Lines,edges and intersections: Building border criminology from the margins

Abstract

An abridged version of this paper was delivered at the ANZSOC annual conference in Christchurch on 4 December 2024, after the presentation of the Distinguished Criminologist award. Amongst other omissions, the long anecdote about my arrival in the United Kingdom was not included in the lecture due to time constraints. All the material that was delivered orally on the day is reproduced here without significant changes.

I would like to thank everyone involved in bringing about this award. There is no one more astonished than I at receiving this unexpected recognition. Still, here I am delivering the inaugural Distinguished Criminologist lecture in which I will attempt to say something suitably distinguished. Before I do that, I want to acknowledge the Māori people as tangata whenua – or the people of this land. I want to declare my solidarity with the current struggle against the Treaty Principles Bill and to also express my hope for long overdue treaties to be negotiated between Indigenous Peoples and that settler colony across the pond that we now call Australia.

I have called my talk today “Lines, edges and intersections: building border criminology from the margins”. Some of that imagery will be recurring in what I have to say. I know that most of you will have little awareness, and perhaps not a lot of interest, in this still emerging branch of the discipline. So I will try not to bore you with a long chronology about the development of academic work in this area. Instead, I thought I would indulge myself a little and proceed mainly via personal anecdotes and snippets of stories about how my own interest in border control came about, why I thought it was relevant to criminology, and who has influenced me along the way.

When I entered university in the late 1970s, criminology was not available as a field of undergraduate study. To be honest, I doubt that I would have taken it even if it had been. But after working for a few years as a researcher, first in correctional services and then the police department in my home state of South Australia, I decided I should become a “proper criminologist” and took up a scholarship in 1992 to complete the MPhil at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge. I ended up living for 10 years in that city, but that first year in the United Kingdom turned out to be very formative in the research agenda that ultimately unfolded, not straight away – you will see that I was a reluctant academic – but gradually over the next several decades.

Although I did not realise it at the time, my own experience of crossing a border for the first time as a “migrant” reads like a script illustrating the seismic changes that were happening in border control across the globe. According to Zygmunt Bauman's racialised hierarchy of global mobility (Bauman, 1998), while “tourists” (mostly from the Global North) were being allowed relatively free entry across most borders, the movement of those viewed as “vagabonds” (mostly from the Global South) was being severely curtailed. My visa offered me permanent residence as the “spouse of a British subject”, and I intended to stay for the foreseeable future after finishing my studies. Despite this intention, I would qualify as a “tourist” in Bauman's typology, being accorded privileged access to British territory by virtue of my partner's Anglo heritage. My total lack of preparation for what would happen as I arrived at the United Kingdom border after several months of carefree backpacking through Asia and the Middle East reflected the attitude of entitlement that often comes with unrecognised privilege. I had expected simply to arrive at Heathrow airport, have my Australian passport stamped by a border official, and then get on with my new life. But events did not unfold in that way.

I was “taken aside” at the arrival desk without explanation and whisked away into a holding area, with just enough time to catch a glimpse of my partner's anxious and bewildered face. I was escorted down a long corridor and left, also without explanation, in a windowless room that already contained four others who appeared to be as confused as me. The wait seemed like an eternity. A frightened, sari-clad woman sitting next to me who, until then, had been trapped alone with three unknown men, immediately clung to my arm, speaking urgently in a language I did not understand. She seemed to believe that, as the only White person in the room, I must have held some answers as to why we were all there. A well-dressed Punjabi man seated opposite introduced himself in immaculate English and bemoaned the fact that her husband-to-be had not “prepared her properly”. For what, I had no idea at the time. Making up the rest of the group of captives were a young man who appeared to hail from sub-Saharan Africa, wearing a rather dapper pastel-coloured suit and clutching a briefcase, and an emaciated and haunted-looking older man I surmised to be from the Horn of Africa, whose only possession was a plastic shopping bag.

