Sources and References

This document draws on three required ethnographies: Shahram Khosravi, Illegal Traveler: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (2010); Jason de Leon, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015); and Ian Kalman, Framing Borders: Principle and Practicality in the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory (2021). Additional sources include work by Ruben Andersson, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Julie Chu, Didier Fassin, Paolo Gaibazzi, Sarah Green, Darryl Li, Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, Walter Mignolo, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Michelle Obeid, Mathijs Pelkmans, Audra Simpson, Miriam Ticktin, Giorgio Agamben, Nicholas De Genova, Saskia Sassen, and Etienne Balibar.

Chapter 1: Theorizing Borders

1.1 What Is a Border?

The border (边界) is among the most contested and theoretically productive concepts in the contemporary social sciences. Far from being a simple line on a map demarcating the territorial limits of nation-states, borders are complex social institutions that produce, regulate, and differentiate populations. They are simultaneously material infrastructures – walls, fences, checkpoints, detention centres – and immaterial regimes of law, classification, documentation, and affect. Every border simultaneously includes and excludes, connects and divides; it is a site where sovereignty (主权) is performed and where its limits become visible.

The study of borders has undergone a dramatic transformation since the 1990s. Where earlier scholarship treated borders as given features of the international state system – lines drawn by treaties and maintained by armies – critical border studies insists that borders are processes rather than things. Borders are continually made and remade through everyday practices: the stamping of a passport, the questioning of a traveller, the construction of a wall, the issuing or withholding of a visa. This processual understanding means that borders do not exist only at the edges of national territory. They travel with people, surfacing at airports, train stations, workplaces, hospitals, and schools wherever documents are checked and identities verified.

1.2 The Border as Method

Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have proposed what they call “border as method” (边界作为方法), an analytical approach that uses the border not merely as an object of study but as an epistemological vantage point from which to examine broader processes of political, economic, and social transformation. For Mezzadra and Neilson, borders are productive: they do not simply block movement but actively shape, channel, and differentiate it. The concept of differential inclusion (差异化包容) is central here. Rather than a simple binary of inclusion and exclusion, borders produce a spectrum of subject positions – the citizen, the permanent resident, the temporary worker, the refugee, the undocumented migrant – each with different bundles of rights, obligations, and vulnerabilities.

This framework draws attention to the relationship between borders and labour. The differential legal statuses produced by border regimes create pools of precarious, deportable labour that can be exploited precisely because of workers’ vulnerability to state power. The border, in this reading, is not the antithesis of the free market but one of its most important mechanisms.

1.3 Balibar and the Polysemy of Borders

Etienne Balibar’s influential work on borders argues for their fundamental polysemy (多义性) – the idea that borders do not have a single, stable meaning or function but rather mean different things to different people depending on their social position. For a business executive travelling on a first-class ticket with a powerful passport, a border is a minor administrative formality. For an undocumented migrant attempting to cross the same line, it may be a matter of life and death. Balibar thus insists that borders are experienced differently according to one’s class, race, nationality, and legal status, and that this differential experience is not incidental but constitutive of what borders are and do.

Balibar further argues that borders are no longer located exclusively at the territorial edges of states. In what he calls the “vacillation” of borders, they have been dispersed throughout the social body. Identity checks in city centres, employer verification of work authorization, hospital intake procedures that demand documentation – all of these are border practices that occur far from any territorial frontier. The border, Balibar suggests, is everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent yet constantly shifting in its location and effects.

1.4 Sovereignty and the Exception

Sovereignty (主权), in its classical formulation, is the supreme authority within a territory. The border is the spatial expression of this authority: it marks where one sovereign jurisdiction ends and another begins. But the relationship between sovereignty and borders is more complex than this formulation suggests. Drawing on Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben has argued that the sovereign is defined not by the routine exercise of law but by the capacity to declare the state of exception (例外状态) – to suspend the normal legal order in the name of its preservation.

Borders are paradigmatic sites of exception. At the border, sovereign power operates with extraordinary latitude: migrants can be detained without charge, subjected to invasive searches, deported without judicial review, or held in conditions that would be impermissible for citizens. The border zone (边境区域) functions as a space where ordinary legal protections are thinned or suspended, where the sovereign’s power over life and death becomes most visible. Agamben’s concept of bare life (赤裸生命) – life stripped of all political qualification, reduced to mere biological existence – finds its most literal expression in the bodies of migrants abandoned in deserts, drowned in seas, or warehoused in detention centres.

1.5 Decolonial Perspectives on Borders

Walter Mignolo and other decolonial thinkers insist that modern borders cannot be understood apart from the history of European colonialism. The contemporary international border regime is a product of the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states, which was itself forged through colonial conquest, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the racial classification of the world’s populations. The borders that now regulate global migration were imposed through violence, and they continue to reproduce the colonial hierarchies of race, civilization, and belonging that attended their creation.

From a decolonial perspective, the very categories through which borders operate – citizenship, nationality, legality – are colonial inheritances. The passport, that quintessential border document, is a technology of identification that emerged from European practices of racial and national classification. To hold a passport from a powerful nation is to carry the accumulated privilege of colonial history; to hold one from a formerly colonized country – or to lack one entirely – is to bear the weight of that same history in the form of restricted mobility, extended scrutiny, and perpetual suspicion.

