Researching Border Violence in an Indefensible Europe

Abstract

Significant documentation generated by activists, researchers, and human rights organisations has evidenced how violence is systematically deployed by European states to regulate the mobility and settlement of people on the move arriving from the Global South. While documenting violations at Europe’s borders is necessary to challenge states’ efforts to obscure violence and to enable accountability for border injustices, this article offers a critical reflection of the assumptions and performative effects of such research. Drawing on critical border studies literature and the critique of ‘damage-centred’ research (Tuck and Yang, 2014) offered by decolonial and feminist theorists, the article reflects on how efforts to render border harms visible in a Europe where violence against people on the move is normalised–and widely endorsed–risk reproducing the dehumanisation it seeks to challenge. I examine two strands of critique: firstly, of how research describing violence may unintendedly reify dominant representations that suggest an unbridgeable difference between those whose bodies can be injured, and those untouched by violence. Secondly, I suggest that provided the inherent violence of Europe’s borders and the affective attachments of European societies to the unequal world order they sustain, exposing violence may not necessarily contribute to ending it. I conclude with a discussion on how research may be deployed to challenge these affective attachments to violence. The article thus contributes with a critical reflection on the role of knowledge production in variably reproducing and challenging the borders of a Europe that, as Césaire (1950) has proposed, is indefensible.