Summary of Work Group 4 2009 MEETING
Documents, Techniques and Technologies
Manchester, 15-16 May 2009
Convenor: Sarah Green
University of Manchester, Social Anthropology
sarah.green@manchester.ac.uk
+44 (0)161 275 3989; +44 (0)797 329 1882
EastBordNet/ COST IS0803 (Remaking eastern borders in Europe:
A network exploring social, moral and material relocations of Europe's eastern peripheries)
Meeting Theme:
Passports and passing: everyday encounters with borders
WG4 overall is concerned with ‘Documents, Techniques and Technologies,’ and it involves research on the legal, bureaucratic, technological and other forms of border creation, control and maintenance. The objective of this first meeting was to compare existing research on everyday experiences of borders in terms of documents, techniques and technologies – and in particular, to look at how different people are diversely affected by, and effect, such techniques. [1]
As one of the main aims of the Action overall is to compare research on different areas of the eastern periphery of Europe, from the north to the south, and another key aim is to consider different ways of thinking about these phenomena, the meeting structure was designed to draw out those comparative and conceptual elements.
(a) Summary of the meeting
The participants for this meeting were directed to think about their research in terms of any relationships they had found between borders and the bureaucratic techniques and technologies that are used to mark (or unmark), control and maintain borders. The overall aims were:
(i) To gather existing information about both the common and diverse experiences of these issues across the eastern periphery of Europe;
(ii) To begin to create a comparative context for considering these diverse experiences; and
(iii) To begin to understand the constant process through which borders are created, maintained, dismantled and remade in people’s everyday experiences, particularly across this eastern border region of Europe.
The presentations given covered expertise from across the region: specialists on globalization; those working on various aspects of post-conflict former Yugoslavia; a criminologist working on the building of biometric techniques for monitoring European borders; specialists on the Slovak-Ukrainian border, the Lithanian-Polish-Belarusian border, the Macedonian-Bulgarian border, Norwegian-Russian border, and the Aegean borderland region between Greece and Turkey; and a researcher working on Kyrgyz migrants working in Russia. There were anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, people working in the humanities, and others. There were people working on legal and illegal migration, as well as the smuggling of goods across borders; others who considered the effect of the internet on borders; those who focused on the bureaucratic techniques used by state institutions, by officials, and by those attempting to cross borders; and those studying citizens of one country who were considering applying for a different citizenship in order to gain greater access to travel, status, economic opportunities or even healthcare. Importantly, research reports were given on countries both within and outside the EU zone, including reports on countries that are now designated ‘Near Neighbours’ by the EU. That wide remit was very helpful in challenging ‘EU-centric’ perspectives, providing an opportunity to extend our understanding of experiences and perspectives to countries that are located just beyond the EU’s borders, as well as our knowledge about the way peoples from outside the EU’s borders are engaging with the EU and its bureaucratic requirements and opportunities.
This bringing together of expertise also highlighted how a dominant focus on what are defined as immediate ‘problem areas,’ areas identified as requiring rapid solutions (e.g. security, climate, technology, conflict) has left a gap in our understanding of much slower, more mundane, and more everyday experiences: minor disputes and everyday relations and interactions across borders – the kind of events that make up most people’s lives, and which cumulatively, if sometimes imperceptibly, shape people’s understandings and experiences, as well as perhaps having quite important material effects on the areas eventually identified as immediate ‘problems’.
Many of these points emerged as a result of the different style of academic meeting that was used in this working group, which encouraged a collaborative research environment rather than simply the presentation of research results. A brief outline of this is given below; a more detailed summary of research results is provided after that.
(b) The structure of the meeting: towards a more effective way to build a comparative perspective within the COST network.
Most academic meetings have a similar format: participants are asked to submit a title and abstract of a paper; they are often asked to circulate this paper in advance; then participants are asked to present a version of the paper at the event in quite a formal way: presenters deliver the paper to a silent audience, usually for a period of between 20 and 40 minutes. If presenters are fortunate, they might receive a brief and informative discussion about their paper afterwards. The event then moves on to the next paper, usually rapidly forgetting the previous one.
For about two years, those involved in developing COST Action IS0803 (which has been nicknamed EastBordNet since 2007, and will be referred to as such from now on), felt this was not an appropriate structure for making the best use of a research network. First, it is not an effective way to build communication between researchers; second, it is even less effective at fostering a comparative perspective across the material presented in the different papers; third, it does not provide the best environment for developing future collaborative work. So even though this classic style of academic meeting has the advantage of being a familiar and therefore quite comfortable format for most academics, the convenor of WG4 asked participants to do something different in this meeting. Rather than write the paper in advance and present a version of it, participants were asked to come prepared to discuss their material and their planned argument, as well as providing a brief overview of the background to their interest in this subject. This would give the other participants in the event the context within which each speaker had developed their research, as well as a sense of what was emerging from that research. After each presentation of ten to fifteen minutes, an equal amount of time was set aside for collective discussion of the presenter’s work in progress. Participants were informed that they would have to write the formal paper, or prepare the material for the network’s Wiki (like Wikipedia) after the event, and not before.
The rationale behind this unusual format was to ensure that as the meeting progressed, participants became as actively engaged in the presentation as the presenters themselves. This structure almost inevitably led to the making of comparisons across papers, across different material and experiences, and across diverse ways of analysing the material presented. As the Action is a four-year project in which people will continue to be engaged with one another over time, there is an opportunity for people to develop high levels of communication and a rich comparative environment. The hope is that when participants come to write their more formal texts, they will use the discussion of the meeting to inform the structure and analysis of their paper.
