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Bordered with boundless violence

Violent Borders Refugees and the Right to Move
Forfatter: Recce Jones
Forlag: Verso Books, 2016
The state has always tried to prevent people from moving freely and unattached. But isn't man really nomadic in his being?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Violent Borders. Refugees and the Right to Move is about the relationship between refugees, the nation-state and human rights. According to human rights, all people have the right to travel from their own country to any other country, and back home. But this does not apply to refugees. Isn't the refugee a human being? Yes, but she's stateless. And then the Refugee Convention applies, which does not oblige states to accept stateless people. Therefore, it is up to each state to consider whether an asylum seeker falls within the definition of the Refugee Convention and thus is entitled to protection. The convention requires that a person must cross an internationally recognized border in order to be called a refugee. Therefore, many who are on the run never get refugee status.

Agamben. The book begins by asking the following questions: Why has the state always been an enemy of people who want to move freely and freely? Isn't man really nomadic in his being?

I Funds without goals wrote Georgio Agamben: "In the system of the nation-state, the so-called inviolable and indisputable human rights prove to be devoid of any form of protection at the same time it is no longer possible to perceive them as rights of the citizens of a state (…) It is time that we cease to regard the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1789 as a trumpeting of eternal meta-legal values ​​(…) When a refugee constitutes such a disturbing element within the nation-state system, it is first and foremost because he or she erodes . »

Barriers. What status and rights a refugee should have is and will be a serious human rights problem. What on earth should we do with them? Here and now one can of course refer to the Declaration of Human Rights, but the sovereignty of each state makes it difficult to intervene effectively to prevent human rights violations against people who are on the run, especially for those who do not have or are granted refugee status.

The book shows that about 14 million people were displaced by war in 2015, the largest number since World War II. It is this book's clearly stated goal to examine the relationship between the state and people on the run. The book goes deep into the problem of all the violent actions taking place at the European borders. The book is based on the growing number of fences and fences that have been built at the borders of Europe in recent years, and what this means for the treatment of the refugees. We live in a world with a global immigration crisis: "The first chapter asks why the European Union, which was once at the forefront of opening internal borders to free movement, became the locus of the current crisis when more than 23 people lost their lives on its borders from 000 to 2005. »

Then the book addresses the problem of building fences along the Mexican-American border.

Self-rated. The author of this book knows what she is writing about. She is not at all a desk person, but she has made a number of trips herself, including to Nador, a troubled city with 300 inhabitants across the Moroccan border, which she did to address the modern refugee crisis. And she has traveled to Melilla, where hordes of refugees from West Africa daily try to cross the Spanish border at risk of life. They are usually sent back to Morocco. She writes: "The Spanish Guardia Civil, in older white trucks with green doors, patrols the roads along the edge of fences, looking for anything out of place."

The book also begs the question: Why did the dominant narrative of the 1990s be that all artificial borders across Europe should be removed, when reality became the complete opposite? As of 2014, 26 countries were members of Schengen. While the myth was that globalization would create a boundless world, 24 European countries built borders and devised a common surveillance system for migrants. The book substantiates its claims with numbers and statistics, and shows that over 3500 people were killed or died at the European borders in 2015. In 1993, on the other hand, only a few died. As the author writes: "The reality is that EU borders were not removed in the 1990s, but simply moved to different locations."

Military. Who is responsible for the growing number of people on the run and the rapidly increasing number of dead along the borders of Europe? One possible answer is that the authorities in countries that are involuntarily being sought by boat refugees are doing as little as possible to save the refugees from drowning death so as not to encourage other refugees to come.

First, the chapter explores the historical relationship between Mexico and the United States. The book points out that the borders are increasingly going from being controlled by political decision-makers to being part of a larger military operation, with the risk of killing refugees trying to cross the borders. The author writes: "The US-Mexican border is also characterized by violence on the Mexican side, as cartels work to solidify control over profitable smuggling routes."

UN failure. One of the most interesting chapters in the book deals with the relationship between climate change, boundaries and how boundary fences and fences affect the environment. Perhaps not many people are thinking about what damage to the environment such border fences can do.

In a time of growing nationalism and a focus on borders and fences, this is an important book. It is well-written, conscientious and number oriented. Finally point Violent Borders on the fact that the UN has totally failed as a global environmental police. Now it is the nation state that decides how border problems should be dealt with, and international authorities have little to say.

I Funds without goals Giorgio Agamben operates with a global nomadic concept: We are all nomads, shut out or controlled by the nation state. Should we take into account the nomadic in human existence, or should we continue to close each other inside or out?



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Henning Næs
Henning Næss
Literary critic in MODERN TIMES.

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