Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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It is important, however, not to mistake the increasing omnipresence of the border for omnipotence. The reason that the state must constantly attempt to maintain control over borders—and their futile attempt to categorize and separate people, often through violence—is because they are brittle. We must hold onto victories so as to remember the border is not all-powerful and can be abolished. In these essays we return to an example from Glasgow in the nineties, where a buddy scheme partnering recent migrants with locals built bonds of solidarity and kinship.12 The scheme was such a success that when the state attempted to detain some of the migrants in dawn raids, they found themselves confronting a working-class community united in defense of their friends. Dawn raids ceased.
The bunker-network of the planetary ruling class is by no means a fait accompli. Proliferating borders can be—and are every day being—opposed. Communal efforts to combat such violence, such as those in Glasgow, will form some of the most important struggles against ecological disaster. The essays in this section, more than anything, seek to explore border struggles as ecological struggles.
This section begins with an interview with two of our members by BASE Magazine. Contextualizing border politics in terms of care, the conversation ranges widely over questions of natures, futures, and strategies. It also serves as an introduction to our conceptualization of borders as a means of differentiating the impacts of climate change and to our thought and politics more generally. Alex tweaks a formulation from the geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore which might serve as the foundation for our politics: climate change is the group-differentiated destruction of the means of our survival.13
Alex also draws on the work of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, who has written evocatively about the use of state violence to produce “death-worlds” of populations exposed to violence. This is a theme taken up in the second piece, “Refuges and Death-Worlds,” in which we seek to find spaces of survival which can serve as antonyms and antidotes to the ongoing production of disaster. A politics of refuge is, for us, a planetary politics which insists that everyone has a right to a habitable place. Again, to quote Gilmore, “freedom is a place.”14 So, if the habitable zones of the Earth retreat pole-ward without regard for the sovereignty of nation-states, then we must look beyond nation-states and the white supremacist “lifeboat ethics” we identify in Section II of this book.
In “Infrastructure Against Borders,” we argue for building webs of mutual aid across borders and migrant/citizen divides. Creating such infrastructures of solidarity over the coming decades is vital for undermining the currently prevailing “build the wall” mentality which has turned the Texas desert and the Mediterranean Sea into mass graves, and the island of Nauru into a detention camp.15 These are material infrastructures as well as infrastructures of feeling—the “consciousness-foundation, sturdy but not static, that viscerally underlies our capacity to … select and reselect liberatory lineages” of ancestors and their capacious and expansive struggles.16 It is difficult to give a full account of the radical potential of such infrastructural practices. China Medel describes how humanitarian aid in the desert by the direct-action group No More Deaths undergirds an “abolitionist care”:
In our practices of care, No More Deaths actively works against the neoliberal process of strategic abandonment, in which governing bodies carefully eschew responsibility for a minoritized social group deemed valueless by a logic of racialized criminalization. Sequestered in the Sonoran Desert, the camp wakes up each day committed to practices of taking care, not only of migrants in distress, but also of one another. In the practice of care, desert aid workers prefiguratively build a world in which hierarchies of human value are abolished, where migration is an expression of life making, and where food, shelter, medical, and emotional care are available to all, regardless of notions of deservedness. This care work becomes an abolitionist gesture of direct action that builds alternative forms of recognition and inclusion against the logic of criminalization and the production of valueless life functioning to “protect” the United States.17
Such actions actively work against the weaponization of the desert accomplished by the US’ “prevention through deterrence” policy, which in many ways, might be seen as analogous to the UK’s “hostile environment” policy. Broadening the understanding of environment here, our essay “A Hostile Environment” seeks to demonstrate how contemporary British and American border imperialisms are tied to the maintenance of white supremacy. Having established our analysis of xenophobia in the North as a racist reproductive politics steeped in old fears of sexual defilement and miscegenation, we advance the usefulness of a concept of “critical dystopia” to think though the bleakness of this political moment without foreclosing the prefigurative, even utopian, struggles described by Medel above. This essay has been updated since its original publication. The addition of recent examples more thoroughly flesh out the logics we describe, and have shown their extension in even the eighteen months since the original essay was written.
In order to adequately address climate change, a project that develops a politics beyond and against the border imperialism of nation-states is required. While there are robust border abolitionist movements scattered around the world, much like our examples of disaster communism, these spaces are not yet robust and interconnected. Undoubtedly, this is in part due to the power of military and police forces, which we should not underestimate. Yet there is also a disappointing lack of attention to, and investment in, such struggles from the Green Left. For our part, we insist on the necessity of a “no borders” politics to the ecological crisis. Like communism itself, this is both a movement that abolishes the present and a description of a world beyond that present. It is a necessary condition—perhaps the most necessary condition—for a livable world of ecological flourishing.
1. Quoted in Hannah Barnes, “How Many Climate Migrants Will There Be?,” BBC News, September 2, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23899195.
2. Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue” (Report for the 13th Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe [OSCE]), May 25, 2005. Available at https://www.osce.org/eea/14851.
3. Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London and New York: Verso Books, 2016).
4. Giovanni Bettini, “Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A Critique of Apocalyptic Narratives on ‘Climate Refugees,’” Geoforum 45 (2013): 63–72.
5. Thomas L. Friedman, “Trump Is Wasting Our Immigration Crisis,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/trump-immigration-border-wall.html.
6. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism.
7. Anonymous Contributor, “This Movement Is Not Ours, It’s Everybody’s,” It’s Going Down (blog), July 25, 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/this-movement-is-not-ours-its-everybodys/.
8. Anonymous Contributor, “Occupation, Revolt, Power: The 1st Month of #OccupyICEPHL,” It’s Going Down (blog), August 14, 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/occupation-revolt-power-the-1st-month-of-occupyicephl/.
9. Against Borders for Children, “We won! DfE are ending the nationality school census!,” Against Borders for Children (blog), April 10, 2018, schoolsabc.net/2018/04/we-won/.
10. See Docs Not Cops, “#NHS70—No Borders in Healthcare,” Docs Not Cops (blog), July 5, 2018, http://www.docsnotcops.co.uk/nhs70-no-borders-in-healthcare/; Erica Consterdine, “UK to Remain a Hostile Environment for Immigration under Nebulous New Post-Brexit Policy,”