Evento

What is a border or a frontier? Borderlands act as a magnifying lens for the world's securityproblems (Idler, 2019). In a world where environmental security has become one of the most pressing challenges, conservation spaces such as protected areas have become new borderlands and new sites of violence and criminalization. When conservation and national border securities are mixed, new types of violence arise, rendering these conservation sites test beds of governance. Kaziranga National Park, that is located in the borderland state of Assam, in northeast India, is renowned for its successful conservation of the one-horned rhino. This is a protected species that has become the state's national symbol in the last decades. This 'success' emerges amid criticisms of its violent anti-poaching conservation measures and efforts to safeguard rhinos "at any cost." Using the Kaziranga National Park as an example, this piece examines how conservation sites are becoming extensions of borderland spaces, generating the same dynamics of violence, eviction, migration, and dispossession of national borders. Furthermore, they are becoming highly secure zones, with national paramilitary forces dispatched to control people and borders under the guise of environmental protection. Two conclusions are drawn from the study. The first examines how violence in conservation changed from hard to soft forms supporting the structural violent process of nation formation in Assam, framing the new soft violent measures as 'counterinsurgency practices'. The second looks at the new solidarity movements and resistance that are developing in this highly securitized and contested space, as part of a larger movement against violent neoliberal practices, bringing out new imaginative local spaces and narratives founded on social and environmental justice. The designation of Kaziranga as a borderland space enables to shift the focus from land borders to land control, and from nation-state borders to land resource borders. This research is based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork and on qualitative analysis of semi structured interviews carried on with local and indigenous communities, state government representatives and non-governmental organisations. Keyword: violence; protected areas; India; borderland; conservation.

Keywords: migration, borders, everyday life, South / Abstract: In recent years, the South Italian city of Palermo (Sicily) has proposed itself as a safe harbour for migrants, often in opposition to national and international politics of control and repression. From the ground of the city’s historical centre, after nine months of intense participant observation, volunteering and activism, my presentation will explore how the narrative of solidarity has shaped physical spaces, society and economies of this part of the city, observing how these transformations are both reproducing and challenging migration politics and racial hierarchies. My ethnographic study is informed by a critical reading of migration, border politics and racial capitalism and by a postcolonial approach to European history. It aligns with authors who denounce the unresolved colonial racism subtending the long-standing framing of migrants as disposable and deportable subjects (De Genova, 2010; Bhambra, 2016; Dadusc, 2019; Tazzioli, 2020), and who expose how Western understanding of belonging has been historically built and reinforced through the construction and repression of the racialized other (McKittrik, 2011; Kobayashi, 2013; Hawthorne, 2021). From 2015 onwards emergency discourses have grown drastically in Europe, giving rise to generalized right-wing nationalist responses, as well as moral panic throughout the self- proclaimed liberal, post-colonial and post-racial Europe (Isakjee et al., 2020). Reactions of fear and closure have also been fomented by the aftermaths of the economic crisis of 2008 and the regime of austerity (Bhambra, 2016). Public depictions of migrants hardly escape the dichotomy of them being either passive victims or subversive subjects, wanting more than basic provisional needs, accorded out of compassion (Dadusc, 2019). The interplay between economies of control and solidarity actions produces yet another dichotomy, that between the good white and the bad white, glossing over underpinning hierarchies. Drawing on observations from refugee camps in Calais (France) and Ventimiglia (Italy), authors like De Genova and Roy (2020), Isakjee et al. (2020), Tazzioli (2020) and Dadusc and Mudu (2020) have denounced the disposability of human life at the borders, where migrants are subjected to ‘legal’ practices, such as the preclusion of safe passages, the hostilization of the borders’ environment (e.g. through the banning of food distribution or water supply), the deployment of ractices of dispersal, enacted both to make migrants’ presence less visible, and especially to cut whatever form of self-organization and political voice, with all these practices often blamed on the migrant’s own making. Within this context, Italy represents a most important external border for Europe, making this country a preferential context for investigating the politics and counter-politics of migration. Furthermore, Italy’s “precarious whiteness” (Hawthorne, 2021:173), the country’s historical struggle to racially belong to a