Category: Bordering control justice

The environment as a necropolitical actor in global border regimes

Posted on by Emily

By Marielys Padua Soto.

Borders are often depicted as man-made barriers such as fences, checkpoints and walls. But some of the deadliest borders in the world are not built by human hands. Instead, they are deserts, seas and jungles, environments transformed into barriers through policy neglect and the criminalization of mobility. By closing legal pathways, states force migrants into lethal landscapes, where the environment itself becomes a tool of governance. This perspective aligns with the broader literature on border violence, which increasingly examines how states govern mobility through indirect, dispersed forms of harm. Some scholars argue that borders operate not only through policing but through exposure, abandonment and deterrence. My analysis contributes to these debates by proposing the environment as a necropolitical actor, a terrain through which sovereignty delegates lethal force while maintaining plausible deniability.

Environmental borders in practice

The necropolitics of environmental exposure is visible across migration corridors worldwide. In the English Channel, the absence of safe routes has forced asylum seekers into fragile boats, leading to repeated mass drownings documented by the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project. Along the US–Mexico border, US border deterrence policies have diverted migrants into the Sonoran Desert, where extreme heat has produced thousands of deaths, an outcome extensively documented in Jason De Leon’s The Land of Open Graves. In Latin America, the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama has become one of the world’s most dangerous corridors, with Human Rights Watch reporting rising migrant deaths due to flooding, exposure and wildlife as routes have shifted deeper into the jungle. Similarly, in Calais, authorities have repeatedly destroyed migrant camps and repurposed the land as nature reserves, turning the environment itself into a hostile space, a process described as environmental racism.

These cases show that the environment is not an innocent backdrop but an active participant in the politics of death, a necropolitical actor shaped by human control. By denying safe routes and pushing people into danger, states weaponize nature, outsourcing death to environmental conditions. Violence thus appears natural, when it is in fact the direct product of political choice.

Sonoran Desert, Southern Arizona (image: Kevin Dooley, Flickr)

Killing by letting die

In contemporary border regimes, sovereignty no longer needs to kill directly. It can kill by letting die. When states impose legal and bureaucratic barriers that make safe movement impossible, they push migrants into lethal terrains. The desert becomes a border wall made of sand and heat. The sea becomes a liquid grave. The jungle becomes an entangled labyrinth of exhaustion and decay. To call the environment a necropolitical actor is not to humanize it, but to recognize how power operates through it. It acquires agency, not because it possesses intent, but because policy transforms it into an enforcer of sovereignty.

In this framework, the environment functions as a vehicle through which death is outsourced. Governments avoid direct accountability by framing deaths as natural disasters or personal misfortunes. The official narrative speaks of dehydration, drowning or disappearance and never of deterrence, denial or deliberate omission. But these deaths are not random. They are the logical consequences of a system that treats movement as a threat and suffering as a deterrent. The desert embodies the politics of abandonment. In its vast emptiness, borders are drawn not by fences but by thirst. Migrants exposed to extreme heat and dehydration die slowly, their bones merging into the terrain that kills them. This violence is dispersed, invisible and bureaucratically convenient. When the state refuses to provide safe routes or humanitarian assistance, it allows the environment to perform exclusion in its stead.

The sea, by contrast, enforces the politics of disappearance. It swallows evidence, conceals bodies and erases traces of suffering. Each year, thousands of migrants vanish in transit across oceans and gulfs, their deaths registered as missing. Maritime deterrence policies, such as the withdrawal of rescue missions and the criminalization of humanitarian efforts, transform the sea into a border patrol. The waves do the killing, while sovereignty remains unseen. Meanwhile, the jungle enacts the politics of filtering. Dense, humid and unforgiving, it tests who can endure and who cannot.

Political natural selection

The landscape therefore becomes a mechanism of natural selection, but one no longer governed by evolution, chance or biology. What appears to be a natural struggle for survival is, in truth, a carefully engineered condition of exposure. Borders have transformed the environment into testing grounds where only those able to endure extreme deprivation may pass. Survival then becomes a political qualification. The environment performs the work of sorting, filtering and eliminating – functions once attributed to nature but now orchestrated by policy. In this way, Darwin’s principle of adaptation is repurposed as an instrument of governance: a political natural selection that decides who lives to reach safety and who is consumed by nature.

In each of these environments, death is bureaucratized and rationalized as the unintended side effect of migration control, rather than its intended function. The repetition of these patterns across geographies reveals a clear logic: deterrence through exposure. The goal is not simply to stop migration but to make the act of movement itself agonizing. The genius and cruelty of environmental necropolitics lies in its credibility. Death appears natural, even inevitable. Who can blame the sea for a storm, the desert for the sun or the jungle for its predators? In this narrative, the environment is cast as the killer, and the state as a distant observer. Such framing conceals responsibility and depoliticizes violence. By framing border deaths as tragedies, governments and media reinforce the illusion of nature’s neutrality. And yet, every drowning, every body recovered from the desert or the jungle, points to a deliberate architecture of neglect. The absence of rescue missions and the refusal to open safe corridors are not passive omissions, they are political choices.

These choices also rely on language. Death is reclassified through euphemisms: missing migrants, fatalities along migratory routes, unidentified remains, or lost at sea become categories that depersonalize tragedy and detach it from accountability. Through such vocabulary, violence is rendered technical, detached and manageable. The environment becomes a convenient scapegoat for policies designed to deter through death. The border thus speaks in the language of statistics, not mourning, where human loss is counted but never named, and suffering is recorded but never owned. This form of governance thrives on denial. By outsourcing violence to the environment, states maintain an image of legality and civility. They can claim adherence to international law while presiding over a system that kills through omission. Environmental borders thus become sites of plausible deniability: a place where policy and nature fuse to produce death without accountability.

Why recognizing the environment as an actor matters

Recognizing the environment as a necropolitical actor demands a shift in how we understand border violence. Safe migration corridors, legal pathways and the restoration of search-and-rescue operations are not acts of benevolence: they are obligations arising from this recognition and from international law. As climate change accelerates displacement and environmental frontiers expand, the convergence between ecology and sovereignty will only deepen. The challenge, then, is not merely to rescue those who cross, but to dismantle the structures that make such crossings deadly. Safe corridors and legal migration pathways are urgent necessities. Anything less ensures that deserts, seas and jungles will continue to serve as silent enforcers of exclusion.

Marielys Padua Soto is a lawyer and researcher currently completing an MA in Migration and Refugee Studies at The American University in Cairo. She specializes in migration, forced displacement, and refugee protection, with field experience in the USA, Latin America, Europe, and the MENA region. Her Master’s thesis is entitled ‘The Smuggled Body: Understanding Sudanese Journeys Along the Sudan–Egypt Smuggling Routes’.

Vigilante bordering – implications for immigrant rights protection in South Africa

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Enocent Nemuramba.

In August 2022, a group of men and women gathered at the entrance of Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, a township near Pretoria, South Africa. They were not patients, nor were they staff. They were members of Operation Dudula (hereafter Dudula), a vigilante movement that has grown in visibility over the last three years. Their objective was simple, if chilling: to block access to health care for anyone whom they suspected of being a foreign national (or immigrant) based on the colour of their skin or the language that they spoke. Patients were turned away, accused of ‘stealing’ resources. In some cases, healthcare workers themselves were intimidated for treating immigrants.

