**Call for Papers for the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2022: Geographies Beyond Recovery**
    Newcastle University, 30th August – 2nd September 2022

    Session title: Beyond borders: challenging bureaucracy and state violence at the border

    Organisers: Dr Emma Marshall (Exeter University), Dr Amanda Schmid-Scott (Newcastle University)


Deadline for abstracts now 10am (GMT) Friday 25 March - if you would like to present please confirm in your email whether you would like to attend in person or online.


As the Russian attacks on Ukraine intensify and the humanitarian crisis grows, we feel an urgent and pressing responsibility to consider what we can do as academics, as well as in our personal lives, to respond. We are beginning to try to comprehend and articulate the significance of the situation, at the same time recognising that framing the significance of the war as ‘European’ is underpinned by racist logics that prioritise some lives over others. We do not believe that moral responsibility for other people should be contingent on who they are and where they are from.

In the UK, we are conscious of the very fast shift in public pressure on the Government to respond to the crisis through the easing of border control.  Even as we write this, the Home Office has announced a modest change in policy to allow Ukrainian citizens entry without requiring fingerprints and photographs before travelling to the UK. Given our view that bureaucracy is used as a tool of oppression to enable violent state border practices, it is both interesting and unfortunate that the administrative logic of preventing migration to the UK has made it difficult for the Government to respond immediately and effectively to Ukrainians fleeing the crisis. Critical scholarship on border bureaucracies reveals a discord in how these systems are supposed to approach people seeking protection and the restrictive and rigorous border regimes which are constitutive of their normal functioning (Abdelhady et al. 2021; Gill 2016; Lindberg 2021). We note that notions of neutrality and rationality as the axiom of bureaucratic ethics (Stivers 2015), contradict the repeated experiences of those seeking protection on our shores. As well, research which attends to the ways in which different forms of violence function across sites and scales (Conlon and Hiemstra 2017; Pain 2015; Pratt and Rosner 2012), reveals how the bureaucratic components of these processes are situated within a network of violences which produce an intricate web of exclusionary practices, which affirm the non-belonging of people who have been categorised as unwanted by the state (Lindberg 2021).

We wonder if this is a moment at which debates can be shifted, or is it likely to be more fleeting? We are also reminded that previous moments of public pressure for governments to respond to humanitarian crises, such as the war in Syria, have not enabled any longer-term developments to more progressive policies. In fact, the situation in the UK over the past five years has arguably become more hostile towards migrants arriving in the UK, despite government rhetoric making this less explicit (The Guardian, 2018). We are also concerned that the current Nationality and Borders Bill passing through Parliament in the UK is highly significant but also another fast-moving situation. We are unsure what exactly its final shape will be, but it will almost undoubtedly lead to a more punitive border regime.

This session aims to build upon these urgent concerns by bringing together interdisciplinary work that speaks to dominant framings of migration in relation to the concerns of states i.e. security, economic, humanitarian (Huysman 2006) and how these might be reconsidered and remade:

    •       How can we respond to the situation in Ukraine, as individuals in our personal lives and work, and collectively? What are the temporal dimensions of this i.e. what can we do now and how can we plan for the future? What does a helpful response look like, and what can we learn from the current crisis as well as previous events that share similar characteristics?

    •       How might we understand the administrative logics that prevent migration more broadly, in relation to recent public pressure in mobilising quick policy shift? How can this shift be embraced to push for longer term changes?

    •       How can we ensure that the current situation does not only make the case for more open borders for people from Ukraine, but also strengthen wider understanding of the violence of borders? How does the situation in Ukraine challenge governmental framings of border control that justify limitations on who enters using grounds of national security?

    •       As activists and scholars, how can we challenge oppressive state bureaucracy at the border without further entrenching racist logics that play out through framings of who we should open borders for? How can we embrace the shift in public attitudes that call for openness to receiving refugees from Ukraine and at the same time challenge the racist logics that make some refugees perceived as more acceptable than others?

    •       As academics what should we now be calling for, and how should we lead debates, that take collective and subsisting responsibility for challenging violent border practices?

    •       How can we respond quickly as academics to emerging situations/crises when often the focus of academic research is longer-term? Can scholarship be rigorous and fast? And can we act quickly without undermining the importance of slow scholarship (Mountz et al. 2018)?

    •       What is the future of critical border studies, or what should it be, in response to major political shifts resulting from significant events, including but not limited to Brexit, the Covid pandemic, war in Europe and elsewhere (Syria, Afghanistan and beyond)?

Although we are writing as academics living in Britain, we welcome contributions from scholars and activists with global perspectives. We also encourage contributions that provide insight into lived experiences of oppressive border regimes and ways of resisting.

Please send your abstract (up to 300 words) by 10am GMT Friday 25 March 2022 to Emma Marshall [log in to unmask]


References

Abdelhady, D., Gren, N., and Joorman, M. (2021) Refugees and the violence of welfare bureaucracies in Northern Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Conlon, D. and Hiemstra, N. eds. (2017) Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention: Critical Perspectives. Oxon: Routledge.
Gill, N. (2016) Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Huysmans, J. (2006) The politics of insecurity: Fear, migration and asylum in the EU. Abingdon: Routledge.
Lindberg, A. (2021) Minimum rights policies targeting people seeking protection in Denmark and Sweden, in, eds. Abdelhady, D., Gren, N., and Joorman, M.. Refugees and the violence of welfare bureaucracies in Northern Europe: Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T., & Curran, W. (2015) For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 1235-1259.
Pain, R. (2015) Intimate War, Political Geography, 44, pp. 64–73.
Pratt, G. and Rosner, V. (2012) Introduction: The Global and the Intimate. In Pratt, G. and Rosner, V. (Eds.), The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in our time. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-28.
Stivers, C. (2015) Rule by Nobody: Bureaucratic Neutrality As Secular Theodicy, Administrative Theory and Praxis, 37, pp. 242-251.
The Guardian (2018): https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2018/apr/30/theresa-may-new-home-secretary-amber-rudd-quits-politics-live

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