Border Environments
The concept of “border environments” attempts to capture two distant, yet interconnected processes. On the one hand, it emerges from the acknowledgement that, across the world, state borders have been increasingly militarised and illegalised migrants forced to take more dangerous journeys. With legal ways of access such as visas foreclosed, many of those trying to reach countries of the Global North have in the last few years been funneled into more and more inhospitable and hazardous terrains—arid deserts, choppy seas, rugged mountain chains—with the assumption that the risk of injury and death they will face will deter them from attempting the crossing. In the last few years alone, several thousand people have died while crossing these hostile environments, whose material geographies have been weaponised as crucial tools of border control.
On the other hand, across and beyond urban geographies in the Global North, a generalised atmosphere of hostility has led to shrinking forms of social protection for those classified as outsiders, with legislation passed to deny migrants access to work, housing, services and education. In the UK, which through its “hostile environment” policies has arguably been at the forefront of such process, the deputization of border controls to a wide range of figures (doctors, teachers and university lecturers, but also landlords, bank employees and driving instructors) has conjured up a diffused “atmosphere of surveillance” that has infiltrated the most elementary infrastructures of living, a form of racialized violence that has become, in terms proposed by Christina Sharpe, as pervasive as the weather.1
Thinking through the terms “border” and “environment” together, within the same conceptual frame, is first of all an invitation to reflect on how both civic and natural spaces have been turned into spaces of hostility forthose racialized as other. In both cases, the border becomes a pervasive environment that subtracts life-sustaining resources (e.g., water, food, rescue, healthcare provisions) and exposes illegalised migrants to harsh socio-natural conditions (e.g., extreme heat or cold, chronic food and sleep deprivation, lack of access to any social support). Environments, here, does not simply refer to the “environs of humans” (that which is around and outside of us) but rather to a dynamic, socionatural space: “a society of societies, an international arena, a cosmopoliteia”2 that is composed by multi-scalar and multi-temporal interactions across a range of human and more-than-human entities. Similarly, borders are understood not as fixed but mobile3; as discontinuous and porous zones with no clear territorial limits and “whose contours are continuously negotiated by the movement of people and things, new forms of surveillance technology, and new processes of supranational government”.4
As a “ synthesis of nature, space, technology and law”, border environments represent an inversion, a critical “turning inside-out” of the concept of “natural border”.5 The latter—a well-known trope of the modern era—provided the conceptual justification to the idea that borders are somehow the political expression of naturally existing, geophysically determined boundaries. As such, it “formed part of a constitutive myth of the state” and served to legitimize and rationalise the territorial claims of the then emerging European (empire-)states.6 Thinking through the notion of border environments is instead a way to denaturalise the very existence of borders, point to their constructedness and instability, and to the violence required to keep them in place. Border environments are understood not as constituted by the intrinsic qualities of “nature”, but rather brought into being through legal geographies, surveillance technologies, and bureaucratic protocols.This is because an excessive focus on the harshness and hostility of these terrains tends to abstract “complex, bio-diverse ecology[ies]” into a “static image of wilderness […] as lethal and naturally unsuited to migrants”.7 This process of epistemic erasure wilfully obliterates centuries of Indigenous inhabitation and trans-regional exchange. In doing so, it does not only risk reproducing (neo-)colonial narratives which, in order to justify violent dispossession and the genocide of Indigenous populations, have consistently described these areas as empty, remote, and unliveable. It also risks being co-opted into racialised conservationist narratives that describe migrants as a threat to the environment and the objects they leave behind as hazardous “trash”.8 In order to counter the process of abstraction at work in such narratives, it is critical to account for the veritable process of design that is at stake in the becoming borders of oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges. It is when those classified as nonhumans — whether living or inert — are recognised as integral to and constitutive of boundary enforcement in the same ways in which border guards, national and international institutions, legal frameworks and surveillance systems are, that certain environments are being turned into rugged borders for specific categories of people.9
The concept of border environments recognises that the environment is not solely a site of border control, but one of its modes of operation. It identifies how the environment must be understood as a technology in the formation and conservation of territory, shaping the border zone to be hostile to some, inviting to others.10 It is in rethinking the border as environment that the border control practices mobilised in urban areas in the Global North, and those operating across oceans, deserts and mountains might be understood as different but intimately related expressions of the same logic of border control and of its expansive, multiscalar reach.
This entry builds upon the book chapter: Pezzani, L., Percival, T. and Badano, R. (2023) ‘Border Environments: an introduction to the entangled politics of ecology and migration’, in R. Badano, T. Percival, and S. Schuppli (eds) Border Environments. Leipzig: Spector Books, pp. 7–13.
In this context, ‘weather’ is used as a concept to understand the total climate as encompassing of atmospheric conditions and social/political dimensions: ‘the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack’.
Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, ‘“Mobile Mountains?”’, Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de Géographie Alpine, no. 101–2 (1 November 2013); ↗
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Marco Ferrari, Elisa Pasqual, and Andrea Bagnato, A Moving Border (Milan: Studio Folder, 2019). ↗
Miriam Ticktin, ‘The Offshore Camps of the European Union: At the Border of Humanity’, International Affairs Working Paper, 1 January 2009.
Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World (Malden, Massachaussetts: Polity Press, 2016).
Stefanos Levidis, ‘Border Natures. The Environment as Weapon at the Edges of Greece,’ PhD diss., (London, UK, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2021).
Peter Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century,” American Historical Review 95, no. 5 (December 1990): 1424.
Pietro Autorino, ‘“No Exponga Su Vida a Los Elementos’: the Political Ecology of the US-Mexico Border in the Sonoran Desert” (University of Heidelberg, 2017).
See: Vicki Squire, ‘Desert “Trash”: Posthumanism, Border Struggles, and Humanitarian Politics’, Political Geography 39 (March 2014): 11–21, ; Pietro Autorino, ‘''No exponga su vida a los elementos': the Political Ecology of the US-Mexico Border is the Sonoran Desert” (University of Heidelberg, 2017).
Juanita Sundberg, ‘Diabolic Caminos in the Desert and Cat Fights on the Río: A Posthumanist Political Ecology of Boundary Enforcement in the United States–Mexico Borderlands’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no. 2 (16 March 2011): 318–36. ↗
Hanna Rullman, ‘Fort Vert: Nature Conservation as Border Regime in Calais’ (Statewatch, 2020). ↗
