Book review: Border Harms and Everyday Violence – A Prison Island in Europe 

Guest post by Emma Patchett. Emma is a Lecturer of Law at Northumbria University. Her most recent work on law, film and immigration detention has been published in The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies (Eds Karen Crawley, Thomas Giddens, Timothy D Peters, 2024). 

Review of Border Harms and Everyday Violence: A Prison Island in Europe by Evgenia Iliadou (Bristol University Press, 2023) 

The harms produced by the border are sometimes acutely visible – in the detainees whose bodies are a map of trauma or in the sight of a hotel containing asylum seekers being set alight. Yet these are only the most apparent harms – they do not take account of the slow drip of minutes spent watching a clock, queuing for documentation or the insidious mental toll of living through precarity and uncertainty of the future. 

Evgenia Iliadou engages with a myriad of practices of border harms across time and space, reflecting her experience of working for an NGO in Greece and on the island of Lesvos where she witnessed the violence of the border regime firsthand. She defines her work as ‘heartfelt ethnography’ due to its use of autoethnographic techniques and unashamedly emotional perspective, a challenge to more traditional perspectives of scholarship in which emotional introspection is regarded as an indication of a lack of credibility, and often deliberately marginalised. Iliadou is keen to note that this introspection is not confined to her own personal reflections, but more importantly, the testimonies of ‘border crossers’ interacting with, witnessing and resisting the border regime. 

Her book stresses the need to look beyond the ‘crisis’ narrative which insists on a sudden, temporary problem. Reports of a dehumanising ‘influx’ or ‘flood’ of migrants imply a simple solution: build a dam, stem the tide. In this reductive vision, the complex realities and “deep historical roots” (p.1) of migration, regional postcolonial violence and displacement are obscured or ignored completely. In the superficial depiction of a singular failure of border control — exploited by anti-immigrant politicians and media —the bodies of asylum seekers are depicted as dangerous, and threatening to the cohesive myths of the nation state. For Iliadou, understanding ‘crisis’ as ‘continuum’ instead forces the reader to understand harm as fluctuating, expansive, dynamic and productive.   

In carving out the history of forced displacement in Greece, Iliadou describes the way in which traumas of past displacement and postcolonial violence make a deep mark on the materiality of the present, “leaving their traces upon spaces in the locality” of Lesvos (p.49). She draws parallels between monuments, shared familial stories of the past and the contemporary memorialisation of ongoing trauma such as the lifejacket graveyard in the border town of Mytilene. Physical suffering and death are operationalised as part of the border regime, building on Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics and critical border studies scholarship to conceptualise necroharm as that which results from “disposability…dehumanization, abandonment and, therefore, social death” (p.121).  The camp at Moria is described as “an active landfill” for human beings; after the fire which ravaged the camp in 2021 she notes that “the abandoned tents, belongings, clothes and shoes produced a dystopic and macabre landscape” (p.124).   

Her concept of thanatoharms attempts to highlight the ways in which the ‘thanopolitical’ violence of the border (‘Thanatos’ is death personified in Greek mythology) enacts deterrence and practices of securitization, resulting in physical harms to those crossing borders. The impact can be immediate or long-term: whilst violent pushbacks at sea may result in evident abuse, enforced delays and prolonged detention can result in physical harm that perpetuates for many years. Furthermore, even after death, border crossers are subject to a “brutalizing” process of desecration, a lack of dignity and a denial of funeral rituals and proper burial. Even “the soul” is thus trapped “in a liminal threshold between earth and afterlife” (p.150). 

This book also engages with the spatialising of harm in the context of policies of externalisation.  Justified through the rhetoric of emergency, externalisation has not only led to agreements with authoritarian regimes but has also resulted in mechanisms for deterrence and ‘non-reception’ that make “land and sea pathways more violent, risky, perilous and fatal” (p.28). As a result of the closure of safe and legal routes, externalisation has opened the door to further coercion and exploitation by smugglers and traffickers, in addition to state sanctioned corruption in the case of a number of officially authorised actors within the “border mafia” (p.30).  

Border harms are further spatialised through policies and practices of internalisation in which, as one interviewee points out to Iliadou, “Greece [becomes] Europe’s lounge – a protracted waiting room” (p.38). The ‘hotspot’ approach implemented on Lesvos, and the intervention from security actors such as Nato and Frontex, turned the surrounding Aegean sea into a dehumanised threshold site or buffer zone, a “dystopic maritime carceral space” (p.39). Iliadou defines Lesvos through the metaphor of a prison island – ports became caged in, the sites between city centre and the camps an underworld for the “living dead” (pp.12-13).  

Detention spreads beyond sites of confinement and is “diffused and expanded across the island” (p.42) through mechanisms of control and surveillance. Iliadou draws attention to the history of islands as a form of “spatial and temporal confinement” (p.73), providing sites in which to quarantine ‘undesirables’, and now forming part of the ‘enforcement archipelago’ which has turned Lesvos into a “liminal threshold” (p.74). The language of disease or contagion has been often operationalised to justify containment, exclusion and/or expulsion, most recently in the practices of securitisation as a response to the Covid 19 pandemic, in which Lesvos was declared to be in a state of emergency, even whilst restrictions were being lifted elsewhere. 

Iliadou also reflects on the temporality of harm, specifically the way in which supposedly temporary ‘hotspot’ zones such as Lesvos become sites in which individuals are ‘stuck’ and border crossers are left “in limbo” (p.78). Moria seemed to have been designed to exacerbate the discomfort of waiting – Iliadou describes the way in which “there were no walls to lean on, no chairs to sit on, and all border crossers experienced forced queuing and standing” (p.128), sometimes in extreme heat or cold, as a form of degrading treatment.  

Iliadou clearly sees the role of the scholar as that of making harm visible; to draw attention to violence inflicted by state actors within contemporary border regime policies. At the same time, she recognises the ethical burden of responsibility and privilege that falls upon academics seeking to address harms through engagement with those who are forcibly displaced – one border crosser describes how NGOs, journalists and others who came to Lesvos were keen to hear stories but then departed: “they consumed the place and now they are gone, abandoning the place and leaving all of us to bear the consequences alone” (p.20). 

If the border regime is an attempt to render subjects invisible so that they do not (as an undesirable border crosser) leave a mark even after death, Iliadou’s insightful work insists on doing the opposite, drawing attention to the continuum of violence through testimonies of the tempo-spatial materiality of border harms, rooted in a particular place.  

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