Collapse upon the border
Shiv Gill

 

Summer in Fortress Europe

Europe was hotter than I knew it could be this past summer. Traversing its scorched contours from the west of France to the eastern borders of Poland, the dried out rivers, the parched, dusty earth and a burnt, brown edge to the landscape reminded me of driving down the Hume Highway in Decembers past. As with so many moments back in so-called Australia, it was hard to not feel the sharpness of environmental devastation.

In western France, I had attended the Transborder Summer Camp^[1] on the formerly occupied (but now legalised) site, Le Zad.^[2] In a week of 40 degree days, we had set up camp in paddocks unprotected from the sun, huddling in the bare bits of shade we could find under trees and circus marquees that had been erected to host hundreds of people from across Europe and Africa (and a couple of other places too). The heat was overwhelming, but we made it work together: cooking meals, doing dishes, picking up garbage, emptying shit pits, translating, playing music, dancing and much more. And, of course, we listened and spoke across an astonishing array of workshops and panels covering all aspects of border politics.

From there: directly to the other end of the EU, endless hours along motorways before turning down unsealed dirt roads into the villages of rural Poland, to be confronted by a wall erected along the border with Belarus. Stark and imposing in that sparse landscape, its silver razor-wire cuts through paddock, forest and marsh, attempting to sever one of the access routes into Europe used by people on the move from Africa and the Middle East, not to mention creating a physical block upon the migratory patterns of many animals. Out there anti-fascist and No Border activists have a few small bases, doing their best to live collectively while engaging in the difficult, direct solidarity of assisting people who are crossing, hiding and moving towards safer parts of the continent.

The wall is a reminder that while climate catastrophe foreshadows collapse, it is at border zones where dystopian scenes are produced with the most immediate presence. Poland has militarised the area around the border, creating a ‘red zone’ that is inaccessible to the public. The border force uses checkpoints, drones and helicopters in attempting to find and ‘pushback’ migrants who’ve scaled the wall, trying to cross the treacherous ancient forest, its protected status and swampy wilderness, the conditions which simultaneously create the possibility and the cold, deadly difficulty of passing through.^[3]

Here, the wall is a physical manifestation of another sense of collapse that is related to border regimes—the ideologically racist, phantasmagoric vision of the sanctity of white European society overrun by the teeming non-white hordes on the outside. This paranoia doesn’t only exist on the far-right edges, but has become increasingly normalised and makes brown and black people the target of institutional and vigilante racist violence both within and at the border. This can be seen on the waters of the Mediterranean,^[4] at the port of Calais,^[5] on the famed Greek islands^[6] and many other places. The overt racism behind this paranoia not only makes itself known at these sites of violence, but also in the warm welcome white Ukranian people fleeing the war received across Europe this past year.

A dystopia of walls

Other well-known walls replicate this dystopia of borders within a settler-colonial context: one at the US-Mexico border, as well as the ‘apartheid’ wall built by the state of Israel in the West Bank. Both these walls were established on the grounds of similar racist paranoia, while also being a further imposition of the coloniser state’s dominance over Indigenous land and the way it is able to be re-organised, removed or simply divided at the coloniser’s behest.

In the case of the ‘apartheid’ wall, it further displaces Palestinians from their homes while enforcing racial hierarchies that specifically target their ability to move within the land. Sari Hanafi has described how this “wall is destroying the landscape and Palestinian human life and makes any political solution… impossible. It is not only a physical barrier but a psychological, functional, sociocultural, and geopolitical one.”^[7] As a barrier that takes all these forms, it exemplifies an insular security that settler societies require to offset the persistent sense of illegitimacy that ongoing occupation fosters—one where the alleged sovereign ‘right’ of the settler state is affirmed through a paranoid gaze that constantly seeks out that which it considers to be threatening.

In his book Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe describes the work of colonisation as enforcing a permanent physical and psychological separation between settlers and the perceived dangers beyond, one that creates a paranoid existence where “settlers lived in fear of being surrounded on all sides by ‘bad objects’ that threatened their very survival and were ever liable to take away their existence: natives, wild beasts, reptiles, microbes, mosquitoes, nature, the climate, illnesses, even sorcerers.”^[8] Within settler-colonial society, the almost unconditional acceptance of borders cannot be separated from these fears. While no such physical wall exists to maintain such nationalist paranoias in so-called Australia, the imagined ’emptiness’ of the vast interior related to the founding fantasy of terra nullius, as well as the seas surrounding the continent that keep the ‘swarms’ to the north at bay both serve a similar myth-making purpose connected to the imagined fragility of settler society.