modern, whiteness-bound Europe, makes it a powerful in- between context from where to understand the power and limits of race in shaping peoples’ lives, from institutions and political discourse to everyday life and human interactions. This is particularly relevant in Sicily, historically described as a disadvantaged part of Italy, one of many ‘othered’ souths within Western borders produced by Eurocentrism (Giglioli, 2017). In recent years, Palermo, Sicily’s main city, has proposed itself as an exception to aggressive responses to immigration. International press has described the city as ‘a crossroad’ (Bradley, 2018), a ‘heaven for refugees’ (Kirchgaessner, 2015), where ‘tout le monde est palermitain’ (Chabas, 2018). My study aligns with those authors(Hall, 2021; Lafazani, 2021) who investigate how bordering practices exceed the ‘extra-ordinary’ geography of the borders to infiltrate everyday life in the city. It sees urban space as a preferential site for exploring how national and international bordering practices – and migrants’ lives accordingly - are embedded within other global/local processes, such as economic crises and restructuring, governance changes, politics of urban regeneration; how they embed within specific histories and geographies; how they are reproduced and/or challenged through everyday human encounters, going beyond simplified dichotomies and towards a more layered understanding of the encounter with the ’other’. My presentation will explore how the narrative of ‘hospitality’ has shaped Palermo’s historical city-centre - in terms of economies, services, research culture, aesthetic – creating a micro- community of students, social workers/practitioners, activists, volunteers (both locals or coming from other Italian regions or from abroad) working with migration-related realities and connected to global networks of solidarity, but also of new inhabitants simply attracted by an image of the city grounded on perceived diversity and coexistence of contrasts. The presentation will touch upon two main reflections. First, focusing on the role that migration-related activities have come to play within the city’s driving economies (tourism and the third sector), I will offer a critical and nuanced reading of the narrative of hospitality and its above mentioned consequences, seeing them not only as a form of resistance to the racialized border regime, but as a part of it, tightly interrelated, existing because of the latter. Also, I will argue that the urban transformations related to the hospitality narrative are not just a political stance, but are embedded within a broader process of social/economic/political/cultural change and reaffirmation of the city on the national and international scene, started in the late ‘80s. Second, I will argue that the hyper-visibility of the safe harbour narrative and of successful forms of solidarity, intersected with a sort of normalized southern lifestyle - based on diffused informality, scarce infrastructure and a huge reliance on networks to get things done - which is perceived to affect everyone indiscriminately, flattens how borders related to the migrant status manifest violently daily, through slow and complex bureaucracy, heightened difficulties in meeting basic needs such as housing and jobs, restricted options, lack of information and direction and everyday racism, with heightened problematics when all of this intersects gender/age/mental health. At the same time I will look into how the coming together of a supportive community and the existence of a close-knit network of places of solidarity create a fertile ground for counter-politics, through everyday encounters, clashes and negotiations.

Keywords: frontier assemblage; weapons; spirituality; community; Myanmar. / Abstract In recent years assemblage thinking has been deployed by political geographers as a conceptual tool to approach and analyse frontiers. against this scholarly background, and contributing to recent calls for expanding the study of the militarisation of borderlands through more-than-human conceptual sensibilities, this article addresses weapons and armed collectives as a quintessential frontier thing and assemblages. The paper thus explores how the relations between humans and the gun are managed, and how different spatialisations of power/rule are articulated via the management of such entanglements. As managing violence – i.e. managing weapon-human relations specifically here – is understood as a political field/capital to uphold a specific idea and praxis of political community and subjectivity, the paper investigates processes of political counter-spatialisation in borderlands and frontiers at the margins of state authority. It does so from a bottom-up perspective and one that operates through the concept of frontier assemblages, understood as the ensemble of forces – “intertwined materialities, actors, cultural logics, spatial dynamics, ecologies, and political economic processes” – that reproduce frontiers. Conceptually speaking I work through Roberto Esposito’s politico-philosophical analysis of contemporary forms of rule and the co-constitutive relationships between violence and political community. I argue that spirituality, practiced in particular through sacrifice, is harnessed to regulate the encounters between humans and the gun as a technical object in