Border practices and border games

The impressive papers collected in this theme issue on border practices richly illustrate how ‘border’ has become a new keyword orienting interdisciplinary and critical research (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015). Whether investigating how borders criss-cross the lives of domestic workers (Blanco), how the violence of borders shapes experiences of mass displacement and flight (Ilcan; Almustafa; Squire), or the limits which prevailing epistemologies and disciplinary conventions impose on our thinking about human movements (McNevin; Stierl), these papers demonstrate the wealth of methods, concepts and theories that currently invest and enrich the field of borders and migration. A key lesson I draw from the diverse meanings which are attached to borders and mobilities in this collection, but across the research field more broadly, is that it would be unwise to aspire towards a general theory of the border. Better, surely, to regard the world of borders research in terms of what Wittgenstein (2009 [1953]) famously called ‘language games’. The philosopher’s radical move was to reject the view that language has a single, logical structure. Instead, Wittgenstein insisted on the multiple ways in which actors can use language, and how these uses correspond with different ‘forms of life’. In a similar vein, we should not look for the essence of borders for there probably is none to be found. Rather, and in the spirit of this issue’s focus on practice, we should look at the different games which actors play with borders – and here actors include borders researchers themselves. Not a general theory of the border, then, but rather border games, with their various rules (and violations), their players, their tactics and their effects.

To speak of border games requires that I offer a couple of caveats from the outset. For one thing, we have to note that the array of possible border games is not finite. Rules can be changed, and new games can also be invented. For another, let us allay the concern that such a language of games is in some way trivializing a serious topic. Think of war games or Russian roulette. Games can be deadly. So, it does not gloss over the violence and injustice that is often a feature of borders to think in terms of games. But it does call attention to the multiplicity of borders, as well as the active role that scholars play in interpreting borders, and causing this keyword to multiply.

With this point about border games in mind, and with the claim that it is more useful to empirically describe and analyze actions, experiences and operations than it is to unify matters within the framework of a grand theory, I want to highlight three themes which these papers raise with particular intensity – three findings which this theme issue offers to this fascinating and important field of borders, migrations and mobilities.

First, there is the point that subjectivity and experience matters, and that there is ‘agency-in-displacement’ (Ilcan). If you want to understand the power of borders then speak to people who have experienced what it is like to sell off one’s worldly possessions to finance the attempt to escape one’s government (Ilcan). If you want to understand what sets great movements of people in motion then talk to people about their reasons for fleeing countries when, things being different, they would much prefer to stay (Squire). If you want to know what it means to struggle with a lack of legal documentation speak to people whose livelihoods are marginalized in this way (Blanco). Asking questions like these, engaging bordercrossers as interlocutors, living, feeling subjects and even as experts with opinions that policymakers should hear (Squire), these papers make questions of subjectivity and identity central to their accounts. This is, no doubt methodologically difficult, and not without serious ethical challenges. Yet, the insights delivered by these articles shows that the investment is worthwhile.

Second, several of these papers challenge the way in which the social sciences discipline our thinking about borders and migration. For Squire, as we have just seen, there is the question of who are the experts on migration? For Stierl, there is the problem of the ends and uses of research. How do critical researchers navigate a research field structured by funding agencies seeking rapid solutions to the latest migration ‘crisis’? What does the injunction towards ‘policy relevance’ mean when the policies in question are implicated in violence, suffering and death? For McNevin, there is the fact that particular accounts of time and space are so deeply embedded in our thinking that even research that calls itself critical risks reproducing these structures and their limiting assumptions. And here, I agree with McNevin that thinking beyond the limits of these epistemologies will not come from scholars working in isolation. Rather, it will come from encounters with those who find themselves crossed by the border. It will come from taking seriously – as McNevin suggests in one of her examples – what I would call the border games of those Indigenous people who issue and use their own passports (Bloom, 2017: 162–5), and listening carefully for the stutter that such acts have introduced into the operation of border regimes.

Third, individually and collectively these articles shed light on emergent spaces, scales and geographies of migration. Almustafa argues that what commentators called Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ in 2015 is better seen as a protection crisis, whose conditions of possibility are not just the escalation of state violence in countries like Syria, but the reluctance of countries of the Global North to live up to their responsibilities to protect people seeking refuge. This ‘migration crisis’ was at the same time a breach in the geography of containment that has largely served to corral people fleeing violence within their own regions. Ilcan illuminates these geographies of containment and flight on the scale of the different, fragmented journeys refugees have experienced. Crucially, in asking important questions about the waiting, the stickiness, the prolongation of migrant journeys, she gives questions of temporality equal weight alongside spatiality. Squire speaks of ‘hidden geographies’ of war and antiwar, of colonialism and anticolonialism, of corruption and dreams of better governance. These geographies appear in policy narratives infrequently, but their traces can be found when migrants bear witness to their own situations. Finally, Blanco approaches geographies of migration and mobility on a scale that combines a sense of the intimate and the temporal order of biography. Her research with Marie, a woman whose life has criss-crossed the borders between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, shows how reproductive and care work, intimacy and sovereignty all produce one another. Here, we glimpse another hidden geography, different from that of the Mediterranean crisis, different from the forms of violence, forms of care and forms of subjectivity which the latter upheaval is generating, but no less significant for what it tells us about lives and borders impinging one another.

These are three take-aways from this theme issue, then. Readers will doubtless discern others. For the border game, like Wittgenstein’s language game, ‘is part of an activity, or of a form of life’ (Wittgenstein 2009: para 23).