Feeling the pressure to come up with answers, I ventured a couple of times down the long, empty corridor, but we seemed to have been abandoned. Eventually, someone came, deliberately ignored our pleas for information, and marched us unceremoniously through the back corridors of the terminal and into an unmarked white van. He then drove us at breakneck speed across the tarmac, executing sharp and totally unnecessary swerves designed for the sole purpose of flinging us from one side of the van to the other. As we disembarked, shell-shocked and duly intimidated, his parting gesture was to bellow “Speak English!” directly into the face of the already-traumatised East African man. This was not the welcome to Britain I had been expecting.

We were then deposited in another waiting room and told we would be given chest X-rays. I berated myself for not taking more care to find out what the procedures would be for people seeking to migrate to the United Kingdom. At his request, I found myself explaining to the young African businessman that X-rays were pictures of the inside of your body, and this was probably to make sure none of us had a disease we could spread to others. A short time after my X-ray was done, I was taken to another border control area where I could see my partner waiting anxiously behind a barrier. I also noticed the young African man walking jauntily across the terminal and was relieved he had made it through. I was less sure about the fate of the man with the haunted eyes, who I realised much later was very likely an asylum seeker. I have also wondered, in hindsight, if the frightened young bride-to-be was subjected to the invasive virginity testing that has since been documented by border criminologists, a practice one would hope has been permanently consigned to history (Marmo & Smith, 2010).

My experience, by comparison, had been one of privilege. But still, I had looked on with nervous disbelief as my passport had been stamped with a 12-month probationary period rather than the straightforward permanent entry I had assumed was my right. At intervals over the next 12 months, I would receive coldly worded letters from the Home Office describing me as “a person subject to immigration control” and warning of a range of misdemeanours that could result in my expulsion. Some of their content – although I was a native English speaker and the holder of a prestigious university scholarship – I could barely understand. I could only imagine the terror these communications would have elicited in recipients who were more precariously situated. I would return many times to these first-hand experiences to reinterpret their significance as I learned more about the incomparably harsher border crossing experiences designed for the world's vagabonds.

A year or so later, after completing the MPhil in Cambridge, I still had no thought about proceeding to an academic career. Instead, I took a 1-year contract as a Research Assistant (RA) at the rival Centre for Criminological Research in Oxford, as it was then called. Arriving in that historic and rather sedate city, it was impossible to ignore the angry posters fixed to the ornate facades of ancient buildings demanding, in a decidedly un-Oxford-like way, the need to “Close Down Campsfield”. They were referring to the immigration detention centre, Campsfield House, that had opened in the nearby village of Kidlington. I soon learned that no less an establishment figure than the Bishop of Oxford was often to be seen on national television expressing his abhorrence at the detention of people who had committed no crime but had come to Britain seeking refuge or a liveable life.

I had been involved in Amnesty International for a long time and was immediately drawn to what was clearly a human rights crisis of mammoth proportions. I made my way to Campsfield House as soon as I could and started visiting detainees. It was all quite disorganised and unregulated at the time. As well as calls for closure of the detention centre, the main form of resistance involved working with pro bono immigration lawyers – the most committed and capable bunch of people I had ever had the privilege to meet – to provide financial sureties and offers of temporary accommodation that were the pathway to obtaining release on bail. While I was horrified at the criminalising connotations of being required to apply for bail, I was becoming aware that the situation in Australia was even more dire, where detention was mandatory and, at that time, offered no opportunity for release other than having one's asylum claim accepted after a protracted, and by no means infallible, determination system.

Whenever he arrived in Oxford for the weekend, my longsuffering partner, who still lived and worked in Cambridge, grew accustomed to finding strangers – usually men – from Zaire or Nigeria or Turkey, sleeping in the spare bedroom or dossing down on the lounge room floor. Our rented place had become something of a halfway house for people escaping Campsfield. One day I received a phone call at work from an immigration lawyer asking me to provide a surety for a 16-year-old boy from Nigeria. She explained he had been detained ostensibly for presenting a false passport and yet appeals for release on the grounds that he was a minor had been rejected because that same passport recorded his age at 19. I had never seen a more breathtaking piece of bureaucratic doublespeak. I visited Stephen just once in Campsfield House before the bail hearing. An older Nigerian man, who had taken Stephen under his wing, accompanied him into the visitors’ room. Stephen performed an elaborate ritual of prostration before me in what I later learned was a gesture of respect for elders or benefactors. He uttered not a single word during the entire meeting. But even more memorable that first time I saw Stephen's face was how his eyes were as wide as saucers, filled with terror, like a deer caught in headlights. Stephen was ultimately released from that place of terror and, after a 10-year battle to gain the legal security he needed, has remained a cherished part of our family now for three decades.

