Dear all

Vincent Joos (Florida State University) and I are co-organizing a panel on "Privatization of Migration Enforcement and Humanitarian Management in Borderland Infrastructures" for the American Anthropological Association meeting Nov 20-24 in Vancouver, Canada. 

If you are interested, please send us a message before 31 March. We’ll expect an abstract of around 200-250 words before 5 April, as abstracts must be initiated by April 5th and finalized by 10 April on the AAA website.

Very best wishes, Carolina

Carolina Sanchez Boe, Danish Research Foundation fellow, CERLIS Université Paris Descartes - Sorbonne Cité, IMC Aarhus University
101 rue de Clignancourt 75018 Paris, + 33 686 44 37 30, [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Facebook: Anthropology of Confinement


Panel Abstract:

Privatization of Migration Enforcement and Humanitarian Management in Borderland Infrastructures

Since the early 1980s, Western governments have increasingly relied on private corporations and non-governmental organizations to administer their borderlands, both on their geographical borders with other nation-states and within internal border-zones, where “the spatialized condition of ‘illegality’ reproduces the physical borders of nation-states in the everyday lives of innumerable places throughout the interiors of the migrant-receiving states” (De Genova 2002: 439).

Private corporations fueled by public funds have built watch-towers, anti-intrusion walls and have reinforced video surveillance along the border between Mexico and the USA (de Léon 2016), the French northern coast (Joos & Leleu 2017), in the Mediterranean (Rodier 2012, Anderson 2014) or on Schengens’ artic border to Russia (Boe & Horsti 2018). Meanwhile, the internal border zones of nation-states are reproduced and multiplied though an infrastructure of private prisons, immigration detention centers, shelters and the use of electronic monitoring for border control purposes. Within these infrastructures, state or privately funded non-profit organizations operate, and concerned citizens and foreign-nationals themselves develop critiques and strategies to denounce corporate interests. Against this backdrop, we ask:

-        How and why do public institutions increasingly engage the corporate world into borderland administration and management?

-        How can we contextualize, politically and economically, the periods of corporate surge in the handling of immigration (such as the 1980 Haitian migration “crisis” in the USA, the 2015 Calais crackdown or the use of electronic monitoring for border control purposes)?

-        How are profits generated from the framing of immigration as crisis and what kinds of corporate ethics lie behind the increase of punishment and incarceration of migrant populations?

-        How do corporate technologies foster new ways to track migrants? How do non-profit organizations and solidarity networks take part or avoid reproducing similar practices?

-        How might the global rise of nationalism and the neoliberal turn in border administration be related?

-        How can we tie ethnographic approaches of immigration and counter-hegemonic practices in the face of growing repression of activism and solidarity?

We invite historically and ethnographically grounded studies that explore the development and the effects of corporate infrastructures of confinement and bordering. Possible topics and issues to explore might include (but are not limited to) the development of humanitarian and securitarian landscapes, corporate and non-profit infrastructures to track and manage people who are in immigration processing, and the process of extractivism applied to human bodies.

Abstracts of 250 words, with few lines of biographical information, should be submitted electronically to: 

Vincent Joos: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> and Carolina Sanchez Boe: [log in to unmask] by 5 April, 2019

 Notification of acceptance by: April 15, 2019


Carolina Sanchez Boe, Danish Research Foundation fellow, CERLIS Université Paris Descartes - Sorbonne Cité, IMC Aarhus University
101 rue de Clignancourt 75018 Paris, + 33 686 44 37 30, [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Facebook: Anthropology of Confinement





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