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Map of refusal showing the location of major pushback zones along the Croatian-Bosnian border (BVMN 2019).
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Borders are sites of epistemic struggle. Focusing on the illegal tactic of the “pushback,” which is routinely deployed by state authorities to forcefully expel asylum seekers from European Union territory without due process, this article explores the uneven politics of knowledge that helps to support or unsettle this clandestine border violence. D...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... BVMN maps refuse the hegemonic depiction of migration, and instead of using arrows to denote movement, they show data points that can be expanded, linking them to the full archived violence report for each location (see Figure 3). They also produce maps that subvert the nature of standard border maps entirely, by focusing on the "major push-back zones" themselves (see Figure 4). ...
Citations
... Amelung, Scheel, and van Reekum 2024). For if it is true that borders as well as the deliberation of migration policies are 'sites of epistemic struggles' (Davies, Isakjee, and Obradovic-Wochnik 2023), then the analysis of this article shows that these struggles also have to be thought of as agnotological struggles. ...
Since the 2015 ‘migration crisis’, various measures have been
introduced in Europe to enforce deportations. They include
detention in prison-like facilities, unannounced executions of
deportations at night-time and the scraping of legal safeguards
like medical reasons prohibiting deportations. These evidently
violent measures are justified with alarmist reports which suggest,
supported by statistical knowledge, an ever-widening
‘deportation gap’. The term refers to the divergence between
the number of migrants issued with a return order and the
much smaller number of deportations. Illustrated through the
case of Germany, this article combines insights from ignorance
studies with a sociology of translation to show that the claim of
a widening deportation gap is a statistical chimera that is based
on various kinds and sources of nonknowledge. Contrary to
actor-based approaches in ignorance studies, it is argued that
this nonknowledge is not reducible to the production of ‘strategic
ignorance’ (McGoey 2019) by policy actors seeking to
advance their agenda. Rather, the production and circulation
of nonknowledge appears to be dispersed and messy as it is
facilitated by complex and fragile sociotechnical networks. In
this way, a sociology of translation allows scholars to avoid the
impression of entertaining a conspirational logic in the study of
strategic ignorance and other forms of nonknowledge.
... Since then, Croatia has been harshly criticized by NGOs, International Organisations and scholars for the numerous violent pushbacks that have been recorded along the Bosnian border. Croatian authorities are criticized not only for violating the right to ask for asylum, as they refuse to collect asylum requests, but also for the verbal and physical violence used against asylum seekers crossing the borders 1 (Davies et al., 2022;Human Rights Watch, 2018). This practice, moreover, highlights how the humanitarian approach adopted at the beginning of the Balkan Route was backed by the fact that Croatia was only seen as a transit country. ...
Since the mass migration dynamics along the so-called Balkan Route in the years 2010s, the Adriatic-Ionian region has acquired new political relevance. In fact, the perceived migration and security challenges have led to a close cooperation with the EU in the management of migration. Beyond humanitarian and security matters, the arrival of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants has triggered crucial questions in relation to the opportunities for their reception and integration. Against this backdrop, this chapter investigates how the governmental response to migration evolved in the Adriatic-Ionian area and what are the main trends, points of convergence and gaps between countries. Here, the objective is also to foresee possible future evolutions in light of the experiences of the neighbouring countries and in consideration of possible future reinforced cooperations. The study grounds on the findings collected within the Interreg-Adrion project REInSER though literature review, document analysis and interviews to key stakeholders, and it is supported with further desk research aimed at highlighting the latest legislative evolutions in the region.
... Testimonials of violent pushbacks from EU countries back into Serbia and other border countries are regularly reported by the self-organised Border Violence Monitoring Network (2023) and evidenced in academic studies (e.g. documenting police violence, damaging mobile phones or tents, stealing money (Augustová and Sapoch, 2020;Davies et al., 2023)). Deterrence mechanisms at territorial borders result in migrants taking longer, more hazardous journeys to enter Western Europe, often necessitating smugglers and further risks (Crawley et al., 2016;Medzini and Ari, 2018). ...