Needless to say, my RA duties in Oxford during those early days were being increasingly neglected, and as the end of my contract approached, I realised I was in need of a new job, or at least a new project. The detention of asylum seekers seemed to fit the bill. A perfect combination, I thought, of my practical interest in human rights and my new qualifications in criminology. I returned to live in Cambridge while I completed a second master's degree from the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex and looked for philanthropic funding for my project. At that time, email was a new thing and I sent a message to a close friend who had just completed her PhD in the United States of America and was embarking on what would become a most distinguished career in criminology. I told her about my plans. Her reply took me by surprise. She said, “I’m sorry to hear you’ll be leaving criminology”. I thought about this for a long time. Is that what I was doing? Criminology, I reasoned, should surely be concerned with the misapplication of coercive powers that were normally confined within the boundaries of the criminal justice system ¹ – all the more so because of this dangerous expansion. The detention of asylum seekers, in my reckoning, sat squarely at the intersection between the domains of criminology (which was concerned, in part, with the use of coercive powers) and human rights (which was concerned with state accountability for those practices).

I did eventually obtain funding from the Nuffield Foundation – and, since I did not have an academic post or any interest in obtaining one, one of my former teachers from the Institute of Criminology, Loraine Gelsthorpe, agreed to host the grant on my behalf. Loraine also negotiated access for me to interview front-line immigration officers about how they were making their discretionary decisions to detain asylum seekers on arrival. Contrary to the pessimistic expectations of the immigration lawyers advising me, the border officials I interviewed told me astonishing things about their practices which were often at odds with the law and certainly contradicted the official line that detention was being used as a tool of last resort. I have never since been able to obtain this extraordinary level of access or (often unwitting) openness. In fact, government departments, in Australia at least, seem to be increasingly closing down pathways to truly independent, external scrutiny, including through academic research.

Everything was going extremely well, until one day I returned from fieldwork to find the contents of my tiny office at the Institute of Criminology packed into a plastic bin bag and sitting in the corridor. A new Director had just arrived and was clearly eager to make his mark. I still had grant funds remaining and data collection to complete so I went to see him. “I’m sorry” – he said – “I have looked at your project and see nothing criminological about it. We won’t be hosting it any longer”. The bright line this revered criminologist drew around the discipline left no room, it seemed, for intersections of any kind.

A few months later, I was sitting in Ben Bowling's office at Kings College London, lamenting my sudden expulsion from the Institute when he said something that made a lasting impression on me. Urging me not to be disheartened, he suggested that the view from the margins was often the most valuable. The satirical novelist Kurt Vonnegut once expressed a similar view when he wrote: “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the centre”. ² If we imagine different knowledges and ways of seeing as a Venn diagram of interlocking circles, we can readily see that there is no need to venture over the edge of what is safe and familiar to find that enriching space where the circles overlap.

I eventually found a new home for my project at the Human Rights Centre in Essex and managed to complete the work. While the expulsion from the Cambridge Institute had been traumatic at the time, it did seem fitting that the work I saw so clearly as sitting at the intersection between criminology and human rights had a connection to each of the places where I had studied those two disciplines. Just as I was finishing the reports from that work (Weber & Gelsthorpe, 2000; Weber & Landman, 2002), the Australian criminologist Sharon Pickering sought me out for a special issue of Current Issues in Criminal Justice she was putting together on Refugee Issues and Criminology, having somehow heard about the work I had been doing at U.K. ports of entry. This provided an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, as it led to my first ever academic article on “The detention of asylum seekers: 20 reasons why criminologists should care” (Weber, 2002). As you can imagine, I had a very clear image in my mind as I was writing of who I was trying to convince.

