Holiday Newsletter 2023

As this year draws to a close, we would like to share with you some of the achievements of Border Criminologies’ members and our plans for next year. We are currently celebrating our 10th anniversary and have taken the opportunity of reaching this milestone to reflect on the nature and shape of the organisation. When it was first founded in 2013, interdisciplinary research on border control was still in its infancy. Today, border criminology is a discipline in its own right. Members of our network have played an important role in drawing attention to these issues and to developing critique and creative responses, through academic scholarship, activism, and policy work.

In recognition of the vibrancy and wide-ranging nature of the field, we made the decision to re-structure the network into thematic groups – currently: Detention and Deportation, Asylum and Border Criminology, Technology and Digital Futures, Law and the Courts, Gender, Violence and Exploitation, and Border Policing and Emotion. In so doing, we hope to enable our members to engage in new ways with Border Criminologies and to develop their own interests and expertise. Our commitment to the global reach of the network continues via our close connection with our colleagues in Asia-Pacific via the ANZSOC Borders thematic group, as well as in the range of network members and blog authors. While there remains a core group of people based in Oxford, particularly among those studying immigration detention and deportation, many of the other themes are based in our partner institutions, from Leiden to Melbourne. As you will see in this Holiday Newsletter, there are many new members among the thematic groups. Please read on to see how to get involved.

In addition to our new structure, we have also seen some operational changes. Having previously managed the website and blog, Andriani Fili is now a co-Director. Ana Aliverti and Rimple Mehta have stepped down from their roles as Associate Directors, although Ana has not gone far, as she has joined our Advisory Board, which is also changing. We would like to thank Didier Fassin, Sharon Pickering, Coretta Philips and Ben Bowling for their early support, and Ana, Andriani and Rimple for their contribution to the network, especially during the very difficult time of the global pandemic. We have welcomed two new MSc student researchers, Carmen Le and Sophia Dermetzis, who have joined forces with Diana Volpe in blog editing and helping with the newsletter. We have also appointed Alla Sui Lau to a paid role in communications. These positions have been funded by the British Academy and matched by Leiden, Oxford and Warwick law schools.

As usual, our members have been active in research and dissemination, as well as in activism and teaching. They continue to innovate in new forms of communication, such as the podcast series co-produced by Francesca Esposito and the Unchained Collective launched at the University of Westminster in late November. These conversations between people with lived experience of the British immigration detention system offer a moving set of testimonies about the nature and impact of this form of border control. We are proud to support this work and amplify it through our network.

This year has seen some important legal victories against border control, like the recent Australian Supreme Court decision about indefinite detention. We welcome these developments. Yet, such legal remedies are always contingent. In Australia, for example, the federal government has rushed in to replace one form of control with another -- opting for electronic monitoring of non-citizens, rather than their integration.

In the UK, legal challenges to the placement of unaccompanied children in hotels have forced the government to meet its safeguarding responsibilities, although the form that will take is, as yet, unclear. Here, the battle over outsourcing the asylum process continues, with the Supreme Court ruling against the Rwanda policy, only for the government to respond with sweeping new legislation that will bring new forms of harm and human rights violations. We will continue to cover these and other developments in border control policies in both the Global North and the Global South in our blog.

While any victories should be celebrated, the research of our network members continues to reveal how governments around the world are dismantling legal protections for the most vulnerable, and insisting on harsh border controls even as public opinion surveys suggest that much of the population holds more welcoming views. Our job is not done – far from it. Please consider joining us in whatever capacity you have and support our important work in disseminating original research, legal analysis and first-hand accounts of immigration and border control around the world.

Coming together in person and online, supporting early career scholars and working with people with lived experience, has always been key to the efforts of Border Criminologies. While COVID disrupted some of that work, we hope that the new organisational structure will allow us to build new ties and find new pathways to imagine and work for alternatives. As we grieve the lives lost in Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, as well as those on our own borders and within, our efforts can feel slight. Yet, working together, across borders, whether territorial, disciplinary, or even political, is a powerful ethical response, in the search for shared futures and new possibilities.

Be sure to have a good break over the holiday period. We are living in sad and difficult times, and we all need to rest and recharge. See you in 2024!

Mary, Sanja and Andriani

You can read our full report here.