Chapter 2: The Auto-Ethnography of Illegality

2.1 Shahram Khosravi and the Experience of the Border

Shahram Khosravi’s Illegal Traveler occupies a unique position in the literature on borders and migration. It is at once a scholarly analysis of border regimes, an auto-ethnography of the author’s own experience as an undocumented border crosser, and a meditation on the existential condition of illegality (非法性). Khosravi, who fled Iran as a young man and crossed multiple international borders without authorization before eventually reaching Sweden, brings a rare experiential authority to the study of borders. His text insists that borders are not abstractions to be theorized from a distance but lived realities that mark bodies, shape subjectivities, and determine life chances.

2.2 The Production of Illegality

A central argument of Illegal Traveler is that illegality (非法性) is not an inherent quality of certain persons but a juridical status produced by the state. No human being is intrinsically “illegal”; people become illegal through the operation of laws that define certain forms of movement as unauthorized. This is what Nicholas De Genova calls the “legal production of migrant illegality” (移民非法性的法律生产) – the process by which immigration law creates the very category of the “illegal alien” and then subjects those so classified to regimes of surveillance, exploitation, and expulsion.

Khosravi demonstrates that the production of illegality is intimately bound up with the production of the nation-state itself. The nation-state requires borders to define its territory, and it requires immigration law to regulate who may cross those borders. Those who cross without authorization become “illegal,” and their illegality in turn serves to reinforce the authority and legitimacy of the border. The illegal traveller is thus not an anomaly in the system of nation-states but a necessary product of it – a figure whose very existence confirms the power of the state to distinguish between those who belong and those who do not.

2.3 The Temporal Economy of Illegality

Khosravi’s work is particularly attentive to the temporal dimensions of border crossing and illegality. The experience of the undocumented migrant is structured by a distinctive temporal economy (时间经济) – a regime of waiting, uncertainty, and suspended time that is fundamentally different from the temporal experience of the documented citizen. Undocumented migrants wait: they wait in smugglers’ safe houses, in transit countries, in detention centres, in asylum queues. This waiting is not merely inconvenient; it is a form of power. The state’s capacity to make people wait – to hold their lives in suspension, to deny them the ability to plan, to foreclose their futures – is one of the most potent and least visible forms of border violence.

This temporal analysis connects to broader questions about biopolitics (生命政治) and the governance of populations. The management of time – who is allowed to move quickly and who is made to wait, whose time is valued and whose is wasted – is a central mechanism of modern border regimes. Fast-track lanes at airports, expedited visa processing for business travellers, and trusted traveller programs all attest to the differential valuation of time according to class, nationality, and race.

2.4 Documents, Identity, and the Self

Khosravi explores how identity documents – passports, visas, residence permits, identity cards – become constitutive of personhood itself under modern border regimes. In a world organized around nation-states, to lack documents is to lack a recognizable social identity. The undocumented migrant exists in a condition of what Khosravi calls social death – a state of being present in a society yet invisible to its institutions, unable to access its protections, and perpetually vulnerable to its punitive apparatus.

The relationship between documents and identity also reveals the racial and geopolitical hierarchies (种族与地缘政治等级) embedded in the international passport system. Passports from wealthy, predominantly white nations confer near-universal mobility, while those from poorer, non-white nations restrict it. This differential mobility is not a natural feature of the world but a product of colonial history and ongoing structures of global inequality. The passport, ostensibly a neutral travel document, is in fact one of the most powerful instruments of racial and economic stratification in the contemporary world.

2.5 Borders and the Body

Illegal Traveler insists on the embodied nature of border crossing. Borders are not experienced abstractly but through the body: through the physical exhaustion of long journeys on foot, the pain of hiding in cramped spaces, the fear that manifests as a racing heart and sweating palms, the hunger and thirst of desert crossings. The body is also the surface on which borders are inscribed – through scars from barbed wire, sunburn from exposure, the physical toll of labour performed in conditions of illegality.

Khosravi’s attention to the body connects his work to broader discussions of necropolitics (死亡政治), Achille Mbembe’s concept for the sovereign’s power to determine who may live and who must die. Border regimes exercise necropolitical power not only through active violence – shootings at borders, forced deportations to dangerous countries – but through the creation of conditions in which death becomes likely. The desert, the sea, the smuggler’s truck – these are not merely routes of migration but killing fields produced by the deliberate channelling of migrant movement through landscapes of danger.

Chapter 3: The US-Mexico Border and the Politics of Death

3.1 The Land of Open Graves

Jason de Leon’s The Land of Open Graves is a landmark ethnography of the United States-Mexico borderlands (边境地带), focusing on the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as a site of mass migrant death. De Leon, a cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, brings a multi-method approach to the study of border violence, combining ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented migrants, forensic analysis of the material traces they leave behind, and a searing critique of US immigration policy. His central argument is that the US government has deliberately weaponized the desert environment, using its extreme heat, aridity, and remoteness as tools of deterrence (威慑) against unauthorized border crossers.

