Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives - Polly Pallister-Wilkins
Published in 2022 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
224 pages
ISBN: 9781839765995
On February 2nd, 2022, nine frozen bodies were discovered on the border of Turkey and Greece. This horrid discovery prompted a local search, resulting in two more bodies being found and another person who was racked with frostbite and later died after being rushed to a hospital. This event sparked a fierce exchange between the two countries, each blaming the other for these unnecessary and tragic deaths along their precarious borders.
Closer to my home here in the United States, deaths continue to climb along our Southern border with Mexico. The conservative rhetoric of “building the wall” and increasing funding for ICE and other border policing agencies hides a much darker truth. According to The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR), “the U.S. Border Patrol has recorded over 7,000 migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border between fiscal year 1998 and 2020, and 2020 year was the deadliest year on record, with 227 recorded deaths of those attempting to cross the border through the desert.” The UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration has tracked 357 deaths along the US-Mexico border so far in 2022, “on pace to match or exceed the 728 it counted in 2021.”
More recently, in a brazen and disgustingly immoral political stunt, Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis flew two planes full of Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. In an act of coercion and deception, these migrants were told that they would receive transportation to Boston and were given promises of expedited work visas, all of which turned out to be false. This follows a similar action by Texas Republican governor Gregg Abbot, who sent 11,000 asylum-seekers onto buses heading to three predominantly Democratic Northern cities (Detroit, Chicago, and Washington DC).
In another act of brazen cruelty, Abbot repeated this stunt on Christmas Eve of the same year, dropping a busload of migrants at US Vice President Kamala Harris’s home in Washington, DC. These migrants were left in the middle of a fierce winter storm without provisions, shelter, or adequate clothing. The vulnerability of these fellow human beings was exploited by Republican leaders in an attempt to make a political statement about the hypocrisy of liberal attitudes toward immigration. Once again, the debates regarding border policies filled the headlines.
In response to the wide array of border deaths and the deterrence policies that only work to increase these numbers, humanitarian organizations often mobilize to fill the gap in providing aid to refugees that governments cannot (or simply will not) fill. We often see these organizations as an unfettered good by providing food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities to asylum seekers and those on the fringes of our borders. Yet, these philanthropic, humanitarian efforts often leave unintended consequences. In her 2022 book, Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives, political geographer and associate professor at the University of Amsterdam Polly Pallister-Wilkins complicates our typically genial relationship towards humanitarian solutions. Drawing on her personal experiences and fieldwork on the border of Turkey and Greece, Pallister-Wilkins argues that humanitarianism often works to reinforce the border and border policies that make humanitarian aid necessary in the first place.
Overview:
Drawing from her experiences with the daily work of Greek border police along the land border between Greece and Turkey, Pallister-Wilkins complicates the role of humanitarianism as a response to death and suffering on our national borders. When there is a crisis at the border, our immediate response is to mobilize humanitarian aid through the employment of state actors (border police, coast guards, etc.), various non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, and grassroots activists. These groups often work to provide basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and medical relief to devastated areas, as well as perform search and rescue operations at sea.
Pallister-Wilkins contends that all of these actors working along the border contribute to shifting and shaping the border in particular ways. According to Pallister-Wilkins, these activities have three main effects. First, these life-saving borderwork efforts change the physical location of borders. As European ships rescue refugees in the territorial waters of Libya, the territorial border of Europe has thus shifted further south into this region. Secondly, humanitarian borderwork introduces a range of new activities within the region. For example, since many refugees and life seekers were struggling to traverse and survive the treacherous terrain, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) started a bus service on the island of Lesvos to transport them safely. Third, these activities bring new actors into the border region, such as volunteers and grassroots activists seeking to raise awareness of the issues on the border. As a result of these actions, the lives of many people are saved as they are given food, shelter, transportation, and medical care.
Yet, Pallister-Wilkins argues that these organizations often mask the underlying inequalities that make such life-saving activities necessary in the first place. For many people, crossing borders is a matter of life and death. This is often due to insufficient immigration policies that deny migrants access to safe and legal routes of transportation. As a result, many migrants are forced to utilize unsafe modes of transportation, often relying on smugglers. These risky activities lead to an increased need for life-saving interventions by those working on the border, which involve not only state actors such as border guards and police but also non-governmental humanitarian organizations and volunteer grassroots activists.
While these actors do serve to help save lives, they also further entrench global inequalities of race, class, gender, and disability through the privileges and limitations of movements across national borders. Focusing on a wide range of examples--such as the privilege of owning a passport to secure mobility and the colonial history of white supremacy in the expropriation of labor and resources from the Global South--Pallister-Wilkins reveals the tensions and paradoxes within the borderwork that often serve to depoliticize the issue of border violence and work to bolster liberal-tolerant and paternalist attitudes toward those who suffer at along our national borders.