After the validation that came from inclusion in that special issue, I no longer felt as if my position, perched at the edge of the discipline, was a banishment or repudiation. Instead, in the years that followed, border control was becoming identified as a rich intellectual space at the intersection – not only of criminology and human rights – which had been my starting point, but of political theory, international relations, security studies, political sociology, critical geography, migration studies, law and many more, and was being recognised as a hot topic of truly global significance. None of the authors I read saw borders simply as fixed lines on a map. Enabled by global advances in technology, borders were becoming increasingly “deterritorialised”; they were “externalised”, “virtual”, and “pre-emptive”, as governments tried to prevent unwanted border crossings well before they occurred, using both visible and unseen methods (Weber, 2013a). Moreover, the globalisation of neoliberal governance and the so-called hollowing out of the state was leading to the intensification of border control as states attempted to reassure insecure populations that they could and would reinforce the boundaries of membership in a rapidly changing and unstable world, using violence if necessary. In what I consider to be a little piece of brilliance, globalisation theorist Saskia Sassen summed up these developments neatly as the “denationalising of economic space”, alongside the “renationalising of politics” (Sassen, 1996, p. xvi).

Border scholars were starting to explore these transformations in new and important ways. In 2007, U.S. legal theorist Juliet Stumpf published an influential thesis on the intersection of criminal and immigration law that she termed “crimmigration” (Stumpf, 2006). This was a much more sophisticated way of examining what I had clumsily referred to in my “20 reasons” article as “criminal-justice-like-powers” that had “escaped the confines of the criminal justice system” (Weber, 2002, p. 26). Soon after, Australian ex-pat Mary Bosworth borrowed from the “new penology” thesis (Feeley & Simon, 1992) to argue that U.K. governments were not just governing through crime control, but through migration control as well (Bosworth & Guild, 2008). She also deployed her skills as a prison ethnographer to explore the nature of immigration detention and its intersections and contrasts with imprisonment (Bosworth, 2014). Katja Franko, then publishing as Katja Franko Aas, established through her empirical work that a completely different pathway was being travelled by non-citizens through the Norwegian criminal justice system which she termed “bordered penality” (Aas, 2014). She later developed influential theory around the rhetorical and structural positioning of outsiders as “crimmigrant others”, building on Stumpf's terminology (Franko, 2020).

I had returned to live in Australia in 2003 and succumbed to the inevitability of working in a university. Some of my early contributions to this growing field of study were made with Ben Bowling, conceptualising border control as a form of racialised policing (Weber & Bowling, 2004; Weber & Bowling, 2008). I later teamed up with Sharon Pickering to write about new bordering technologies (Pickering & Weber, 2006) and the border deaths that often resulted as the Global North sought to draw a sharp and exclusionary line against incursions from the Global South (Weber & Pickering, 2011). I had become quite indifferent by this time as to whether the objects of my research were considered by others to be criminological, so I expressly avoided jumping on what I saw as the “crimmigration bandwagon”, as much as I admired this contribution to the field. And woe betide anyone whose article was sent to me for review who referred to any particularly harsh example of border control as crimmigration, without explaining in what way that very specific thesis might apply. Rather, I became interested in understanding the nature of borders themselves as sites for the expression of state power, with or without any reference to criminal law or practice.

After arriving back in Australia, I had noted that Australia's heavily militarised external border and the unconstrained use of administrative detention were already being researched by extremely capable scholars from law (Taylor, 2005), cultural studies (Giannacopoulos, 2005; Perera, 2009), political science (Nethery & Holman, 2016), and criminology (Giannacopoulos & Loughnan, 2020). So, I decided to concentrate my empirical research on the creation and enforcement of “internal borders”. When a request came to contribute to an edited collection on methodology in border criminology, I was forced to find words to explain how I had been doing that. On one trip back to the United Kingdom, I had visited the Tate Modern with my old colleague Ben Bowling. Ben's father is the celebrated artist Frank Bowling, so Ben knows a thing or two about art. We visited a Paul Klee exhibition and Ben mentioned that the great artist had once described the act of drawing as “taking a line for a walk”. It was instructive to be reminded that lines could also be understood as something that connected, rather than divided. But the main observation I took away was that this visual metaphor might also describe what I was intuitively doing in my research: that is, taking the border for a conceptual walk to discover where that might lead. Taking the border for a walk thereafter became my stated methodology, and I sought to legitimise it in the chapter I wrote for the collection (Weber, 2018) by identifying it as a form of inductive, exploratory method – free from the top-down imposition of theory or the constraints of hypothesis-testing methodology that, to be honest, had kept me out of academia for so long. ³