3.2 The Desert as Weapon

The logic of Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD) is deceptively simple: by making traditional urban crossing points – such as those near San Diego and El Paso – heavily fortified and surveilled, the policy forces migrants to attempt crossings through the most inhospitable terrain available. The Sonoran Desert, with summer temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, minimal water sources, and vast distances between settlements, becomes the enforcement mechanism. The desert does the killing that the state cannot be seen to do directly.

De Leon meticulously documents the material infrastructure of this policy: the walls and fences that block urban crossings, the surveillance technologies that monitor the border, the Border Patrol’s deployment patterns that funnel migrants into specific corridors of extreme danger. He also documents what the policy produces: hundreds of deaths per year, thousands of bodies recovered from the desert since the mid-1990s, and an unknown number of missing persons whose remains lie undiscovered in the vast and unforgiving landscape.

3.3 Necroviolence and the Afterlife of Bodies

One of de Leon’s most original contributions is the concept of necroviolence (死后暴力) – violence performed on dead bodies. In the Sonoran Desert, the extreme environment does not merely kill migrants; it rapidly destroys their remains. Scavenging animals scatter bones, intense heat accelerates decomposition, and the elements erase the evidence of individual identity. Many bodies are never found; of those that are, many cannot be identified. The dead are rendered anonymous, their stories untellable, their families left without closure.

De Leon draws on his training as an archaeologist to read the desert landscape as an archive of this violence. The material traces of migration – backpacks, water bottles, clothing, photographs, rosaries, personal effects – become evidence of lives lived and lost. His “Undocumented Migration Project” collects and catalogues these objects, treating them as artefacts worthy of the same careful attention that archaeologists give to ancient remains. This methodological choice is also an ethical and political one: it insists on the humanity and significance of lives that the border regime treats as disposable.

3.4 The Experience of the Crossing

De Leon’s ethnographic work with migrants in the Mexican border town of Nogales and with those who have survived desert crossings provides vivid accounts of the experience of unauthorized border crossing. Migrants describe the physical agony of walking for days in extreme heat with limited water, the terror of encountering Border Patrol, the anguish of being separated from companions, and the psychological toll of repeated attempts and failures.

The ethnography also documents the economies that have grown up around border crossing: the networks of smugglers (known as coyotes (蛇头)) who guide migrants through the desert for fees that may represent years of savings; the safe houses where migrants are held, sometimes in conditions of extreme privation; the corruption and violence that pervade the smuggling industry. These economies are themselves products of the border regime: the more dangerous and difficult the crossing becomes, the more migrants must rely on paid guides, and the higher the prices those guides can charge.

3.5 Humanitarianism and Its Limits

De Leon examines the role of humanitarian organizations that operate in the borderlands, leaving water and supplies along known migration routes. These groups – such as No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes – engage in what they understand as life-saving work, yet their efforts exist in profound tension with the enforcement apparatus. The US government has at times prosecuted humanitarian workers for providing aid to migrants, treating acts of compassion as crimes of facilitation.

This dynamic raises fundamental questions about the relationship between humanitarianism (人道主义) and sovereignty. Humanitarian intervention at the border simultaneously challenges the state’s right to let people die and reinforces the framework within which that dying occurs. By treating the symptoms of border violence – dehydration, exposure, injury – humanitarians may inadvertently normalize the conditions that produce it. The border remains; the desert remains; the policy remains. What changes is only whether a few more individuals survive the crossing that the state has designed to be lethal.

Chapter 4: Indigenous Sovereignty and Colonial Borders

4.1 Akwesasne and the Imposition of Borders

Ian Kalman’s Framing Borders examines the experience of the Akwesasne Mohawk community, whose territory straddles the border between Canada and the United States (as well as the provincial/state borders of Ontario, Quebec, and New York). For the Mohawk people of Akwesasne, the international border is not a natural or legitimate boundary but a colonial imposition that divides a pre-existing political community against its will. The border was drawn through Mohawk territory without Mohawk consent, and its presence has profoundly shaped daily life in ways that range from the inconvenient to the devastating.

Kalman’s ethnography is attentive to the everyday practicalities of living on a border that one does not recognize as legitimate. Akwesasne residents must cross international and sub-national borders to visit family, attend ceremonies, go to work, access services, and participate in community governance. Each crossing subjects them to the authority of a state that they regard as occupying their territory. The border checkpoint becomes a daily site of friction, humiliation, and resistance.

4.2 Framing Borders: Principle and Practicality

A key analytical contribution of Kalman’s work is the distinction between principle and practicality in how Akwesasne Mohawks engage with the border. In principle, many community members do not recognize the legitimacy of the US-Canada border or the authority of either state over their territory. The border is understood as a violation of Mohawk sovereignty, an instrument of colonial control, and an affront to the political unity of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. In practice, however, Akwesasne residents must navigate the border on a daily basis, making pragmatic accommodations to a system they fundamentally reject.

Kalman documents how this negotiation plays out in specific contexts: in disputes over the use of Mohawk-issued identification documents at border crossings, in conflicts over taxation and customs duties on goods moving within Akwesasne, and in debates within the community about how best to assert sovereignty in the face of overwhelming state power.