Serbia is a well-established transit country for Afghans travelling overland to seek protection in Western Europe, and Afghan women continue to experience pregnancy and birth during migration. This qualitative study aimed to explore the perspectives and experiences and of clinical and non-clinical perinatal care and support providers to Afghan women during migration through Serbia, using a critical border studies lens. Semi-structured interviews with 21 Serbia-based providers (conducted August 2021-October 2022 and analysed thematically) provided five inductive themes: (1) contours of life in Serbia for Afghan women; (2) providing maternity care and support to a highly mobile group; (3) enablers and barriers to accessing and using maternity care; (4) risks of onward migration; and (5) supporting women in a landscape of constant change. We identified ways in which regional geopolitics translated to bordering practices that interfered with maternity support provision to Afghan women in Serbia. We argue that non-exclusionary systems of care are needed to ensure women on the move receive adequate maternity support.
... In addition to this, funding frameworks often operate within set parameters, limiting the questions that can be asked and the material that can be engaged with. Explore how this might privilege certain ways of knowing and being and create a form of 'epistemic bordering' (Davies et al. 2023), and how it might affect access to funding for people and ideas operating outside these parameters. ...
Recent scholarship on the need to decolonize refugee research, and migration research more generally, points to the urgency of challenging ongoing colonial power structures inherent in such research. Increased involvement of scholars with lived experience is one way to challenge and remake unequal and colonial power relations. Through discussions with researchers of forced migration, we aimed to explore the challenges, barriers, and supports related to involvement in such research, and to identify how research practices and structures could be improved to increase and facilitate the involvement of scholars with refugee backgrounds. In this field reflection, we highlight key points and suggestions for better research practice that emerged from these discussions. In doing so, we are endeavouring to contribute to the important ongoing conversation about ethics and decolonizing research. We build on existing ethical guidelines by opening up some of the complexities of ethical practice and offering concrete actions that can be taken to work through these.
... Operating within a field of humanitarian witnessing dominated, in terms of reach and visibility, by international NGOs like Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), grassroots volunteers have developed a diverse repertoire of witnessing to violent state bordering practices (Davies et al., 2023). While we acknowledge the importance of migrant-led witnessing, our focus is limited to testimonies that are authored, both individually and collectively, by volunteers in response to daily confrontations with the intimately embodied violence of Europe's border and asylum regimes (Tyerman, 2021). ...
... Yet, through their interventions in the public sphere as witnesses, volunteers can challenge received scripts that states must detain, expel, and ultimately dehumanize border-crossers (Stierl, 2018). Writing on the Bosnia-Croatia border, for example, Davies et al. (2023) detail how networks of grassroots activists create a "counternarrative of refusal" by collecting testimonies from migrants and recording instances of state violence in digital archives. It is precisely because such practices of witnessing threaten the legitimacy of borders, that both migrants and volunteers are heavily censored for speaking out against the violence that people on the move experience, whether during 'pushbacks' or their incarceration in camps (Stavinoha, 2019). ...
... Thinking with Mountz (2020), we argue that these practicesdespite their inevitable contradictionsform part of a transnational struggle against the "continual processes of forgetting and erasure" that make "the violence enacted on the body" (13) of illegalized migrants possible. The words, descriptions, and accounts that make up the testimonial discourse of intimate witnessing have the power to destabilize hegemonic truths: a source of "epistemic friction" (Davies et al., 2023) against the masking of state violence against people on the move. Whether volunteers can engage in denunciatory acts of témoignage is largely dependent on the extent of criminalization of solidarity initiatives, modes of securitization in particular migrant spaces, as well as their degree of entanglement with the state-sanctioned "humanitarian industrial complex" (Dadusc and Mudu, 2022)this also includes dealing with threats to migrants from far-right vigilante groups. ...
In this paper, we center the witnessing repertoires of grassroots volunteers and explore the ways in which they bear witness to and condemn the border violence experienced by illegalized migrants across Europe. Drawing on long-term research of volunteer solidarity structures across Greece and in Paris, our analysis of witnessing uses the ‘intimate’ as a conceptual framing across three intersections of analysis. First, we locate the ‘intimate’ in volunteers’ embodied presence in migrant spaces, where important relations of care between volunteers and migrants emerge based on physical and emotional proximity. Second, we unpack how intimate mourning over migrant incarceration and death are publicly evoked, in the affective and emotive authorship of events to which volunteers bear witness. Finally, we reflect on the multiple political potentialities of intimate witnessing, not only as an alternative to traditional modalities of humanitarian witnessing, but as a radical confrontation against racialized logics that underpin Europe’s bordering apparatus. Bringing together literature on feminist geopolitics, humanitarian witnessing, and volunteer-refugee solidarities, we argue that the distinct repertoires of ‘intimate witnessing’ are paramount to solidarity, whereby volunteers render visible the mundane violence and indignities illegalized migrants face across Europe.