This spectacle of exclusion has not ended. In 2025, Dudula (which loosely means to ‘push back’, ‘drive back’ or ‘push out’ in the local Zulu language) extended its activities to dozens of clinics across Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. As the group explained in a public statement: ‘Our goal is clear, to protect our people’s rights and ensure public services prioritise South Africans first.’ Later, the movement targeted schools, delivering letters to principals in Soweto that warned against enrolling undocumented children. The vigilante group’s de facto leader, Zandile Dabula, was even more explicit: ‘We’re going to be stationed at schools, and no foreign child will be allowed to attend a public school.’

What began as sporadic harassment has hardened into a strategy, to recast public services as checkpoints of belonging. Hospitals and school gates have become borders. Citizens and non-citizens are separated not by officials in uniforms but by self-appointed vigilantes.

Members of Operation Dudula stage a protest against immigrants in Gauteng Province, November 2025 (image: Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism).

From everyday bordering to vigilante bordering

Migration scholars describe ‘everyday bordering’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018) as the dispersal of immigration control into daily life, from landlords checking passports to nurses being asked to check who is entitled to care. Dudula takes this dynamic a step further.

The movement’s modus operandi amounts to what I call vigilante bordering, an overt and extra-legal enforcement of access by organised non-state actors who appropriate the logics of the border and re-stage them in ordinary sites. Unlike bureaucratic bordering, which disperses the state’s authority into welfare and work, vigilante bordering relies on coercion, intimidation and public spectacle to impose exclusionary rules of access. This often means operating alongside and sometimes against the law. The concept entails mobilising vigilantism to create everyday ‘border posts’ that confront and, in practice, curtail constitutional guarantees.

Dudula illustrates this phenomenon vividly. Hospitals and schools, spaces meant to symbolise universal rights, are re-imagined as checkpoints. Vigilantes patrol entry, scrutinise bodies and determine belonging. In so doing, they reproduce the aesthetics of border control while producing new geographies of exclusion.

Vigilante mobilisation and the making of vigilante borders

Operation Dudula did not appear from nowhere. It is a culmination of long-standing frustrations by South Africans with unemployment, inequality and weak service delivery, which are frequently channelled into xenophobic scapegoating. What distinguishes Dudula from earlier waves of anti-migrant violence in South Africa is its organised and performative character.

Rather than spontaneous riots, Dudula stages carefully choreographed blockades, livestreams confrontations and issues press statements. While their actions fall within the broader subject of policing everyday life in South Africa, as described by Buur and Jensen (2004), vigilante mobilisation functions as informal social control that blurs with state authority. In Dudula’s case, this control is explicitly redeployed to construct vigilante borders.

The consequences of vigilante bordering can be fatal. A sick one-year-old child died after the mother, from Malawi, was denied access to Johannesburg’s Alexandra Clinic by members of Dudula. The cumulative impact of these tragic events is that, over time, they instil fear in immigrant communities, prompting some to avoid hospitals altogether, which can delay treatment for tuberculosis, HIV or maternal health. Vigilante bordering in the health sector not only reshapes mobility but also impacts access at the most intimate scale.

Rights under siege

South Africa’s Bill of Rights enshrines socio-economic rights and the country’s Constitutional Court has repeatedly affirmed that these extend to all who live in it. The right to basic education (Section 29) is unconditional and the right to emergency health care (Section 27) is explicit. By disrupting access to both, Dudula challenges not only migrants’ rights but the state’s constitutional order.

Before the advent of vigilante bordering at the gates of public health institutions, immigrants had long been subjected to what migration scholars refer to as medical xenophobia. In abstract terms, it ‘refers to the negative attitudes and practices of health professionals and employees towards migrants and refugees based purely on their identity as non-South African’ (Crush and Tawodzera, 2013). These sustained practices of medical exclusion, which are now punctuated by intimidation at facilities, can have outsized effects. They do not simply inconvenience migrants, they also corrode trust in the health system itself.

Civil society organisations, medical NGOs and legal advocates have sounded the alarm on vigilante mobilisation at health centres and schools. Médecins Sans Frontières has documented cases where Dudula intimidation effectively denied care, including reports of security staff and healthcare workers acting in collusion with the vigilante groups. Education rights groups have condemned school gate blockades as unlawful and harmful to child development.

Beyond South Africa

While Operation Dudula is distinctive, its orientation and approach are in no way unique. Across Europe, community patrols have targeted refugee housing. In the United States, volunteer militias monitor the southern border. In each case, vigilantes position themselves as defenders of sovereignty, translating social anxieties into exclusionary practices.

What South Africa shows is how such movements can turn inward, with hospitals and schools, rather than border posts, becoming the stage. The immediate implications are that any site of welfare provision can now be reframed as a border, eroding the universality of rights through the spread of vigilante bordering.

Towards counter-mobilisation

What, then, is to be done? I contend that the state has an obligation to preserve the rule of law and ensure the depoliticisation of hospitals and schools. So far, the timid response by the South African government and law enforcement authorities has only served to embolden vigilante groups such as Dudula. Some of their members are now engaging in open confrontation with immigrants inside hospital facilities. For as long as these vigilante groups are allowed to carry out their unlawful activities with impunity, vigilante bordering is bound to get worse.

South African civil society actors, from the media to NGOs, should be commended for the proactive approach they have taken to record and challenge vigilante bordering incidents across the country. Journalists, NGOs and community leaders deserve ongoing support to ensure that they continue exposing human rights abuses by groups like Dudula. Their advocacy efforts place the spotlight on the actions of vigilante groups and provide the impetus needed to constantly challenge and contest them. Over time, this reduces the spectre of accepting vigilante impunity as the norm.

Public education is necessary to help increase awareness about the dangers of denying healthcare access to a segment of the population. Dudula has garnered public sympathy for its actions by conveniently claiming that they are protecting ‘public resources’ by restricting non-South Africans from accessing public services. What is missing from the ongoing discourse on Dudula’s actions is that health access restrictions not only pose health risks to immigrants but can potentially impact the health security of communities in which immigrants reside, especially if there is an outbreak of a communicable disease.

Conclusion

Operation Dudula’s vigilante mobilisation is a demonstration of how everyday bordering is being appropriated by non-state actors to reshape everyday spaces like hospitals and schools into sites of exclusion. This new form of bordering, which I refer to as vigilante bordering, mimics the state’s control of access while undermining human right protections.

Recognising vigilante bordering matters for migration scholarship because it shifts the analytical gaze from state policy to non-state mobilisation. It matters for human rights advocates because it highlights the fragility of universal rights when enforcement is outsourced to vigilante actors. And it matters for everyday South Africans because it warns how easily the spaces of care and learning can be transformed into spaces of exclusion.

Enocent Nemuramba is a second-year PhD student in Politics at the University of Bristol and a member of the SPAIS Migration Group. His research interests include the ways in which multi-scalar power structures mediate migrant political economies. For his PhD research project he is using a critical multi-scalar lens to study how Zimbabwean immigrants living in the middle-income suburbs of Cape Town make and establish home.

Citizen geopolitics: understanding the role of migrant naturalisation in the transformations in the Middle East

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By Paladia Ziss.

Naturalisation is usually seen as a process by which migrants access the rights, duties and passport of their country of residence. They may feel that they belong there and want to be able to stay, have a say in its politics or access better jobs. States also have interests in naturalising migrants, usually because they bring skills or wealth, or because they are already considered part of a nation. In my initial research with Syrian refugees living across Turkey and Germany, however, naturalisation does not seem to be predominantly about the relationship between a state and a person. Instead, in the changing context of the Middle East, citizenship and naturalisation seems increasingly about navigating politics, travel and territory across multiple states – that is, about geopolitics.

