Two new books focus upon how creeping imperialism, (re)colonization and the exportation of the modern surveillance state are central to First Worldist border regimes and their responsibility to protect privilege. Andersson and Miller both unveil how the financing of states in the Global South to act like pre-emptive border forces, through ‘keeping people sedentary’ as much as through ‘dampening extremism,’ has become central to 21st century geopolitics.

Devastating to families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in particular--countries where US meddling has long stoked the violence and instability that cause migrants to flee in the first place--this and other policies of the Trump era can be understood, as Ananya Roy has put it, as an ideological commitment to, and renewal of, “white power in statecraft”.

Today, the displaced in Calais are campless. Their lives are lived furtively in forests on the fringes of the city while they seek clandestine passage to the UK.

In 2015 our TV screens, newspapers and social media were full of stories about ‘flows’ of migrants ‘pouring’ into Europe, set alongside photos and videos of people packed into boats at sea or meandering in long lines across fields. Now, this same language is being used to describe the ‘migrant caravan’ of the thousands of Hondurans leaving the violence of their home country and attempting to journey to the US.

After several days spent visiting hospitality centres for refugees in Serbia, we decide to change our plans and take a detour via Bosnia-Herzegovina on our way back home to Trieste. We have just learned during our meetings with the representatives of the Serbian Commissariat for the Refugees that the irregular refugee route towards the EU is now deflected towards that country, and in particular that in Velika Kladuša, a few kilometres away from the Croatian border, a new set of informal encampments was taking shape.

In 2015 and 2016 Bosnia-Herzegovina received almost no migrants during the humanitarian emergency that saw nearly one million refugees moving north to reach the rest of Europe, establishing an informal corridor along the so-called Western Balkan Route. This changed in 2018 when Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced a sharp increase in arrivals coinciding with a related humanitarian crisis in the north-western Canton of Una-Sana, where a significant number of refugees have gathered in the past few months waiting for the opportunity to cross the Croatian border and enter the EU.

In the summer of 2018, Trieste – an Italian port city a few kilometres away from the Slovenian border – seemingly overnight became a new arrival point for the informal refugee Balkan Route. On 25 August 2018, together with a group of other people, deputy Mayor Polidori took the initiative to remove the refugees sleeping outdoors along the Trieste waterfront, near the Port Authority headquarters, and a few hundred meters from the spectacular Piazza Unità d’Italia, the political and tourist core of the city.

Border patrolling brings together racial profiling and passing with pernicious consequences for Indigenous migrants. In the paper, I argue that migrants are differentially vulnerable to deportation based on perceived race, gender and class.

The meanings were multiple; the ironies deliberate and critical. We later learned from a visit to the Kempsons, UK artists-turned-humanitarians who live on the northern tip of Lesvos, that many of these life-jackets are worse than useless. Sold to refugees for a small fortune in Turkey, they often turn out to be fakes filled with foam that absorbs water.

In recent weeks, concerns about the Trump administration’s policies of family separation and child detention have sparked a firestorm of media attention and a powerful public outcry. In response, the administration has become increasingly vocal and radical in asserting the legitimacy of its actions and rhetorically assassinating any claims to refuge or protection individuals and families in detention offer in their defense.

With some contemporary environmentalists dismayingly allying themselves with this closed-border vision of the world, we feel it is necessary to highlight the ways in which struggles against national borders and against the racial geographies of capitalism more broadly are of central importance to any fight against climate chaos.

"Bodies Across Borders" is an insightful anthology examining the multiple geographies of cross-border health care mobility encouraged by advances in transport, information technology, and biotechnologies (cryopreservation, immunosuppressive drugs, DNA sequencing), as well as by variegated national regulations and uneven regional development (between the Global South and the Global North, rural and urban areas).

In this piece we join with others to call for a renewed commitment to the practices and principles of Sanctuary, now on an even larger scale. We offer here a Manifesto for radical action: the formation of a Global Sanctuary Collective.

January 25th, 2017. Newly elected US President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming at the construction of the so often announced 3,200km long wall along the Mexican border, adding to the existing hundreds of km of material barriers already in place. Trump declared that “a nation without borders is not a nation. Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders, gets back its borders.”

The referendum result has raised questions of home and, in some cases, identity. It has also begun to reshape the lives of the Seniors Club members, alongside other retired British people I have met. The financial implications of the referendum result on these people’s everyday lives is already visible.