The Greek island of Lesvos is frequently the subject of news reports on the refugee ‘crisis’, but they only occasionally focus on the dire living conditions of asylum seekers already present on the island. Through direct experience as an activist in Lesvos refugee camps and detention centres, Iliadou gives voice to those with lived experiences of state violence. The author considers the escalation of EU border regime and deterrence policies seen in the past decade alongside their present impacts. Asking why the social harm and suffering border crossers experience is normalized and rendered invisible, the book highlights the collective, global responsibility for safeguarding refugees’ human rights.

This book examines EU external border violence and the role of Frontex, and how it can be made legally and politically accountable for these incidents. The volume sets out what the international standards are for monitoring border violence and how monitors’ independence must be guaranteed and where these standards come from. The book provides realistic options to resolve the crisis by focusing on how effective and independent border monitoring can ensure better human rights compliance at EU external borders. At the centre of the book is the question: how can we achieve effective monitoring of border police, including Frontex, by competent and independent state authorities which have as a mission human rights implementation? The goal of the book is to examine how states can prevent and investigate allegations of such violence and diminish the apparent impunity of those border police who engage in it. This book will be of interest to students of EU policy, law, migration and refugee studies and International Relations.

Combining conflict studies and feminist perspectives on everyday violence, this book analyses games and push-back which are vectors to migrants' border-crossing attempts and violence that aims to deter their journeys at the Bosnian-Croatian border. It questions how these diverse forms of violence are experienced, not treating violence as singular episodes but rather paying attention to how migrants make meaning of it across months and years. The author examines direct violence and its symbiosis with structural harms and questions how these turn into everyday, concrete, and intimate processes at the border. She also questions who this violence targets and where it takes place and asks whether and how the dominant assumptions about race and gender impact men's migration journeys. The book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students interested in issues of migration, violence, masculinities, racialization, the European Union’s border governance, and scholar activism.

Forty thousand people died trying to cross international borders in the past decade, with the high-profile deaths along the shores of Europe only accounting for half of the grisly total. Reece Jones argues that these deaths are not exceptional, but rather the result of state attempts to contain populations and control access to resources and opportunities. "We may live in an era of globalization," he writes, "but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people." In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and their dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the aftershocks of decolonization, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. With the growth of borders and resource enclosures, the deaths of migrants in search of a better life are intimately connected to climate change, environmental degradation, and the growth of global wealth inequality.

This book introduces readers to the cultural imaginings of borders: the in-between spaces in which transnationalism collides with geopolitical cooperation and contestation. Recent debates about the "refugee crisis" and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have politicized culture at and of borders like never before. Border culture is no longer culture at the margins but rather culture at the heart of geopolitics, flows, and experience of the transnational world. Increasingly, culture and borders are everywhere yet nowhere. In border spaces, national narratives and counter-narratives are tested and evaluated, coming up against transnational culture. This book provides an extensive and critical vision of border culture on the move, drawing on numerous examples worldwide and a growing international literature across border and cultural studies. It shows how border culture develops in the human imagination and manifests in human constructs of "nation" and "state", as well as in transnationalism. By analyzing this new and expanding cultural geography of border landscapes, the book shows the way to a fresh, broader dialogue. Exploring the nature and meaning of the intersection of border and culture, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers across border studies, geopolitics, geography, and cultural studies.

This publication examines the role of border regions in shaping patterns of violence since the end of the 1990s in North and West Africa. Using the innovative OECD Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi), the report looks at the growing relationship between political violence and borderlands at the regional level, by analysing more than 170 000 violent events between January 1997 and June 2021 and through the exploration of case studies in the Central and Eastern Sahel.