Since 2011, about six million Syrians have been forced to flee the dictatorial regime of Bashar Al-Assad, his brutal crackdown against an uprising and a violent civil war. Most settled in Turkey and Germany. Although most of these continue to hold a temporary legal status, many have tried to naturalise in order to access rights they were denied by their own state. About 500,000 Syrians have become dual German-Syrian or Syrian-Turkish citizens. Holding citizenship of their country of residence is a way to feel more protected against rising anti-migrant sentiment and threats of mass deportation by right-wing pundits. In Frankfurt in 2021 Youssef, originally from Latakia, had just filed his citizenship application when he told me: ‘With the war in Syria, I know how quickly politics can change. At least with citizenship they won’t be able to kick me out.’

The Syrian-Turkish border at Nusaybin (image: William John Gauthier on Flickr, 2018)

With a Syrian passport, which was expensive and hard to get, the refugees I spoke to could rarely travel to see family in other states. The German and (although less so) Turkish passports helped with that.

But research participants also felt ambivalent about their new citizenship. They were often disappointed that, as dual citizens, they still faced racism and discrimination. Citizenship to them was not only about their own relationship to one nation-state. It was also about whether and how they could share lives with family and friends spread out across many different geographies. Dual citizens were even more aware that most Syrians could not travel or use their rights in a context where citizenship, more than anything else, determines life chances and status. Some felt that citizenship stuck them to a territory they had not chosen. Especially for Turkish-Syrians, citizenship meant they would probably never move elsewhere but settle in Turkey, a state in repeated economic crisis and political turmoil. For all, citizenship was embedded in their social networks across Germany, Turkey and Syria.

On 8 December 2024, Assad’s regime was overthrown, changing the lives of the Syrian diaspora overnight. Many Syrians have been trying to return to Syria. They want to visit family: parents or grandparents they have not seen in years, or siblings, nephews and nieces they have never met. They want to check up on their cities and homes, often reduced to mere rubble. Many want to participate in the rebuilding of their country. Again, however, citizenship divides opportunities. Syrians with a second passport can travel and return to their country of residence. Those with temporary refugee papers risk losing their status if they do. The security, economic and political situation in Syria remains fragile and permanent return is risky.

Meanwhile, Syrians have pointed out to me that it is not only them who are using their national citizenship for global purposes. Their states of residence are starting to do so too.

Taha, a naturalised citizen of Turkey originally from Deir Az-Zor in Syria, told me: ‘The Turkish state’s plan is to naturalize 1.5 million Syrians as a belt in the southern region.’ He thinks that giving citizenship to Syrians is one way through which Turkey seeks influence in Syria. It is not clear whether this will actually happen. Naturalisation for Syrians is granted on exceptional grounds. There are no official statistics and the Turkish government hasn’t updated the number of accepted Syrian citizenship applications for more than a year. Yet, for Syrians, naturalisation is part of a pattern that Yassin al Haj Saleh has called ‘liquid imperialism’ to describe the overlapping and opaque military, economic and political ways in which states such as Turkey, Russia, Iran and the US have shaped the Syrian civil war and denied Syrians self-determination. These practices echo older, imperial conceptions of membership that were not about democratic participation, national belonging or rights, but rather about competition for population to secure labour and territory.

Back in Germany, citizenship is also changing from a national to a global institution. The new citizenship law of 2024 requires applicants to abide to the German constitution or values, however vaguely defined. Following a late addition during the parliamentary process, however, it also requires citizens-to-be to swear to commit to the ‘prohibition against waging a war of aggression’ – shorthand for condemning the Russian war on Ukraine – and ‘Germany’s special historical responsibility for the unjust National Socialist regime and its consequences, in particular for the protection of Jewish life’ – relating to Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

In short, both migrants and states increasingly use citizenship not only to access or regulate national belonging but also to navigate a changing geopolitical world order. These insights point to complicated questions about the changing struggles between citizenship, nationality, territory and the state. How do states employ the institution of citizenship not only for domestic benefit but also for global power? How is this embedded in imperial histories? How do citizens and citizens-to-be use multiple citizenships to negotiate the global hierarchy of passports? What do these practices do to the institution of citizenship itself, which is mostly still understood as membership in a nation-state? The case of Syrians naturalising across Germany and Turkey in the contexts of the transformations of the Middle East shows that we need to rethink what citizenship is and does in the 21st century, beyond membership in and to a nation-state territory.

Paladia Ziss is Senior Research Associate at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She studies the politics and sociology of displacement and citizenship across postcolonial Europe and the Middle East.

The carceral economies of asylum: who’s working the border?

Posted on by Emily

By Eda Yazici.

The UK government’s new immigration white paper, Restoring Control over the Immigration System, promises to ‘surge resource’ into immigration enforcement. But what does this surge look like on the ground – and who is doing the work? This blog draws on a pilot for a proposed research project with people working in the asylum system to explore what their labour conditions and relations reveal about the carceral economies and socialities of asylum.

Labour on the border

Successive governments have ‘surged resource’ in immigration enforcement. In 2023, the Home Office doubled its number of Asylum Decision Makers (ADMs) to 2,400. In 2024 and 2025 plans were announced to recruit 1,000 more officers each year. But who are these new recruits and what does their labour tell us about Britain’s immigration regime?

(Image: Flickr)

This post begins a conversation about the working conditions and experiences of those employed in the UK asylum system – ADMs, Housing Officers (HOs) and Detainee Custody Officers (DCOs). In doing so it interrogates the relationship between the political economy of asylum and labour conditions and explores workers’ (potential) solidarity with asylum seekers.  

Work wanted

In the US, scholars have examined how mass incarceration developed alongside the decline of local job markets. For Gilmore (2007), the US prison system generates jobs and profit and serves as a fix for surplus populations. McCoy (2017) similarly links incarceration to deindustrialisation. While there have been studies that look at the role of market forces and privatisation in the asylum system as well as studies that look at the harm perpetrated by its frontline workers (Kalir, 2023), there has been less focus on the jobs created by carceral capital in this system (Wang, 2018) – and even less on how border workers see themselves and relate to their employers and to asylum applicants.

Who are the workers?

in the UK, Asylum Decision Makers (ADMs) are employed by the Home Office, and Housing Officers (HOs) and Detainee Custody Officers (DCOs) are employed by Home Office contractors. These workers are asylum applicants’ main point of contact with the state during the asylum process. ADMs conduct substantive interviews and decide the outcomes of applicants’ asylum cases. HOs and DCOs determine the everyday living conditions of people seeking refuge.

ADMs, HOs and DCOs are paid little over the national living wage. In 2023, the Home Office’s contractors reported record profits, yet workers saw no corresponding pay rise. In 2022, ADMs went on strike, with their union, PCS, stating that 10% of its members in the civil service rely on food banks and Universal Credit. ADMs, HOs and DCOs are largely based in post-industrial cities with high unemployment rates and limited job opportunities. Many ADMS are from ethnically minoritised backgrounds, with 49.3% of people on the ADM pay bands and working in migration and borders operations for the Home Office identifying as such.