4.3 The Jay Treaty and the Right to Free Passage

The legal framework governing Mohawk border crossings is complicated by the Jay Treaty of 1794, which guaranteed Indigenous peoples born in Canada the right to pass freely across the US-Canada border and to live and work in either country. The treaty, negotiated between Britain and the United States, did not consult Indigenous nations, yet it has become an important legal instrument for asserting Indigenous border-crossing rights.

The Jay Treaty situation illustrates a broader dynamic in the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and colonial border regimes. Indigenous peoples’ rights to mobility predate the borders that now restrict them, yet the assertion of those rights must be made in legal and political vocabularies that were not of their making. The border forces Indigenous peoples to frame their sovereignty in terms legible to the colonial state, even as they insist on forms of sovereignty that exceed and challenge the state’s categories.

4.4 Securitization and Its Consequences

The post-9/11 securitization of the US-Canada border has had particularly severe consequences for Akwesasne. The intensification of border enforcement – additional checkpoints, enhanced surveillance, increased staffing, stricter documentation requirements – has made daily life more difficult for community members whose routines require frequent border crossings. The securitization (安全化) of the border treats the Mohawk territory as a potential conduit for terrorism and smuggling, subjecting its residents to heightened scrutiny and suspicion.

Kalman also documents the phenomenon of smuggling (走私) across the Akwesasne border, a practice that the community views very differently from the way state authorities do. From the state’s perspective, the movement of untaxed goods (particularly tobacco) across the border is criminal activity. From the perspective of many Akwesasne residents, it is the exercise of a sovereign right to trade within one’s own territory without paying duties to a foreign government. This divergence in framing reveals the fundamental incompatibility between state and Indigenous understandings of sovereignty, territory, and law.

4.5 Audra Simpson and the Refusal of Recognition

Audra Simpson’s work on Kahnawake Mohawk nationalism provides crucial theoretical context for understanding the Akwesasne situation. Simpson develops the concept of refusal (拒绝) – the practice of declining to participate in the political frameworks of the settler-colonial state, even when doing so might yield pragmatic benefits. Refusal is not simply saying “no”; it is an assertion of sovereignty that operates by withholding consent, declining to be legible to the state, and insisting on the continued existence of political orders that the state has attempted to eliminate.

Simpson’s framework helps explain why Akwesasne Mohawks continue to assert their right to cross the border using Haudenosaunee-issued travel documents, even when doing so invites confrontation with border agents. The use of these documents is an act of refusal – a declaration that Mohawk identity and Mohawk sovereignty are not contingent on recognition by Canada or the United States. It is also an assertion that the border, however materially present and coercively enforced, does not possess the legitimacy that the states that maintain it claim for it.

Chapter 5: Mediterranean Crossings and the European Border Regime

5.1 The Sea as Border

The Mediterranean Sea occupies a unique and tragic position in contemporary border politics. It is simultaneously one of the world’s most ancient routes of commerce, cultural exchange, and human movement, and one of the most lethal borders on earth. Since the 1990s, tens of thousands of people have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe. The sea, like the Sonoran Desert, has been transformed from a natural feature of the landscape into a border technology (边境技术) – a barrier that kills those who attempt to cross it without authorization.

Ruben Andersson’s ethnography of the Euro-African border regime documents the elaborate infrastructure of border enforcement that has been constructed around the Mediterranean: the naval patrols, the surveillance systems, the agreements with North African states to intercept migrants before they reach European waters, the detention centres in Libya and elsewhere where migrants are held in conditions of extreme deprivation and violence. This infrastructure does not prevent migration; it makes it more dangerous, more expensive, and more dependent on smuggling networks.

5.2 Frontex and the Externalization of Borders

The European Union’s border agency, Frontex (欧洲边境管理局), embodies the logic of border externalization (边界外部化) – the displacement of border enforcement away from the territorial boundaries of the destination state and into the territories and waters of transit and origin countries. Through agreements with states such as Libya, Morocco, Turkey, and Niger, the EU has effectively extended its border deep into Africa and the Middle East, creating a vast zone of migration management that operates far from European soil and largely beyond European legal accountability.

This externalization has profound implications for the rights of migrants and refugees. When interception occurs in international waters or in the territory of a third state, the legal obligations of European states – particularly their obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention (1951年难民公约) – become attenuated or are claimed not to apply. The result is a system in which Europe can control migration without bearing direct legal responsibility for the violence that control entails.

5.3 Rescue, Abandonment, and the Politics of the Sea

The Mediterranean has become a laboratory for the politics of rescue and abandonment. European states oscillate between humanitarian rescue operations – saving migrants from drowning – and policies of deliberate neglect, withdrawing naval assets from known migration routes and criminalizing NGO rescue vessels. This oscillation reveals a fundamental tension in the European approach to migration: the desire to prevent arrival coexists uneasily with the moral and legal imperative to prevent death.