She suggests that governments need to work to offer safe and legal transport routes, such as opening the EU’s visa system and offering life seekers access to legal transport. She challenges us to consider: “How can humanitarianism - as a practice oriented around the human subject and intimately shaped by its colonial past and its relationship to whiteness - function as an ethical commitment to others?” (p. 181). Thus, Palister-Wilkins calls us to question how humanitarianism as a practice has been shaped by social, political, and economic forces and challenges us to consider how it can be remade and reimagined with the human subject at its center.
Commendations:
Humanitarian Borders offers a challenging and necessary critique of humanitarianism as a liberal response to suffering at the border. Through her careful reconsideration of something that we often see as an incontrovertible good (humanitarian aid), Pallister-Wilkins challenges our current understanding of immigration and activities on our borders. She emphasizes how white supremacy and colonialism have shaped our humanitarian responses on the border, as it works to further state violence while masquerading as noble work. Pallister-Wilkins continually points us to the systemic structures that create violence and suffering at our national borders. As such, humanitarian borderwork often serves as a band-aid that allows the contradictions of our neoliberal order to continue unchallenged. Instead of focusing on borders, we should interrogate why people make the perilous choice to leave their home country and address the systemic issues that cause migration (such as geopolitical conflict, economic poverty, and climate change).
In particular, I enjoyed her discussion of the relationships between religious institutions and humanitarianism. As someone who grew up in the evangelical Christian world, I am intimately familiar with the role of Christian non-profits and international mission organizations. While I can recognize that some do genuinely good work while trying to minimize harm, I also understand their rootedness in the history of colonialism and white supremacy. Palister-Wilkins makes a few fascinating and salient points about the relationship of religious organizations and their impacts on humanitarian borderwork toward the end of the book, though it could have been greatly expanded in a deeper capacity.
I also deeply appreciated how Palister-Wilkins drew attention to the politics of mobility and the intertwined history of colonialism and borderwork. She connects the creation of borders with the desire of the Global North to keep those from the Global South from freely moving into a shared common space. Thus, borders are structurally founded to keep the racial Other at a distance. Pallister-Wilkins does well to take this historical perspective into account as she analyzes the current situation at the borders, as border police slash the water bottles and destroy other provisions that are left for migrants in the arid, hot desert.
Finally, Pallister-Wilkins does a commendable job of blending both quantitative and qualitative methods in her research. Not only does she supply data and statistics to back up her thesis, but her work is also deeply informed by her personal experiences and interviews with life-seekers, border guards, and humanitarian workers working alongside the border of Turkey and Greece. This combination gives her writing all the more credibility and authority, as she deftly interweaves the stories she has heard along the border with hard data on immigration patterns.
Critique:
On the other hand, due to the academic nature of the work, Humanitarian Borders can often be a dry read. While she makes several smaller arguments throughout the book that are thought-provoking, the larger thesis of the book is relatively simple. Since the premise of the book is rather straightforward, Pallister-Wilkins repeats herself often from chapter to chapter. While this repetition reiterates the central thesis of the book, it also makes the book repetitive and overly long, like an article that has been unnecessarily stretched out to a book’s length. Unless you are deeply interested in or familiar with immigration and humanitarian aid, then this book might be a bit of a slog to get through.
Furthermore, since Palister-Wilkins has done most of her fieldwork on the border of Greece and Turkey (Pavlos), the book primarily focuses on this geographical area. While this is undoubtedly illuminating and insightful for those who are more unfamiliar with the region, this narrow focus can also be a bit limiting. For those of us across the Atlantic, it can be unfamiliar territory to navigate. It might have been helpful to include a map of the regions discussed, as well as other visuals of activity at the border (barring any privacy/ethical barriers, of course) to help the reader more clearly visualize the context.
Finally, while Palister-Wilkins intimately describes the current situation on the border and the actors who provide humanitarian aid, she gives few concrete solutions to address these issues. She gestures towards a policy of open borders within the EU, but while this might ameliorate the politics of mobility across borders, it still does not fully address the root cause of why people choose to risk their lives to immigrate to another country. Socio-political turmoil, economic inequality, resource extraction, and climate change are all primary drivers of immigration, and addressing these systemic issues would help to render the problems of mobility less salient and powerful. Yet, this is slightly beyond the scope of Pallister-Wilkin’s analysis, as she primarily focuses on the patchwork of activities that make up humanitarian borderwork rather than the deeper systemic issues that make such life-saving measures necessary in the first place.
Conclusion:
Overall, Humanitarian Borders is an insightful, if narrow, examination of how humanitarian work can inadvertently reinforce colonial structures of exclusion and inequality. While it can be overly repetitive in places, it is still a valuable contribution to the discourse surrounding the history of borders and the policies that affect movement across them. Immigration and border policies are currently front-and-center issues in both Europe and the United States. Anyone interested in the relationship between humanitarian aid and policing borders will find much to consider in this slim, but dense volume.