Moral dilemmas and material realities

The labour market realities faced by these workers and their own subjectivities have the potential to reveal a lot about how the asylum system is sustained. But how do people who work in the asylum system and those closest to them see themselves? Among the first set of concerns raised in my preliminary conversations was the moral dilemma posed by the relative security of a job in the civil service in comparison to the potential impacts of decisions that employees had to make regarding asylum applications, highlighting the affective challenges of the role. For the partner of ADM no.2, the ‘evil’ of working for the Home Office is outweighed by the opportunity to leave insecure work in retail. For ADM no.1, the Home Office, with its 26 weeks of maternity leave on full pay in comparison to the statutory 90% of full pay for six weeks available at the call centre she was working for, enabled her to start a family. Despite this, the ADM role did not present a significant pay rise for either.

‘Look, I know working at the Home Office is a bit evil, but it’s not like she can work the checkout at B&M forever.’ (Partner of ADM no.2)

‘If it wasn’t for the Home Office job, we wouldn’t have been able to start a family; the call centre only paid statutory maternity.’ (ADM no.1)

Alongside these labour market concerns and the power ADMs exercise over applicants’ lives are a set of questions around worker subjectivities and opportunities for solidarity.

‘My neighbour is an Asylum Decision Maker. I was so shocked that someone whose family are migrants would want to work for the Home Office.’ (Neighbour of an ADM)

‘I’m stopping rapists from coming into the country.’ (ADM no.2)

The ADM described by his neighbour is second-generation British-Pakistani. He is in his early 20s and his ADM role is his first fulltime job since leaving compulsory education. ADM no.2 is a dual British-Australian citizen who decided to settle in the UK after visiting for the first time in 2017. ADM no.2’s comments reveal gendered and racialised assumptions about who seeks asylum and her citizenship and legal status point to tensions around privileged migration and mobility as they relate to race and settler colonialism. These conversations highlight the need for engagement with worker subjectivities, working conditions and wider carceral economies.

Is solidarity possible?

I argue that it is important for scholars of migration and labour to engage with the tensions, concerns and trade-offs raised by workers in the asylum system. Their labour market trajectories and decisions can reveal how carceral economies are reproduced.

By asking the question of what options these workers have, we can – following Tierney’s (2012) engagement with US prison workers – consider whether border workers’ unions pit workers in the asylum system against those seeking asylum. Can solidarity exist between those enforcing the border and those subject to it? And how does the British labour movement reconcile its support for border workers with its dedication to ending a hostile immigration regime?

These are early reflections and I invite readers’ thoughts and contributions on how to engage with this potentially exciting and insightful area of research and organising.

Eda Yazici is a Senior Research Associate on the PRIME Project in the School of Sociology Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is interested in race, migration and labour organising.

Curating Waymarkers – an exhibition visualising mobility, connection and friendship

Posted on by Emily

By Liz Hingley.

‘A person in any country begins their relationship, adventures and acquires an identity, whether temporary or long, when they put the SIM card of that country in their phone.’
Kacem, from Syria to the Bibby Stockholm Barge, 2020

The words of Kacem frame the door of an old Victorian shop on the Strand in London, which is currently displaying SIM-scale artworks created by hundreds of people as part of the Waymarkers exhibition commissioned by Kings Culture. Waymarkers is a landmark platform for The SIM Project, a programme I founded in 2017 that draws on the smartphone SIM card as an international symbol of connection – one that unlocks local and global networks to bring people with different experiences of mobility together. Combining analogue and digital photographic processes, the project gives material meaning to the ways people curate personal digital archives, and how they visualise and map their everyday lives using the common camera phone.

The SIM Project uses a sensory workshop methodology that has been co-designed over eight years (Hingley, 2022). Participants draw lines with wool to places they connect to on a borderless world map and then select one image to print from their smartphone that gives them a sense of belonging. Using a bespoke 3D printed camera and the chemical ‘magic’ of a miniature darkroom, participants optically transfer the image from their phone screen onto a SIM-scale glass piece. Gathered around a table, the group learns how to polish a metal frame and hand stamp a backplate with a meaningful number, to mirror the International Identification Number on the back of every SIM card. Each person makes one to keep and wear as a pendant, and they are invited to add another to the mobile collection.

The Strand exhibition showcases artworks made in eight countries – from Cyprus to Finland to the USA and the UK – by people with roots in more than 40 countries. Their SIM-scale windows are illuminated daily from 6am to midnight in multiple formats and scales. Mosaic sculptures feature over 1,000 chosen images and portraits of contributors. Through a peephole in the door passersby can view the SIM prints enlarged into a moving projection. In the adjacent window pendants are suspended from a glittering silver shawl inspired by the Portland Global Friendship Group and the international trade of Portland Stone.

In 2024, as part of the b-side arts festival on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, UK, I ran two SIM Project workshops to bring together five residents of this tidal island with five men living on the Bibby Stockholm barge, a container-like floating structure designated as temporary housing for men in the asylum system, moored at that time in Portland Harbour.

During this time, I stayed in the house of a co-founder of the Portland Global Friendship Group (PGFG), whose downstairs rooms were stuffed to the brim with donations of clothes and shoes. The PGFG emerged in response to fear and hostility surrounding the arrival of the Bibby Stockholm barge in August 2023. Originally built for 220 people, the barge’s capacity was expanded to accommodate 506 residents, along with up to 40 staff. The group’s mission was simple: to welcome these men to the island and uphold Portland’s spirit of kindness. When the local Dorset council prohibited members from distributing welcome packs to arriving men and banned them from inviting the men into their homes, the group, in their own words, ‘went maverick’. During the following 18 months, weekly activities evolved in response to the needs and interests of both the men and the local community. These ranged from clothes and SIM card distribution, arts activities and games clubs to grounding pursuits such as walks to explore the island’s distinctive geology and migratory bird life.

Words of the PGFG members inscribed on the Waymarkers exhibition walls highlight the creativity and impact of this grassroots network, which was designed to foster emotional resilience and resist hostile migration policies: ‘Out of adversity, a really beautiful thing has grown.’ The experience also strengthened local ties, bringing many islanders together for the first time. ‘We have become a tight community, a better community because of the men,’ another member reflected. In January 2025, the barge was towed away following the conclusion of the government contract and the ex-Bibby residents were rehoused across the country under the government’s dispersal policy.

In response, the network moved online, with many PGFG members continuing to provide legal, practical and emotional support, primarily through WhatsApp. Seeking to visualise and materialise this ephemeral yet intimate digital connection, I invited islanders and former Bibby Stockholm residents to share five mobile phone photographs that reflected their experience of Portland and the PGFG on their WhatsApp groups. This generated a collection of more than 200 images that captured activities, views, life on the barge, hugs and laughter, a selection of which were printed onto SIM-scale glass and framed in silver to weave into a jewellery piece.

The central core of the jewellery piece is formed by fragments of Portland limestone collected by PGFG members. Highly prized and extensively quarried Portland stone has been exported to construct some of the world’s most powerful landmarks, from the UN headquarters in New York to London’s St Paul’s Cathedral and Bush House, located just opposite the Waymarkers exhibition on The Strand. These ‘waste’ fragments chipped from the valuable stone allude to the lucrative trade of extraction and migration of materials; a wealth that has not profited the island. The monumental Bush House was originally conceived as a major new trade centre by American industrialist Irving T. Bush. Statues symbolising Anglo-American friendship flank the building, which was, until recently, home to the BBC World Service. The building bears the inscription ‘To the friendship of English-speaking peoples.’ In response, the facing Waymarkersexhibition wall is inscribed with the quote, ‘The Portland Global Friendship Group is the biggest family in the world.’