The politics of Mediterranean migration also involve what Didier Fassin calls humanitarian reason (人道主义理性) – the logic by which suffering becomes the primary basis for claims to rights and resources. Under humanitarian reason, migrants must present themselves as victims – of persecution, of trafficking, of extreme deprivation – in order to gain access to protection. Those who cannot narrate their suffering in terms legible to the humanitarian apparatus, or whose motivations are deemed “merely economic,” are classified as undeserving and subject to deportation. This framework individualizes what are fundamentally structural problems, reducing questions of global inequality and colonial legacy to assessments of individual victimhood.

5.4 The Camp and the Hotspot

The European border regime has produced a distinctive spatial formation: the camp (难民营). From the detention centres of Libya to the reception facilities of Lampedusa, from the sprawling informal settlement of Calais (known as “the Jungle”) to the Greek island hotspots of Lesbos and Moria, camps have become the primary sites where Europe processes, classifies, and contains mobile populations. These camps exist in what Agamben would recognize as a state of exception: their inhabitants are physically present on European soil yet legally suspended, their claims to rights held in abeyance while bureaucratic processes grind on.

The camp is not merely a pragmatic response to migration but a political technology with deep historical roots. It represents the sovereign’s power to create spaces of exception – zones where the normal legal order is suspended and where populations can be managed, sorted, and, if necessary, expelled. The proliferation of camps at Europe’s borders is thus not a failure of the migration management system but one of its central features.

Chapter 6: Affect, Violence, and the Embodied Border

6.1 The Affective Dimensions of Borders

Borders are not only legal, political, and economic institutions; they are also affective ones. They produce and are sustained by affects (情感) – fear, anxiety, hope, despair, humiliation, rage, solidarity. The study of border affect draws attention to the embodied, emotional, and experiential dimensions of border crossing that are often occluded by policy analysis and political theory.

Yael Navaro-Yashin’s work on the materiality and affect of borders – particularly her research on northern Cyprus – demonstrates how the physical infrastructure of borders generates affective atmospheres. Ruins, checkpoints, barriers, and no-man’s-lands produce feelings of melancholy, unease, and displacement that permeate the lives of those who inhabit divided landscapes. These affects are not merely psychological responses to political conditions; they are themselves political, shaping how people understand and relate to the borders that structure their worlds.

6.2 Fear and Surveillance

Fear (恐惧) is perhaps the most pervasive affect associated with borders. For undocumented migrants, fear is a constant companion: fear of detection, fear of detention, fear of deportation, fear of violence. This fear does not end at the border; it travels with the migrant into the interior, structuring everyday decisions about where to go, whom to trust, and what risks to take. Khosravi describes living in a state of permanent alertness, scanning every encounter for signs of danger, calibrating every interaction against the possibility of exposure.

But fear operates on both sides of the border encounter. State agents cultivate fear among migrants as a tool of control, but they also experience their own forms of anxiety and uncertainty. The discourse of border security is itself shot through with fear – fear of invasion, of contamination, of loss of identity, of existential threat. These fears, often stoked by political entrepreneurs, generate the affective conditions that sustain popular support for ever-more-punitive border policies.

6.3 The Violence of Deportation

Deportation (驱逐出境) is among the most violent acts that a state can perform against a person short of killing them. It is the forcible removal of a human being from the place where they have built a life, the severing of social bonds, the destruction of livelihoods, and, in many cases, the dispatch of a person to a country where they face danger. Deportation is experienced as a profound violation of personhood – a declaration by the state that one’s presence is intolerable and one’s claims to belonging are void.

The violence of deportation is compounded by its bureaucratic character. Deportation is carried out through legal proceedings, administrative orders, and institutional routines that present it as an ordinary, even banal, function of governance. This bureaucratic normalization obscures the violence of the act, making it appear as a routine exercise of sovereign authority rather than the traumatic rupture it is for those who experience it.

6.4 Solidarity and Resistance

Borders also generate affects of solidarity, resistance, and collective action. Migrant communities develop networks of mutual aid and support; humanitarian organizations provide shelter, legal assistance, and advocacy; social movements challenge border violence through protest, direct action, and political organizing. These practices of solidarity constitute what might be called border activism (边境行动主义) – the assertion that the violence of borders is neither natural nor inevitable and that alternative arrangements of human mobility are possible.

Chapter 7: Biopolitics, Humanitarianism, and the Governance of Mobility

7.1 Biopolitical Borders

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (生命政治) – the governance of populations through the management of life itself – provides a powerful framework for understanding contemporary border regimes. Borders are biopolitical institutions par excellence: they regulate who may live where, who may access what resources, who is entitled to health care, education, and social services, and who is exposed to disease, deprivation, and death. The border sorts populations into categories of greater and lesser vitality, channelling the forces of life toward some and withdrawing them from others.

The biopolitical character of borders is evident in the health screenings, medical examinations, and quarantine procedures to which migrants are subjected. It is evident in the differential access to health care that border regimes produce, with documented residents receiving full coverage and undocumented residents receiving emergency care at best. It is evident in the ways that migration policies are framed in epidemiological terms, with migrants figured as vectors of disease and border control as a form of public health.

