The Border Harms of Human Displacement: Harsh Landscapes and Human Rights Violations

Abstract

Building on the work of critical migration and border studies, particularly the scholarship on the suffering of displaced people through border-related violence, the article focuses on bordering practices and human rights violations relating to the Syrian civil war. It advances the argument that during peoples’ fragmented journeys to seek safety and protection within and outside of Syria, which are often punctuated by stops and starts, they encounter one or more of three kinds of bordering practices—hardening of borders, expansion of borders, and pushbacks—that can injure them and violate international human rights and often the principle of non-refoulement. The article refers to these encounters as the “border harms of human displacement”. The analysis emphasizes the experiences of people on the move and the cruelties and spatial violence they endure. The latter include lengthy periods of walking and running, travel across hazardous lands and seas, family separation, state restrictions, and mistreatment by border authorities. Yet, in response to such difficulties, they continue to assert their agency by negotiating bordering practices and harsh landscapes.

From Exception to Extra-Legal Normality: Pushbacks and Racist State Violence against People Crossing the Greek–Turkish Land Border

“…By exploring the practice of pushbacks, including their under-researched organizational features, within the borderscape of Evros in a time frame of more than three decades we trace its logics, logistics and justifications. We argue that pushbacks and other forms of violence should not be conceived merely as human rights violations and therefore aberrations of the laws and values of Europe and its states, but as normalized technologies of border management (Ilcan 2021;, embedded in the racialized, violent border regimes of liberal states (Isakjee et al 2020). Through inquiring why pushbacks have been such an enduring and enduringly tolerated practice in the Evros borderscape, we contend that pushbacks are far from an aberration of border management practices but rather that they represent, paradigmatically, the violence which characterizes and defines the Westphalian border, that is, the national borders of the nation states in Europe (Zaiotti 2011).…”

“…Pushbacks have been systematically practised at multiple border sites in Europe for a long time: at the Spanish-Moroccan border at Ceuta Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/ and Melilla since the early 2000s (Gazzotti 2020); in Italy since the tightening of migration controls with the 2002 Bossi-Fini law and, at sea, since the 2008 bilateral agreement with Libya (Caponio and Capiali 2018); at the French-Italian border of Ventimiglia, following the Arab Spring and since the introduction of temporary internal border controls in 2015 (Aru 2021); in Hungary and Croatia since the closure of the Balkan route in 2016 (Augustová and Sapoch 2020;. Their prevalencesuggests they are embedded in the European border regime as yet another technology for impeding mobility into European territories (Ilcan 2021;Mountz 2020). The systematic occurrence of pushbacks after 2015 at different European borders underlines our proposition that they constitute a default mode of border management, rather than being an aberration or exceptional practice.…”

“…In this article, we focus on pushbacks as a normalized, enduring practice within the Greek and European border regime (Ilcan 2021;. Pushbacks, that is, illegal returns across an international border, have been documented at many European borders, emerging at different points in time since the 2000s (see Aru 2021;Augustová and Sapoch 2020;Caponio and Capiali 2018;Gazzotti 2020).…”

Syrian Displacement, Gender and Boundary-Making in the Turkish Borderlands

“…After the EU-Turkey statement in 2016 3 , it became obvious that Syrians in Turkey have become permanent residents despite their lack of full refugee rights due to Turkey's geographical limitation established by the 1967 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention (İçduygu 2015, 5). Today, Syrians in Turkey still face insecure legal status, limited rights and employment, and restricted mobility (Can 2017;Carpi and Şenoğuz 2019;Dağtaş 2018;Ilcan 2021) The hardships that Syrian refugees experience on a daily basis in Hatay present different gendered forms of precarity. During my fieldwork, I observed that a Syrian in Antakya had to negotiate social and sectarian boundaries by confronting the ways the lack of legal protection, as well as systematic indifference and disdain toward Syrians, render them cheap labor and gendered Islamist "others."…”

The Impossibility of Home: Displacement and Border Practices in Times of Crisis

“…Suzan Ilcan (2021), drawing on interviews with Syrian refugees, documents systematic border practices designed to deter would-be refugees, regardless of the human costs of such practices. She outlines a typology of three border practices: the hardening of borders, expansions of borders and pushbacks.…”