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Description:

Border scholars and activists have increasingly highlighted connections between sites of border fortification across the world (Jones, 2012; Brown, 2011; Fitzgerald, 2019), arguing that similar rationales and practices of border fortification travel between different locations (Kahn, 2016).

In recent decades, the Mediterranean sea and the US southern border have emerged as some of the most dynamic, busy, contested and violent borderlands in the world (Rajaram & Grundy-Warr, 2007) - emblematic of the global shift towards securitization (Alvarez et al, 2019). As crucial ‘hinges’ between the Global North and South, where thousands of migrants face life and death situations in order to reach the US and the EU, they play a key role in the geopolitics of global migration. Geographically distant and historically distinct, these spaces are nonetheless interconnected, and are being increasingly transformed into “treacherous geographies” produced by liberal violence and techniques of control and immobilization. Thus, we argue that it is necessary to analyze these spaces in an interconnected and conjoined manner, and - by so doing - shed light on global processes of bordering.

Existing academic and journalistic writing on the global border regime (Jones, 2012; Brown, 2011; Fitzgerald, 2019) has adopted a “birds eye view” of borders. This means that we know less about grounded experiences in both of these borders, as well as practices of solidarity and interconnection between activists located at these different sites. In addition, at the macro level, we know little about how practices of border fortification travel.

This session aims to be a laboratory of discussions about comparative and interconnected processes of border fortification between the Mediterranean and the US Southern Border (US / Mexico border and Caribbean).

Non-Presenting Participants