7.2 Humanitarian Governance

Miriam Ticktin’s work on humanitarianism (人道主义) in France examines the contradictions of humanitarian governance at borders. Ticktin argues that humanitarianism, far from being a straightforward expression of compassion, is a form of governance that produces its own categories of inclusion and exclusion. The humanitarian framework recognizes suffering but depoliticizes it, treating systemic problems as individual emergencies and structural violence as natural disaster.

This dynamic reveals a fundamental tension in the relationship between humanitarianism and rights. A rights-based framework would extend protections to all persons regardless of their condition; a humanitarian framework extends them only to those whose suffering meets a threshold of visibility and urgency. The humanitarian border regime thus creates what Ticktin calls a “politics of compassion” (同情政治) that is simultaneously generous and exclusionary – saving some lives while abandoning others to the ordinary violence of the system.

7.3 Didier Fassin and Humanitarian Reason

Didier Fassin extends this analysis through his concept of humanitarian reason (人道主义理性) – the moral framework in which the alleviation of suffering becomes the paramount political value. Fassin argues that humanitarian reason has increasingly displaced the language of rights and justice in the governance of migration, replacing political claims with moral sentiments. Under humanitarian reason, migrants are not rights-bearing subjects but objects of compassion, their claims to inclusion grounded not in justice but in pity.

Fassin also examines how humanitarian governance produces hierarchies among migrants. Those classified as “genuine” refugees – fleeing persecution, bearing visible marks of trauma – receive sympathy and, potentially, protection. Those classified as “economic migrants” – seeking better material conditions – are treated as illegitimate, as queue-jumpers who exploit the compassion extended to the truly deserving. This classification is itself a border: it divides mobile populations into those worthy and unworthy of humanitarian attention, reproducing within the humanitarian field the same logic of inclusion and exclusion that characterizes the border regime as a whole.

Chapter 8: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Limits of Inclusion

8.1 Citizenship as Border

Citizenship (公民身份) is the legal institution through which individuals are recognized as full members of a political community. It confers rights – to residence, to work, to vote, to access public services – and imposes obligations, most notably the obligation to obey the law and, in some states, to perform military service. But citizenship is also a border: it distinguishes between those who belong and those who do not, and it distributes life chances accordingly.

Saskia Sassen’s work on the transformation of citizenship under globalization highlights the tensions between national citizenship and the realities of transnational mobility. As people move across borders in ever-greater numbers – for work, for family, for survival – the assumption that political membership is organized exclusively through national citizenship comes under increasing strain. Sassen identifies the emergence of new forms of partial or denationalized membership – residency without citizenship, citizenship without residence, transnational affiliations that do not map onto the territorial logic of the nation-state.

8.2 The Production of Non-Citizens

If citizenship is a form of inclusion, then non-citizenship (非公民身份) is its constitutive outside. The category of the non-citizen – the alien, the foreigner, the outsider – is not a natural given but a product of the citizenship regime itself. Every definition of who belongs simultaneously defines who does not; every extension of rights to members simultaneously withholds them from non-members. The border between citizen and non-citizen is thus not peripheral to the institution of citizenship but central to its operation.

De Genova’s work on “the spectacle of migrant illegality” shows how the figure of the “illegal alien” is discursively produced as the antithesis of the citizen: lawless where the citizen is law-abiding, parasitic where the citizen is productive, threatening where the citizen is vulnerable. This discursive production serves to naturalize the privileges of citizenship, making them appear as earned rather than as products of the accident of birth, and to justify the violence directed at those who lack citizenship’s protections.

8.3 Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights

At the extreme end of the spectrum of non-citizenship lies statelessness (无国籍状态) – the condition of belonging to no state at all. The stateless person lacks not merely the rights of a particular citizenship but the right to have rights, in Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation. Without a state to vouch for them, the stateless are exposed to the full force of sovereign power with none of its protections. They cannot travel legally, cannot work legally, cannot access public services, cannot vote, and cannot claim the protection of any government.

Khosravi’s account of his own period of statelessness – after fleeing Iran but before gaining recognition in Sweden – vividly illustrates the existential precarity of this condition. Without documents, without a recognized identity, without a state willing to claim responsibility for him, he existed in a legal void. He could be detained by any state yet protected by none; he could be expelled from any territory yet admitted to none. His survival depended not on rights but on luck, resourcefulness, and the kindness of strangers.

Chapter 9: Temporality, Waiting, and the Suspension of Life

9.1 Border Time

Borders do not merely occupy space; they also structure temporality (时间性). The experience of borders is profoundly shaped by time: the time spent waiting for visas, the time spent in transit, the time spent in detention, the time lost to deportation and the need to begin again. This temporal dimension of borders is often overlooked in analyses that focus on spatial metaphors of walls, lines, and zones, but it is central to the lived experience of border crossing.

9.2 The Politics of Waiting

Paolo Gaibazzi and others have examined waiting (等待) as a political condition produced by border regimes. Waiting is not merely an inconvenience; it is a form of governance. The capacity to make people wait – to hold their applications in process, to defer their cases, to suspend their lives in bureaucratic limbo – is a form of sovereign power that operates through time rather than space. The asylum seeker who waits years for a hearing, the visa applicant who waits months for a decision, the detainee who waits indefinitely for release – all are subjected to a temporal regime that is as coercive as any wall or fence.

