Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move

"The final book is called Violent Borders (2016) , by Reece Jones. This book looks at border policies all over the world, and in places that I haven’t myself reported from, such as the Mexican border with the US. It’s also a history of the border and it makes a powerful case for how borders are essentially a construct, something that we’ve invented only fairly recently in human history, and it shows how it is a deeply problematic construct. Personally, I try not to get too involved in the debate about open borders or the philosophical discussions about nation states and so on, but I think it is very useful to read a book like Violent Borders because it makes us rethink our understanding of how the world and how different countries all fit together. He reminds us that our configuration of the global order is only a recent one and one that isn’t particularly perfect. At its heart, it’s an analysis of what a border between two countries is, but it also says how borders haven’t always been as fixed as they are now, and haven’t always been as militarised as they are now. In previous centuries and eras, we’ve had different conceptions of the role of the state. We haven’t always had the same ideas about property or sovereignty. In the process, he provides an alternative history of human movement, and he connects the dots between many of the world’s different migration crises. He basically presents it as a crisis of the world order. The way we have configured nation states in the 21st century is unfair, and, moreover, has created many of the problems that surround migration at the moment. Intellectually, it is a very important book that provides a different vision of where we are today. I recommend it to anyone that is interested in refugees or in migration or in the role of the state. You tell me! I can talk about how I felt walking with refugees as they crossed borders, which I did a few times. The way that I see it is that, for many refugees, walking across Europe or walking across different borders is a bit like a miner in the 19th century who is only able to see the little bits of the mineshaft on which his head torch shines. It is like being in a pitch dark room and you’re only got a torch to see with and you can only see the little bit of the wall that the torch is shining on, at that particular moment. If people are walking across the Serbian-Hungarian border, they are reliant on little snatches of internet they have from Wi-Fi hotspots in cafes, in hotels, and that comes and goes. From the little snatches of internet, maybe people get messages about the best way to go or they can check the Facebook group which has directions about the best routes to take. The mental picture that they have of their route is very different to that of a local or someone who’s lived in Europe all their lives because they’re coming to Europe for the first time. They don’t really understand how the continent fits together. It’s like a short-sighted person walking without their glasses. Nothing is in focus and everything seems a little bit confusing. In our minds, the border is a big deal: it is the division between two countries or two cultures. But when you get down to it, and you actually cross a border, you realise that it’s just a little stretch of land that doesn’t have any demarcations on it. It doesn’t tell you when you’ve moved from one place to the next. As a result, it feels quite underwhelming. It makes you question whether these borders that we build up in our minds are really as significant as some of us make out. The only way you know you’ve crossed the border is by looking at the GPS and you see that the little blue dot that marks where you are has moved from one side of the little black line to the other. But when you are in the real world, that black line isn’t marked on the ground, and there is little difference between the field that is supposedly in one country and the field that is supposedly in another country. I’m sure you remember the walk between Serbia and Croatia, that there is little difference between the farmland in Serbia and the farmland in Croatia. When did you cross? Exactly. So I don’t know how you remember it, but I remember walking with a group of people in June, and I was struck by how there was no physical gap between the two countries. There was just a single continuous space. The other, final point I want to make is that in the context of different countries being hard distinguish from each other, where everything is very confusing because you only have limited access to the internet, and where you’re having to take all sorts of information from lots of different sources—from smugglers, from people that have passed by this way in previous weeks—that it can be very frightening. I remember on this walk with people from Serbia to Hungary last June, with every person they passed they wondered if that person was going to report them to the police. There was an elderly couple up on a ridge next to where we were walking, and the people I was walking with wondered if they were bandits who were going to attack them. Instead, they were just a couple walking their dog. A place that, to me, looked like a nice clearing in the woods was in fact a place where, on a previous attempt, some Serbian policemen had solicited bribes from one of the Syrian men that I was walking with. So as well as things being very confusing and indiscernible, they’re also much more frightening than they would be for someone that understands fully the context they’re in. When I’ve gone back to places where I previously walked with refugees across the border, it struck me that you can feel much more confident and much more at ease when you’re in these spaces as a normal citizen — rather than as a refugee whose life depends on this journey through unknown lands. Yes, because you don’t know what it all means, what you can and cannot do, who the people that you are meeting are. My book does two things. First, it is a story of one refugee’s journey from Syria to Europe. He’s a Syrian civil servant called Hashem and his journey is told every other chapter. It provides, hopefully, a human thread that holds the book together. The chapters in between deal with different thematic or geographic aspects of the refugee situation. So there’s a chapter about smuggling, there’s a chapter about the sea journey, there’s a chapter about the desert journey, there’s a chapter about the route through the Balkans. In the process, I hope that it provides not just a gripping personal story that helps people relate to all these people on the move, but also a 360 degree picture of almost every aspect of the refugee crisis in 2016. I hope that people come away from it with a comprehensive account of why people are on the move, how they are moving, who is helping them to do that movement, and, to so some extent, what happens to them once they arrive. I hope that it contains a little bit of all the books that I’ve mentioned in this list: I hope it has something of the personal narrative in Gulwali Passarlay’s book, something of the investigative journalism that is in Jeremy Harding’s book, and, hopefully, something of the storytelling that is in Ian Serraillier’s book, and of the context and analysis that you get in Reece Jones’s book."