which a certain modality of making violence is materially codified. While the weapon produces its own contribution by constantly materialising a certain modality of doing violence, the different ways in which sacrifice is embodied/performed in order to manage such violence (codified in the weapon) contribute to shape political subjectivities and communities with their political spaces. I articulate this argument along the following lines. First, I emphasize the role of (semi-automatic) weapons in the making of frontiers and in the processes of territorialisation and counter-territorialisation of frontiers, specifically highlighting how in/through such weapons a certain manner of doing and spatialising violence is codified, made material and real. Second, I posit that, by regulating the encounters of humans with the gun, different actors – such as single political activists, rebel movements,and other militant organisations – perform a certain form of spirituality. In doing so, they work to constitute, embody, or take distance from a political vision of community across the borderlands, one that shares a certain modality of regulating violence and that produces counter-spatialisations of the borderlands. The paper contributes to the literature in two main ways. First, it contributes to fill a major gap in the political geographical literature on frontiers concerning the study of the relations between weapons and processes of frontierisation and territorialisation. While the two are understood as strictly interrelated, overall weapons, armed groups, military and security means have been mostly dealt with as “pre-given” instruments/assets deployed by human actors and agency to turn frontiers into secure and legible spaces in a context of high political (and often armed) contestation to processes of frontierisation and territorialisation. Second, the article not only highlights the role of weapons and their linkages with the production of space in the borderlands, but it also highlights how certain constructions of the “human” are worked through by managing weapon-human entanglements. In other words, the article illuminates how the materiality of weapons constantly requires to be managed, and how via the management of weapons and violence a certain understanding of the “human” i reproduced. Third, by linking up these more-than-human approaches with the work of Roberto Esposito, the article also shows how weapon-human assemblages work to create, maintain, and/or contest and dismantle a particular conception of the human and a particular conception of the vital space of this “human” underpinning political communities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork methods, I take as an entry point for such analysis the attempted colonisation of the Myanmar borderlands by military-state regimes. In this sense, traversed as it has been by more than 7 decades of armed conflict, Myanmar represents an extremely illustrative case study to explore the nexuses between weapons, power and socio- spatial relations in frontiers. The military-state in Myanmar has long been attempting a frontierisation-cum-territorialisation of the borderlands that in part is embodied through various techniques of modulating violence. One specific set of them I am interested in (and that I have tried to unpack elsewhere (xxxx) has to do with semi-automatic weapons and the development of semi-automatic fire. As this modulation and spatialisation of violence has proceeded though, different forces have been assembled to counter such frontierisation-cum-territorialisation processes: it is towards the study of these that I shift the focus here. In particular, the paper delves into the activities of a self-identified “multi-ethnic humanitarian movement” called Free Burma Rangers (FBR). Active beyond Myanmar, the FBR provides training and support to resistance forces in order to create teams that produce spaces of relief and rescue in war zones. Central to the trainings provided by the FBR is the relationship with the gun as a tool to carve out a “humanitarian” space in conflict: here spirituality as a way to cope with and use violence in a balanced manner is underpinned and inflected by evangelical Christian visions. In this context I find that the spiritual practice of sacrifice is harnessed by the FBR to constitute a trans-borderland political community based on Christian values, inflected in terms of love, forgiveness, and never surrendering, that takes distance from and opposes state governmentality. Rebel movements instead harness the activities of the FBR in order to counter the colonisation of borderlands by military-state authorities. In particular, they create spaces of rescue and relief with a view to preserve population and political territory. In doing so though, they perform another political cosmology/vision of community along the lines of the dominant ethnonational rationality that has long been deployed by state authorities to shape Myanmar as a polity. Lastly, I find that single activists that participate to trainings and team missions related to the FBR and the rebel movements carve out a personal space to take distance from the militarism and violence informing these forms of authority and their political visions of community. They do so by relating to and distancing from the weapons and violence that they encounter.

