UK Borderscapes

This book analyses bordering practices and their negative effects as well as the many creative and often grassroots ways in which borders are resisted and reinvented. From the hostile environment to Brexit and the Nationality and Borders Bill, the UK border regime has become increasingly strict and complex, operating both at the edge of the state and within everyday life in unprecedented ways. At the same time, this securitisation approach is often contested, and its effects are fought daily by many groups and individuals. This book explores this tension, documenting and analysing how the contemporary UK border is imagined, constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in multiple ways. To draw together the different pieces that compose this evolving and conflicting landscape, this book uses the concept of "borderscapes", which views borders as sites of multiple tensions between hegemonic, non-hegemonic, and counter-hegemonic imaginaries and practices. This lens enables contributors to draw a multifocal overview of the UK border that includes the different human and material actors that form it, the spaces and practices they shape, and the imaginaries and counter-imaginaries that emerge from their conflictual encounters. Bringing together contributions by researchers from a variety of disciplines, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of migration and border studies, refugee studies, human geography, criminology, sociology, and anthropology.

Kahina Le Louvier is a Research Fellow in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at Northumbria University. She is a researcher working on various aspects of migration, including environmental migration, the information needs and barriers experienced by people seeking asylum in the UK and France, drivers and imaginaries of migration, the heritage practices of people in exile, and the ethics of migration research. Karen Latricia Hough is a Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is an expert in migration and refugee studies. She obtained her doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, and she has worked on several EU-funded projects regarding the development of asylum and immigration law in the Russian Federation and in Europe. Her current research projects focus on modern slavery and anti-trafficking.

1. Introduction PART 1 Legal and operational implementation of the border 2. From the Aliens Act to the 'hostile environment': The making of the British border control system 3. Towards two-way integration: A comparative review of refugee integration strategies 4. Temporalities, dependency, and the politics of marriage migration 5. Rethinking access to asylum: Border-shifting, burdenshifting, and externalisation of international protection in the light of the UK-Rwanda arrangement 6. Politics of exhaustion at the UK border: Depoliticising suffering, invisibilising violence 7. Cracks in the UK borderscape imaginary: Opportunism, fluidity, and contradictions in implementing migration controls abroad PART 2 Lived experiences of the border and modes of resistance 8. Conflicting imaginaries of the UK border and self-bordering 9. Evaluations of 'opportunity' versus 'risk': Vietnamese migrants' experiences and perceptions of the UK border 10. No longer marginal: Migrant rights activism and the confrontation with everyday borders 11. Institutionalised resistance and everyday bordering 12. The material politics of asylum support: Speed, intimacy, and confusion 13. Migrant women resisting borders through participatory arts 14. Epilogue