Of course, the reverse is true and it is the colonising state of Australia that has built itself upon its attempts to destroy or assimilate all facets of Aboriginal life. As Ghassan Hage has written, “it is actually the case that a feeling of being besieged by the very people whom one is actually colonising is, paradoxically, part and parcel of the history of European colonialism.”^[9] From this feeling of being besieged, the Australian state has composed dystopian scene upon dystopian scene. Naval ships sent to stop boats of asylum seekers in the waters to the north. People locked up for years in the detention centre at Woomera. This detention centre itself built in the South Australian desert on land used by the ADF, only a few hundred kilometres east from Maralinga where the testing of nuclear weapons rendered the dispossession of Indigenous land an act that would be carried into the distant future. And the detention centre on Nauru—an island nation already plundered and left bereft by colonial, capitalist extractivism through decades of phosphate mining that ruined the ecology, leaving a sparse, un-vegetated terrain, now a prison for migrants.^[10]

On the borders of now and then

Geographical distance was not the only spatial terrain that I found myself grappling with as I made my way across Europe. Prompted by those experiences at sites of border resistance, my thoughts drifted back across the temporal landscape of twenty years of involvement in anti-border struggles in so-called Australia. Twenty seems a nice, round number—a simple timeframe where we went from then to now. Yet, looking back on that time — beginning with memories of those desert detention centres: the protest and breakout at Woomera^[11] and visiting detainees at Baxter—nothing seems obvious.

Measured against the conversations I was amongst in Europe, it is difficult to not feel that anti-border discourse and action in this country has regressed. That is, there was a period where solidarity seemed to include participating in breaking people out of detention, assisting them in hiding and getting by while living on the down-low, as well as using various means to help them leave to other countries with better asylum policies. There also seemed to be a stronger understanding of a no borders, ‘no one is illegal’ politic that countered the ubiquitous liberal, humanitarian narrative that ‘we’ (the presumed good white citizen) must welcome ‘them’ (the desperate, hopeless, non-white other holding no agency of their own). This narrative will always persist and, no matter how constantly it is framed as an obviously progressive ideal, it should not be understood as anything but part of a ‘debate’ that can only exist within the ideological shell of white, colonial possessive claims to this land.

At the Transborder Camp, migrants weren’t just asking for the ‘right’ to stay, they were asserting the freedom to go and come back—a true freedom of movement, tied to an understanding of long-standing historical patterns of circulatory migration, where being in one place does not require a totalising de-linking from connections to the places that people had come from. It seems almost impossible to countenance such a position arising in any meaningful way within anti-border struggles here.

To any degree that I claim a truth to that sense of regression, it too does not simply present as a straight line. A different flow is presented by the formation and continued existence of groups like RISE, an organisation of refugees and ex-detainees. Amongst many activities, they have helped build an understanding of how the control that borders enact materially, socially and psychologically occurs not only in detention centres or at the extremities of the nation, but at all levels within it.^[12] And so, in suggesting a ‘regression’, I am not intending to bluntly critique the anti-border struggles on this continent or those involved in them. It is more to note that there isn’t a linearity to the motion of struggle.

When momentum isn’t a straight line

There is no obviously identifiable scale for how the strength of a movement might impact the general conditions it exists within. In the context of so-called Australia, we saw resistance to detention centres arise especially from those detained inside, but also including liberal, humanitarian organisations and more militant anti-border activists. This then forced the state into policies that would ultimately erase some of the conditions for that movement to grow in the first place. Of course, the closure of the desert detention centres improved the situation for many detainees. However, as successive governments pivoted to off-shoring detention, moving detention centres to Christmas Island, Manus and Nauru, the connections that were built with those inside felt diffuse and far-away, unreachable except by a few NGO’s and journalists.

If movements aren’t building, are they degrading? Collapsing? But regression doesn’t sit quite right either because it also seems to fill a need to fix paths of linearity. Maybe none of our struggles follow the logic of forward and backwards? Within the fractured memories from so-called Australia that I reached for to give greater context to my time at the borders of Europe, any sense of linearity felt like a ruse. Instead, flows are multi-directional, sometimes taking impetus from the actions of detainees, occasionally from the doings of those of us on the outside, and too often from the reactionary moves of the State. Movements did not ‘progress’ and the passing of time was irregular with periods where all things seemed condensed and others where everything felt drawn out.

Notions of collapse within the radical imagination are generally aligned with a sense of the progress of linear time. In the main, collapse tends to be considered an event that we are moving towards in the future, even if its exact moment is ambiguous, and so functions as an attempt to spur urgent action. An alternate version might see it as correlating with an idea of a rupture in normative social conditions that creates new possibilities to re-make the world. In either instance, our actions are to be guided by timelines of apocalyptic futurity, usually related to climate change in the current context.

