The safety/security nexus and the humanitarianisation of border enforcement

Abstract

This article contributes to the existing literature on the securitisation and militarisation of national borders through an examination of the humanitarianisation of contemporary border enforcement efforts. Drawing on discourse and policy analysis and ethnographic fieldwork at the southern border of the United States, I argue that humanitarian discourse and rationality have been integrated into the way in which border enforcement efforts are both framed and justified. I term the resulting discursive configuration the safety/security nexus to draw attention to the way in which migrant safety and border security are seemingly reconciled in official state discourse and policy. I then employ a feminist geopolitical framework to unpack the political and ideological significance of this process. In doing so, I argue that the humanitarianisation of border enforcement has three primary effects: it works to counter the challenges of transnational human rights organisations and constituencies that argue that border enforcement policies violate transnational human rights; it justifies the continued militarisation and securitisation of national borders; and it upholds the territorialised logic of sovereignty and rights upon which state efforts to secure, fortify, and regulate transnational mobility are founded. In turn, this article illustrates that understanding contemporary regimes of border governance necessitates attending to the entangled relationship between militarisation, securitisation, and humanitarianism.

Between Enforcement and Precarity: Externalization and Migrant Deaths at Sea

“…The plan was to qualitatively determine unique reports of boat losses or operations using content analysis and store these files in rich-text (.rtf) and portable document (.pdf) for recording in data sets. We were interested in a number of variables, discussed further in the next subsection, as modelled from Weber and Pickering (2011). The resulting data sets were saved in multiple formats (e.g.…”

“…This gap in empirical knowledge relates to the hidden nature of these operations and to the racialized dehumanization and devaluation of migrant lives and losses of life (Davies et al, 2017). There have, however, been important, recent efforts to document losses in different regional contexts, including Central American and Mexican journeys to the United States (Delano and Nienass, 2014), losses at sea among people from various countries of origin trying to reach Australia (Weber and Pickering, 2011;Hodge, 2015), and losses in the Mediterranean Sea among those headed for the European Union (Spijerbauer et al, 2015;IOM, 2015). Researchers and activists with No More Deaths have documented losses along the Mexican border, often accessing death certificates available at county morgues in the border regions (Burridge, 2009).…”

“…This analysis is timely due to recent empirical spikes in displacement (UNHCR, ), asylum claims, and losses at sea – particularly in the Mediterranean (IOM, 2015). Scholars associate the increase in enforcement and securitization with more dangerous journeys on land and at sea (e.g., Williams, ; Williams, ). European state investments in deterrence in the form of interception have become so significant in 2015 as to involve what some called the “militarization” of the Mediterranean (Lemberg‐Pedersen, ).…”

The Humanitarian War Against Migrant Smugglers at Sea

“…its focus on the infrastructure of migrant journeys, also comparing EUNAVFOR MED to previous episodes of the military‐humanitarian government of migration and particularly to the Italian Navy's Mare Nostrum Operation (2013–2014). Building on a critical geography approach our study of “Operation Sophia” brings a spatial engagement to the growing conversation about the “humanitarian border” carried on in other disciplines (Cuttitta , ; Pallister‐Wilkins ; Vaughan‐Williams ; Walters ) and, to a lesser extent, in geography (Williams , ). In particular, our work contributes an attention to the logistics of the humanitarian frontier: first by looking at the logistics of migrant journeys as they become the target of a military‐humanitarian operation of migration management; and, second, by looking at the logistics of military‐humanitarianism—its deployment, protocols, and outcomes.…”

The EU Humanitarian Border and the Securitization of Human Rights: The ‘Rescue‐Through‐Interdiction/Rescue‐Without‐Protection’ Paradigm

“…In the act of interception/rescue, faced with the imminent danger of the crime of smuggling/trafficking being perpetrated, the border guard may be confronted with a dilemmatic choice: either to protect the border or to protect the migrant (or even to protect himself), as there will be occasions in which all may not be reconciled ( cf . Williams, ). The protection of the abstract value of human rights that ‘border integrity’ represents may require concrete human rights sacrifices – so smuggling/trafficking is prevented.…”