Description
The criminalization of people who cross borders, who challenge and transgress them, is a pillar of the prison industrial complex in many EU countries. People accused of human trafficking constitute one of the largest groups in prisons and serve the longest sentences. Dominant narratives portray criminalised people as dangerous, violent, and illegal, in order to legitimize the racist violence of the border regime, their killing and the organised abandonment by State authorities. Narrated as a strategy of deterrence of people’s mobility, as well as of protection of fellow vulnerable migrants, the criminalisation of migration and of anyone who facilitates unauthorised freedom of movement, is the mirror of an authoritarian border regime that seeks to suppress any form of resistance, transgression and radical alternatives to European racist necropolitics. This paper argues that rather than stopping people's movements and struggles for freedom, the aim is to create docile, silent, fearful, and disciplined subjects who can be easily exploited and controlled. Yet, these authoritarian border policies fail not only in their claimed attempts to deter and protect, but also to suppress resistance and people’s struggles for freedom of movement.