Indigenous and colonised peoples have regularly been intervening to interrupt this idea of collapse related to climate change that projects it forward, emphasising that “for many, the bleakness is not something of ‘the future.’”^[13] Ngarabul and Wirrayaraay Murri activist Philip Marrii Winzer has written that for “Aboriginal people, climate change is merely the latest chapter in a long history of dispossession and destruction of our lands, waters and bodies. It’s not just our future; it’s our past and present.”^[14] Manifestations of collapse are ongoing, forcing people to move, replicated in scenes at the militarised borders that people try to cross and also guiding the ideological basis for the maintenance of border regimes.

Whether the various, ongoing states of collapse we reside in exist as a moment of devastation or a rupture full of radical potential, it is a disservice to our lives and the struggles we partake in to simply align them to a timeline that moves step-by-step in a singular direction. Most of us have already experienced, and will experience many times more, that things do not flow in such a way. Understanding this doesn’t require evacuating the possibility of future(s) from our lives. However, it does require excoriating a sense of hope that is affixed to the kind of political program that seeks to ‘resolve’ the unknown of the future like an equation—that so long as certain actions are taken and conditions met, liberation will occur. Instead, we could follow the lead of Lola Olufemi who proposes the ‘Otherwise,’ a suggestion of what might exist, not as a certain claim that “the political horizon awaits,” but instead as “a firm embrace of the unknowable; the unknowable as in, a well of infinity.”^[15] This unknowable might be slippery and intangible, an uncomfortable void, but it urges us to act with love and solidarity now, building our capacity in light of endless, open, and sometimes scary, possibilities.

Terra incognita^[16]

Does disinvesting from hope and its future trajectory simply empty our current struggles of resonance and depth? There is no reason that resistance to the material conditions and pervasive logic(s) of capitalism, colonialism, and borders should be rendered absent of meaning simply because it is not tied to a projected future that promises hopeful outcomes. It is just as possible to invert this suggestion and argue that politics that finds its meaning woven into a future vision is inherently abstracted and based on suppositions that end up restraining our rebellious energy in case it overflows too abruptly, in advance of the ‘correct’ moment.^[17]

At the same time, less hopeful visions—specifically the sense that climate-change related environmental collapse is imminent, if not already here—as an invocation to urgent action can also lead to a restriction on the possibility of liberatory struggles. In such instances, the desperate nature of the situation appears to require us to submit to the power of the State, to legitimise it in all its assumed coercive, legislative authority. The repressive outcomes of allowing the State to provide its authoritarian solutions to the perceived danger of societal and ecological collapse can be seen at the borders of Europe, so-called Australia and elsewhere.

The significance of the intervention that Indigenous and colonised peoples have made within the climate change movement is to correct the ahistorical idea that places environmental and societal devastation as a looming presence instead of being an ongoing product of a colonised past and present. One outcome of recognising this is to undermine the turn to the coloniser State to ‘fix’ the problem. In his critique of ‘toxic hope’ within the climate change movement, Phillip Marii Winzer compares such a relation to the State as “waiting for an abuser to change their behaviours when they’ve given us every reason to believe they never will.”^[18] Similarly, Laurent Berlant writes of ‘cruel optimism’ as the “attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy or too possible, and toxic.”^[19] In both instances there is an understanding that forms of hope have been deployed in toxic ways that ensure we remain unable to cut loose from the attachments that bind us to the very conditions and institutions we seek to overturn.

The act of ‘illegally’ crossing borders is itself an assertion of agency that undermines these attachments. In her book Border and Rule, Harsha Walia emphasises that “even as bordering practices fragment international solidarities and exert seemingly totalising power over who migrates and under which conditions, the mere existence of autonomous ‘illegal’ migration—an expression of revolt, redistribution, and reparation—defies attempts to control it.”^[20] States and other reactionary forces will make moves to interrupt the momentum of certain routes and courses of action, either repressing them outright or seeking to co-opt the contradictions and points of tension back into their own logic. But people will always continue to move, to desire possibilities that exist elsewhere.

An understanding that collapse isn’t about a moment in the future but has occurred, continues to occur, and will occur further, is also crucial for interrupting uni-directional timelines. The point isn’t to replace toxic hope with hopelessness. Instead, it is to point to the existence of fault-lines in capitalist state governance that ensure a constant state of precarity and crisis. While this constant state of precarity produces consequential negative effects on all of our lives and can certainly be the basis from which further authoritarian tendencies can prosper, it also contains the conditions from which the possibility of autonomy, resistance and solidarity can grow. Neither is all this simply a suggestion to resign ourselves to the monotonous, oppressiveness of the ‘everyday moment’. Instead, in relieving ourselves of these attachments to already ‘compromised conditions’ there are endless possibilities to experiment with action.