From the stone core of the jewellery piece, I knotted silver into a delicate, net-like structure, evoking the maritime setting and the island’s historic reliance on fishing for sustenance. The numerous photographs of hugs shared by PGFG informed a shape that echoes both the embrace of a shawl and the interwoven chains of protective battle armour. By challenging common sense conventions around the materials used to create necklaces and nets, the piece can be understood as a theoretical ‘body of thinking’ with tangible effects (Culler, 1997). The use of Portland stone fragments disrupts familiar associations between the stone and its histories of ecological extraction, imperial power and cultural influence.

On World Refugee Day, 20th June 2025, an event will reunite the PGFG at Waymarkers. Transport for some of the men to join from around the country is sponsored by Counterpoints Arts as part of Refugee Week. MMB friends are invited to join. Please contact Liz Hingley for details.

Liz Hingley is an artist and anthropologist with a participatory practice shaped by her experiences living across Europe and China. Rooted in the visual arts, her work focuses on tools and rituals of relation that transcend political boundaries and connect the local and global. She is the inaugural MMB Honorary Artist and a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar on the Programme for Interdisciplinary Resilience Studies. Liz has authored five books, including Under Gods (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2010) and Sacred Shanghai (Washington University Press, 2019). She founded The SIM Project in 2017, which was exhibited at the V&A, London, in 2024.

All photographs by Jack Latimer, on behalf of Kings Culture, 2025.

Bolsonaro’s paradox: a far-right leader’s pro-immigration strategy?

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A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Maeli Farias.

Immigration is a highly politicised and election-defining issue. Across the Global North, conservative, liberal, left-leaning and far-right leaders alike typically adopt hostile, dehumanising stances toward immigrants and refugees, as most explicitly exemplified by Donald Trump’s US presidency and what has become known as ‘fortress Europe’. Similar anti-immigrant policies and attitudes exist in the Global South. However, far-right rhetoric on immigration in this region often follows a different model. This blogpost explores one such case, that of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022) in Brazil.

Although Bolsonaro’s far-right government was retrogressive on many human rights issues, it maintained and even expanded entry programmes for immigrants and asylum seekers, diverging sharply from the practices of many far-right leaders in the Global North, including his ally, Donald Trump. Despite often expressing xenophobic and hostile rhetoric toward immigrants and refugees, Bolsonaro strategically leveraged Brazil’s progressive immigration framework, developed through the early 21st century, and a generally favourable public perception of immigration to advance his political agenda both domestically and internationally. His case highlights how border controls, as a naturalised and widely accepted feature of modern statehood, are employed across the ideological spectrum to serve specific political interests.

Operation Welcome Shelter Rondon 1, Boa Vista, Brazil, January 2020 (image: author’s own)

Since 2015, a severe shortage of essential goods, widespread socio-political unrest and deprivation in their country have triggered mass displacement of Venezuelans across Latin America, including Brazil. Instead of closing its borders or clamping down on the new arrivals, the Brazilian government, then led by President Michel Temer, launched Operação Acolhida (‘Operation Welcome’) in 2018 to receive Venezuelans arriving at the northern border. It is instructive to note that the crisis in Venezuela did not meet the conceptual frame for asylum under the Geneva Convention of 1951. As such, requests by Venezuelans fell outside the normative international framework for refugee status approval. Strikingly, instead of refusal and deportation, the Brazilian government used the Cartagena Declaration and MERCOSUR residency rights to create legal pathways for Venezuelans to enter and settle in Brazil. Operation Welcome also offered voluntary relocation to migrants once admitted to the country, helping them to move from remote border areas to cities where they would have greater employment and public service opportunities.

Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right nationalistic politician, was elected president a year after the launch of the Venezuelan humanitarian response. Given his radical rhetoric during the campaign, fears grew among those working in humanitarian, civil society and migrant support circles that the programme response would be dismantled. Indeed, one of Bolsonaro’s first acts as President was Brazil’s withdrawal from the UN’s Global Compact on Migration. Yet, to the surprise of many, his government maintained and expanded the Operation Welcome initiative. It committed significantly more resources, further easing entry and migration status regularisation pathways for Venezuelan migrants in Brazil. Furthermore, the administration did not revoke or alter any regulatory measures that facilitated the migration and regularisation of other nationalities in Brazil, such as Haitians, Afghans and Syrians.

Whenever I share my experiences working with immigration in Brazil during Bolsonaro’s administration, people are often surprised to learn that a far-right government supported pro-immigration policies and facilitated the regularisation of immigrants who otherwise would be considered ‘illegals’. It is important to emphasise that Bolsonaro is not a pro-immigration president – far from it. His rhetoric on immigration often aligns with the violent stances and interventions of other far-right leaders.

His seeming pro-immigration approach can be explained in three ways. First, it was ideological. Bolsonaro leveraged the Venezuelan migration issue in support of his opposition to socialism. He often referenced the fact that Venezuelans were ‘fleeing socialism’ to support anti-leftist narrative. In effect, he supported Venezuelan migration to Brazil because in his eyes it vindicated his political messaging that conservative, right-wing actors were the humanitarian actors and ‘socialists’ were not. Second, the Brazilian welcome programme was strongly supported by international agencies such as UNHCR, IOM and EU Humanitarian Aid. The US government also funded the scheme to the tune of USD 46 million. Thus, far from being an exclusive national programme, it had financial benefits and international dimensions that made continuation politically and diplomatically advantageous for the Bolsonaro administration.

‘Brazil shelters Venezuelans fleeing socialism.’ President Bolsonaro tweets about his visit to Operation Welcome in Boa Vista, 30 January 2022.

A third factor is Brazil’s relatively positive public perception of migration. Unlike other countries shaped by settler colonialism, Brazil has continued to embrace its multiethnic identity and history, making immigration a less politically contentious issue. Although xenophobia persists – particularly at the local level and toward specific groups – it has not become a dominant theme in national discourse. This comparatively open and progressive stance has gradually been institutionalised in governance frameworks, reflecting a broader shift in South American migration policies that began at the close of the 20th century. Brazil’s 2017 Migration Law-13.445/17 exemplifies this trend, emerging from a participatory legislative process grounded in a strong human rights orientation, emphasising the non-criminalisation of irregular migrants.

Within this context, Bolsonaro was able to navigate and utilise an already-established, inclusive legal framework, even as his public rhetoric remained openly anti-immigration. Preliminary findings from my ongoing doctoral research further indicate that, despite the progressive design of programmes such as Operation Welcome, these initiatives often reproduce patterns of marginalisation, particularly for immigrants and asylum seekers who are racialised as non-white. In practice, Brazil’s ‘welcoming’ approach remains selective, failing to guarantee dignified integration and leaving these populations to confront systemic obstacles in accessing rights and settling in Brazil.

In conclusion, taken at face value, the Brazilian case challenges simplistic assumptions about far-right politics and immigration. However, Bolsonaro’s approach reveals how immigration policies, far from being purely ideological, are often strategically contextual, shaped by history, public opinion, geopolitics and vested interests. It invites broader reflection on the complex realities behind human mobility, migration management and how power structures often shape humanitarian responses to fit particular narratives rather than being purely about doing the right thing.

Maeli Farias is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. She previously worked for two years in the humanitarian response ‘Operation Welcome’ in Brazil and most recently served as a Research Associate on the MMPPF (Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World) project at the University of Bristol. Her research explores the anthropological dimensions of narratives and everyday experiences to examine critical issues in contemporary migration, such as colonial legacies, belonging and social inequalities.

