Europe's peripheral and racial (b)orders workshop summary (SEI)

In May Dr Aleks Lewicki and Katy Budge of the Sussex European Institute hosted a two-day workshop, bringing together prominent scholars and postgraduate / early career researchers from a range of countries and disciplines to explore ‘Europe’s peripheral and racial borders’. A month later, the salience of our conversations has (once again) been confirmed, as on 8 June the European Council agreed proposals to further restrict the right to asylum and facilitate mass deportation. The following week, a shipwreck in the Mediterranean exposed the violent reality of the European Union’s border policies and practices, as up to 600 people drowned in the Mediterranean under the watch of Frontex and the Hellenic Coast Guard. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Government continues its ‘STOP THE BOATS’ campaign, including by pursuing proposals to detain people crossing the channel in redundant ships and barges, and to implement systematic, mass deportations to Rwanda. As explored throughout the contributions to the workshop, these disturbing developments constitute a particularly visible, but in no way new, manifestation of the persistent and pervasive racial violence of Europe’s borders.

The event began with an expert panel in which we heard from Professor Sabine Hess, Dr Arshad Isakjee and Dr Josh Bowsher. First, Sabine Hess shared her findings from a recent field trip to the Eastern EU border zone of Poland and Belarus, drawing on critical race theory and postcolonial interventions to examine and explain the normalisation of violence and human rights violations at the border. Next, Josh Bowsher reflected on data activist responses to the deadly violence of the EU’s Mediterranean Sea border, inviting us to engage critically with their epistemic possibilities, tensions and limits. Finally, Arshad Isakjee shared insights from his long-term ethnographic research among people on the move in the Balkans, revealing the material struggles of individuals navigating Fortress Europe’s borders and/or asylum systems.

The panel was followed by the first of three ‘work in progress’ sessions, in which postgraduate / early career scholars had the opportunity to share and discuss the themes emerging from their research. In a stimulating, friendly and supportive environment, we exchanged ideas, shared experiences, and explored connections. In the first session, a series of ethnographic contributions drew attention to the insidious nature of the border and the ‘everyday bordering’ that people on the move are subjected to, from the Sicilian ‘migrant reception’ centre to the Belgian classroom. Despite a late night for some (!), the following day began with energetic analyses of the coloniality and racialised logics of the ‘symbolic’ boundaries constructed by notions of ‘British soft power’, and Europe as a cosmopolitan ‘community of value’. And finally, we engaged with the coercion, abandonment and harm enacted at, and through, the material borders of Europe, hearing interventions on the UK’s criminalisation of people crossing the Channel in ‘small boats’, and the broad implications of the EU’s approach to ‘migration management’, from Senegal to Greece.

What connected our interventions was a confrontation with the material and epistemic violence of Europe’s peripheral and racial borders, and the logics of coloniality that underpin them. And our discussions also demanded reflection on how our research operates within, and risks complicity with, such dynamics. In particular, we acknowledged how purportedly critical research can sometimes function to reinscribe racial othering and ordering, thus reifying, rather than resisting, the exclusionary implications of the border. Rather than seeking a straightforward or reassuring solution to that dilemma, our conversations instead pointed to the need for continuous reflexivity and humility, and the critical and creative potential of co-created research and epistemic collaboration. Undertaking critical research in the neoliberal universities of the Global North can be an isolating and exhausting experience for postgraduate and early career researchers, particularly so for those who are subject to the institutional violence - both explicit and insidious - of the academy. But by coming together in a space intended to challenge, rather than reproduce, academia’s competitive and hierarchical dynamics, we were able to enjoy a moment of respite and to support each other in our critical endeavours. With a number of collaborative projects emerging from the workshop already underway, the hope is that we all left with some energy and inspiration in our continued efforts to discern, and disrupt, Europe’s peripheral and racial (b)orders.

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