Once again, I realised later that scholars more distinguished than I had said this much better. Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) had already published an entire book on what they called “Border as Method” in which they advocated adopting the border as an “epistemic viewpoint”, rather than a physical location, from which to examine contestations over expressions of state power. This sounded a lot like taking the border for a walk but expressed with far more rigour and elegance. Nevertheless, my cobbled-together approach did produce work on multi-agency policing networks (Weber, 2013b; Weber et al., 2013), theorising about the “structurally embedded border” (Weber, 2019) and the use of the welfare system as a bordering technology built on surveillance and enforced destitution (Gerard & Weber, 2019; Weber, 2023). Ultimately, I ventured even further into the intersections between borders and social boundaries and argued that racialised policing mapped out an effective divide between those recognised as full citizens and those deemed not to belong (Weber, 2020; Weber et al., 2021). As I began to see borders almost everywhere, it could be argued that my taking the border for a walk had gone a step too far. Still, the idea of near-ubiquitous borders seemed to capture the divisive styles of governance typical of the confluence of neoliberal and settler colonial mentalities (Weber et al., 2023, 2024) and reveal what I call the “deep structure” of internal borders (Weber, 2024).

Alongside this unfolding programme of empirical research, an idea for a more philosophical intervention had been crystallising in my mind for a long time. Once again, the spark for this had arisen in that first year as a master’s student in Cambridge, but this time based on a seemingly innocuous observation rather than a profound personal experience. Growing up in the suburbs of a small Australian city, history had never been foremost in my mind. This changed in England where I was constantly confronted with visible traces of momentous historical events. To drive to the edge-of-town supermarket, I used to cross over the busy A14 highway. Perhaps because of the incongruity of it, I would always notice an old signpost on the other side of this traffic-filled road depicting a quaint bucolic scene that marked the boundary of a neighbouring parish. This border crossing was of course entirely inconsequential, although that had not always been the case.

At the time, I was studying the history of English vagrancy laws, during a period where the mobile poor – displaced initially by the rise of agricultural capitalism and then by industrialisation – would be pushed back across parish boundaries, often criminalised and sometimes physically punished as they crossed borders looking for work or alms. The violent defence of parish boundaries followed from the role played by churches, rather than the state, in supporting the indigent within local communities. With the slow emergence of the nation-state in England and the introduction of poor laws, the borders of security and entitlement slowly expanded until the national border became the primary site of contestation against the incursion of outsiders, with the intensity of border control waxing and waning over time. Parish borders had outlasted their original purpose.

After first exploring the historical and racialised control of mobility in England in an article with Ben Bowling (Weber & Bowling, 2008), I became rather obsessed with a conclusion that arose from this line of thought. If borders that had been heavily defended in the past, such as parish borders, had taken on a dramatically altered role over time which no longer made them a site for the exclusion of unwanted outsiders, this could also apply, surely, to contemporary borders. Adopting a soft historical determinist approach, I reasoned that the massive transformations now taking place due to neoliberal globalisation might, with suitable injection of human agency, result in a “differently bordered world” that was better aligned with a new and as-yet-unknowable world order. I recruited an obliging team of authors who agreed to apply the “peace at the border” thought experiment I devised, in which they were asked to consider how we might reach a set of structural conditions in which it would no longer be possible or productive to violently defend national borders. Adopting this “preferred future” method facilitated the pursuit of what I saw as a moral outcome, but based on an empirical, and non-utopian, foundation (Weber, 2015).