Keywords: sea border; humanitarianism; activism; solidarity. / Abstract: Between 2019 and 2023 I was on board various civil search and rescue (SAR) vessels in the central Mediterranean, and between 2022 and 2023 I lived for six months on the island of Lampedusa, as part of field research for my PhD thesis in Anthropological Sciences at the University of Turin. Since the early 2000s, the central Mediterranean has clearly become a space of negotiation between the global north and south. Being on board SAR vessels, and adopting a cross-eyed gaze - that is, as a researcher and rescuer at the same time - I have been confronted, on the one hand, with the violence of European migration management and border externalization policies; on the other hand, with the contradictions that run through many non-governmental organizations, which are born in an attempt to challenge such policies but often end up becoming their implementation tool; finally, with the micro practices of resistance that are deployed by individuals, both activists and migrants, in their struggle against a deadly and exclusionary regime. Such 'currents' cross and shape the Mediterranean - far from being an 'empty' space, a natural force with the 'fatal' power to kill - and make it a political arena in which different actors move, outlining trajectories of control, separation, violence, but also creative and often informal forms of solidarity, coexistence, sharing. Specifically, I would like to focus on the forms of solidarity and support for people on the move that, while dealing with rescue at sea, attempt to move away from the rhetoric and emergency practices that generally characterize this context, in order to situate the crossing of the maritime border within a broader framework of migrant struggles, autonomy of migration, and the creation of instruments of resistance. In an attempt to move from 'rescue' to 'support', from assistance to 'empowerment' and facilitation, various individuals, inside and outside institutions and organizations, attempt to build networks of complicity to insert themselves into the cracks of a system they do not recognize or criticize. People who challenge borders and those who support them constantly straddle the line between claiming certain rights that are already, at least formally, recognized - and thus the constant reference to international conventions and appeals for States to respect them, but also the search for strategies of movement within the existing system and legal framework - and the appeal to extra-legal utopian horizons, such as 'freedom of movement'. In this, many subjects seem to remain 'marked' by the border even after crossing it. Once they enter Europe - the horizon of perceived freedom - people are immediately placed in a stringent control system from which they can never leave, paradoxically not even if they are / Jasmine Iozzelli / Jasmine.iozzelli.13@gmail.com / University of Torino / PhD student in Anthropological Sciences repatriated. When they cross the border, bureaucracy, categorizations and technicalities invade their lives in a pervasive way. At the same time, many operators and activists seem to approach the phases following disembarkation with the same emergency modalities that characterize rescues at sea. In this sense, the SAR vessel defines a suspended time between a before and an after in which material conditions, roles, horizons of freedom and imaginaries are transformed in the space of a few hours or a few days. The attempt, in conclusion, will be to investigate how, in the face of the practical and symbolic action of borders on individuals, the ship is constituted as a dense space and how the sharing of struggles opens up spaces of resistance and resemantization.

Key words: Palestine-Israel; checkpoints; colonialism / In this paper I discuss Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem on the Israeli occupied Palestinian West Bank. Over the last two decades, Checkpoint 300 has been developed into a space of ordering, closure and surveillance technologies – a borderland space of colonial violence and also anti-colonial resistance, negotiation, and endurance. Every day, thousands of Palestinians pass through the checkpoint to reach Jerusalem and Israel, mostly for the purposes of work but also for medical appointments, religious reasons, and family events. Conditions inside Checkpoint 300 are crowded with an ever-present threat of violence; it is as a result one of the most photographed sites in the West Bank, and widely reported on in the international press and human rights reports. The research I present here goes ‘beyond the checkpoint’ to consider both the borderlands in the northern part of Bethlehem and wider geographies of labour, security, and technologies. Drawing on seven years’ of fieldwork around Checkpoint 300, three moves are made beyond the checkpoint in this paper. First, taking into account that only Palestinians with a permit may pass through the checkpoint, and that most permit-holders are labourers whose document depends on the status of “married father”, I connect long commutes and hard days at work with gendered and generational effects. The bureaucratic and temporal impositions of the checkpoint bring the border into domestic space, ordering the rhythms and divisions of family life. Second, I discuss the economic and social effects of Checkpoint on the Hebron Road area of Bethlehem, documenting the ways that businesses are affected, how new businesses grow, and the un/making of colonial space in this part of northern Bethlehem. Economic life is simultaneously strangulated yet newly emergent; established hotels and shops suffer reduced custom and/or municipal services while adaptive activities benefit from tax grey zones and the new exigencies of becoming a borderland (taxi services, food vendors, souvenir sellers, etc.). Third, moving across the border, I discuss the checkpoint and borderlands in the context of international geographies of both labour and technologies, or the ways that Checkpoint 300 fits within the global geometries of colonialism and capitalism. The number of permits issued by Israel to West Bank Palestinians rests on the needs of the colonial economy and the presence of other pools of cross-border cheap labour, and the capacities of the checkpoint to control and surveil depend on a global exchange of ideas and hardware that come together to be ‘battleground’ tested on occupied land. The borderlands of Checkpoint 300 can thus be read as expansive, reaching far beyond the crowded corridors and turnstiles that are central to many existing imaginaries of Israeli checkpoint infrastructures. The paper draws on interviews, photography, and videography, and is based on a long-term engagement in the Hebron Road area of Bethlehem and the neighbourhoods surrounding Checkpoint 300. Reaching ‘beyond the checkpoint’, I argue, brings us to the multiple and multi-scalar effects and of Israel’s colonial project in Palestine. It simultaneously shows us the ways that Palestinians adapt, negotiate, and resist the impositions of colonial power – and thus how colonial space always appears in a form of un/making, or never complete in either direction.