Mathijs Pelkmans’ ethnographic work on the Turkmenistan-Turkey border illuminates how temporality operates at borders that are simultaneously open and closed, permeable and impermeable. His research shows that borders do not simply block or permit movement; they regulate its rhythm, pace, and timing. The experience of the border is one of alternating speed and stasis – moments of rapid, even frantic movement interspersed with long periods of enforced immobility.

9.3 Detention and Suspended Life

Immigration detention (移民拘留) represents perhaps the most extreme form of temporal governance at borders. Detainees are held in a condition of radical temporal suspension: they do not know when they will be released, whether they will be deported, or what the future holds. This uncertainty is not incidental to detention but constitutive of it. The indefiniteness of immigration detention – the absence of fixed sentences, the opacity of decision-making processes, the possibility of release or deportation at any moment – creates a state of perpetual anxiety that is itself a form of punishment.

The camp and the detention centre thus operate as temporal as well as spatial technologies of border control. They do not merely contain bodies in space; they suspend lives in time, creating zones of temporal exception where the normal rhythms of human existence – growth, development, achievement, connection – are interrupted and held in abeyance.

Chapter 10: Borders Beyond the State

10.1 Social Boundaries and Symbolic Borders

While much of the literature on borders focuses on the territorial boundaries of nation-states, borders also operate at other scales and in other registers. Social boundaries (社会边界) – the distinctions between groups based on race, class, gender, religion, language, and other markers of difference – function as borders that regulate access to resources, opportunities, and recognition. These social boundaries may be reinforced by state borders, but they also operate independently of them, structuring social life within as well as between political communities.

10.2 Michelle Obeid and the Everyday Border

Michelle Obeid’s ethnographic work examines how borders are experienced and negotiated in everyday life, paying attention to the mundane practices through which borders are maintained, challenged, and transformed. Borders, in Obeid’s analysis, are not only dramatic sites of confrontation and violence but also ordinary features of daily existence – present in the routines of commuting, shopping, visiting, and working that characterize life in border regions.

This attention to the everyday challenges the tendency in border studies to focus exclusively on moments of crisis – the dramatic crossing, the violent confrontation, the deadly shipwreck. While these moments are important, they are not the whole story. For the millions of people who live on or near borders, the border is not an exceptional event but a permanent condition, woven into the fabric of ordinary life.

10.3 Darryl Li and the Transnational Border

Darryl Li’s research on transnational mobility complicates the assumption that borders are necessarily tied to fixed territorial locations. Li’s work on the movements of foreign fighters reveals networks of solidarity, ideology, and violence that traverse multiple borders and connect distant places. These networks are themselves border-crossing phenomena, but they also produce new forms of bordering – distinctions between insiders and outsiders, allies and enemies, brothers and strangers – that operate according to logics quite different from those of the nation-state.

Li’s work, along with that of other scholars of transnational mobility, points toward a understanding of borders that encompasses not only the territorial boundaries of states but also the social, cultural, and political boundaries that mobile populations create, traverse, and contest in the course of their movements.

Chapter 11: Decolonizing the Border

11.1 Colonial Genealogies of the Border

The contemporary international border regime is a product of European colonialism. The borders of most postcolonial states were drawn by colonial powers, often with little regard for the social, cultural, or political realities of the territories they enclosed. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which partitioned Africa among European powers, is the most notorious example of colonial border-making, but similar processes occurred throughout Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. These colonial borders persist, and they continue to shape the political geography of the postcolonial world.

11.2 Settler Colonialism and the Border

In settler-colonial contexts – Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Israel/Palestine – borders have a particularly fraught relationship with Indigenous sovereignty. Settler-colonial states were founded through the appropriation of Indigenous territories and the displacement or elimination of Indigenous peoples. The borders that these states now defend are thus borders of dispossession, marking the limits of territories taken through violence and maintained through the ongoing denial of Indigenous sovereignty.

Kalman’s ethnography of Akwesasne provides a vivid illustration of this dynamic. The US-Canada border runs through Mohawk territory not because the Mohawk people consented to it but because colonial powers imposed it. The border’s presence is a daily reminder of colonial dispossession, and every encounter with a border agent is an encounter with the coercive apparatus of a state that has built itself on the ruins of Indigenous political orders.

11.3 Toward a Decolonial Politics of Mobility

A decolonial approach to borders does not merely critique the violence of existing border regimes; it imagines alternatives. If borders are products of colonial history and ongoing structures of inequality, then a truly just arrangement of human mobility would require not merely the reform of existing border policies but the transformation of the political, economic, and epistemic structures that produce borders as instruments of domination.

This does not necessarily mean the abolition of all borders – a position that, while held by some scholars and activists, raises difficult questions about the governance of territory, the distribution of resources, and the protection of vulnerable populations. It does mean taking seriously the demands of Indigenous peoples for recognition of their sovereignty over their own territories; it means acknowledging the role of colonial history in producing the inequalities that drive contemporary migration; and it means challenging the assumption that the current arrangement of borders is natural, inevitable, or just.