On the basis of the meeting itself, this was an extremely successful technique. It remains to be seen what the results are in terms of the papers and wiki entries that will be written over the summer based on this experience. The following is a summary of some of the substantive issues that emerged from this collective effort.
(c) Summary of the presentations and discussions
The abstracts for each presentation discussed at the meeting can be found at http://www.eastbordnet.org/events/workgroups/WG42009/index.htm. The working papers of these meetings are being posted on the website over time, and wiki entries based on the meeting will appear in the project's wiki.
Part I: Documents
Many of the presentations dealt with all three themes in WG4 – Documents, Techniques and Technologies – but some papers focused more on one area rather than another. The first set of presentations focused particularly on the paperwork involved in managing borders – passports, visas, work permits and so on. Any documents required for travel, or for the right to reside or work in a place, were considered in this section.
Stef Jansen, who has carried out ethnographic research in former Yugoslavia, began this section by focusing on the material and legal inequalities in the ability to travel for people with different citizenships: those with Serbian passports have much less opportunity to travel than those with British passports, and both have fewer opportunities than those who held the Yugoslav passport during the Cold War: the Yugoslav passport afforded travel across all the major political divisions of that earlier era. Dr Jansen went through a range of theoretical perspectives (e.g. actor network theory, Foucault, Agamben and post-colonial studies) to tackle this inequality in the value of different passports. He concluded that while these perspectives were useful, none of them were effective in capturing the deep material and personal effects that inequalities of border documentation has on people’s lives. Dr Jansen also outlined how his wider research involved analysing how everyday geopolitics of this kind also affect people’s sense of possibility, and most importantly, of hope, in their lives.
Dr Jansen’s insistence that citizenship, not nationality, is the key issue in diverse experiences of border documentation led several other participants to question him, arguing that the significance of citizenship or nationality depended on context. Dr Jansen responded that on the matter of rights to travel, the key is still citizenship: while certain kinds of persons have their citizenship questioned or denied to them on the basis of nationality, it is still the citizenship, in the end, that provides the real difference in the ability to reside and/or to travel. When combined with the geopolitics of the unequal value of documents, this generates a situation of multiple hierarchy and inequality between peoples and places.
The debate then moved on to how documents are evaluated through the presentation of Madeleine Reeves, who has carried out research in the Central Asian border region of the Ferghana Valley. Dr Reeves discussed research on the paperwork used by Khyrghyz labour migrants in Russia, whose documentation was not easily distinguished as being either ‘genuine’ or ‘fake,’ but constituted a complex gradation between them. What Dr Reeves called ‘clean fakes’ (e.g. papers that had a genuine police stamp on them, but this stamp had not been acquired officially) were widely regarded as very nearly genuine. This raised questions about what is and is not authentic paperwork, and it introduced the idea that documents can be simultaneously both legal and illegal.
Dr Reeves questioned the existence of any direct relationship between borders and documentary practices. Her research suggested that what constitutes borders depends as much on the ‘fakes’ as it does on the official paperwork and other paraphernalia that marks the existence of borders. The implication was that the way in which documentary practices mediate between people and their experience of border is key to generating a sense of border in everyday terms, and sometimes, this can create quite a blurred sense of the boundary that borders mark. The official practices used to make borders appear are insufficient to understand ‘border’ as an existing entity in everyday terms, she suggested.
Some participants who had not thought of borders in that way before questioned Dr Reeves over the apparent fluidity that this was introducing into the idea of border: after all, borders do actually exist in material terms, one participant suggested. Dr Reeves clarified that she was not arguing for the lack of the material existence of borders; rather, she was suggesting that what makes them into borders involves informal as much as formal practices, and that these practices are constantly changing. Her point was that borders are not simply built by a political authority and then thereafter, they simply exist, with people either crossing or not crossing them: rather, the building of a physical border and the setting out of rules and procedures for managing that border is only one part of what brings borders into existence and shapes how they develop; Dr Reeves suggested she wanted to study all the different elements and practices through which the border came to be understood as a border.
The question of what it is that generates a sense of border was continued with the presentation made by May-Len Skilbrei, who has been researching the Norwegian-Russian border, and has a background in research on sex work. Dr Skilbrei reported that this Norwegian-Russian border has been in existence, in one form or another, for around 500 years; others noted that research on borders with such long histories will be quite useful to the Action for considering how the passage of time affects the sense of border. Dr Skilbrei focused on the experiences of people who lived near the border, and discussed a proposal made by the Norwegian side to create a frontier zone of about 30 km in width, which would allow Norwegians into Russia and Russians into Norway within this zone. People living within the zone would be issued with special passes so that they could travel across the border.
Dr Skilbrei outlined how this proposal led to a series of concerns in the Norwegian media about the entities that might ‘leak’ into Norway as a result of this frontier zone: rabid dogs, king crabs, organized crime and a variety of what were described as ‘moral threats.’ The local media expressed a fear that even if what crossed the border was not illegal, it might somehow generate an ‘immoral’ environment in Norway. Several participants noted that this type of fear is quite common around borders that become much more open than they had been: closed borders tend to generate a sense of a strong or stark difference between one side and the other, with the result that when borders are opened again, there is a fear of too much ‘mixing up’ of the differences between the two sides. Other participants noted the visceral tone in which these fears are expressed – a fear of a physical, bodily intermingling that might result from the loosening of borders, which seems to tap into a much wider and historically deep rhetoric of the fear of miscegenation. A note was made that the historical development of concepts of miscegenation within Europe should be investigated.
