Border Criminology: An Introduction

Post by Mary Bosworth, Katja Franko, Maggy Lee, and Rimple Mehta. This post introduces a series of four posts that summarise individual chapters from Handbook on Border Criminology, edited by Mary Bosworth, Katja Franko, Maggy Lee and Rimple Mehta and published by Edward Algar. 

In this themed series, we profile a selection of chapters from the newly released Handbook on Border Criminology. Produced as part of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the research network Border Criminologies, this handbook draws together a wide range of scholars working across the globe on the intersections between criminal justice and border control. Contributors assess the nature, findings, and implications of academic scholarship on border control, understood in a broad sense of the term, in a period of hardening politics, rhetoric and law. Over 24 chapters, they explore the relationship between theoretical and empirical work on border control, as well as normative philosophical questions about how best to respond in an unequal and unjust world. While the book itself, with its hefty price tag, is destined for library collections, here in our introductory overview and in four accompanying pieces, we offer a glimpse of the issues it raises.

As readers of this blog are painfully aware, who has ‘the right to have rights’ has become a perennial question in a world where the nation state is under a profound process of transformation, and where the boundaries of the political community are increasingly contested and unclear. In practices like deportation, immigration detention and refugee camps, the building of walls and border surveillance, the rights of the migrant stand at the crux of contemporary debates about the changing nature of state sovereignty and its limits.  

Over the past decade such matters have become subjects of extensive scholarly analysis in a range of disciplines, including criminology. As the Handbook reveals, Border Criminology has deep and widely spread intellectual roots, which connect it to a range of debates in feminist theory, refugee and immigration studies, postcolonial studies, human rights, immigration and refugee law, and critical race scholarship. Authors draw on philosophical and methodological offerings of scholarship from decolonial, Southern and critical race perspectives, from different geographical and epistemological locations, to explore the complexities of migration governance and consequent harm to people on the move.  

The ongoing impacts of colonialism and neocolonialism on border control and mobility is evident in the transnationalisation of border control practices and structures from the North to the South. Practices of offshoring and outsourcing asylum and border externalisation through disbursement of aid - what Stambøl refers to as “neocolonial penalities”- are recasting geopolitical relationships and deepening the divide between the North and the South. While most of the forced mobility is within the South or of people moving from the South to the North, scholarship in border criminology has predominantly been UK/US or Australia centric. Nonetheless, as contributors to this themed series make clear, a growing body of work draws on decolonial or Southern perspectives to highlight the legacy of colonization in the drawing of borders, policing, immigration laws and humanitarian aid. There has also been research on how geopolitical and racial inequalities shape the state response towards people forcibly moving across borders, while scholars interested in the nexus between capitalism, race and class foreground what has been termed the ‘militarized global apartheid’ that benefits wealthier nations.  

Methodological approaches and challenges 

 Much of Border Criminology has concentrated on a set of institutions and organisations, including border police, NGOs, law and the courts, and sites of confinement from prison to immigration detention. To a lesser extent, scholars have also studied the actions and experiences of people crossing the border, and the nature and consequence of deportation.  Indeed, one of the key contributions of the subfield has been the ability to access sites run by the state and their private sector or third sector partners. Like colleagues in prison and police studies, Border Criminologists have been able to persuade often hostile, or at least suspicious, bureaucrats and other gatekeepers to let them into sites that were previously closed to academic inquiry. 

Such access has not been without consequence, however, since in most places, it has been hard earned and usually provisional.  It usually takes some time to agree, ensuring that only those with secure academic posts may be able to afford to work on such sites and practices. Researchers may struggle to be openly critical. They are unlikely to be invited back if they are too insistent about the structural and systematic nature of the system’s injustices and inequalities, particularly when the sites under analysis and their staff are not used to being the object of study. While previously some matters could be managed by strategic delays in publication, or by producing multiple and targeted outputs, a growing insistence on open access publications alongside demands that academic research demonstrates ‘real world’ application, render such techniques unviable. Scholars have responded creatively to these strictures, with many pursuing multiple forms of dissemination, from blog posts to policy briefings alongside their overpriced research monographs. Teaching is another important method of communication, and one in which academics are likely to have more freedom for candor.   

Yet, difficult questions remain. How important is it to access the actual state-run institutions of border control? Is the cost of maintaining access simply too high? How would those costs be measured or identified? How about countries where access is almost non-existent? As many states continue to harden their responses to migrants, clearly it is important to gather evidence. At the same time, however, that evidence is likely to be increasingly ineffective in changing any practical aspect of how the system operates. What then, is the purpose of research? Are we there to bear witness for future generations? Is understanding sufficient as a goal in itself? 

Most Border Criminology relies on qualitative research. Considerable emphasis is placed on story-telling, an approach that both reflects the still exploratory nature of much of the research as well as, often, the feminist inclination of the researchers. While a useful technique in building empathy and understanding, qualitative methods rely on good communication. Yet, many of those subject to border control may not be fluent in the same language of the researcher, and criminological training rarely includes language instruction.  In this system too, where people are often required to tell their story over and over again, the distinction between a researcher and a coercive state agent may not always be clear to those being asked to participate, an uncomfortable reality that reminds us of the importance of supporting people to tell their own stories, in a manner of their own choosing.  

Such issues have led some to pursue a more interdisciplinary approach, working with artists to generate other forms of knowledge in creative outputs. Still others have worked with people with lived experience to set up groups of their own, to control their own research and dissemination. In the UK, for example, in 2023, the Unchained Collective, a group of people with and without experience of immigration detention, worked together to gather and disseminate first-hand accounts of border control through a podcast and accompanying artistic outputs.  

Conclusion 

In mapping the origins and development of this field of inquiry as well as many of its key findings, the Handbook on Border Criminology invites reflection on what to do next. How can we develop our interdisciplinary and critical work further? And how can we use the heavy weight of the knowledge about state use (and misuse) of force over disadvantaged populations, which has been accumulated in the field, for greater public good? As editors, we do not provide a definitive answer to these questions, but rather see them as an indication of future directions that we look forward to following.