Chapter 12: Ethnographic Methods and the Study of Borders

12.1 The Challenge of Border Ethnography

The ethnographic study of borders presents distinctive methodological challenges. Borders are sites of secrecy, danger, and restricted access. The populations most affected by border regimes – undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, detained persons – are among the most difficult to reach and the most vulnerable to harm from research participation. Border enforcement agencies are often hostile to scholarly scrutiny. The legal and ethical complexities of conducting research with people who are, in the eyes of the state, engaged in criminal activity add further layers of difficulty.

12.2 Auto-Ethnography and the Politics of Knowledge

Khosravi’s use of auto-ethnography raises important questions about the politics of knowledge production in border studies. Who has the authority to speak about borders? Whose experience counts as knowledge? The conventional social-scientific approach positions the researcher as an outside observer, analysing the experiences of others from a position of detachment. Khosravi’s auto-ethnographic method disrupts this positioning, insisting that the experience of the border crosser is itself a form of expertise – an embodied knowledge that no amount of observation from the outside can replicate.

This method also raises questions about vulnerability and exposure. By writing about his own experience of illegality, Khosravi makes himself vulnerable in ways that other scholars do not. His text is a confession as much as an analysis – an admission of having been “illegal” that carries real social and, potentially, legal consequences. This vulnerability is not a weakness of the method but one of its strengths: it demonstrates the stakes of border crossing in a way that no detached analysis could.

12.3 Material Culture and Archaeological Approaches

De Leon’s archaeological approach to the US-Mexico border introduces a distinctive set of methods to border studies. By treating the Sonoran Desert as an archaeological site and the objects left behind by migrants as artefacts, de Leon produces a material record of border crossing that supplements and complicates the testimonial record. Objects speak where people cannot – where they have died, disappeared, or been deported beyond the reach of the researcher.

This approach also serves a forensic function. In a context where the state has a vested interest in obscuring the scale of border violence – where bodies are not counted, where deaths are classified as “natural,” where the desert is expected to erase the evidence – de Leon’s meticulous documentation constitutes a form of counter-forensics, producing evidence of violence that the state would prefer to render invisible.

12.4 Community-Based Research and Sovereignty over Knowledge

Kalman’s work in Akwesasne raises yet another set of methodological questions, centring on the relationship between academic research and Indigenous sovereignty (原住民主权) over knowledge. Research in Indigenous communities has a deeply troubled history, marked by extractive practices in which outside scholars have taken community knowledge without consent, benefit, or accountability. Kalman’s ethnography grapples with this legacy, negotiating the terms of research with community members and attending to the ways in which the production of scholarly knowledge about Akwesasne is itself a site of power.

The question of who benefits from border ethnography is particularly acute in the Akwesasne context. The Mohawk community has been the subject of extensive scholarly and journalistic attention, much of it focused on smuggling and other activities that the state regards as criminal. This attention has not always served the community’s interests; it has sometimes reinforced stereotypes, provided ammunition for enforcement agencies, and contributed to the securitization of the territory. Kalman’s work attempts to navigate these dangers by centering community perspectives and attending to the ways in which borders are experienced not as exciting frontiers of transgression but as mundane yet oppressive features of daily life.

Chapter 13: The Future of Borders

13.1 Technology and the Digitization of Borders

Contemporary border regimes are increasingly mediated by digital technologies: biometric identification systems, algorithmic risk assessment, automated surveillance, drone monitoring, and digital document verification. These technologies do not replace human border agents but supplement and extend their capacities, creating forms of border control that are simultaneously more pervasive and less visible than their analogue predecessors.

13.2 Climate Change and the Borders of the Future

Climate change (气候变化) is poised to transform the politics of borders in profound and unpredictable ways. Rising sea levels, desertification, extreme weather events, and the collapse of agricultural systems will displace millions of people, creating new populations of mobile persons who will encounter borders as barriers to survival. The existing international legal framework provides no specific protections for “climate refugees,” a category that does not exist in international law. The gap between the scale of climate-induced displacement and the capacity of existing institutions to respond to it portends a future of intensified border violence.

13.3 Open Borders and the Ethics of Mobility

The philosophical case for open borders (开放边界) has been made by a number of scholars who argue that restrictions on human movement are morally indefensible. If freedom of movement within a state is recognized as a fundamental right, these scholars ask, why should freedom of movement between states be any different? The accident of birthplace – the “birthright lottery” – distributes life chances in ways that are as arbitrary and as consequential as any other form of inherited privilege. Borders, from this perspective, are instruments for the protection of unearned advantage, morally analogous to the racial segregation or feudal restrictions on movement that previous generations rightly abolished.

The study of borders, in the end, is the study of power: its operations, its justifications, its contestations, and its consequences. Every border is an exercise of power – the power to include and exclude, to protect and expose, to give life and to deal death. The scholars and communities whose work has been engaged in this text – from the deserts of Arizona to the waters of the Mediterranean, from the checkpoints of Akwesasne to the smuggling routes of Iran – all attest to the profound and often devastating effects of this power on human lives. They also attest to the resilience, resourcefulness, and resistance of those who encounter borders not as abstractions but as daily realities, and who insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that the world can be organized otherwise.