... Kada je u proljeće 2022. godine, sedam godina nakon "dugog migracijskog ljeta" (Hameršak 2022) i nakon pet godina sustavne politike zaustavljanja i nasilnoga protjerivanja izbjeglica na hrvatskim granicama (v. Davies et. al 2023;Hameršak i Mucko 2023 u tisku) prostorom Republike Hrvatske počeo prolaziti značajno veći broj ljudi u pokretu, odgovor lokalnih stanovnika i civilnih inicijativa bio je neusporedivo manji nego tijekom uspostavljanja i funkcioniranja izbjegličkoga koridora 2015./2016. godine. Državne vlasti 2022. godine nisu pokrenule organizirani humani ...
Praksama i politikama humanitarne skrbi u okviru aktualnog režima migracija u Hrvatskoj, ali i u širem kontekstu europske (semi)periferije, ovaj rad pristupa kroz analitičku prizmu koncepta temporalnosti. Pritom se fokusira na individualnu i iskustvenu razinu humanitarnoga rada, ali i na šire shvaćen proces humanitarizacije skrbi i s njim povezane transformacije uloge i položaja humanitarnih organizacija. Uzimajući u obzir autoričino višegodišnje iskustvo istraživanja humanitarnoga rada i nevladinih organizacija angažiranih na pružanju pomoći izbjeglicama / tražiteljima azila / osobama u pokretu, članak pokazuje različite načine na koje temporalni aspekti humanitarnoga angažmana zrcale politike upravljanja migracijama. Izdvajajući tri primjera iz provedenog etnografskog istraživanja, rad propituje kako temporalno analitičko usmjerenje doprinosi tumačenju uloge humanitarizma u režimima migracija. Prvi primjer tiče se organizacijske održivosti humanitarnih inicijativa, drugi primjer adresira zatiranje trajne kategorije skrbnoga rada u humanitarnom sektoru, a treći primjer analizira humanitarnu stanicu kod Paromlina kao dio temporalnoga upravljanja migracijskim kretanjima.
... Sharing some hot tea on a windy winter day can indeed become an opportunity to collect evidence on push-backs and other violations. Part of this information is disseminated and systematised through networks of associations and NGOs, fostering transnational alliances and cross-border initiatives that amplify the political scope of the daily interactions between solidarians and migrants in border zones (Davies, Isakjee and Obradovic-Wochnik 2023). In December 2022, the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) released the second edition of The black book of push-backs: almost 800 pages documenting more than 1,635 testimonies of human rights violations affecting almost 25,000 people. ...
While asylum policies at the EU borders get stricter and stricter, civil solidarity initiatives towards people on the move keep spreading and growing around the continent. By looking at these dynamics through the lens of an institutional crisis, this paper describes and interprets the components, practices and attitudes of solidarity initiatives within a relational field whose boundaries are defined by the (in)actions of state institutions in matters concerning the protection and reception of asylum-seekers and refugees. For this purpose, I engaged in a relational ethnography in Trieste, at the Italian-Slovenian border, taking myself the role of a solidarity actor and using this positionality as an epistemological and methodological tool of analysis. In this way, the article overcomes reductionist and mutually-exclusive categorizations of solidarity and claims instead that initiatives in support of people on the move are contextual and relational. At the same time, and because of that, it also brings to the surface the deepest and common roots of these projects, which ultimately lie in the political dissatisfaction for and moral condemnation of the current asylum regime.
... I want to emphasize the role that different non-state actors play in publicizing security processes and violence. In the case of pushbacks, the role of investigative journalists was crucial as they engaged in meticulous 'epistemic work' (Davies et al., 2023) that involved gathering, analysing, disseminating and presenting information to hold Frontex accountable. This information was not always hidden from the public's view. ...
