Four seasons of border violence: The co-option of the seasons into the management of migration

Abstract

From ocean currents to rivers, deserts, and mountains, the environment is often weaponized into border controls against people homogeneously racialized as “irregular migrants’’. This paper is based on our observation that direct violence used during pushbacks – illegal forced returns over a border – are enforced as well as resisted in the context of seasonal shifts; temporal processes that have been side-lined in migration-violence literature. Based on long-term fieldwork comprising “four seasons of ethnography” with survivors of pushbacks at (i) the border between Turkey and Iran (EU external borders), and (ii) the borders between Croatia with Bosnia-Herzegovina (EU internal borders), we introduce an intervention demonstrating how border violence either co-opts seasonal shifts or is fully externalised to extreme weather conditions. Combining border security studies and critical geography literature, we explore how the four seasons are incorporated by state officials to harm and debilitate migrants. We argue that state decisions to physically attack people are called into action when the seasonal affordances of the environment fail to immobilise migrants. Border security, in other words, has a seasonality that reveals the symbiotic relationships between seasonal changes and direct state violence. Yet, we also show that people migrating are not only victims of the environmentally-co-opted violence, but also use seasonal changes to challenge border controls, avoid detection, and finalise their journeys. By viewing border violence as a dynamic, shifting, and longitudinal process, we highlight how borders are punctuated by cyclical temporalities that open up and foreclose possibilities for resistance.