Given that the conversation had turned to the physical characteristics of borders, one participant asked Dr Skilbrei to what degree there had been a physical link across this border in the past: had there been a good road, for example? Dr Skilbrei responded that the infrastructure had always been limited, and that a big motivation for Norway in this venture was to promote an increased population in northern Norway, by making the towns across the border in Russia, that were more populated, more accessible. In other words, the aim in loosening the restrictions in the crossing of the border for people living nearby was in fact to increase the population living in northern Norway: fostering closer relations between Norway and Russia was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
The character of relations between neighbouring states was followed up in Elena Nikiforova’s presentation, which considered the shifting relations between Russia and Estonia. This provided an interesting comparison with the previous presentation in historical and contemporary terms. The border between Norway and Russia historically marked a Cold War border, and in contemporary terms, neither Norway nor Russia had joined the EU, even though Norway has become a Schengen country, which obviously has significant implications in terms of borders. In contrast, the Russian-Estonian border, as a state border, is a relatively new one: in the past, both Russia and Estonia were part of the Soviet Union, but now, Estonia is a member of the EU, and Russia is explicitly outside the EU zone. In short, quite different political changes have occurred in these two parts of Russia’s European border.
Elena Nikiforova has carried out research on the Russian-Estonian borderlands since 1995, on both sides of the border. In this presentation, she discussed her research on non-Estonians (Russian-speakers) living in Estonia. In the past, many of these people were denied citizenship in Estonia. Dr Nikiforova discussed the issue of the circumstances under which these people make decisions about whether to apply for Russian citizenship – given the worsening economic situation in Estonia, and the fact that Russia often, and unpredictably, varies its visa regulations, making it difficult for people to rely on the ability to travel to Russia for work. The alternative option for these Russian-speaking residents was to press for Estonian citizenship, which would give them easy access to the states within the European Union, instead of access to their neighbouring Russia.
Several participants noted similar experiences of regular and unpredictable changes in visa requirements as a technique used by a number of governments to maintain certain forms of control over borders. This apparently common practice of introducing unpredictability about the paperwork required in order to legally cross a border is an additional ‘border-making’ practice. Dr Skilbrei’s presentation also introduced the point that the actual borders people are trying to get the paperwork to cross are often not the ones actually bordering the country in which people are located, but the ones giving access to somewhere, or something, much wider and more distant. This is not only in terms of how far people can reach with a particular visa or passport, but what that ability to pass, to be allowed access, means in economic, social, and personal terms. For Russian-speaking people in Estonia, the question of whether or not to apply for Russian or Estonian citizenship involved a mixture of all of these factors, ranging from the purely practical and pragmatic to the deeply personal and social.
The question of which citizenship people choose emerged again in Ljupco Risteski’s presentation concerning the efforts of some Macedonians to gain Bulgarian citizenship in order to have access to the EU. This example, amongst others, demonstrated the importance of having participants in this Action who are not from current EU-states, and of including studies of regions – such as the Khyrghyz example offered by Madeleine Reeves – that are not immediately of concern to the EU. Dr Risteski also noted, as had Stef Jansen, that many people were sorry that the former Yugoslav passport no longer existed, for that passport allowed access, without visas, to more parts of the world than almost any other passport that had ever existed. In that light, attempts by Macedonians to gain Bulgarian citizenship (and therefore access to the EU) could be seen as a way to partially recover that former ability to travel widely. Dr Risteski noted that currently, it is extremely difficult for people with Macedonian passports to travel anywhere, and it requires a considerable amount of effort and expense in order to obtain the right paperwork. In this context, it was, for some Macedonians, seen as quite convenient that Bulgaria does not recognize Macedonian ethnicity; this makes it possible for many Macedonians to claim Bulgarian citizenship, and therefore to have the possibility of claiming an EU passport.
One participant asked Dr Risteski if he knew how many ‘real’ Bulgarians there were in Macedonia. Dr Risteski responded that there was no final answer to that question, and that in the end, it was a bureaucratic issue: it depended how ‘Bulgarian’ was defined. This again returned to the issue first raised by Madeleine Reeves, concerning the complexity of how the boundaries between entities (places or people) are created and maintained: establishing what counts as a ‘real’ Bulgarian must depend on how that is defined, both officially and unofficially. This leaves open the possibility of having several different definitions existing simultaneously.
Dr Margarita Karamihova, an MC member for Bulgaria, who was attending the meeting as a discussant and who was familiar with this issue from the Bulgarian side, noted that there was a concerted effort on the part of both the Bulgarian and Macedonian governments to keep the debate ‘unheated’ – that is, to avoid reopening historical disagreements about what counts as ‘Bulgarian’ and what does not, while still attempting to resolve the issue of some Macedonians claiming Bulgarian citizenship. Another participant asked whether Macedonians would lose their Macedonian citizenship if they took Bulgarian citizenship, and Dr Risteski reported that no, Macedonia permits dual citizenship. Whether countries allow dual citizenship or not raised another issue of the inequalities referred to by Stef Jansen in the first presentation.
Dr Karamihova’s comments about the care with which the Bulgarian and Macedonian governments were handling this issue reminded several participants of the way historical traces are always important in how borders are experienced. That issue of traces, one that was also discussed in the WG1 meeting in Nicosia, was raised on several occasions during the WG4 meeting. On this occasion, the discussion about Dr Risteski’s research led some to reflect upon how, or whether, the outcome of the exchange of populations in the region in 1919 (between Greece and Bulgaria) and the 1920s (between Greece and Turkey) as the result of an earlier conflict might now be under reconstruction as a result of people’s strategic choices about which citizenship might suit them best.