... In research on security, borders and migration management, scholars can encounter challenges related to field access when investigating controversial policies and practices: extradition of terrorist suspects (Kapoor, 2018), deportation programmes (Cleton, 2022;Walters, 2018;Wissink, 2019), border violence and pushbacks (Davies et al., 2023;Karamanidou and Kasparek, 2022). Such challenges are often due to state secrecy, which is directly linked to the tactical production of non-knowledge to avoid 'repercussions of inconvenient evidence' and liability for malpractices (McGoey, 2019: 2-3). ...
In early 2021, the European Parliament established the Frontex Scrutiny Working Group (FSWG) to monitor all aspects of the functioning of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). The FSWG organized a series of public hearings and carried out a ‘fact-finding’ investigation to gather information and evidence about pushbacks of refugees in the Aegean Sea. By unpacking some of the controversies that emerged during the hearings of the FSWG, I explore how secrecy was practised and strategically employed to obscure the responsibility of Frontex for the reported pushbacks, and how it was contested through the presentation of related evidence. I explain how secrecy and related controversies and struggles over making pushbacks public involve a variety of actors that enrol and interact with a heterogeneous set of objects, including digital, visual and archival traces of violence at sea, as well as databases used to record information about maritime incidents. I argue that secrecy regarding pushbacks is not just about keeping information about people and objects involved in security operations hidden. Secrecy is also produced through the selective recording, (mis)categorization and circulation of information in the name of transparency.
... By taking institutions and governance structures seriously as important environments within which visuality operates, the article reveals that Frontex's visual politics are not external to or simply a public relations activity tagged onto its migration management and policing practices, but inscribed into its very logic. As the agency continues to face massive criticism over migrant pushbacks and human rights violations (Davies et al., 2023), at the same time as member states and EU bodies continue to facilitate the agency's expansion, the alleged neutrality and objectivity Frontex uses to police and patrol the border needs to be further scrutinized, challenged and ultimately resisted. ...
Visuals, including photographs and data visualizations, play a crucial role in the politics of EU border security, both as an internal governance tool (e.g. in surveillance) and as an external means of communication/representation (e.g. in photojournalism). Combining scholarship on photographic representations of migration with literature on surveillance technologies and data visualizations, we argue that these visuals interact to reproduce gendered and racialized meanings of migration and border security. Using a feminist postcolonial lens, we develop an intervisual framework for studying how processes of gendering and racialization render subjects, practices and spaces knowable at the intersection between these visuals. We apply this framework to a case study of Frontex’s Risk Analysis Reports (2010–2021) and demonstrate how it is applicable to other security institutions. The intervisual analysis reveals how the migrant Other and (white) European are visually reproduced through: 1) the (in)visibilization of bodies; 2) the ascription and denial of agency; and 3) the spatialization of borders as ‘frontier imaginings’ that oscillate between fortification and expansionism. The intersectional co-constitution of gender and race, we conclude, is central to the visual politics of Frontex, contributing to problematizing migrants and migration and legitimizing violent border practices.
... These solidarity initiatives have disrupted the violent nature of border control policies, in particular by demonstrating and enacting publicly migrants' 'right to have rights' (Arendt 1951cited in Isin 2008, by rendering visible the violence of border controls (Stierl 2016), and by countering dominant narratives of exclusion based on a 'us and them' logic (Tyler and Marciniak 2013). These efforts are again met with repression by bordering agents (della Porta and Steinhilper 2021b), including 'epistemic borderwork', in which 'insurgent knowledge claims are denied access to credibility' (Davies et al. 2023). ...
Borders as legal, social, and material aspaces of inclusion/exclusion constantly spark resistance, by both migrants and solidarity actors. In this article, we combine the dual observation of a proliferation of border control policies and of migrant and solidarity activism to analyse how different types of border control policies affect the forms of resistance that emerge in them. We inquire on three different cases: first the Calais region at the territorial border between France and the UK; second the camps and detention centres for refugees and migrants marking borders within Europe; and third the intimate space of encounters between citizens and migrants during practices of migrant support. In our theory oriented qualitative analysis, we carve out how power relations, and thereby notions of inclusion/exclusion, deservingness and (il)legality play out differently on the ambivalent solidarities unfolding in these settings.
