Paper short abstract:

This proposal aims to discuss a set of questions about the structural violence shaping cross-border mobility, to capture the hierarchical modes of excluding or incorporating migrant people, shifting the parameters of belonging. This inquiry adopts a postcolonial feminist anthropological perspective.

Paper long abstract:

There is a desire to border through state tactics (De Genova, 2017), which militarise borders using what Catherine Besteman (2020) calls the new apparatus of apartheid in the form of militarised border technologies and personnel, using the methods of intelligence and military mentality (Von Clausewitz [1832] 2014; Davies 2018), to disrupt the mobility of migrants from the global South, to detain them in detention centres and at certain borders, and then deport them. New forms of criminality emerge, while biometrically tracking of the mobile phones that migrant people carry coexist with the using of drones and motion sensors in the name of an emerging new world order of new forms of militaristic border security, containment and empire building (Besteman 2020). The growing border industrial complex, the proliferation of the surveillance network and the relationship between the construction of walls, global inequality and displacement related to climate change, impoverishment and war can't be dissociated from the anthropological 'gaze'. What does all this brutality mean for migrant people? How does it impact on their personhood, their individuality (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001). And how is it argued within the EU about the sites of compassionate humanitarian control (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001)? It is important to situate this debate and enquiry in a postcolonial feminist anthropological critique of what Achiume (2020) points out that many of the emerging digital technologies employed in immigration control and border surveillance have "historical antecedents in the colonial technologies of racialised governance".