Indeed, on several occasions during the meeting, the traces of the way travel, territory and bureaucratic procedures were differently organized during the Ottoman period, and the circumstances under which the Ottoman regime collapsed, came to the minds of several of the participants who specialised in the south-eastern part of the European periphery when contemporary issues involving the same region were being presented at the meeting. The traces (both material and symbolic) were often present in the accounts given of what is occurring in the everyday renegotiations of these borders. It was noted, for example, that while some Macedonians were considering claiming Bulgarian citizenship, none were claiming Greek citizenship; even though Greece is also in the EU and is also a neighbour of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the character of the relationship between the two countries made such claims much more complicated than in the case of relations between Bulgaria and Macedonia. In the border between the Greek region of Macedonia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a border whose name is still a matter of debate, the traces are clearly still being created, rather than being remembered.
Having looked at a series of specific examples of debates over diverse borders, both from the north-east and from the south-east of the European periphery, Carna Brkovic, a doctoral candidate working in Bosnia-Herzegovina, provided a summary review of the literature on the history of border documents (passports, visas, etc). Her approach was to consider, on the one hand, the history of the documents themselves, and the way different documentary regimes reflect changes in understandings of the categories and classifications of what, and who, is being documented; and, on the other hand, to look at the way places are actually created by these documentary regimes – including those contemporary panopticons, detention centres, and their expansion, and the places that are now just outside the EU area, those existing both in, and outside, the EU Neighbourhood. She also suggested using the documents as an ethnographic tool in her own research, as a means to follow how people were recorded, listed, classified and itemised as they travelled.
That pointed to another issue involving traces that came up several times during the meeting, which concerned the character of persons. Obviously, most travel and visa documents provide a form of identification – not only identifying a unique individual, but more importantly, identifying a range of categories by which that individual can be classified. [2] These categories establish where a person belongs, where she or he may travel, and what rights or obligations that person holds.
In that sense, identification documents provide a certain kind of trace of a person: this trace might be a biometric one (as discussed by Katja Aas – see below); or it might provide a copy of a person – in the form of an image; or it might be more of a simulacrum in Baudrillard’s terms (Baudrillard 1994), or some form of mimesis in Taussig’s terms (Taussig 1993); or then again, these documents could be regarded as producing additional persons – a way to multiply people’s existence in different forms. In any case, the idea of looking at identity documents during research in order to examine the relationship between the documentary regimes, the people to whom the documents refer and these people’s everyday experiences of dealing with these documents, was thought by the meeting to be an excellent one, that is likely to produce very promising results.
Participants drew out several points from this presentation that built on previous comments. The way Schengen had altered the documentary regimes of many borders, while also making significant distinctions between Schengen borders and other borders, was raised; another participant again mentioned the Ottoman regime, noting that the Ottomans also issued documents for travellers. This raised the question about who was issued with that document during the Ottoman period, what it contained and for what purpose. It was known that the Ottomans did not regard borders in the same way as state borders are regarded, and nor were people identified by the Ottomans in the same way passports identify individuals. So what the Ottoman travel document was documenting about the person, and what it was or was not allowing somebody to do was an interesting question. Some participants suspected that the document simply allowed the holder the right of passage, rather than identifying the individual. The meeting noted that this needed to be further researched, as these kinds of historical examples could highlight a great deal about the distinctive character of border documentation of the contemporary period.
Another participant raised the issue of different levels of suspicion involving documents: some documentary regimes reflect deep levels of institutional suspicion, and others less so, and this is something that changes rapidly and often. Another participant, whose research concerns Cyprus, noted that the study of the history of border documentation can give us a sense of the often strong moral charge associated with travel and border documents: having or not having a passport, being a certified member of something, has often been the subject of official manipulation. In addition, such official documents often take on all kinds of moral implications never predicted by the designers of the documentary technology.
Part II: Techniques
Having generated a good overview of diverse perspectives on the documentary aspects of borders, the next part of the meeting focused on research concerning what could be called border ‘techniques.’ Techniques cannot be entirely separated from documents and technologies, as both are often involved; but the focus in this part of the meeting was more on what could be called bordering practices – methods used to achieve certain effects, whether intentionally or otherwise. The researchers speaking in this section of the meeting considered formal, informal, official and unofficial, legal and illegal techniques used around borders; they also considered the question of how borders take on different appearances and characteristics depending on the techniques used and the people involved.
Eleni Sideri, who gave a presentation about the life stories of Greek-speaking diasporic communities (in this case from Georgia), looked at the complex process of authenticating and legalizing identities, and brought in the issues of both waiting and rumour in the way that people on the one hand experience the process of trying to get the right paperwork, and on the other hand try to get some kind of handle over what they need to do. One participant noted that locating accurate information about what an applicant needs to doin order to obtain the right status is often deliberately kept officially vague. Here, the question of how vague or explicit the procedures are made, was raised for the first of several occasions during the meeting. That tapped into questions about techniques of visibility and non-visibility, methods by which places, people and things are rendered visible at some times and invisible at others. This is different, another participant noted, from the issue of transparency: visible things can be seen; transparent things can be seen through. The whole language of ‘transparency’ concerning official documents, as a means to provide accountability, was not explored in depth during the meeting, but it was noted that this was likely to be raised again as an issue over the course of the Action.