To read more blogposts on migration and mobilities in Latin America visit the MMB Latin America blog. And to see the full SPAIS Migration Research Group blog series visit the group’s webpage on the MMB website.

‘El Carrusel’: digitising the US-Mexico border with(out) the CBP One app

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Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Martin Rogard.

Many people had been waiting in Mexico for months to make their asylum claim legally in the US when, at midday on 20th January 2025, all CBP One appointments with the US Border Force were suddenly cancelled. The CBP One app, which was the only legal land asylum route for people arriving at the US’s southern border, was discontinued the moment Donald Trump’s inauguration began.  

The MAGA wing of the US Republican Party had long campaigned to shut down Biden’s controversial CBP One app, claiming it had become a back door facilitating undocumented immigration into the US. I spent two years researching this app – and the various claims made about it – for a chapter of my PhD thesis on the digitalisation of bordering practices, only to realise that it would be discontinued overnight. But how did this app compare to the COVID-era asylum ban that Trump has now effectively reinstated?

The US-Mexico border fence at Tijuana, 2021 (image: Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash)

Far from the open border policy its detractors portrayed it as, the CBP One app – which has previously been used to automate commercial travel processing – became a mandatory pre-registration step for all non-Mexican US asylum seekers arriving by land. This new protocol, which included a 5-year asylum ban penalty for non-compliance, made:

… people who traveled through a third country but failed to seek asylum or other protections in those countries ineligible for asylum in the United States… [except for those people who can reach central and northern Mexico and make an appointment]… through a DHS [Department of Homeland Security] scheduling system (AIC, 2023; see also Federal Register, 2023: 31399).

Since the app was the only such ‘scheduling system’, the protocol effectively forced asylum-seeking individuals and families to wait in Mexico for months by making their asylum eligibility contingent on securing an appointment through a glitchy, geofenced and data-harvesting lottery system.

CBP One has therefore been part of a shadowy binational bordering scheme colloquially known as ‘El Carrusel’ or ‘the merry-go-round’. The majority of people who made their long journeys to the restricted locations in Mexico where the app could function were swiftly targeted by the heavily militarised Mexican migration governance regime, which included parastatal security agencies such as the ‘grupo enlace’, which claims to enforce government contracts. Migrants report being forcibly bussed back down to Mexico’s border with Guatemala before they had a chance to pre-book or attend their CBP One appointments. Others who evaded ‘El Carrusel’ became highly visible targets for extortion, abduction, theft, exploitation and torture. As a Human Rights Watch report (2024: 4) states, ‘The more difficult it is for migrants to cross the US-Mexico border, the more money cartels make, whether from smuggling operations or from kidnapping and extortion.’

Migrants who did manage to attend their appointment on time after clearing the app’s highly data extractive preliminary security checks were subjected to a ‘credible-fear’ interview. Those deemed convincingly fearful of persecution were granted admission into the US under a temporary, criminalised and precarious status known as ‘humanitarian parole’ while they waited for their asylum decisions – the majority of which were denials, expeditiously followed by detention and eventual deportation.

The CBP One policy has recently been replaced with Trump’s renewed ‘Remain in Mexico’ asylum ban (an indiscriminate policy officially known as ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’ or MPP). In the US, as elsewhere, election cycles tend to be punctuated with big promises of ‘fixing’ the broken asylum system and/or finally ‘securing’ or ‘taking back control’ of national borders. Beneath the rhetoric, however, MPP, CBP One and Trump’s recent flurry of ‘emergency’ executive orders only maintain the status quo: they subject racialised people fleeing persecution and violence to further suffering and containment, failing to meet the standards of international law or provide truly accessible, safe and legal routes for asylum.

Despite the recent termination of the CBP One app as an asylum tool, much of my research remains relevant because it speaks to broader patterns of border digitisation that are expanding states’ reach far beyond pre-existing democratic and legal limits (see also Albert Sanchez-Graells’ post on AI and MigTech in this series). CBP One was repurposed for asylum processing during the COVID-19 pandemic with little public attention. At the time, humanitarian shelter workers in Mexico were tasked with filling out questionnaires on the app on behalf of asylum seekers under a deceptive US government promise to expedite their claims; in reality the app was introduced alongside restrictive immigration policies ‘that sought to increase penalties for crossing the border unlawfully, even to request asylum, and greatly reduce the number of migrants eligible for asylum’ (Kocher, 2023: 6).

But the CBP One app was never just the efficacious ‘scheduling tool’ that the DHS claimed it to be. It was principally a mass-scale data-gathering experiment that exploited undocumented migrants in order to extract a large-scale, non-cooperative dataset featuring biographic, biometric and live-location information. These data were avowedly shared across an equivocal ‘law enforcement community’, likely to train risk-predictive policing algorithms (AIC, 2025: 6; Longo, 2017: 150-153).

As Matthew Longo explains in The Politics of Borders, contemporary ‘smart’ borders have become increasingly reliant on large risk-predictive algorithms in order to ensure that ‘the good [are] let in quickly, and only the risky are slowed down… a process that depends heavily on data’ (Longo, 2017: 141; see also Travis Van Isacker’s post in this series, ‘Who’s in the fast lane?’). These large algorithms are known as ‘convolutional neural networks’. They work by combining the users’ biometric data (facial recognition, iris scans, liveness checks) and biographical data (travel history, gender, age, recent contacts) to build adaptive and multi-layered ‘risk profiles’. The more data they are fed, the better these so-called neural networks allegedly become at predicting and flagging potential ‘criminals,’ ‘terrorists’ and ‘impostors’ prior to any crime, attack or threat having taken place.

Before the CBP One app, for legal and practical reasons, the US’s physical borders were its primary site of personal data accumulation and surveillance. There are restrictions around the private information states can uncooperatively capture from non-citizens outside their jurisdictions. By requiring prospective asylum seekers to book an appointment via a smartphone while they waited in Mexico, the US decentralised and expanded its surveillance capacity far beyond preexisting limits. Conveniently, the geofenced app – requiring live location and prohibiting VPNs – forced its users to remain in Mexico. Since CBP One users were outside its jurisdiction, the US could shed its accountability for the human rights abuses asylum seekers faced while waiting across the border.

The app required the latest phone technology, updated software and stable broadband, excluding anyone unable to meet these expensive requirements. Its limit of four language options also disempowered those who didn’t read English, Spanish, French or Haitian Creole as well as anyone without good literacy skills. Similarly, the app’s so-called ‘glitches’ and design choices, prevented its users from correcting mistakes, contacting support or speaking to a human. The app automatically deleted profiles flagged as spurious, disadvantaging families and/or people with similar names and/or facial features (see, for example, Kocher, 2023: 7-8).

While this ‘smart’ digitised asylum system promised efficiency, its black box design prevented accountability and transparency for the harms it caused. Furthermore, as Human Rights Watch (2024: 26) explains, the insufficient number of appointments available on the app was presented as being due to ‘limited capacity’. Yet, this limited capacity largely reflected the US government’s prioritising of removal proceedings and hyper-securitised bordering over humanely processing asylum seekers.

By amassing vast archives of personal data from non-citizens, which were then shared domestically and internationally without their informed consent, the CBP One app fuelled a new wave of discriminatory and abusive bordering practices. Sold as a ‘technological fix’ this digitisation only perpetuated cycles of violence and disempowerment while expanding the US’s imperial reach beyond existing democratic, physical and legal limits.

