unbordering first definitions

[jacopo's contribution]
reseraching on the southern european border
works on the external frontiers of the eu and the re-emergence of the internal frontiers 

entanglements between human and non human means of infrastructure of control.

practices and imaginaries linked to mobility from ppl on the move and people part of solidarity org/groups

multisited ethnography, different work on different sites altogether

connected by for example an object, a specific meaning to understand what a specific object means in different places (eg.: drones at different border-spaces)

trying non-extractive methods, building relationships that are kept for a longer time with people that inform the reserachers, like acitivists and people on the move -> book co-written by ppl on the move and researchers 

why studying borders & digital technologies? in Europe, the emergence of the Schengen framework/area in the 90's -- physical borders have been "removed" or are at least not so visible anymore ; the other part of the deal has bene increasing/stregthening the border control -- digital tech prominent in such effort
digital technologies are prominent in this effort, as the goal is not anymore to stop everyone, but to filter mobilities/ select mobilities that can pass or not, or are slowed down

trajectories, mobilities

books: exploring together (researchers, activists and ppl on the move) through the language the meanings revolving around the border and the mediterranean; 

how to explain movement and borders within the Mediterranean seen through words/language? 2 points to highlight, about the book's method (which is a collective effort of reflecting on border devices, mobility practices and so on):

example of the centro depicted in the Mahdia academy, as a scenography where different elements of the different centro (hotspot, CPR, ..) were brought together

ginou, active activist, human rights especially around migration questions, abolish frontex,  one of founders of obspol

Giullia, Collettivo Rotte balcaniche (Blakan routes collective) arches of solidarity of people on the move in the balkans. active inthe border between turkey and bulgaria. 

Jara,  titipi member,  infrastructural rehearsals, combo of green and digital transition. aesthetic, propagandistic move of frontext europe, the greening of borders.  the green collapse is also happening through the transition of the disgitisation of borders.

celine, abolish frontex, different collectives
amendine, desorceler la finance, transdisciplinary artistic practice. research project around desorceler frontex. they created a glossary too ! Creating words, freeing words

Simone, participatory art practices. resonate a lot with narratives, ambiguiti for dutch addition.  nieuwkomer

Dari, 

round of introductions, words/ points of interest

- unbordering
- refugees (a word and a status), a border within a community, 
- expat/immigrant
- illegal
- green+digital border
- devolución en caliente -  hot return, pushback (in this word the temperature is not there) 
- operative images ( a term that comes from media theory [harun farocki]) machinic vision, not in a body, but through points and data sets etc. 
- words for borders within the sami language (indigenous people from norway)
- using fiction narratives as a mode for describing displacement and mobility
- Asielzoeker
- asielopvangcentrum
- nieuwkomer
- being questioned or addressed
- resources
- in science fiction, imagining a radical herbalist. 
- bridge


--------

(NEW GROUP starting with Illegal/illegal refugees, + being questioned/being adressed)

being questioned / being addressed 
tracing apps; making treshold at the entrance of a shop 
elite, ice app (palentir), adressing ppl as points on a map; working very much like uber 
green certificate, yes no system 
digital technologies are mediating the experience of being questioned/ being adressed 
shifting idea of precision; with infrastructures where are the most ppl gathering, instead of being able to say there's a group of 40ppl with 10ppl illegal and 30 legal ppl; it's more to identify cluster of ppl (oh there's 400ppl there) so statistically there's more chance to get more ppl (so massively arresting ppl) 
in what's happening in the us it's clear that the step of being question/addressed is not happening, they're just arresting massively and deal with ppl afterwards
-different experiences of people being addressed at the border, by another human being or a machine, having the 'right' papers or appearance/look or not.. --> origin of these protocols technologies being military


illegal 
legality imposed onto bodies, it became so naturalised to characterised people and not objects or acts anymore; ppl cannot be illegal. Illegal being used everywhere all the time has become mundane. Its a big lie.  They (those invested in border violence, supremacy, fortress europe) dont care about it being grammatically wrong, its used as a precursor to many words, illegal person, illegal crossing, illegal activity, or in french to refer to a peson , an identity as 'an illegal'.  Is a person an illegal without a border, does unbordering = the rendering obselete of illegal as an identity, as grammatically incorrect? We recount the slogan 'No one is illegal', we check it across different languages, its grammatically correct. We check the similarly used word Clandestino as a similar word in Italian, but as the counter dictionary says it has a different genaology, more related on how to hide oneself, it gestures towards care needed, hiding, escaping as mode of travelling of publishing. In the hypervisibility of making people illegals that the right wing press propgate the clandestine isnt useful. The legal vs.  illegal holds a useful binary for a miletary surveillance state.  

