Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, Verso Books, 2016.

Violent Borders focuses on the performative function of borders that creates differences and thereby generates violence. Author Reece Jones provides insights and data from numerous sources, including fieldwork, to back his explanation of why borders are increasingly becoming violent and in the process brings into play historical anecdotes, information and documentation. The ‘hardening of borders’ he argues is the ‘source of violence, not a response to it’ (p 5). It is from this ethical standpoint that he also argues persuasively for the ‘right to move’ and provides details about how this right has been restricted with the rise of state power.

The book carries the subtitle, ‘Refugees and the Right to Move’, and Jones not only condemns border controls that prevent workers from moving but also the role of national borders in obstructing efforts to mitigate climate change and give individual states the power to deplete resources. One of the main strengths of the book, which travels across different eras and geographies to demonstrate how juridical, administrative, social, economic and political operations of the border inflict harm on people and destroy ecosystems, is the many examples Jones provides. Jones also refers to specific individuals and events to demonstrate the complex relation between borders and violence. In order to shed light on the shifts and the continuities in the construction of bounded territories, Jones takes a historical approach to some of the case studies and the historical discussion of the Enclosure Movement in Britain and the colonisation of oceans and non-European territories makes the central argument of the book more compelling.

Jones divides border violence into five categories. First, the physical harm caused by border guards and security infrastructure. As an example he notes that at the US-Mexico border, patrols shot and killed 33 people between 2010 and 2015, many of them in questionable circumstances. The second of Jones’s categories is the more general use of state power that increases the likelihood of injury or death by sealing safer and easier migration routes. This, he argues, is the chief dynamic in Europe, where irregular migrants have over the last few decades been forced to take increasingly dangerous routes due to visa restrictions, hefty fines for transporting migrants for transport companies and the closing of land borders. The third category of violence is the threat imposed to limit access to resources. Jones points to Israel, which has ‘the most complete border fencing and security network in the world’, and uses its defences not only for military objectives but to bar Palestinians from access to such resources as olive groves, or land on which to build houses in parts of the West Bank. The fourth and fifth categories relate to the harm that borders do on the largest scale. By stopping people from poorer countries to moving to richer ones, Jones argues, borders perpetuate global inequality. Similarly, by turning natural resources into private property divided between nation-states, they prevent meaningful collective action to tackle climate change. And where national borders have been softened within a particular region – for example the EU’s Schengen zone, or the Nafta countries, Canada, Mexico and the US – it has been to privilege a particular group, not to open the region up to the world at large.

The first half of the book deals with the global migration crisis and the ways in which certain population groups are excluded from the global mobility regime and exposed to different forms of violence. The contemporary criminalisation of the movement and the militarisation of the border are examined in the context of the European Union’s external borders, the transformation of the US-Mexico border, the Wall in the West Bank, the enclosures built along India’s border with Bangladesh, and Australia’s offshore refugee detention network. Jones makes a convincing argument that such practices dispute the narratives of globalisation. In contemporary politics, the border constitutes a space where the state re-articulates and expands its sovereign power in order to capture the movement of the non-citizen who is deemed threatening and dangerous. The criminalisation of movement, deportation of undocumented migrants, construction of walls and fences, and institutionalisation of detention camps are no longer exceptional conventions of statecraft. In all these spaces, asylum seekers, migrants and refugees are subjected to the routine use of state violence and the normalised practices of discipline and control. It is such permanent normalisation of violence that makes the border the most contested site of sovereign power.

The second half of the book explores the proliferation of borders: the fragmented nature of the border that operates within the territory of the state and at sea. In examining different types of boundaries such as the enclosure of private property and natural resources, Jones shows that the border is not only a line separating two sovereign entities, but a global technology that creates conditions for the exploitation of labour and the extraction of the earth’s common natural resources. The discussion of the slave-like working conditions in Bangladesh, the global restrictions imposed on the movement of the poor, and the territorialisation of the oceans in the form of exclusive economic zones demonstrates the ways in which the border creates and preserves inequality between the rich and the poor. In this context, the final chapter deals with the question of how such conditions of inequality also disrupt eco-systems. The final chapter examines how the enclosure of commons is in fact ‘the tragedy of resource destruction, which occurs when the enclosure of resources is combined with the ideology of extractivism’ (p. 147). The territorialisation of common lands and oceans gives the sovereign an exclusive right to exploit natural resources and  limits global solutions to tackle climate change. Consequently, in the age of anthropocene, Jones invites us to rethink the role of the Westphalian system and its associated regime of capitalist forms of production in perpetuating the effects of climate change. .

Jones ends the book with some proposals for his conception of an alternative world: he calls for a global movement against borders, and suggests the development of global laws for fair and humane working conditions and the genuine implementation of social safety nets for the poor and the environment. Jones is a compelling storyteller and the reader is persuaded to believe in this alternative till global realities intrude. However, the book remains a must read for those engaged with the study of global migration.

Anita Sengupta