The Politics of Injury

Debilitation and the Right to Maim at the EU Border

Bibliographic Data

ID3948145
AuthorsT Davies (0000-0001-8392-8151, University of Nottingham, corresponding author), Arshad Isakjee (0000-0001-6095-2597, University of Liverpool), Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik (0000-0003-0850-2737, Aston University)
Year2024
Volume31
Issue2
Pages1-29
Publication date2024-04-12
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2024.2339894
OpenAlexW4394750299
LanguageEN
Citations received22
References cited59

Borders are sites of mass injury. This article questions the necroconsensus that has emerged within migration studies, and explores the political role that less-than-deadly violence plays at contemporary borders. By withholding from outright killing, and thus avoiding the optics of public scrutiny, EU states are deploying a carefully calibrated politics of injury designed to control racialised groups through debilitation. The injuries produced through this border regime-typified by illegal 'pushbacks' and deplorable camp conditions-exist beneath a threshold of liberal acceptability. In short, EU states routinely deny the right to asylum by imposing the 'right to maim' (Puar 2017). This article draws upon long-term research along the 'Balkan Route' in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, including interviews with medics, activists, EU officials, and people on the move, as well as analysis of a large border violence database. We argue that mass injury has become a politically tolerated form of violence that perversely provides the EU with the illusory conceit of humanitarian "care". In dialogue with postcolonial scholarship that has questioned the centrality of death within biopolitics, we assert the importance of interrogating not only the necropolitical logics of migration policy (i.e death), but also the politics of non-lethal violence: the strategic and attenuated delivery of injury, maiming, and incapacitation that shapes contemporary borders. Contributing to geographies of violence and critical border studies, we suggest that greater attention is needed towards less-than-deadly harms that underpin contemporary political geographies

Biopower · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Sociology · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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