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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
- [00:15]
B
Thank you and welcome everyone to LSE for today's event. Not just Lines on a Map, Borders in a Changing World My name is Armina Ishkanian and I'm the Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity Program and Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I'm very pleased to be here to welcome Dr. Tarsis Brito, Dr. Maya Goodfellow, and Dr. Luc de Norona to both our online audience and to our audience here in the Old building. Tarsis Brito is an Associate Lecturer in International Relations and at SOAS University of London. Tarsis has served as co Editor and Associate Editor at Millennium Journal of International Studies and as Coordinator at doing International Political Sociology PhD series based on his award winning doctoral dissertation. His book project is titled Unsettling Race, Colonialism and Violence at the European Borders. Welcome to oursis. Maya Goodfellow is a Presidential Fellow in the Department of International politics at City St George's University of London. She is the author of Hostile How Immigrants Became Scapegoats and she writes regularly for the Guardian. Her current project examines the rise of private security companies in immigration enforcement in the uk. Beyond this, her work focuses on racial capitalism, immigration and bordering, the politics of international development, and animal rights. Welcome Maya and last but not least, Luc de Neronha is Associate professor in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at the Sarah Parker Raymond center for the Study of Racism and Racialization at ucla. His first book, Deporting Black Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica, was published in 2020. Luke produced a podcast with deported people in Jamaica called Deportation Discs, a riff on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, in which deported people tell their stories via their life soundtrack. Luke before we begin, I'd just like to note that we were originally going to have another speaker join us today, Noosha Kabawat, an AFC Fellow, but unfortunately Nusha had to pull out at the last minute due to unforeseen circumstances. We're sorry Nusha couldn't be here with us tonight and hope to welcome her at a future event. So today we will be discussing the complex and evolving role of borders in in our world today. Each of our panelists will present on the topic, bringing their perspective and expertise to explore how borders shape and are shaped by contemporary global challenges. I would ask the audience in the room to put their phones on silent so as not to disrupt the event. The event will be recorded and hopefully will be made into a podcast, subject to no technical difficulties. There will be an opportunity for you to put your questions to the panel for our online audience. You can submit your questions via the Q and A feature and please include your name and affiliation when you're putting in your question. For those who are in the theater this evening, I will let you know when we will open the floor for questions. Please raise your hand and wait for the roving microphones to get to you. And also again, please let us know your name and affiliation. I will try to ensure a range of questions from both our online audience and from our audience here in the theatre. But now I'm delighted to hand over to Dr. Tarsis Bruto, who will be our first speaker.
- [04:24]
A
Can everyone hear me? Am I speaking to the mic? Yes. Fine. So hello everyone. It's really nice to return to the lse. After a month and a half after I left it realized there's so many new faces around. So my Talk today. Should I get used to click? I guess. Oh, it's already here. Okay, so my talk Today is part of a broader book manuscript that is currently under review. So overall, this book seeks to rethink the links between borders, whiteness and colonialism in the Global north, specifically with a focus on Europe. So today my main argument will be that global north borders have historically and continued to function as settler colonial tools, not just to police mobility, but also to settle whiteness as native. So there won't be much time though to substantiate much of my points. So I apologize in advance and I hope you can ask me questions during the Q and A. Okay, so I think this is too fine. So since the beginning of the so called migrant crisis in Europe, we have seen the proliferation of a certain invasion narrative on the part of politicians, state leaders, far right campaigners, their very you, et cetera. So this portrayal of the crisis often frames migrants as settler colonial threats, that is Potential colonizers who threaten to invade, occupy and settle Europe, replacing its native population. Whiteness here becomes the very key marker of European nativeness, a shared identity that seems to cut across national lines. So what is certainly striking here, however, that there is a certain use of an anti colonial vocabulary to to justify anti immigration sentiments and policies. After all, it has become widespread to use Europe's settler colonial invasions and genocides in the past as a way to defend the idea that contemporary Europe is merely protecting its native land from outsiders. So the rationale is very clear. If you are against Europe's past colonial invasions, you should now oppose the invasion