In the moments we push ourselves beyond the control of the State and refuse to be bound to its futurity, we might even begin to create a capacity for rebellious lives that include joy, love, friendship, militancy, communalism and solidarity. At the dystopian fault-lines of border regimes there have already existed struggles where all these characteristics thrive. The gathering at the Transborder Summer Camp, the actions and lives of militants at the Polish-Belarus border in solidarity with migrants crossing, and the riotous refusal of detainees in Woomera connecting with the protesters outside the fence all exemplify this. Reflecting Lola Olufemi’s sense of the ‘Otherwise’, these acts of resistance are multi-directional: they are situated in the necessity of acting now to secure the possibility of better lives at the same time as carving out new, unknowable paths that might lead to ongoing sites of liberatory struggle. Even where we can’t sustain these moments, the affective and material value to our lives can linger—as experiments in autonomy where strategic lessons are learned, but also in experiencing the residual taste of freedom. Those lessons and that taste can be crucial markers for ongoing resistance and a desire to not be curtailed by timelines of collapse that postmark it to a future day.

1. For a more in-depth description of Transborder Summer Camp: <https://trans-border.net/index.php/transborder-summercamp-transnational-solidarity-against-the-european-border-regime/> ↑
2. After decades of occupation and resistance, the continued use of the site at Le Zad now occurs on the basis of a legal agreement with the French government. The decision to make such an agreement created bitter divisions within the occupiers, with many militants refusing to have anything to do with it and scathing of the loss of autonomy. Crimethinc have a great overview of the history of the occupied zone: https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/23/reflections-on-the-zad-looking-back-a-year-after-the-evictionsOr for an excellent, longer, analytical reflection, see Mauvaise Troupe, The ZAD and NoTav: Territorial Struggles and the making of a new political intelligence, 2018. ↑
3. An excellent article about two migrants trying to make this crossing:Poland-Belarus border: The people pushed back in a Polish forest, Al Jazeera, 2023. ↑
4. Human Rights Watch, European Court Slams Greece Over Deadly Migrant Pushback, 2022. ↑
5. A good intro to the situation at Calais: Calais Migrant Solidarity, Introduction to Calais, <https://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/introduction-to-calais> ↑
6. Greece: Trapped in Island Camps. <https://50years.msf.org/topic/2/gb/greece-trapped-in-island-camps> ↑
7. Sari Hanafi, Spacio-cide and Bio-politics: The Israeli colonial conflict from 1947 to the Wall, in Against the Wall, 2005. ↑
8. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019. ↑
9. Ghassan Hage, Fears of ‘white decline’ show how a minor dent to domination can be catastrophic for some, The Guardian, 2019. ↑
10. Matthew Halton, The transparent labyrinth: offshore detention and surplus life, Overland, 2020. ↑
11. Ska TV’s footage of the protest and breakout can be found on YouTube. ↑
12. For one recent example, see this call to boycott the queer arts and culture Midsumma Festival, pointing to how it contributes to ‘pink-washing’ the role of the police and its connections to Australia’s ‘detention industrial complex’: <https://www.riserefugee.org/ex-detainees-open-letter-to-midsumma-festival/> ↑
13. Wretched of The Earth, An open letter to Extinction Rebellion, 2019. ↑
14. Philip Marri Winzer, We need a blak new deal to fight the climate crisis, Overland, 2019. ↑
15. Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, 2021. ↑
16. For one of the best pieces of political writing that follows similar threads as I attempt to in this piece, see Crimethinc’s zine Terror Incognita found at: https://crimethinc.com/2012/07/16/terror-incognita-now-online ↑
17. Blessed is the Flame: an introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism by Serafinski, covers a few similar arguments that I make in this article, but is particularly relevant on this point. It draws on examples from resistance within Nazi concentration camps and points to examples where uprisings that were in the works were told to wait by outside political organisations due to the moment not being ‘correct’. In some instances the ’correct’ moment would never arrive, while at other times prisoners simply refused to obey these orders to wait. ↑
18. Philip Marrii Winzer, I’d rather be called a climate pessimist than cling to toxic hope, Overland, 2011. ↑
19. Laurent Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011. ↑
20. Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism, 2021. ↑

 

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Shiv Gill is a brown migrant in a racist, colonial country, residing on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. Previously based in the lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. Anarchist, cynical of Leftist tropes and demands for hope. Trying to write and act from within the fractures of colonialism and capitalism, trying to make sense of these things for myself and maybe contribute to collective, radical practice. Subscribe to his writing.

Photo by Tamar Gordon.