How to get illegal back into its correct container, stop it from expanding, render it out of use. What would be the tactics for this. Cutification, historical archives, namings, changing the use. There isnt an alternative, the only solution is to allow people to move freely (always situated). Tactics might be useful but not the horizon. The sentence should never feel complete when you say "They took an illegal."/"They are targetting illegals." We check the ELITE app of ICE, we can't see they use illegal, instead they use tageting, enforcement, is this because legality isnt anymore the issue, just profitability financialisation, soon illegal wont be profitable, legal will also need targeting, enforcement, services from which Palantir can continue to profit from. This is because they already make it generalisable.

The surprising lack of the term "illegal" by Palentir or Elite. They clearly don't care. It is not profitable for them or interesting for them to get entangled in this. 
E - enhanced
L - leads
I - identification
T - targeting
E - enforcement

Militarisation where humans are illegal but not interested in talking about justice, or legality.. 
illegal in the media coverage but not in its name.. 
-usage of the word 'illegal' by the press, normalising this noun, 'educating' readers to use it, entering the imaginary of population. 
lesbian flame throwers....

What is the end goal? We are talking about freedom of movement, but is this what 


refugees 
A legal status that it's basically a divide to conquer strategy; legal framework that divides by 'offering' access to just a few while a state can maintain its violent system/logic; it creates a 'natural' 'moral' justification for defining who's in and who's out 


Enforcement 


(De)humanitarian
Emptying of the term. Exhaustion. Fully governmental temr which is now mobilized to contain or repress  movement and solidarity actors. Humanitiarian dimension has conflated into the securitarian dimension. State actors are using humanitarian narratives to push more restrisctive policies on migration.
Historical account:
    "Since migrants’ arrivals from Albania through the Adriatic Sea during the 1990s, humanitarian search and rescue operations have been a crucial aspect of migrations towards Europe, while always contentious. Since the Italian-government-led Operation Mare Nostrum – running from October 2013 to October 2014 – the focus of EU and member states’ operations has been at the same time on border control and preserving human life. The connection between rescue and the militarization of the Mediterranean has strengthened in the following years, with the implementation of military assets through Eunavfor Med-Operation Sophia (2015-2020, a joint naval intervention involving vessels from eight EU member states) and Operation Triton (2014-2018, led by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency). At the same time, from 2015 non-governmental actors such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Migrant Offshore Aid Station, Sea Watch, Jugend Rettet, and Proactiva Open Arms, systematically commenced search-and-rescue operations, in what has been called the “humanitarian fleet”. In this context, we observed the coexistence of an ambiguous convergence between humanitarian and border government actors in terms of public discourse and interventions, with the former risking of being co-opted by the latter (Vaughan-Williams, 2015). We have also seen humanitarian actors materially contesting an increasingly militarized border governance through rescue performed as an act of solidarity exceeding state-led efforts to govern migrant mobility (Stierl, 2017). Consequently, from 2017 we have witnessed the rising criminalization of sea rescue operated by NGOs through the seizing of ships and the accusations of “helping smugglers” and being a “pull factor” for sea border crossings (Mainwaring and DeBono, 2021), which has led to a partial withdrawal of the humanitarian fleet1. The recent Law n. 15/23 of the 24th February 2023, imposed further restrictions to NGOs SAR activities in the assignment of the place of safety, limiting the activity to one rescue operation at a time (Art. 1 condition “d”). In the parliamentary debate preceding the law approval, representatives of the far-right government led by Prime minister Giorgia Meloni connected the necessity to save human lives to stricter rules for NGOs, which they allege help facilitate Mediterranean crossings and favour human traffickers2: SAR operations, in this view, should be run by state actors.
1         The 2017 “Code of conduct” ( https://www.interno.gov.it/sites/default/files/codice_condotta_ong.pdf ) imposed by the Interior Ministry Marco Minniti to NGOs greatly         limited non-governmental SAR operations.
2         See for example the speech by the MP Laura Ravetto ( https://www.camera.it/leg19/410?idSeduta=0034&tipo=stenografico#sed0034.stenografico.tit00050.int00140 )"
[Humanitarian border: reprise](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/23996544241259576)
[EUropean Digital border](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54d6213ee4b0cdfb496d50dc/t/647dfc2d043d1c7ba0c7f33c/1685978163089/Jacopo_Anderlini_The_European_Digital_Border_06-2023.pdf)

(Dis)encourage
Different levels:
- Mediatization of the movement - crossing: "if you move you end up in a centro" | "if you want to move you have to prepare for the travel" (preppers)
- Phisical infrastructure - hunting | solidarity
- Exposition to death (natura matrigna) 



Hot return (=Devolución en caliente)
thermo-politics as border-making
etc:
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/devolucion-en-caliente