Another participant picked up on Dr Sideri’s implication that this strange mixture of waiting, reliance on rumours to deal with complicated and obscure official processes, and so on, in effect fragments people’s understanding and experience of border. This participant suggested that nevertheless, something coherent about border must remain. She argued that in the end, people either cross or they do not cross; they pass or they do not pass, and for that there must remain a coherent, ‘unfragmented’ border. This returned to the issue that was first raised with Dr Reeves’ presentation: the rather strange situation where much of what constitutes a border is rather obscure, blending both formal and informal, clear and unclear, characteristics, while in another sense, borders are also frequently strongly concrete lines that either can or cannot be crossed.
One participant speculated about the relationship between rumour and information in these contexts, and another noted that there is a flexibility of time around borders that should be attended to; this participant also noted that Dr Sideri’s presentation raised the way that the borders of the state can at times become as complicated to locate as the borders of the nation – even though most research has focused on the way nations often do not neatly overlap with the boundaries of the state.
Having raised the question of the techniques used around borders that involve large amounts of apparently pointless waiting and people’s attempts to use whatever information is to hand to deal with often puzzling and obscure bureaucratic processes, Eftihia Voutira gave a presentation about the history and technologies of asylum seeking in Europe. She began with a note that applications for asylum in Europe peaked in the early 1990s (coinciding with the conflicts involving former Yugoslavia), and have been declining, more or less, ever since. She then turned her attention to the experiences of particular people, examining the details of a few successful and unsuccessful asylum seekers, and demonstrating the points initially raised by Dr Sideri in the previous presentation: that the process of application is complex, full of possibilities of official discretion, misunderstanding, and moral judgements. In addition, the ethnographic detail provided by Dr Voutira gave considerable insight into the way residents of a country often go completely against stereotypical expectations and ‘adopt’ people who are usually strongly rejected as ‘different’ or ‘other.’ This was a timely reminder that generalisations about what borders ‘mean’ need to be treated with considerable caution. The small, apparently insignificant acts of care and mutual regard offered by residents towards strangers – strangers who have, for whatever reasons, ended up being asylum seekers – are an important part of understanding the current process of remaking borders in Europe. In addition, this presentation demonstrated the densely complex series of techniques that have been developed aimed at proving a “well-founded fear of persecution” for asylum seekers. Dr Voutira’s ethnographic data demonstrated the frequently surreal world in which asylum seekers find themselves, and the way they have to double and triple-guess what might ‘work’ in convincing the authorities of a valid case. Once again, the sense that many of these decisions are inflected with deeply moral judgements of the people involved was noted during the meeting.
One participant also noted that during the period studied by Dr Voutira, there has been a considerable change in the architecture of refugee detention centres, reflecting wider changes in how borders are being managed. This was one of several occasions when the question of architecture as a border technique came up in the discussions.
The theme of architecture shifted to themes of vision in Basia Nikiforova’s presentation about differences between the Polish-Lithuanian and Lithuanian-Belorussian borders. Professor Nikiforova began her presentation by saying that “to live is to leave traces,” thus evoking the visual, as well as the historical, meaning of the term. She demonstrated a number of images of border from the region she researches, arguing that in some senses all ‘bordering techniques’ are about visualisation. Professor Nikiforova also discussed the Schengen countries, and the way that the Schengen agreement had rendered many borders virtually invisible (e.g. the Polish-Lithuanian border), whereas others became ever more starkly visible (e.g. the Lithuanian-Belorussian border). Her research had shown that anyone from Belorussia who wanted to enter a Schengen country had to be prepared to lose their time, money and dignity in order to achieve it. In this respect, the difference between the Lithuanian-Polish border (both in the EU) and the Lithanian-Belorussian border (only one side in the EU) was stark: the former felt like a bridge and an ‘opportunity,’ whereas the latter felt a bit more like a wall, a fence, a barrier.
This presentation raised two major issues: the first concerned how different people experienced these borders: was it the case that all people felt that one border was a ‘wall’ and the other was a ‘bridge’? Professor Nikiforova agreed that there were generational differences: for young people who did not remember earlier close ties between Lithuania and Belorussia, the border was relatively irrelevant and did not feel like a wall at all. There were several occasions during the meeting when it was pointed out that what a border ‘felt like’ to people very much depended on who those people were, as well as the documentation they were able to acquire. In a different form, this returned to the issue of citizenship raised by Stef Jansen: borders take on very different characteristics depending on who is confronting them, what rights or obligations they have with respect to the border, and whether they have a central interest in actually getting to the other side.
The second issue that was raised from this presentation was the fact that many people around the Lithuanian-Belorussian border were fairly intensely involved in clandestine trade involving alcohol and money across that border – as is the case across every border where differences in tax rates and charges for currency conversion between one side and the other are high.
This introduced the issue of trade and the movement of things across borders, which taken up in the next presentation by Jan Grill. Mr Grill, a doctoral candidate who is working on the movement of Roma peoples between Slovakia, Hungary and the UK, considered how legal and political changes affected the way that Roma both attempted to travel and the networks through which they carried out various forms of trade. Before Slovakia joined the EU, some Roma sought asylum in the UK, and often went through lengthy processes before, most often, the application failed and the asylum seeker was deported. Some of the experiences of asylum seekers described by Dr Sideri and Dr Voutira were also echoed in Mr Grill’s research description. When Slovakia joined the EU, many of the Roma of Slovakia (about half, Mr Grill suggested) left Slovakia again and went to the places to which they had earlier travelled as asylum seekers. The presentation made no comment about the reasons that people had sought asylum nor why they sought to leave Slovakia again at a later date; the focus was upon the techniques used and how these changed according to the legal and political contexts in which people found themselves. Mr Grill noted in passing that during the earlier period of asylum seeking, few people in the UK recognised these Slovakians as Roma, but over time, they increasingly became more visible to the UK population. The issue of the visibility or invisibility of certain differences – which in themselves mark borders – thus came up again in the conversation.
