Description
How do local communities perceive “migration crises” in securitised border zones, and how are these perceptions shaped by performative state practices? This paper examines these questions through an ethnographic study conducted between April 2024 and September 2025 in the Polish-Belarusian border region. I argue that securitisation does not merely regulate mobility but reconfigures social imaginaries and moral geographies at Europe’s margins.
Building on Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of spaces of confinement and extending debates on the performativity of security, I introduce the concept of “securitisation of visibility”, to explain how state practices render migrants simultaneously invisible - through restricted zones, pushbacks, and surveillance - and hyper-visible as figures of threat. Based on over forty-five interviews and multiple informal conversations with residents, I show that local understandings of crisis emerge not from encounters with migrants but from their managed absence. The perceived threat is produced performatively, through military presence, checkpoints, and narratives of danger that substitute visibility with spectacle.
I propose that the securitisation of visibility operates on two interlinked levels: (1) the material, by physically erasing migrants from the public eye; and (2) the discursive, by monopolising representations of the border and silencing alternative accounts. These intertwined processes generate an affective atmosphere of fear and compliance, reshaping community relations and constraining moral agency.
By tracing how the state’s performative power transforms both what can be seen and what can be said, the paper contributes to critical understandings of securitisation as a form of epistemic governance: one that produces crisis through the control of perception itself.
