Border criminology: an introduction

For some years now, borders and mobility have become increasingly salient aspects of the contemporary production of illegality and social exclusion. Who has ‘the right to have rights’ has become a perennial question in a world where the nation state is under a profound process of transformation and where the boundaries of the political community are increasingly contested and unclear. In practices such as deportation, immigration detention and refugee camps, the building of walls and border surveillance, the rights of the migrant stand at the crux of contemporary debates about the changing nature of state sovereignty and its limits. Examples such as the UK-Rwanda Asylum Partnership and enduring claims of a ‘border crisis’ in US and Australian politics, reveal that the policing of borders has become not only a locus of state coercive power, but also that these issues carry an enormous symbolic and political salience. At the same time, the continued high levels of mortality in the Mediterranean and at other border crossings across the world demonstrate the heavy toll that such policies have on people forced to move. There has also been a marked increase in the number of non-citizens in many prison systems, particularly t hose from disadvantaged migrant and refugee backgrounds.