Having heard the earlier discussion on fake and authentic documents, Mr Grill noted that in his research, fake documents were sometimes used as a means to obtain genuine documents, and also that it was possible to illegitimately purchase genuine documents. The permutations involving documents’ authenticity are clearly multiple.
Mr Grill also discussed research he has been carrying out on the smuggling of cigarettes, and described the complex procedures used, which sometimes involved the cigarette smuggler using the travel documents of people who were deceased (thus not only the cigarettes, but the person carrying them, was being smuggled across borders). The cigarettes were most often traded invisibly through networks of acquaintances; potential buyers learned which shops kept these cigarettes out of view under the counter. Here, in addition to the question of visibility and invisibility emerging yet again, the question of how intimacy and trust across borders is generated arose: how do people who are separated by spatial, legal, economic and often social and cultural differences generated enough mutual trust to engage in this kind of cigarette smuggling trade? The question of the ‘intimacy of strangers’ was noted as an important one to keep in mind through this Action.
The discussion circulated again around how people generate copies or images of themselves through a variety of techniques developed to cope with the legal conditions required to cross borders. One participant wondered how this Action would deal with the reporting of such techniques: do we owe a duty of care to our informants not to report on techniques that might result in official techniques being adjusted in light of learning about how these unofficial techniques work? The question again reinforced the earlier discussion that suggested the techniques used to generate and maintain borders are always both official and unofficial. This discussion highlighted the fact that the official techniques are as much informed and shaped by the unofficial ones as the other way around. For that reason, for researchers to describe some of the unofficial techniques openly would mean direct involvement in the shaping of bordering techniques, both official and unofficial. This also demonstrated how the material, physical characteristics of borders are as much shaped by texts, knowledge and technique as the other way around.
The question of the way imagination and knowledge helps to shape borders was continued in the next presentation. Given that the question of visibility and invisibility had been raised repeatedly in this meeting, the discussion turned to a consideration of artistic techniques in representing borders, through the discussion provided by Vanja Čelebičič, a doctoral candidate working on the Croatian-Bosnian border on issues of time, space and hope in cross-generational perspective. Ms Čelebičič discussed her intention to use photography and film as a method in her research, as a means to allow people to visualize their pasts and imagined futures. She went on to discuss the way in which borders have been represented through cinema, noting also that Balkan cinema had changed quite dramatically with the shifting of the borders after the break-up of former Yugoslavia – i.e. Balkan cinema did not only change how it represented borders, but the change in borders had also altered the way cinema represented borders. Ms Čelebičič provided some examples of films that had focused on border issues (e.g. the work of Agelopoulos) and moved on to look at the way symbolic borders (e.g. East/West) had been represented in films.
The discussion focused on the range of different artistic techniques used to both generate the sense of border and to challenge official representations of borders. Ms Čelebičič was given the names of a series of other films and art works she might consider. The distinction between what counted as ‘art’ and the more everyday ways in which people can make ironic or otherwise challenging commentaries on official border structures was also discussed. The meeting noted that this question of multiple representations of borders would need further attention during the Action.
Part III. Technologies
By the time we reached this final part of the meeting, the participants were entirely comfortable with the highly discussion-focused structure of the meeting, and were actively engaging in the debate about the topics raised. This third section, although it was nominally focusing on technologies, brought together many of the issues discussed during the rest of the day. In any event, border technologies also often involve documents and techniques, in addition to involving technical mechanisms and structures.
Larissa Vetters began this section through a presentation on the administrative reforms being made in the town of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the post-conflict period. This could be called border-making in the context of state-building, through the use of a whole panoply of (formal, semi-formal and informal) techniques aimed at enumerating and categorising people. Once again, then, the question of how persons are generated in the course of generating borders came up in the discussion. The presentation considered this issue from two perspectives:
First, from the perspective of state policies for officially defining or classifying persons and the difficulties which arise when the location of the border and whom to count as what is not entirely clear. The holding of a regular census is a key part of most countries’ administrative procedures for identifying and knowing about its population and it is seen by the international community in BiH as a necessary step in the externally prescribed (EU-member)-state-building process. But how does a place like Bosnia carry out a census when it is not entirely clear where, and which population, is to be measured and census categories contain the potential for future conflict?
Secondly, Larissa Vetters focused on looking at how local street level bureaucrats nevertheless produced the necessary documentation for people to exist as legitimate persons, a relatively difficult task when the state itself is unclear in terms of the conditions of its legitimacy. Given the degree of discretion that local officials had in making decisions and given their embeddedness in specifically structured webs of social relations, local notions of who is a legitimate member of the community might become a decisive factor in their official transactions. Larissa Vetters consequently proposed to look at the way people managed to get registered in Mostar or failed to do so, focusing particularly on the so called local community offices (mjesne zajednice) and the offices of Births, Marriages and Deaths.
The discussion focused around the complexities and diverse styles of bureaucratic systems, and how the case of Bosnia was an interesting one because of the degree of involvement of international actors (the OHR, the EU and (N)GOs of various types) in defining and structuring the new procedures and systems to be used in this new state. One participant, citing the work of Judith Butler, suggested that some bureaucratic systems appeared to be designed to generate ‘petty sovereigns’ - local level officials who had inordinate amounts of power because of the level of discretion they had in making decisions and either allowing, or disallowing, an applicant to obtain the status or paperwork that they required.