Although I have never written explicitly about border abolitionism, this historically informed perspective has discouraged me from engaging in unqualified “no borders” rhetoric. I had seen that historically significant borders could become entirely open to indiscriminate crossing, and yet not disappear completely, if they retained some residual role in social organisation or local governance. It was not the existence of borders that was the problem, so much as the official actions they enabled, and this was primarily determined by the role they did or did not play in regimes of differential in/exclusion. While the carceral institutions that are the rightful target of prison abolitionism may have very little to recommend them, it seemed to me that borders as organising principles for security, governance, identity, and redistribution of resources could not be dismissed out of hand, although these functions might, in the future, be fulfilled in some entirely different way. Indeed, the sovereignty claims of Indigenous Peoples against settler colonial states rest, to some degree, on recognition of pre-colonial borders (Weber et al., 2023). I therefore prefer the more qualified position of saying “No to borders” (King, 2016) – a rallying cry that is generally equated with resistance to the violence perpetrated at the (non-geographic) borders of contemporary nation-states.

Somewhere in the midst of all that I have recounted here, the border criminology “brand” was officially launched by the establishment of the influential Border Criminologies website hosted at the Oxford Centre for Criminology. ⁴ I think that must have been around 2013, because last year I attended events in Oxford celebrating 10 years of “BorderCrim”. This led to the publication of the first Handbook on Border Criminology showcasing the diversity of research and theorising in this area (Bosworth et al., 2024). Some years later, the introduction of ANZSOC (Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology) thematic groups provided a platform for Australian border control scholars to form the Thematic Group on Crimmigration and Border Control (@ANZSOC_Borders), which has gained an international presence through its active connection to BorderCrim. ⁵ Despite its shaky beginnings – at least when viewed from my personal experience – the place of border control in criminology is now surely beyond doubt, still positioned perhaps at the margins of the discipline, but very productively so.

Around the same time that Border Criminologies was taking shape, I finally committed to pursuing the intersection between criminology and human rights beyond the topic of border control. This started with a monograph co-authored with Marinella Marmo and Elaine Fishwick called “Crime, Justice and Human Rights” (Weber et al., 2014). Our purpose was not to insist that criminologists should necessarily engage with human rights as either a normative or analytical framework, but to encourage them, if they chose that terminology, to avoid referring to human rights merely as a slogan. A Routledge handbook followed (Weber et al., 2017), and then a couple of years ago, Marinella and I launched a Palgrave book series “Critical Studies in Human Rights and Criminology” ⁶ where we invite authors to engage substantively and critically with human rights law and concepts. Its flagship title, “A Research Agenda for a Human Rights Centred Criminology” was published earlier this year (Weber & Marmo, 2024).

Eventually, being the late adopter that I am, I succumbed to the crimmigration trend and am currently working with others on a Discovery project conceptualising the visa cancellation and deportation system in Australia as a “crimmigration assemblage”. ⁷ Publications so far from that research-in-progress have examined the role of automation in the visa cancellation process (Weber & Gerard, 2024); explored intersections between deportation, colonisation (Gerard & Gainsford, 2025), and out-of-home care (Gerard, 2025); and interrogated the visa cancellation system from the perspective of non-citizen women (Marmo, 2025). Other work in the pipeline develops the idea of visa cancellation, detention, and deportation as “enemy crimmigration”, using a hybrid theoretical framework at the intersection of crimmigration theory and “enemy penology” (Krasmann, 2007) that was first set out in Weber and Powell (2020). A book that will more fully articulate the idea of a crimmigration assemblage is also in the planning.

Along with my role in that collaborative book, delivering this lecture will be one of my final contributions to criminology, as I will be retiring immediately after this conference. This inclines me to feel entitled to address the upcoming criminologists in our midst in the way guest speakers often advise young graduates at graduation ceremonies, often at great length. I will be very brief. I just want to say that there are many ways to be a criminologist and many urgent and worthwhile topics of study. But whatever your focus, I hope you will not be afraid to push disciplinary boundaries, as the view from the margins, in my experience, is where you will find all kinds of exciting and fulfilling possibilities. No lesser a commentator than Aristotle has reputedly spoken on the importance of intersections, and I will leave you with these words that are often attributed to him: “At the intersection where your gifts, talents, and abilities meet a human need: therein you will discover your purpose”. ⁸

Thank you very much for your attention, and I wish all of you a productive and enriching conference experience.