James Kirkup and Robert Winnett, “Theresa May Interview: ‘We’re Going to Give Illegal Migrants a Really Hostile Reception,’” Telegraph, May 25, 2012, ➝.
The specific rule that was brought to court is the so-called “right to rent” scheme, which forces landlords to carry out immigration checks on potential tenants. Despite this ruling, the UK Home Office has recently won an appeal for upholding the rule. See: Amelia Gentleman, “Right to rent rule ‘justified’ finds UK appeal court,” The Guardian, April 21, 2020, ➝.
Couze Venn, “How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility,” openDemocracy, February 11, 2019, ➝.
See the list of migrant deaths at the European borders established by UNITED for Intercultural Action: ➝.
Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the US–Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002), 144. Forensic Oceanography’s work can be accessed here: ➝.
Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tanja E. Alberts, “Sovereignty at Sea: The Law and Politics of Saving Lives in the Mare Liberum,” DIIS Working Paper (2010): 1–31.
Ruben Andersson, “A Game of Risk: Boat Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe,” Anthropology Today 28, no. 6 (December 2012): 7–11.
Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso, 2014), 14.
As explicitly stated in a document produced by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, cutting back rescue operations “could become a deterrence for facilitation networks and migrants … taking into account that the boat must now navigate for several days before being rescued or intercepted.” See our 2016 report “Death by Rescue”: ➝.
We expand on this notion in Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, “Liquid Violence: Migrant Deaths at Sea and the Responsibility of European States,” in Transit: Art, Mobility and Migration in the Age of Globalisation, ed. Sabine Dahl Nielsen (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2019).
On this, see: Jason De Leon, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015); Geoffrey A Boyce, “The Rugged Border: Surveillance, Policing and the Dynamic Materiality of the US/Mexico Frontier,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 2 (April 2016): 245–262; Geoffrey Alan Boyce, Samuel N. Chambers, and Sarah Launius, “Bodily Inertia and the Weaponization of the Sonoran Desert in US Boundary Enforcement: A GIS Modeling of Migration Routes through Arizona’s Altar Valley,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 7, no. 1 (March 2019): 23–35; Tara Plath, An Elusive Viewshed: An Investigation of United States’ Border Patrol Rescue Beacons in Arizona’s Western Desert (PLOT(S), forthcoming).
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): 318–336.
Duncan Depledge, “Geopolitical Material: Assemblages of Geopower and the Constitution of the Geopolitical Stage,” Political Geography Political Geography 45, no. 2 (2015): 91–92.
See in this series: Ifor Duncan and Stefanos Levidis, “Weaponizing a River,” e-flux Architecture, April 2020, ➝, and Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, “An Ultraviole(n)t Border,” e-flux Architecture, April 2020, ➝. See also: Hanna Rullman, “Fort Vert: Nature Conservation as Border Regime in Calais,” Statewatch, February 2020, ➝.
Steve Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
James Morrissey, “Environmental Change and Forced Migration: A State of the Art Review” (Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, January 2009).
Marco Armiero and Richard Tucker, eds., Environmental History of Modern Migrations, 1 edition (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017). See also: Giovanni Bettini, “Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A Critique of Apocalyptic Narratives on ‘Climate Refugees,’” Geoforum 45 (March 2013): 63–72.
Nigel Clark, “Strangers on a Strange Planet: On Hospitality and Holocene Climate Change,” in Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration, Critique, ed. Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini (London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 131–150.
Works that go in this direction extend, in the UK context, from the writing and organizing of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who coined the well-known dictum: “We are here because you were there,” to Nadine El-Enany’s recent work, which recasts British immigration law as an instrument to cordon off the spoils of empire and prevent racialized people from accessing colonially derived wealth. Nadine El-Enany, (B)Ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19. Thanks to Nishat Awan for pointing me to this formulation.
Farshad Araghi, “Accumulation by Displacement: Global Enclosures, Food Crisis, and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32, no. 1 (2009): 113–146. I would like to thank Silvia Franceschini for pointing me to this text.
A slightly edited version of this text appears in the “Atlas of Critical Habitats” guide that I have edited with Tara Plath and that was designed by Tom Joyes and Hanna Rullman in the context of the exhibition “Hostile Environment’(s), commissioned by ar/ge kunst, Bozen/Bolzano and co-produced with Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Hasselt.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 20–23.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 22–23.
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 191.
See “The Hostile Environment: Turning the UK into a Nation of Border Cops,” Corporate Watch, April 8, 2017, ➝.
Darren Ellis, Ian Tucker, and David Harper, “The Affective Atmospheres of Surveillance,” Theory and Psychology 23, no. 6 (December 2013): 716–731; Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
The already mentioned strategy of Integrated Border Management also goes in this direction.
Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Malden: Polity Press, 2017), 36–37.
Paraphrased from: Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, 38.
Angela Naomi Paik, “Abolitionist Futures and the US Sanctuary Movement,” Race & Class 59, no. 2 (October 2017): 3–25, 17.
A. Naomi Paik, Jason Ruiz, and Rebecca M. Schreiber, “Sanctuary’s Radical Networks,” Radical History Review 2019, no. 135 (1 October 2019): 1–13, 3.
See: “On the Concept of Pirate Care,” ➝.
Joseph Nevins, “The Right to the World,” Antipode 49, no. 5 (November 2017): 1349–1367.
María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 62.
As Heather Davis beautifully writes: “We are radically open, inherently constituted by the molecular outside. We breathe in each other’s air, and despite air conditioning and all the attenuating accoutrements of the wealthy, there is no way to shield against our collective molecular becoming. This radical openness to the outside is both what links us to the world and what threatens us.” Heather Davis, “Molecular Intimacy,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James Graham (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), 205–211.
Malini Ranganathan, “The Environment as Freedom: A Decolonial Reimagining,” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, June 13, 2017, ➝.
Parts of this article appeared in an essay co-authored with Charles Heller and published in: Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley, eds., Ways of Knowing Cities (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019). Research toward this publication was supported by the British Academy Small Grant and conducted with the assistance of Lodovica Guarnieri. This research was the basis of an exhibition that took place at ar/ge kunst, Bolzano (November 21, 2019–February 8, 2020), and was co-produced by Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt. I would like to thank in particular the students and colleagues at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture, in dialogue with whom many of the ideas informing this piece have taken shape.
At The Border is a collaboration between A/D/O and e-flux Architecture within the context of its 2019/2020 Research Program.