of Europe itself. In this move, anti migration becomes ironically rebranded as anti colonialism, a defense against colonial occupation and settlement. So what we seem to be saying in Europe, this is what I call here an attempt to frame global south immigration as a process of settler colonialism in reverse, where whiteness is now the native under attack. This framing also appears clearly in everyday speech. As one on time migration campaign put it during last year's so called race riots in the uk it is our country and we are getting pushed out. Now I understand how the native Indians felt in America because that's what the white man did when we pushed them out, only it's the white man now getting pushed in this country. So if in the past then white people invaded other spaces, now white people's spaces have been invaded, occupied and settled. In this reversal, whiteness appears now as the very dispossessed native under threat of displacement. This narrative, however, is not confined to Europe, but also widespread in other states such as the U.S. australia, Canada and so forth. Trump's first executive order on migration after returning to power, for instance, which was titled Protecting the American People against Invasion. This inflammatory narrative about invasion and replacement is not just a rhetoric. It has been directly linked to an increase in border violence and policing in these spaces, leading to migrant deaths, incarceration, of course, overall suffering. But what I find particularly interesting here is that this transnational framing of migration seems to be based on the racialized understanding of nativeness and ownership over the state. There is here, in other words, a certain assumption of whiteness as both the rightful owner of and native to the nation state. So I would like to pose two questions today. The first one is what explains current claims of whiteness, state ownership over Europe? What explains white nativeness across European countries? And second, what does this dynamic reveal about the intimate links between borders, whiteness and colonialism? Or perhaps more specifically today, settler colonialism in the global North. Right. So when we think about the idea of white nativeness in places like the U.S. australia and Canada, we, we of course start with settler colonialism. As many scholars have argued, settler colonial structures of domination, subjugation and occupation have historically constructed in the settler colony an imaginary of whiteness as the rightful native to and possessor of the land. This political construction of course relied on racialized dynamics of exclusion that produced the black indigenous and non white migrants overall as racial outsiders in the land. So this process of constructing white people, the outsiders as native in the settler Colony is obviously not only in the past. Settler colonialism is an unfinished structure of occupation and settlement that continues to operate to date. The settling of whiteness, in other words, is never final. And it is this very structural incompleteness of settler colonialism in scholars of argued that generates what we can call a stage of siege, the idea that occupation is always under attack. To put it simply, because occupation is never final, it is a process. There is always a fear. The whiteness ownership over the state is under threat by internal and external outsiders. So migrants, indigenous populations, racialized others are continually framed as threats to the settlement of whiteness in the settler colonies. In summary, settler colonial scholars argue that the idea of white dominance in settler colonial spaces is not simply historical fact, but the outcome of a violent settler colonial structure that naturalizes whiteness as native through the erasure of indigenous presence. But the question we rarely ask, and this is a very central question for today, is how does whiteness become native in Europe, the former metropole? There seems to be a tendency to simply take whiteness in Europe for granted, as if Europe were naturally white, a space defined by the true white native. So what my book does is through both historical and conceptual work, to show that a similar process of white settling takes place in Europe too. In other words, I'll argue that whiteness also had to be settled as native in Europe, just as it did in the settler colonial states. Specifically, I show that settler colonial dynamics of belonging, possession, and violence have traveled or boomeranged back to Europe, shaping the former metropole's own sense of nativeness. So in doing so, I reassessed Europe's white nativeness as a racial construction that continually re articulates sensitive settler colonial rationalities of violence. In particular, I show that the settler colonial boomerang creates in Europe its very state of siege, a similar fear that occupation is also continually under threat. To understand this phenomenon, though, we need to go back to the border. We tend to think about borders as these territorial entities that are foundationally connected to the idea of sovereignty. Borders, in other words, are often seen as raised neutral truth to help delimit and protect the sovereign state. Critical border studies, however, have shown us that borders go way beyond lines on the map, to cite our title today, encompassing a set of practices, technologies, and imaginaries that organize