Davies, Thom, Isakjee, Arshad and Obradovic-Wochnik, Jelena (2024). The Politics of Injury:Debilitation and the Right to Maim at the EU Border. Geopolitics ,
Abstract
Borders are sites of mass injury. This article questions the necro-consensus that has emerged within migration studies, and explores the political role that less-than-deadly violence plays at contemporary borders. By withholding from outright killing, and thus avoiding the optics of public scrutiny, EU states are deploying a carefully calibrated politics of injury designed to control racialised groups through debilitation. The injuries produced through this border regime—typified by illegal ‘pushbacks’ and deplorable camp conditions—exist beneath a threshold of liberal acceptability. In short, EU states routinely deny the right to asylum by imposing the ‘right to maim’ (Puar 2017). This article draws upon long-term research along the ‘Balkan Route’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, including interviews with medics, activists, EU officials, and people on the move, as well as analysis of a large border violence database. We argue that mass injury has become a politically tolerated form of violence that perversely provides the EU with the illusory conceit of humanitarian “care”. In dialogue with postcolonial scholarship that has questioned the centrality of death within biopolitics, we assert the importance of interrogating not only the necropolitical logics of migration policy (i.e death), but also the politics of non-lethal violence: the strategic and attenuated delivery of injury, maiming, and incapacitation that shapes contemporary borders. Contributing to geographies of violence and critical border studies, we suggest that greater attention is needed towards less-than-deadly harms that underpin contemporary political geographies.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2339894 |
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Divisions: | College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Politics, History and International Relations College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Aston Centre for Europe College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities Aston University (General) |
Funding Information: | We are grateful to No Name Kitchen for their close collaboration and we thank our anonymous informants for sharing their time, expertise, and testimonies. We thank the participants of the \u2018Safe Haven\u2019 workshops at the University of Bern for help |
Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Political Science and International Relations,Geography, Planning and Development,Geography, Planning and Development,Political Science and International Relations |
Publication ISSN: | 1557-3028 |
Last Modified: | 02 Dec 2024 09:05 |
Date Deposited: | 02 May 2024 16:13 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK
(Scopus URL) https://www.tan ... 45.2024.2339894 (Publisher URL) |
PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2024-04-12 |
Published Online Date: | 2024-04-12 |
Accepted Date: | 2024-04-01 |
Authors: |
Davies, Thom
Isakjee, Arshad Obradovic-Wochnik, Jelena ( 0000-0003-0850-2737) |