Las prácticas de externalización fronteriza que ejerce Estados Unidos sobre México han tenido diferentes fases y etapas. Iniciaron con prácticas de controles fronterizos para contener los flujos migratorios desde una perspectiva de seguridad nacional y una práctica militarizadas (Díaz Carnero, 2021). Posteriormente, siguieron con prácticas de externalización de asilo a la frontera norte de México, ejercidas a través de listas de espera en ciudades mexicanas de solicitantes de asilo en EEUU y con el programa “permanece en México” y los “protocolos de protección al migrante” (MPP por sus siglas en ingles) de 2019 y de 2020 (Díaz Carnero, 2020; París y Díaz, 2020). Inmediatamente después de la cancelación de la segunda implementación de los MPP, a estas prácticas se agregaron las medidas de cierre de fronteras implementadas bajo el argumento sanitario tras la pandemia de covid 19 a través del título 42, que impedía la posibilidad de solicitar asilo en EEUU y expulsaba inmediata a las personas a territorio mexicano. Por último, los recientes acuerdos entre México y Estados Unidos, que formalizan las políticas extraterritoriales de EEUU para expulsar a México poblaciones venezolanas, nicaragüenses, haitianas y cubanas, así como de Guatemala, Honduras y El Salvador. ¿Cómo fue posible que se realizaran estás prácticas?, ¿Cómo fueron los contextos políticos y geopolíticos que permitieron estas prácticas? ¿Qué acuerdos y negociaciones políticas y geopolíticas se realizaron al interior de cada Estado, y entre ellos, para realizar prácticas que van en contra del derecho internacional de refugiados y el derecho internacional de derechos humanos? El objetivo de esta ponencia es responder estas preguntas a partir de las investigaciones realizadas sobre el tema durante los 5 últimos años en Ciudad Juárez, ciudad fronteriza del norte de México. Palabras claves: Migración, Refugio, Asilo, externalización fronteriza, externalización asilo / Bibliografía: Díaz Carnero, Emiliano Ignacio. (2021). Apuntes sobre la seguridad fronteriza en la frontera México - Estados Unidos ante la movilidad humana y desde el paradigma de la seguridad humana. Frontera Norte, Revista internacional de fronteras, territorios y regiones. No. 33, Art. 1, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33679/rfn.v1i1.2071 Díaz Carnero Emiliano Ignacio. (2021). Notes on border security along the U.S.-Mexico border faced with human mobilityand from the human security paradigm. En Frontera Norte International Journal of Borders, Territories and Regions. No. 33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33679/rfn.v1i1.2071 Díaz Carnero, Emiliano Ignacio. (2020) Los protocolos de protección a migrantes, la externalización del asilo a la frontera México - Estados Unidos, el caso de Ciudad Juárez - El Paso. BIBLIO 3W. Revista Bibliográfica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 5 de diciembre de 2020, vol. XXV, nº 1.311. [En línea:] https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/b3w/article/view/30978 Paris Pombo, Dolores y Díaz Carnero, Emiliano Ignacio. (2020). “La externalización del asilo a la frontera norte de México: los protocolos de protección al migrante”. REDODEM, Informe 2019. CDMX: [En línea:] https://www.entreculturas.org/es/publicaciones/informe-redodem-2019