mobility, belonging, and exclusion. But what is really the history of the modern border? Right. So more, the borders were, from their very inception, part of a racial colonial project. They emerged specifically in the settler colony in the 19th century as an instrument to police and restrict the arrival and settlement of racialized bodies, specifically from Asian Africa, while facilitating white immigration from Europe. So by disproportionately targeting, barring and policing the mobility of racialized populations, borders were therefore central to the settler colonial project. Consolidation, the construction of whiteness in the settler colony as the rightful native. In short, what my work shows is that the modern border emerges as a tool to consolidate white ownership over land while policing the mobility of racialized populations. However, these structures of bordering have also traveled to Europe over the course of the 19th and 20th century. And fomenti a very similar settling process in the previous metropole. As also, like Nandita Sharma explained, with decolonization and the dismantling of the empires, specifically after the end of World War II, previous metropoles begin a dramatic change in their migration policies. If movement across the empire was allowed and facilitated for the imperial subjects beforehand, now previous metropoles start closing their borders to the previous column colonies. And here, just like in the settler colonial states, we will see a similar use of the emerging borders and migration regimes to restrict, police and or bar racialized populations, specifically those from the previous colonies. At the same time, ideas of white nativeness start to strengthen across Europe, with racialized migrants being routinely cast as invaders replacers and as a result a threat to whiteness. This becomes particularly evident in Enoch Powell's infamous reverse of blood speech in 1968. There, anxieties over white replacement and racialized invasion show simultaneously the belief that Britain is naturally white, and also the fear that racialized migration poses a threat to white Britain. To sum up then, because I don't have much time today, the argument here is that with the consolidation of migration regimes of governance and security in Europe, we also see the emergence of a similar process of white settling. This process not only formates similar logics of nativeness, but also similar anxieties about racial occupation and settlement. Right, so what am I trying to say here about borders, colonialism and whiteness? If we can just summarize here. So overall, my main argument in this book is that borders and border violence in the global north are essentially living legacies of settler colonial structures of domination. Specifically, my point here is that borders have operated in the global north from their very inception as tools to settle whiteness. Obviously, once again, what do I mean by settling whiteness here? By that I mean the borders, as we understand today, have been primarily designed as instruments to materialize a certain imaginary of the nation state as a white possession in both white settler colonies and in Europe. This bordering project thus has an inch link with settler colonialism and perpetuates settler colonial dynamics of belonging, nativeness, and subjugation, not only in the settler colony, but also in Europe. So, like in the settler colonial statistics, borders have been central for a process of settling of whiteness that creates and reinforces a certain image of whiteness as native to an owner of the nation state. All this is almost a preamble for perhaps the final and most important message. So how does this allow us to rethink Europe's migrant crisis? Are the increasing framing of migration as a settler menace to whiteness? Here we first need to bear in mind that like in the settler colonies, whiteness is not naturally Europe's native or owner. Whiteness is a racial construction that is obviously historical and political. Specifically, in our case, white nativeness is a result of a historical and unfinished process of settling that continually nativizes whiteness. This process, argued, undergirds a broader dynamic of white anxiety, or a certain stage of siege, if you will, that projects onto racialized migrants this fear of losing its own nativeness. The migrant crisis, in other words, can be seen as the very results of settler colonial anxieties that shape Europe's understanding of whiteness. The current panic over invasion and replacement in Europe is not simply a certain response to recent migration flows, but part of a much longer colonial history of how whiteness constructs itself as native, both in the settler colony and in Europe itself. So far from a natural inheritance, white nativeness is a fragile and anxious project that relies on bordering practices to secure its claims to ownership and belonging. From Kyiv, Starmer's warning that the UK could become an island of strangers to Viktor Orban's insistence on keeping Hungary makes ways free. What we see here is not simply the defense of Europe's territorial integrity, the defense of Europe's borders, if you will, but an attempt to preserve a racial colonial order still centered around whiteness. Well, thank you very much. I think that's a moment.
- [18:59]
B
Thank you very much, Tarsis, for your presentation. I'm going to now hand over to Maya for her presentation.