Martin Rogard is a doctoral candidate in political theory at the University of Bristol. His research explores how artefactually mediated practices of memory-making and forgetting constitute and unsettle (b)ordering processes in the North American borderlands.

After border externalisation: migration, race and labour in Mauritania

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New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Hassan Ould Moctar.

In March 2024, the Mauritanian government signed a migration partnership agreement with Spain and the European Commission, the stated aim being to address a surge of unwanted migrant arrivals on the Canary Islands. While unprecedented in financial scope, this was just the latest in a long line of border externalisation strategies that have been implemented in Mauritania. In 2006, Spain and the EU adopted a range of military and surveillance measures off West Africa’s Atlantic coasts, opening a new period of migration control cooperation with West African states. Despite two decades of such efforts, the past year has seen both unprecedented sea arrivals in Spain and – more concerningly – unprecedented deaths on the Atlantic route.

For many scholars of migration and border policy, this persistence of deaths and unwanted arrivals occurs not despite the strategy of border externalisation, but because of it. Many have long illustrated how such policy approaches typically create more ‘irregular migration’, and thus more of the social condition of migrant illegality. Building upon these insights, my new book After Border Externalization: Migration, Race and Labour in Mauritania (Bloomsbury, 2024) examines how this process interacts with the social and historical landscapes of the contexts in which EU migration management increasingly operates. To this end, it analyses how externalisation intervenes within pre-existing histories of bordering and population management in Mauritania (chapters 3 and 4). It then takes an ethnographic turn, asking how the condition of migrant illegality interacts with the social relations that have emerged from this history (chapters 5, 6 and 7).

As such, the book is motivated by a desire to overcome the Eurocentrism that necessarily underpins EU border externalisation policies, but which can also seep into the scholarship, as critical migration and border studies scholars have suggested. To this end, I have drawn on ideas of Samir Amin, who coined the term ‘Eurocentrism’ and wrote a short book on the topic. In Amin’s view, the geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean was central to the Eurocentric ideological project; it acts as the source of a Eurocentric universalism which asserts that ‘the only possible future for the world is its progressive Europeanisation.’

Looking at this geographic imaginary from its margins in Mauritania unveils the contradictions of the historical juncture in which externalisation unfolds. On the one hand, externalisation is conditioned by the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, in particular the division of the Senegal River Valley into the territories of Senegal and Mauritania, and a racialising colonial imaginary dictating who belongs on which side of the Senegal River. These developments were consistent with the ‘define and rule’ strategy of indirect colonial rule that Mahmood Mamdani has analysed, whose logic resonates in contemporary international development and migration management projects, as I show in chapter 4.

 At the same time, however, the form of this colonial legacy is shifting as externalisation unfolds. While Mauritania has periodically figured in the EU’s geographic imaginary of the Mediterranean – through the 5+5 dialogue and the Union for the Mediterranean – it has in recent years become more salient in its capacity as a Sahelian state. Drawing from interviews with officials in the permanent secretariat of the G5 Sahel in Nouakchott, my book argues that the Eurocentric universalising goals of the EU’s Mediterranean geographic imaginary – exemplified in norms such as democracy promotion, human rights and good governance – are giving way to a more security-driven imaginary of the Sahel. At the same time, this region has seen an unprecedented challenge to European dominance in recent years. Together, these facts yield epistemic openings that were not present at the time of Amin’s original writing of Eurocentrism. 

To examine these, the book’s ethnographic chapters foreground migrant agency, detailing from this perspective the social relations in which the condition of migrant illegality is infused in Mauritania. I start in the northern port city of Nouadhibou, detailing a dynamic interplay between Europe-bound migrants and an apparatus of externalisation in the city, before then illustrating how this interplay sits within the political economy of Nouadhibou. While European capital no longer dominates the scene in the city, the EU continues to play a crucial role in facilitating transnational capital flows, as its production of migrant illegality enables the labour exploitation of a precarious and transient workforce.

This Europe-bound transience is key in the context of Nouadhibou, but an exclusive focus on such Europe-bound trajectories also obscures the living legacies of colonialism. For this reason, I am also interested in the Senegal River Valley town of Rosso, which straddles the colonial border between Mauritania and Senegal. Turning my attention to migrants who weren’t on the move to Europe when I met them, I have contrasted their prior experiences of EU border violence with the relative lack of illegality in Rosso. In its absence, a violent history of racialised territorial belonging that I detailed earlier in the book resurfaces. Here, it takes the form of a rice industry that was erected against the backdrop of a spate of expulsions and dispossession in the late 1980s, which acts as the primary employer of migrant labour in the town today.

My final ethnographic chapter moves to the capital city of Nouakchott, where experiences of illegality and border violence are common. But the colonial legacy of racialised territorial belonging means that Afro-Mauritanian nationals can also get caught up in migration policing operations. The line between national and non-national is further blurred by the fact that such operations dovetail with an urban cleansing drive, and therefore often extend to everyone rendered ‘surplus’ and forced to survive on the urban margins. From this perspective, externalisation is the most visible element of a broader regime of spatially managing the racialised outcasts of contemporary capitalism.

It’s important to foreground the agency of those at the receiving end of this triad of illegalisation, racialisation and economic abandonment, and I conclude the book with a reflection on how those encountered in previous pages interpret their own agency. The response to this question opens a window into a non-Eurocentric universalism of the kind Samir Amin envisioned when he first wrote Eurocentrism.

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS University of London. Focusing on West Africa and the Sahara, his research examines how the contemporary illegalisation of migration interacts with the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, uneven development processes, and conflict and displacement dynamics. His recent book, After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania (2024), is published by Bloomsbury and available via Open Access here or in print with a 35% discount (use the code ABE35 by 24th October) here.

Home and researching home from near and far

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By Nyi Nyi Kyaw.

My self and my work

I am from Myanmar and most of my academic work on identity, displacement, migration, mobility and immobility focuses on this country. Having been (self-)exiled and displaced for a number of years I have had the opportunity to think about and research home from near and far, and yet I have to admit that it is taking an increasingly heavy toll on my thinking head and feeling heart.

Since the 2021 military coup in Myanmar I have had the privilege of teaching, mentoring and informally advising several Myanmar students, researchers and academics. We talk all the time and even text about Myanmar – our home. We miss it. But we have to or choose to research home, which has become the bane of our existence and work.

My academic work before the coup was privileged in the sense that I could always go back to Myanmar and research home at home, in addition to visiting family and friends. Now I can’t. These days I tell myself and others that I am both homesick and fieldsick. By homesick, I mean I miss home like any other person from Myanmar who is now (self-)exiled and cannot go back there for any reason. By fieldsick, I mean I miss my field because I can’t go home, visit places, meet people, and talk to people for research.

Myanmar, viewed from Thailand at the Mae Sai-Tachileik land border crossing, December 2023 (image: author’s own)

Where is home?

Where is home for scholars of displacement who are themselves displaced or (self-)exiled? For me, home is Myanmar. In recent years I have been fortunate enough to see it from across the border a few times, and yet I have still felt that home is far away. I have always returned from the border relieved that home would go on with or without me, but dismayed at the prospect that it would be different, most likely worse, when I am finally able to return. When home is fine, I can deal with homesickness. But my home bleeds, burns and suffers – it is being destroyed through tyranny, crisis and displacement. Then I feel the double blow of homesickness and pain for my country.

