Description
The deterritorialization of bordering practices, from the offshoring of migration regimes to the production of ‘hostile environments’, has been well documented. However, border studies – even when focussed on non-state actors - has largely accepted the centrality of state bordering practices. Simultaneously, research has focussed on irregular migration as a core object of contemporary state bordering practices, but less so on the individuals who (re)produce these practices in everyday formats. This paper challenges these approaches by inverting the logic of irregularity to focus on ‘citizen’ bordering practices, drawing on the notion of the frontier.
A frontier is an expansion, a claim to teleological ownership. Whilst states can push a frontier and encourage their citizens to do so on their behalf, individuals can also push their own frontiers. Extreme right groups engage in anti-migrant and racialised violence and many take the state to be hostile to its practices; the extreme right pushes its own frontiers. These act against those individuals already within a state, irrespective of migration status. Irregular practices produce these frontiers; practices from non-state actors acting without state consent, designed to (re)claim territory for a certain people. Therefore, this paper argues for a reconceptualization of bordering practices that focusses on the irregular actions of ‘citizens’ through a logic of expanding the inward the frontier.
