‘Here there be monsters’: Confronting the (post)coloniality of Britain’s borders

Thom Tyerman and Travis van Isacker

19 December 2024

Thom Tyerman and Travis van Isacker discuss the key points from their new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article at - ‘Here there be monsters’: Confronting the (post)coloniality of Britain’s borders

Introduction

This article is inspired by the daily struggles against the UK border regime by people on the move and those in solidarity with them. We first had the idea for the article while in Calais, France. This is the frontline of the UK’s externalised border regime where its hostile environment agenda is outsourced to French authorities who seek to make life unliveable for people seeking to travel to the UK without authorisation. The racism and violence underlying deterrence as a strategy of border control is stark on the streets of Calais. Here, people without citizenship status, often from countries impacted by conflict or authoritarianism, are systematically denied resources, shelter, or basic rights, and subjected daily to police violence, displacement, and harassment. In the UK itself, restrictions on employment, education, healthcare, housing, banking, driving, phone contracts, and much more have weaponised everyday life as a tool of deterrence against people without secure immigration or citizenship status.

At the same time, over the last decade or so, migrants have been increasingly demonised and dehumanised in mainstream British political debate and media coverage. Indeed, the supposed need to secure against such demonised figures is referenced as the primary justification for violent border deterrence policies. Yet, such simplistic and exaggerated caricatures have little in common with the complex realities of people’s lives and their reasons for crossing borders without authorisation. Rather, they perhaps tell us more about the anxieties of British nationalism and the state. Furthermore, they gloss over the structural economic, political, and social conditions that influence the displacement of populations globally, or the direct role of the UK’s (and other Northern countries’) visa policies in actively criminalising migration by closing off access to authorised routes of movement for many, especially the world’s poorest.

So, this article was prompted by the question of how to describe the violence and horror inherent in UK border policy and practice? How can we capture this violence in a way that does justice to its harms while also understanding its sources and why it continues to proliferate? And how might this be linked to the insecurity of the nation-state as a political imaginary which must therefore be continuously and violently reasserted? This led us into the realm of monsters.

In the article, we explore the ‘monster politics’ of Britain’s borders by examining processes of ‘monsterisation’, whereby migrants are demonised as threats to national security, and the enactment of ‘monstrosity’ as a strategy of border deterrence. Drawing on postcolonialism, black feminism, critical race theory, monster theory, and critical border studies we situate the monster politics of Britain’s borders within a longer history of European colonialism and show how it remains central to the ongoing racialised configuration of the nation-state, territory, and citizenship today. We argue this constitutes a novel form of state power, which we characterise as the ‘Border Leviathan’, posing challenges for efforts to reform the border regime towards more humanitarian ends. We conclude by considering what imaginative and strategic resources a focus on border monstrosity can offer abolitionist organising.

Monsters and mobility (past and present)

First, we situate UK bordering within a longer history in which monsterisation and mobility controls underpinned colonial formations of racial hierarchy and spatial division, showing how these persist in the governance of borders today. Here, we trace how the construction of a hierarchy of humanity according to notions of race, which served as a central pillar in the enactment and supposed legitimisation of European colonial power, entailed creating monsters. Initial fantastical portrayals of ‘otherworldly’ monsters in the tales of colonial explorers depicted non-European people as taking monstrous hybrid forms, disqualifying them from humanity which was associated with whiteness. These then gave way during the Enlightenment to ‘naturalistic’ and ‘scientific’ forms of racism and monsterisation which emphasised the supposedly animalistic character of nonwhite populations, placing them at the outer edge of full humanity, or else at the bottom of a racialised hierarchy of civilisation with white Anglo-Saxon society at the top.

At the same time, this racialised hierarchy of humanity invented under colonialism was mapped out spatially, with different populations and cultures divided up and assigned their geographic and historical places. The governance of mobility across and between these divided territories was central to colonial authorities’ efforts to maintain the racial, social, economic, and political inequalities of empire. These ideas and practices gradually informed the basis of the nation-state system we have today, including the governance of national borders and migration. Today’s border controls, therefore, embody a continuation of colonial modes of governance and retain their unequally racialised dimensions. For instance, look at successive UK immigration and nationality legislation since 1945 which sought to limit access to the privileges of British citizenship along racial lines in response to decolonisation.

Having established these historical threads in racialised bordering and (post)colonial statecraft, next we detail some of the ways monsterisation is applied to migrants today in UK discourse, law, and policy, focusing on animalisation, zombification, criminalisation, and barbarisation. From the actual and rhetorical relegation of displaced people to the ‘jungle’, to practices of caging where people are treated like animals, to the depiction of migrants as an unreasoning, devouring, savage and criminal threat to western social political order, we trace the multiple ways in which monisterisation works to produce fear of ‘foreign others’ who must therefore be policed, expelled, and defended against. In doing so, we show how the monsterisation of noncitizens is central to bordering as a practice of statecraft through which the UK is constructed as a national society and political entity according to persisting gendered, sexualised, and racialised hierarchies.

