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Paper short abstract

Critical research resists the “border knowledge economy” by renaming, documenting, and counter-seeing migration violence. Migrants, scholars, activists, and journalists cultivate autonomous practices—archiving, testimony, informal platforms—that reveal what states and agencies render invisible.

Paper long abstract

Policing and border enforcement rely on both direct coercion and the power to define accepted knowledge about borders. This paper examines how information sharing, research and education can resist the “border knowledge economy”—the reactionary network of states, iNGOs, agencies, and academic partners that frame migration through programs, funding, and technocratic discourse. Drawing on examples from Southeastern Europe and the EU periphery, we explore how scholars, activists, and journalists cultivate modes of refusal: rejecting state-aligned terminology, declining compromised funding, and building autonomous spaces for documentation, political education, and collaborative analysis. Practices include community archiving, public testimony, people’s tribunals, blogs, and informal platforms. These efforts foreground what is rendered invisible by dominant institutions and create ethical, politically responsive ways of knowing and seeing.

We highlight how the capacity to rename, document, and voice depends on positionality and politics relative to the border regime. Naming practices—terms like “pushbacks,” “detention,” or “disappearance”— can expose the violence often concealed by technocratic registers. Research that refuses reproduces alternative lexicons, political imaginaries, and solidarities, offering forms of counter-seeing at the receiving end of coercive policing and surveillance. By tracing how knowledge production itself can resist epistemic and bureaucratic power, this paper contributes to understanding movement-led, collective, and ethical practices of witnessing, documenting, and counter-surveillance.