Criminalising Freedom of Movement: a course and a podcast series

Guest post by Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis. Deanna Dadusc is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Brighton, and member of Watch the Med - Alarm Phone, of the Captain Support Network, and of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research. Camille Gendrot  is a PhD Candidate at the Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University/ Collaborative Institute on Migration (ICM), and member of Watch the Med - Alarm Phone, of the Captain Support Network and of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research. Aila Spathopoulou is a lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at the University of Stirling and also part of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and her research focusses on how ferries, ships, cruise ships and barges are being used as offshore floating prisons for people racialised and criminalised across Europe and the UK. Her work with FAC research has shaped her understanding of border violence and border abolition from a transfeminist perspective. Anna Carastathis is a political philosopher and co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research. She is the author of Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons and co-author of Reproducing Refugees: Photographia of a Crisis. 

Over the past years, within our no border networks, including the Captain Support Network, borderline europe, Watch-the-Med Alarm Phone, the Baye Fall crew, Clinica Legale Roma 3, Lesvos Legal Centre, Sportello Sans Papier of Arci Porco Rosso, and more recently the Maldusa project, we have been discussing the relationship between struggles against borders, the illegalisation of people on the move, and the criminalisation of any form of facilitation to freedom of movement. 

All over Europe and beyond, those facilitating freedom of movement and resisting border regimes are often accused of being violent traffickers or smugglers, and risk years of imprisonment (see our Border Criminologies blog series). Often, the word ‘smuggling’ is associated and conflated with the notions of ‘violence’ and ‘coercion’. Whilst we must acknowledge that people might encounter violence during their journeys, we also need to contextualise it within the systemic violence and coercion of global inequality and of immobility regimes. The criminalisation of movement, in this context, is an amplifier of violence: on the one hand, it exercises violence on those people who are criminalised, detained, imprisoned for years. On the other, it forces people into longer and more dangerous routes, into the need of invisibility, into precarity and dependency from other people, all elements that expose illegalised border crossers to further vulnerability and to potential violence, as we know well from the struggles for the decriminalisation of sex work.  

In order to delve into a more nuanced analytical framework to inform our common struggles to decriminalise freedom of movement, we designed an online community course (syllabus here) that was delivered in Spring 2023. In this course, we brought together no-border activists and scholars engaged in the struggle against the criminalisation of facilitation, as well as people who have been directly criminalised by the EU border regime. From the recordings of the course, we created a podcast series (link to materials on website here and on Spotify). 

The conversations in the course, which you’ll hear in the podcast, arose from the need to link struggles against borders with struggles against prisons and any form of confinement. No-border struggles, in our view, must be anti-carceral struggles. Borders and border regimes are punitive and carceral institutions; they require criminalisation and exploitation of people on the move to create regimes of immobility. Therefore, we cannot imagine a world without borders, if we do not imagine a world without prisons. The two regimes are entangled and mutually constitutive of patriarchal and white supremacist forms of power, violence, and control.  

The key questions we pose in this course is how to analyse criminalisation as part of a continuum, without fabricating differentiations between the criminalised sea rescuers, the migrant community organiser, the boat driver, or the lorry driver? In doing so, how can we overcome the language of criminality and of victimisation? And to what extent can some actions that are criminalised be framed as political actions, that willingly or unwillingly pose a challenge and a threat to the border regime? 

Throughout the course and the podcast series, the notion of facilitation allowed us to reflect on this continuum of criminalisation.  

By bringing into conversation people with different experiences, we wanted to question how the process of criminalisation, as well as resistance to it, labels some actions as benevolent and humanitarian, whilst others as potentially dangerous, violent and deserving punishment.  

Whilst people in different positionalities are affected by criminalisation differently, we attempted to take distance from scrutinising the individuals who are criminalised, evaluating their ‘guilt/innocence,’ or whether they are ‘deserving/undeserving’ of criminalisation and therefore of solidarity.  

Indeed, the war on smugglers is informed by fake dichotomies and state-centred narratives contraposing the allegedly ‘dangerous criminal’, the smuggler, and their victims, vulnerable people who are supposedly at their mercy. In particular, the ‘innocent women-and-children’ trope is often mobilised to invoke state protection, namely to legitimise the intensification of border controls, of increased militarisation. Here the state pretends to play the role of the protector, but in fact exercises patriarchal protection that controls, detains, deports and kills ‘women-and-children’ as well as men on a daily basis. Rather than creating protection, border regimes produce vulnerability and are the driving forces of ‘premature death’ of racialised people on the move. In the course and podcast, we propose a feminist analysis to understand how the language of protection and of vulnerability is mobilised to legitimise the criminalisation of those addressed as perpetrators, in this case fellow migrants rather than the border regime. We also call for an abolition feminist framework to keep acknowledging the forms of victimisation border crossers are subjected to, due to state violence and global injustice. 

As border management and border violence are inscribed in gendered and racialised ways on our bodies, and shape our everyday interactions and relationships, abolitionist feminist analysis allow us to counter how colonial, white, carceral feminisms try to legitimise war, violence and killing in the name of protecting women from non-European, non-White men, who are immediately classified as dangerous. And we do so by continuing to burn borders and their binaries, rather than trying to fit more people within them, imagining and practicing a world without borders and without cages. 

We also discussed how the continuum of criminalisation is not only a tool of incarceration and vulnerabilisation, but also an attempt to repress any struggle against borders and border defiance, as well as a tool to weaken any form of migrant self-organisation and solidarity.  

The podcast series comprises 7 episodes, each addressing the politics of criminalisation of facilitation from different perspectives, including the discursive, the political, and legal implications on local, national, and EU levels. All course materials, syllabus and readings can be downloaded from the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research website. 

We thank all the people who participated in the course, either by contributing to the roundtables, or by participating in the conversations and discussions. We also thank all the no border groups that are part of the struggles against criminalisation, and with whom we co-created new languages, narratives and knowledges over the past years. 

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