The question of international and transnational involvement in the making and remaking of borders came up again in Renata Jambrešić-Kirin’s presentation, which looked at inequalities across borders generated by the policies of commercial companies in their trade across the world. Dr Jambrešić-Kirin noted that access to books is, if anything, more unequal than ever in the world of Internet access. Living in Croatia, she often has to pay 30% more for books than people in western European countries, and that is if the company is willing to sell it to her at all. In addition, access to online journals is extremely limited, due to the lack of funds in universities to provide such services. The way that Amazon defines countries (e.g. Croatia is ‘Eastern Europe and Rest of World’) has an enormous effect on the intellectual relationship between different parts of Europe. It appeared that “the West Produces, the East Receives” (at a cost, and usually late), which renders the eastern periphery of Europe as Europe’s ‘consititutive outside’. In addition, the type of economic development occurring in Croatia – what could be called “cowboy entrepreneurship” – was adding to the generation of a new kind of differentiation between parts of Europe – new kinds of borders, that could even be defined as creating a new subaltern group in Europe.
This presentation led to a debate about differences across academic disciplines in this hierarchy: the disciplines that relied less on language than the humanities and social sciences appeared to be having an easier experience of communication across borders than the ones for whom language and access to texts was crucial. The unequal hierarchy of languages in this context was also raised: the Internet might be globally available, but the vast majority of the content is in English, and all the software that runs the Internet is in (American) English.
The presentation also drew attention to the importance of commerce and company policies in the making and defining of borders. This came up in a small way earlier in the discussion of trade and smuggling, but this discussion drew out how multinational companies’ commercial policies towards different parts of the world can have profound effects on peoples’ access to intellectual, cultural, social and economic resources. Most social science studies of borders have tended to focus on the state and political authorities. An equal amount of attention needs to be paid to commercial enterprises.
Another participant noted that Dr Jambrešić-Kirin’s presentation highlighted, once again, that the ideology that the Internet is somehow a kind of borderless space is clearly nonsense. Another participant noted that these beliefs about the Internet being a space without borders echoed western European beliefs in earlier centuries that suggested the lands in the New World (the Americas) that were being discovered constituted ‘empty land,’ without borders and with nobody (who mattered) living there. A note was made that the language of borders concerning the Internet needed to be kept in mind as the Action proceeded.
This discussion of the involvement of new technologies in the making and management of borders was developed further in the presentation given by Katja Franko Aas on the development, at the European level, of new biometric techniques to track and manage the movement of populations across borders. Dr Aas, who is a criminologist and specialist on science and technology studies, has been researching the European policy ideal of creating an area of ‘freedom, security and justice’ –several participants noted that this kind of language is both increasingly common in discussions about border controls, and is also increasingly vague in what it means, precisely. Dr Aas particularly focused on what is known as Integrated Border Management (IBM), which is not a reality, but an ideal vision of what the agencies charged with controlling borders would like to happen. The IBM is based on a four-tier border control mechanism that would integrate the control and management of the entirety of the EU’s borders, and that would thoroughly incorporate new biometric systems into this structure – on the assumption that whatever one might be able to do about faking documents, “the body never lies.” Dr Aas noted that in the past, border control and security was a poor second cousin to many other integration structures in the EU, but that now, it has reached the top of the priority list, and has been given immense quantities of funding to try and make the IBM a reality.
Dr Aas noted that this ideal was unlikely ever to become a full reality (there were some who believed in the possibility of achieving a ‘Surveillance Utopia’), but it was interesting enough to see that agencies charged with designing border control nevertheless pursued this ideal, despite being aware that the assumptions upon which it was based (both technical and political) were highly questionable. Dr Aas reported that the aim was to develop a system that was independent of local actors (i.e. to remove the ‘petty sovereigns’ discussed earlier). She noted that new technologies were particularly attractive in this new policy area, and these technologies focused on identifying individuals through biometric means, so that the link between the documentation about them and the person in person, as it were, was an entirely physical one. The implications of this, given the earlier discussion on how various documents can produce a variety of different types of copies of persons, was very intriguing to the rest of the participants: if the link between the documentation and the person is increasingly becoming bodily, then does this fundamentally change the relationship between persons and their border documentation? Some of those working on illicit and informal techniques of border crossing did not think so: the relevance of the biometric data would still be held within the textual description of what those data meant. In order to ‘read’ the data, there had to be information about its meaning, and so the process of making copies of persons in the documentation, copies that were supposed to stand for the ‘real thing,’ but which is never quite adequate to the task, would continue. Nevertheless, the implications of moving to a more biometric system rather than a purely textual one was something that the Action clearly had to pay close attention to in the future. Many participants were particularly surprised by the data that Dr Aas presented about quite how far the EU has already moved in this direction.
A final implication that Dr Aas raised is that with these technologies, borders are everywhere: if the ideal aims of the surveillance organizations came true, people would in future carry their official status with them on and in their bodies wherever they went. Another participant noted that this had been the case for many decades for certain categories of people – and researchers on undocumented migration particularly noted how the borders followed illegal migrants wherever they went in a country. However, the implications of this new biometric system appeared to be based on a much higher level of suspicion about people wishing to cross borders than had previously been the case. Someone mentioned that attitudes had moved towards the assumption that people attempting to cross the border were more likely than not to be criminals (and someone mentioned in jest that perhaps the word ‘immigration’ should be replaced with ‘crimigration’): the information system intended to protect the Schengen area was overwhelmingly focused on foreign nationals who should be denied entry. This returned to the issue discussed earlier in the day, that levels of suspicion have a very important part to play in the kinds of technologies used to create, maintain and control borders. While it was clear what kinds of events had led to the rise in official levels of suspicion (e.g. the response to the September 11th 2001 events), the meeting noted that such events in themselves might not be sufficient to explain different policies, attitudes and levels of suspicion, and that more attention needs to be paid to this area in the Action.