Deterrence, monstrosity and the ‘Border Leviathan’

In the second half of the paper, we explore another dimension of the monster politics of the UK border: how monstrosity itself is mobilised as a strategy of bordering through deterrence. Deterrence entails manufacturing fear of danger or punishment to coerce a change of people’s behaviour. In relation to UK border policy, deterrence has involved securitising transport infrastructure and blocking routes of irregular mobility in order to leave people with only the most dangerous methods, such as crossing the sea by boat. Furthermore, the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ agenda, pursued by successive governments over the last decade, has sought to make it so hard to establish a life in the UK for irregularised migrants that they either choose to leave voluntarily or to not come in the first place.

Despite there being little evidence of their deterrent effect, these policies have seen practices of bordering proliferate throughout society and everyday life. For many members of the British public, the horrifying impacts of these policies were revealed by the Windrush Scandal in which British citizens from former Commonwealth countries, mostly non-white and elderly, were barred from receiving medical care, made jobless and homeless, with some even detained or deported. Yet, these same policies and their impacts that were decried as unconscionable against the Windrush Generation are ubiquitous and routine for many irregularised migrants. Indeed, their monstrosity is integral to how the border works.

We asked ourselves how we might depict this monstrosity of the UK border so that we can better understand its features and the role of horror in its operation. At the same time, we wanted to show how, through these practices of border monstrosity, new forms of state power were being developed. So, we drew on perhaps the most famous political monster of all for inspiration: Hobbes’ Leviathan. For Hobbes, the authority of the state relies on horror to bind society together into a national body with the sovereign at its head. Today, however, rather than an apparatus that stands above society, the state and the mobilisation of monstrosity as a technology of border control is embedded throughout everyday life. We find this operation of state power embodied in the direct physical violence detention and deportations entail, as well as the ‘slow violence’ (Mayblin, Wake, & Kazemi 2020) of the asylum system. The border can be found throughout our cities and our homes, in human resource offices, university seminars, hospital receptions, marriage registry offices, and in random police checks at bus terminals. It is a form of state power that twists the institutions, spaces, and social relations of society into the tools of border enforcement and deterrence. At the same time, the UK border is connected to carceral spaces and practices that reach out internationally, for example via deportation and prisoner transfer agreements between the UK and countries such as Albania and Nigeria, or the former asylum offshoring agreement with Rwanda.

In light of these dynamics, which we describe as the becoming monstrous of the everyday border’s global reach, we argue that the contemporary Border Leviathan resembles less Hobbes’ humanoid monster and more a writhing mass of tentacles, decentralised yet interconnected, working in concert to ensnare our everyday lives in the border monster’s grasp. Furthermore, we argue, the Border Leviathan is also ‘headless’. That is, the work of border deterrence is not directed from some central sovereign figurehead but rather is diffusely perpetuated by ordinary citizens in everyday encounters coopted into opaque networks of border enforcement.

Beyond humanitarianism: border abolition

More than descriptively innovative, these insights have important ethical political implications for responding to border monstrosity. They remind us of the limits of common liberal humanitarian strategies of critique and opposition to monstrous border policies and practices of monsterisation. The former often equate border monstrosity with the specific agendas of individual politicians and their anti-migrant ‘dreams’ (see for example, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman). But as we argue, this misses where power lies and how bordering operates in more diffuse and headless ways, and hence why monstrous border logics and practices persist among governments across the political spectrum. Furthermore, arguments for the humanisation of monsterised migrants, and the creation of more humane border policies, also fail to fully challenge the ways dehumanisation and deterrence remain central to how the border works. In the end, they usually transpose border monstrosity onto populations seen as less deserving or more criminalisable. Indeed, humanitarian arguments are often mobilised to demand more bordering and policing in the name of saving migrants’ lives, as we see with state efforts to disrupt criminal smuggling gangs. Yet, as shown by the recent conviction of asylum seeker Ibrahima Bah for manslaughter and facilitating illegal entry when the dinghy he was driving shipwrecked in the Channel, the state decides where to draw the line between a life that needs saving and a criminal monster – a line which is always subject to change. Humanitarian responses, then, risk legitimising and entrenching border monstrosity as a political necessity and in doing so extending the carceral reach of the Border Leviathan’s tentacles.

This leads us to our conclusion where we briefly consider the relevance of our arguments to the political project of border abolition. Border abolition seeks to denaturalise and deconstruct institutions and practices of bordering as well as present radical alternative visions for a world without borders. Our analysis of the monster politics of UK bordering contributes to both goals. First, revealing the border to be a historical political construct premised on racism and injustice, it makes the case that not only can we organise our societies differently but also, we must. Second, we propose that abolitionist thinking and organising could benefit from embracing monstrosity. On the one hand, this involves recognising our everyday complicity in border violence as a necessary starting point for resistance through acts of refusal, non-compliance, and disruption. On the other, embracing monstrosity opens imaginative space for thinking about emancipatory alternatives to a bordered world and identifying the coalitions between monsterised subjects that will be necessary to build to get there. As we argue, embracing monstrosity means ‘embracing the power of horror and being honest that abolishing racist hierarchies of global border apartheid requires making the darkest anxieties of the governing status quo a reality: ending white supremacy, losing control of our borders, and accepting the ungovernability of people’s freedom of movement’.

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000779

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