texas, I analyze how commitment is shaped through the caregiving practices of staff and volunteers within two organizations serving immigrants and asylum seekers on the border: Compromiso and Casa Asuncion. Despite the strenuous work involved, I find care givers in these two organizations make sense of their continued participation by drawing on what I call familial moralities. At Compromiso, a legal aid office, caregivers reflect on their or others' immigrant family histories, creating an intellectual attachment to the work through family. At Casa Asuncion, a migrant shelter, caregivers draw on new familial roles with migrants and the shelter staff, creating an emotional attachment as family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As policing and threats become increasingly transnational and plural, practices of managing risk increasingly use technologies that promise certainty. Drawing on a study of the creation of a new border detection device, and ideas from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that devices deployed as objective tools for risk assessment and management in the policing of borders, and the laboratories that develop them, are not simply linear applications of scientific knowledge to control risk but rather are crucial sites in which multiple and contending conceptions and practices of risk converge. Following the interactions of scientists, border guards, policing agents and the EU shows how an official discourse of risk, a scientific conception and experiential working knowledge of risk all 'danced' together in the development of a portable detection device. In the process experiential/contextual and professional knowledge of risk were often privileged over rationalistic and statistically based risk assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Moria hotspot in Greece as a logistical site which fulfills two different functions within the European migration and border regime. It locates, contains, and sorts individuals locally at the external borders of the EU and creates, inserts, and processes data for controlling people on the move. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece, including interviews with local administrators from the Registration and Identification Service, Médecins du Monde, Frontex and Hellenic Police and a collection of internal and publicly available planning, policy, and management documents and handbooks, the paper scrutinizes how both the movement of migrants and data is organized at the site. By developing an analytic lens of logistics, it outlines a specific mode of infrastructuring which aligns staff from different organizations with databases, devices, and migrants all in one place and organizes mundane practices such as filling out forms, taking fingerprints, signing, and entering datasets along a chain. That way the hotspot is able to locate, sort, and detain those who arrive at the hardened EU border and to create a data infrastructure for controlling, monitoring, and governing further movement by processing data through the bureaucratic channels of the EU's transnational control assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What functions do the securitization and the militarization of the border serve under 'authoritarian neoliberalism' in Australia? Having pursued the policy of mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants since 1992, the Australian government has also increasingly sought to outsource, privatize, and offshore the construction and operation of its immigration detention facilities, whilst simultaneously engaging in increasingly authoritarian interventions via the militarization of border control. This article seeks to problematize these developments by constructing an emergent cartography of the various links between the ongoing processes of neoliberal structural adjustment, and the intensification of the policing and punitive apparatuses of the Australian border-industrial complex. Accordingly, using theoretical insights gleaned from emergent work on 'authoritarian neoliberalism' and from race critical theory as a cue, I outline in this article three functions of the border within punitive approaches to immigration control under neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia: first, as an apparatus of ongoing colonial power; second, as a technology of racial differentiation through its functioning as a 'filter' that privileges certain migrant bodies over others, and as an 'insulator' against popular dissent; third, as a site of profit and accumulation for transnational capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Euro-commentary puts the lens on the European Union (EU) North-African city of Ceuta. In so doing, it introduces the notion of EU limboscapes. In the 1990s and early 2000s the iconic twin-metal fencing of Ceuta’s borders added powerful visual strength to the metaphorical Fortress Europe. Today, Ceuta is still (or even more) central when it comes to the conceptual understanding of the socio-spatial articulation of the EU project vis-à-vis migration management. In this respect, we suggest that the limboscape profile drawn by Ceuta’s spatial dynamics is now iconic in terms of current EU b/ordering practices. The notion of limboscape helps us conceptually grasp/map the expanding archipelago of migrant confinement spaces scattered within and beyond EU space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the borderland of Thailand with Myanmar and analyzes how Burmese women migrant workers are both victimized – Agamben’s homo sacer – by the exceptional space of the borderland, but also are able to actively utilize the opportunities afforded by the particular space of the border to juggle their responsibilities and life options. The article focuses on how women migrant workers arrange their healthcare, childcare and children’s education at the borderland of Mae Sot and in the centerland of Bangkok, and analyzes how they use the opportunities available at the border to manage these tasks. At the same time, the borderland leaves women with very weak protection against violence, cut off from their communities of origin, which offer both protection and control. Although borderlands can provide space for alternatives, this exceptional space compounded with a strict gender regime can pose serious restrictions on women’s agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While globalisation unleashes forces that the Indian State1 finds increasingly difficult to stop and contain, a variety of intermediate institutions has emerged in recent years ranging between a fully securitised State and a State integrated fully into the world economy. These obviously call new configurations of border and border economy into existence as much as contribute to the production of new and hitherto unknown political subjects. Border economy produces the community and not the other way round. Border trade is one of the many instrumentalities through which the flow of persons, goods and services is sought to be contained in order to help making the nation in the border. Ethnicity and ethnic identification serve as a technology for governing the unofficial trade and contributes to the production of ethnic subject. Besides, it is important to understand how a number of people eke out a living by taking advantage of differential pricing across the border. Thus, the labouring life of the subaltern has become an agent, and a moral community thus gets produced, bringing about, in the process, mutation in the dominant discourses of national security and functional integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]