- [19:09]
C
Hi, everyone. It's great to be here with you and see so many of you here tonight interested in this subject that we're going to be talking about, which is borders and the inequalities that they arguably produce. What I want to do for like 10 to 15 minutes is to kind of think about these two questions that were posed as part of the event discussion. Perhaps you read before you came here. One is that how can we better understand the way the borders are connected to Inequalities and should we reevaluate how we think about borders altogether? And what I'm hoping to do is by focusing on these two, I want to focus on two interrelated issues that constitute and are constituted by border making processes. One is race and the other is capitalism. So some of the themes kind of, I think, follow on quite nicely from what you've just heard, but really draw on a lot of the work that I've been doing over the past few years. So it is going to be a bit of a whirlwind, but if you stick with me, hopefully you'll be able to follow the thread. So to do this, what I want to do is I want to specifically think about how immigration regimes function. Drawing mostly on the UK is as a case study to think about, because that's where I live, it's where I work, work on. It's also what I work on. But I also want to recognize that this is not the only way that we can and should conceptualize the border. So very happy in the Q and A to kind of talk about a more global scope or to think about different ways that bordering maybe might function. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to think about these two different categories in turn. I'm going to think about race and then I'm going to think about capitalism and then I'm going to try and bring them together. As was mentioned in my bio, I work on this idea of racial capitalism. So hopefully at the end you'll get a sense of what one of the ways we might think about that too. But just before I do, I want to start with the second question, the second question on the slide and then move to the, move to the first, which is thinking about the inequalities. And so there are just some kind of standard ways of thinking about borders. And obviously when I was doing a sort of Google search of what I could use in terms of Creative Commons, this, this image of this, the border to Scotland came up. And it's something me and my. I grew up in Newcastle, which is in the northeast of England. And often when we drive to Scotland, which is something that we do quite a lot for like family holidays, we'll like sort of be pleased as we cross the Scottish border. And this image really made me reassess that, what it means to even be kind of celebrating this idea of like Scottish nationhood. But what I wanted to do before I kind of go, like begin to think about how this is covered in the mainstream and I don't know how this will go. I don't know if you're going to be more enthusiastic than my students or not, but I wanted to get a sense of just in the room, because when we're talking about should we reevaluate how we think about borders? I know how they're thought about in the kind of mainstream politics, which is what I'll talk about, but I wanted to get a sense of in the room how any of you think about borders. And so I've tried to put up a range of different ideas, but they're mostly negative, I suppose. I do have some more positive ones written down as well. So if you could just raise your hand if for you, borders maybe do mean some kind of security.
- [22:43]
A
Yeah.
- [22:43]
C
Okay. Wait. Belongings or nationhood, perhaps. Okay, maybe do some of you think that they're a necessary evil? You're not into them, but maybe they're necessary. Okay. Maybe some of you consider them an unnecessary evil. Anyone? Okay. And. Or maybe just simply an administrative burden for some people, that is. Okay, us, maybe for the people, if this does become a podcast or the people online who maybe can't see the audience, I feel like the administrative burden maybe had the most hands, just, but fairly kind of even spattering hands for all of that, all of those different ideas. And feel free to come back in the, back at me in the Q and A if there's like any other kind of ways that you sort of think about the border. I think it's interesting to hear. But in political discourse, particularly in the uk, borders are taken to represent strength and security. One of their main functions is to filter people, granting some people limited rights, others none at all. And so my answer to that question about should we reevaluate the border? How we think about border is yes, particularly if we're thinking about how the bordering is conducted and the way that immigration is legislated for. So in the UK very recently, these papers, these images are pretty. I mean, this, this one of Conservative Party conferences from this week. You have at least three, three of the UK's main parties, including the party that is currently in government, the Labour Party in the uk, calling for stronger borders. What it. What often happens when you hear this kind of rhetoric is it's conjured up that borders are necessary. They're necessary for protection, they're necessary to keep people safe. But what is often eclipsed, willfully or not, is that borders and bordering also produces harm. So who is it that we're talking about when we're talking about keeping People safe. If you think about the channel, the channel crossings, there's been a lot of which has been in the news a lot over the past few years in the uk. People making these very dangerous journeys from France to the UK border is actually border policies that mean people have to make those journeys. So many people die trying to cross that to make that crossing. People are risking their lives. But it is the bordering policies, is the lack of routes for people to travel via any other means that makes people have to take those journeys. And so whilst borders are being spoken about as if they are fundamental for security and protection, we should see, if we look from a different vantage point, that actually they produce, they can produce this vulnerability. So what has any of this got to do with race and with capitalism? So first, thinking about race, it's very common to hear politicians in the UK again entirely decouple race and immigration. I think it's not just a UK phenomenon, but I am again, the context that I sort of know best. And they claim that to say that they are connected is to call people who have so called legitimate concerns about immigration racist. And I sort of don't want to get into this idea about what this says about people's views. I more want to take a step back and think about when we're legislating and when we're boarding, when this kind of bordering is happening, what does it mean in relation to race? So in this essentially shift has occurred that has allowed this claim to be made, or made this claim, you know, it's not racist to impose limits on immigration, which was a conservative slogan to be made. And essentially what happened in rhetorical terms is whilst people in positions of power may have once more or less explicitly, I mean, not always so explicitly talked about particular racial groups and a threat and the need to use border processes to keep them out, people who were deemed racially other. In the 60s and 70s there was a big shift in the political rhetoric in the uk, at least just talking about culture. So this idea.