As an academic I sometimes have the feeling that I can keep in touch with home through reading, discussing and writing about it. But is this really home? Or am I encountering a virtual version of it? But must home be a physical entity? Or could it be an idea or a feeling? I still can’t find satisfactory answers to any of these questions.

Multiple homes in multiple locations at multiple times

In the past four years I have been based in Germany, Thailand and, most recently, the UK. I have encountered multiple homes or multiple Myanmars in all these places, depending on the time and circumstances. Very early on, just a few months after the coup, I arrived in Germany with memories of disturbing events and scenes from home. But the situation in Myanmar was not as bad as it is now, and the Spring Revolution was not yet in full swing. I had high hopes for a good future for all of us, and yet, as a political scientist, I was deeply concerned about what would or could happen next. In Germany, I was largely out of touch with my political folks, most of whom were still in Myanmar but about to flee to neighbouring countries, especially Thailand. Home felt so far away for me.  

But after I moved to Thailand in late 2022, the resistance was getting stronger and the displacement and humanitarian crisis was already worsening. Thailand is physically very close to Myanmar. I reconnected virtually and face-to-face with old friends and acquaintances in the political world and made new ones. I met all kinds of displaced people. Home felt closer, and we talked and texted about home all the time. I became part of the world of Signal, which became arguably the most popular channel of communication among people of, from and still in Myanmar. Also, I could sometimes see home from across the border.

Recently I moved to the UK and home feels very remote again. But this time I have brought many fresh memories, good, bad and mixed, and home does not seem as far away as it did when I was in Germany. So does this mean that home is indeed a feeling, a memory or an idea?

Researching home or homes

How do I research home now? How can I do it differently? Admittedly, losing access to Myanmar means that I have lost the privilege of doing research at home, with significant implications for topic selection, generalizability and multi-sited fieldwork and ethnography. But I am still digitally connected to people inside and outside the country, though I have to be extremely careful about what I tell and ask people inside, respecting their safety first and foremost, and also their privacy.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Over the past few years, I have been working on various types of displacement and forcibly displaced people in and from Myanmar. While one field site has closed, others have remained and new ones opened. Myanmar refugees, asylum seekers and migrants of all sorts, alongside the more established diaspora, are now dispersed across Southeast and South Asia and further afield. And many of my key informants, who are also my political people, have relocated outside of Myanmar. I also have new informants that I met after the coup. They are no less enlightening. I can move from place to place, meeting and talking to all kinds of people, displaced, exiled or self-exiled, about our homeland and our new homes or temporary shelters.

If home is made up of ideas, feelings, memories and people then it is everywhere. And for now, at least, I must be content with a home of this kind.

Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a Marie Curie Fellow in the School of Politics, Sociology and International Studies at the University of Bristol. His Marie Curie project examines the nexus between conflict, displacement and (im)mobilities with a focus on Myanmar since 2010. He previously held the position of Research Chair on Forced Displacement in Southeast Asia at Chiang Mai University. You can read his recent article about young people under Myanmar’s military rule in The Conversation here.

The nation and its others

Posted on by Emily

By Bridget Anderson.

Hostility to migration and claims about the negative changes that it brings are increasingly being mobilised to fan racism. At the same time, some of the most prominent anti-migration advocates are themselves people of colour. How can we understand the current relationship between the politics of race and the politics of migration?

While hostility towards migrants is growing across all regions of the world, each country has its specificities. In recent years in the UK, the prevention of Channel crossings by people in ‘small boats’ has become a stated political priority of both the Conservative and Labour parties, and the failure to carry this out, together with rising immigration more generally, is regarded as a source of ‘legitimate grievance’.

This was the reason given for last summer’s riots in England – the motivation was thus labelled as ‘legitimate’ even if the violence was condemned. There were arson attempts on hotels where asylum seekers are housed, and immigration advisers were also targeted. However, those singled out were not only asylum seekers; mosques and shops were also attacked. What mattered were not passports and immigration status but the colour of people’s skin: rioters blocking streets allowed ‘whites’ to pass, but not ‘non-whites’. For the rioters, ethnic minority citizens are ‘migrants’ and, regardless of rights or legal status, they simply do not belong.

In migration studies, there is increasing interest in ‘migrantisation’: the legal, social and political processes that turn people into migrants. While this is a rather clumsy and intellectual sounding term, this is precisely what rioters were doing. Giving themselves the authority to decide who were and who were not rightfully present, they ‘migrantised’ British citizens. Crucially, what mattered was not the legal status of citizenship but whether one belonged to ‘the people’, and more particularly the national people (no more a naturally occurring phenomenon of course than ‘migration’).

For migration policy and politics, nationalism and nationality have long been key mechanisms for navigating the treacherous waters that distinguish hostility to immigration from racism. While there is general agreement that racism is a bad thing, nationalism is treated as a far more nuanced phenomenon. Thus, while it is key to the legitimacy of immigration controls that they are not seen as openly racist, they are unabashedly a performance of nationalism. To discriminate or differentiate on the grounds of nationality is ostensibly quite different than to differentiate on the grounds of race.

What is being leveraged here is the ambiguity of nationality. Nationality can mean citizenship in the sense of a legal relation to a state, but nationality can also mean belonging to the nation in the sense of a particular national people. It is possible to be a national in the sense of having citizenship and yet not be regarded as a bona fide member of the nation. To belong to a nation is to make a claim to a history and to (cultural) values, which is why when white people intervened to stop the violence of rioters, they were taunted with the chant: ‘You’re not English anymore’. How one gets to become a part of the nation is, unlike citizenship, not subject to a set of procedures. The mechanism to make such claims is strongly imagined as through ancestry and cultural characteristics, both of which are also imagined as constituents of race.

‘The people’ calls on the class as well as the racialisation of the nation. Indeed, the justification of immigration restrictions lies in part on the representation of the migrant as the competitor with the national working class for privileges of membership. The terminology associated with migration exposes the class dimension of whiteness, which is not a singular identity: the visible whiteness of the ‘Eastern European migrant’ and of the ‘white working class’ both contrast with the invisible whiteness of the white middle class. In contemporary Britain, ‘migrants’ are not imagined as the well-to-do: the movement or presence of wealthy people is not considered a problem; ergo, they are not migrants.

This association between migration, class and race does not come about because the person in the street doesn’t understand who migrants ‘really’ are. Assumptions about migration do not float free of immigration and citizenship policies. It is rather the other way around: that everyday assumptions about who a migrant is make visible the underlying logic of these policies. Immigration controls are aimed at the negatively racialised global poor. A combination of skills, wealth and nationality determines how free a person is to cross international borders. To understand how anti-migration sentiment is being politically mobilised, it is necessary to appreciate the blurred boundaries between race and nation and between race and class and how this blurriness is drawn on in particular circumstances.

Crucially, we do well to remember that while the legal status of citizenship often offers very material advantages, there are exclusions within citizenship as well as from citizenship. Even in wealthy European and North American countries, neither citizenship (as a legal status), nor whiteness, nor the ‘right’ to work, nor even access to the welfare state fully protect people from domination, precarity and exploitation. Indeed, the welfare state itself can force citizens to move within country, that is, can ‘migrantise’ citizens. Finding similarities, parallels and connections and shared interests across differences is necessary to respond to the deeply embedded and highly affective tropes that are powerfully at work in our politics.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol at the University of Bristol. She is the editor of Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (2025), available in paperback (use the code CNF25 for a 50% discount) or via open access here.

This post was originally published by Transforming Society, the Bristol University Press blog, on 3rd March 2025.