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Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move
Reece Jones argues that these deaths are not exceptional, but rather the result of state attempts to contain populations and control access to resources and opportunities. “We may live in an era of globalization,” he writes, “but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people.”
In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and their dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the aftershocks of decolonization, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. With the growth of borders and resource enclosures, the deaths of migrants in search of a better life are intimately connected to climate change, environmental degradation, and the growth of global wealth inequality.
Reviews
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“I'd like an endless supply of Reece Jones’ Violent Borders to hand out to all the people I meet who flirt with an anti-refugee sensibility. This book is the antidote to the world of walls that we live in, an argument for a world of humanity.”
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“A much-needed counter to a thousand newspaper columns calling on us to secure our borders, Reece Jones’ Violent Borders goes beyond the headlines to look at the deeper causes of the migration crisis. Borders, Jones convincingly argues, are a means of inflicting violence on poor people. This is an engaging and lucid analysis of a much misunderstood issue.”
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“From early modern land enclosures through Westphalian state formation to the current fortification of the US–Mexico frontier, Reece Jones explains what a boundary is, and how national sovereignty is being reinforced, in an age of capital mobility, by the crackdown on human movement across borders.”
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“With the building of border walls and the deaths of migrants much in the news, this work is both timely and necessarily provocative.”
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“In an era of terrorism, global inequality, and rising political tension over migration, Jones argues that tight border controls make the world worse, not better.”
Blog
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Violent Borders: Free ebook download
We're not sure what lies ahead at the moment, but it does look like we face a future with increased borders, walls, barriers, and restrictions.
Violent Borders is a major new exploration of the refugee crisis, focusing on how borders are formed and policed. Reece Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and their dire consequences for countless millions.
This book is available to download, for free, until November 19th at midnight GMT.
Click here to download.
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Decade of the Dead
Panteón Municipal La Chaveña, Ciudad Juárez. Photo by Molly Molloy.
On October 31, El Diario de Juárez said the municipal cemeteries were dying. On the Friday before Dia de los Muertos, I walked in the oldest cemetery — La Chaveña. It’s 179 years old. More than 75,000 people in the Paso del Norte have come to rest here. Graves are chiseled into hard ground in the western hills of Juárez and only cactus, ocotillo and bits of spiky brown grass adorn the stones. Someone planted a palo verde sapling in a cement-lined water holder on a newer grave. This tree grows in the driest land of the Chihuahuan desert. -
The era of climate migration meets violent borders
Independent journalist and researcher Alexandra Tempus proposes that reevaluating the global border regime is key to addressing the disproportionate effects of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable people. Tempus has covered climate justice and politics for Al Jazeera America, Vice News, the Associated Press and more. She was a lead researcher on Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.
Less than two weeks before Hurricane Matthew struck Haiti, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson had announced that the United States would hasten the widespread deportation of undocumented Haitian migrants from the US, lifting the protections they’d been given after the fallout from Haiti’s disastrous 2010 earthquake. In the chaotic wake of Matthew, he announced these deportations would be suspended — but only temporarily.