The question of the way changes in the technologies used to manage people who cross borders was taken up by the next presentation, given by Sevasti Trubeta, who has a background in researching ideologies of humanitarianism. In this presentation, Dr Trubeta focused on the steep rise in the use of detention centres around European borders, and the effects that this has had. Borders, Dr Trubeta suggested, are no longer lines (if they ever were), but filtering systems in which certain people are filtered out and placed in detention centres, where they are neither foreign nor domestic citizens, but non-citizens. This returned to the issue raised earlier in the day about the somewhat surreal conditions under which asylum seekers and others without the appropriate paperwork found themselves. Dr Trubeta considered (using the work of Hannah Arendt) the “calamity of the rightless,” looking into the way human rights turned out, in practice, to be a matter of negotiation of the various different human rights agencies in relation with the official policies towards these people.
The discussion again focused around questions of how persons are defined in such contexts: one participant suggested that human rights belong only to people who are defined as human - those whose status is not yet established are in an ambiguous position in relation to that. Another participant noted that this matter had been discussed at some length by Liisa Malkki in dealing with the refugee camps set up in Tanzania after the conflicts between Tutsi and Hutu in the early 1990s (Malkki 1992; Malkki 1995). Another participant suggested that care should be taken not to focus too much on the exceptional circumstances of refugee camps, detention centres, concentration camps (a reference to Agamben’s work on the ‘bare life’ and state of exception), for borders were generated as much, if not more, by the way they define and control majority populations, and not simply the exceptions. Once again, the way questions of morality become entangled with the handling of borders was discussed.
The final presentation of the day, given by Anna Agathangelou, took up the theme of morality quite forcefully. It was based on research carried out in Cyprus, which is one of the many places in the world with a border that is not internationally recognised as a border. Dr Agathangelou’s interest was to focus, on the one hand, on the political implications and motivations of those who create and maintain borders (which she described as being inevitably a form of colonisation); and on the other hand, what happens in people’s everyday lives around borderlands – the way people actually live the borders that are thus created. She focused for a time on the frequent creation of enclaves – places that somehow slip out of official control and definition, and become something a little different. She argued that such enclaves change over time, and depend upon shifting conditions. In that sense, she suggested that enclaves are ‘lived borders’ – the process of border-making that is both involved with official borders but also transgressive of them. [3]
The discussion here, apart from continuing the debate on the degree to which ‘enclaves’ and ‘borderlands’ should be focused upon in trying to understand borders, turned to the question of agency, which had not come up directly during the rest of the day. Dr Agathangelou’s presentation was squarely about the exercise of power and the ability or inability to resist or transform such power, so the participants engaged with that question. The issue of whether ‘frontier zones’ permit a certain amount of flexibility, an experimental space in which ‘entrepreneurial subjects’ might be able to transform officially intended outcomes of policies was discussed, as was the question of whether the location of the physical borders is the most significant in bringing together differences that can be challenged, or whether that could happen anywhere. Issues of shifts in how power is exercised, particularly what is popularly known as a shift from government to (neoliberal) governance were raised.
Conclusion
This first meeting of WG4 identified a host of issues that need to be followed up and pursued during the rest of the Action. The bringing together of specialists working in the north-east and those working in the south-east was particularly effective in drawing out similarities and differences across the eastern periphery of Europe. The quantity and quality of material available through the research being carried out by colleagues provides a real opportunity to begin to piece together the process through which these borders are being transformed – and perhaps the location and meaning of Europe with it. Combined with the work of the other three WGs and the four themed WS groups, it seems highly likely that very significant results will emerge from this Action. The informed hunch that four key issues would turn out to be crucial in this project were borne out: a focus on the everyday, rather than the more headline-grabbing problems and events is important; a focus on borders themselves, as a means to draw together the diverse data and disciplinary approaches being brought to the table within this project, as well as a means by which to shift the intellectual focus of the way borders have been studied in the past; a focus on issues relating to gender and sexuality, which has turned out to be a very important area of debate about the changes occurring in the region; and finally, a focus on the material aspects of borders, not only in monetary and economic terms, but also in terms of structures and architecture. Within this, this working group, in focusing on documents, techniques and technologies, promises to make a particular contribution to the complex interface between changes in official practices, techniques and regulations, changes in unofficial practices, and shifts in what the constant process of making and unmaking borders through these techniques implies for people’s lives and sense of location – both the lives of those who cross the borders, and the lives of those who do not or cannot cross. If there is one thing that emerged clearly from this meeting, it is that the documents, techniques and technologies used around borders are the outcome of a constant negotiation between diverse interests, both official and unofficial. In that sense, the borders that currently exist mark no more, and no less, than where the negotiation has reached so far.
Sarah Green, WG4 Convenor, June 2009
References
Alvarez, R.R. 1995. The Mexican-US Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 447-470.
Anzaldúa, G. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: the new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Caplan, J. 2001. "This or that particular person": Protocols of Identification in Nineteenth-Century Europe. In Documenting individual identity: the development of state practices in the modern world (ed.) J.C. Torpey. Princeton, N.J.; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 49-66.
Malkki, L. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7: 1, 24-44.
Malkki, L.H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Taussig, M.T. 1993. Mimesis and alterity: a particular history of the senses. New York: Routlege.