Bordering humanness, securing whiteness: race, colonialism, and violence at the European borders

This doctoral thesis is a major study of the historical and contemporary intimacies between borders, whiteness, and racial violence in the Global North, especially in Europe. Engaging with Black Studies and Post/decolonial literature, the monograph unearths the multiple ways in which Europe’s contemporary apparatus of border security reactivates and readapts colonial techniques and rationales of repression and policing deployed at colonies and settler colonies in order to police a (post)colonial and racial order deeply embedded in white supremacy. The thesis is focused on Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’, which is here seen as a moment of ‘white anxiety’ over whiteness’ ‘settler’ status in Europe. Its main argument is that Europe’s intensification of border violence over the past decades against Global South migrants can be seen as a process of reaffirmation of whiteness’ settler position in Europe, as the ‘rightful’ possessor of Europe’s land, resources, and identity. As in previous moments of Europe’s colonial past, this is undertaken through what I term here ‘racial violence’, a mode of violence that operates by policing the racial borders of ‘whiteness’ and reducing its target to a non- or less-than-human position. Employing what I call here a ‘practice-oriented’ genealogy, the thesis identifies and investigates three central modes of racial violence at play at Europe’s border apparatus of security: (dis)possession, objectification, and animalisation, and connects them to broader and historical dynamics within colonialism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. Empirically, the thesis offers an analysis of a diverse set of spaces and policies in Europe where we can see the operation of racial violence as a form of bordering. Among the practices of violence analysed by the thesis are Calais’ zero-anchor point policy, maritime pushbacks in the Mediterranean, and the weaponisation of police dogs against migrants in the Balkans.