Death by ‘nature’: The European border regime and the spatial production of slow violence

Abstract

The logic and temporality of the ‘border spectacle’ have dominated public reception of the violence endured by migrants and refugees on their journey to Europe, thus occluding the manifold ways in which daily, silent, slow violence unfolds through the EU border regime. The claim of this essay is that border assemblages are involved in the deployment of spatialized slow violence, especially through what I define as the political production of exposure to the elements. Scholars have shown how geographic and topographic factors are included in the strategies of border control and have become active factors in the policies of deterrence and ‘neo-refoulement’. Building on this work, I elaborate on the mediated agency of the environmental or ‘natural’ forces in the production of border-related violence. This is a violence that expands in space beyond the location of the geographical state border and extends in time beyond the concrete instance of border crossing. Here, sovereign violence operates not only through an unconditional power of death but also through the abandonment and exposure of migrants to the elements and therefore the production of a zone of mere biological survival, while accountability chains are concealed. What in the Western view is understood as ‘nature’ can be produced, mobilized and instrumentalized as an active factor in the infrastructures of border enforcement, producing spatialized forms of slow violence. This operation does not imply, however, that the possibilities of agency and resistance are neglected. Rather, it points to the allegedly neutral dimension of ‘nature’ towards which border struggles are being displaced.