Guest post by Mona Hosseini, Reza Husseini and Razia Rezaie. Mona Hossaini is from the historical city of Bamyan, Afghanistan and completed her BA degree in education and literature and MA in South Asia Studies. With the definitive goal of working in Afghanistan and the human rights area, she worked with different international organisations as researcher, advocacy and capacity building trainer, project manager and policy expert for about 11 years. She also writes papers on women and peace negotiation in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan, women participation for sustainable peace ..read more

To mark one year since the release of Stealing Time: Migration, Temporalities and State Violence, Victoria Canning (co-editor with Monish Bhatia, Birkbeck, University of London) highlights the reasons why the book theme was chosen, and why it is important for us to recognise the active, often deadly mechanisms by which state and corporations steal migrant time as deliberate. In this short video, Vicky outlines the key aspects of the book, and introduces us to the three chapters on which we focus on in our blog series this week at Border Criminologies.  Video of Stealing Tim ..read more

Guest post by Gabriella Sanchez. Photo by Gabriella Sanchez Starting in mid-April, local newspaper and television channels in the border city of Laredo, Texas, began to report the local sector of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was noticing an increase in the cases of people being smuggled through the local checkpoint onboard of trailers. In fact, the very day of the event in San Antonio that took 53 lives, CBP Laredo reported through its Facebook page that that weekend they had encountered over 400 people being transported in the back of trailers in six separate attempts. Every year ..read more

Guest post by Elisa Floristán Millán (anthropologist, PhD student at Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)) and Cléo Marmié (sociologist, PhD student at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris – Centre Maurice Halbwachs- LIRTES, CNRS). June 24, 2022 After a night on the train crossing Morocco from Rabat to the Oriental region, we arrived in Nador in the early morning to continue our research on children and youth on the move. The city was sluggish, hemmed in between a slope of the Mediterranean and Mount Gourougou, which spreads its vegetation as far as the small port of Beni An ..read more

Post by Dr Sanja Milivojevic. Sanja is Associate Professor in Digital Futures at Bristol Digital Futures Institute and School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. She is co-Director of Border Criminologies and Research Associate at Oxford University, as well as Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Sanja holds LL.B and LL.M from Belgrade University’s Law School, and a PhD from Monash University, Australia. Sanja’s research interests are borders and mobility, security technologies and surveillance, gender and victimisation, and international criminal justi ..read more

Guest post by Megan Murphy. Megan has just completed her second year studying law at the University of Bristol, and is currently interested in nationality, human rights, and humanitarian law. From August she will be continuing her studies in Denmark at Aarhus University, hoping to gain a comparative perspective in these areas.  I am delighted to introduce the newly formed Border Criminologies Student Chapter, aimed at engaging with and educating young people on issues of international border control. We operate as an independent offshoot of the wider Border Criminologies network, but mai ..read more

Guest post by Talitha Dubow and Katie Kuschminder. Talitha is a researcher at UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University. Her research focusses on the experiences and decision-making of irregularised migrants, and the impacts of policies on these. Katie Kuschminder is a Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where she is Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant Reintegrate Project. This post is part of a collaboration between Border Criminologies and Geopolitics that seeks to promote open access platforms. The full article, on which this piece is based, is  ..read more

Guest post by Özlem Atar, PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen`s University, Canada. Her doctoral research engages Trump Era narratives of irregular migration from Central America and Mexico to the United States and explores the intersection of migrant justice activism and literature. Ozlem is on Twitter @OzlemAtar. Review of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond by John Washington (Verso, 2020). The Dispossessed opens with a quote from its namesake, Ursula K. Le Guin`s 1974 science fiction novel, thereby implying that readers should approach this journ ..read more

Guest post by Kate Motluk. Kate is a PhD student at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. Prior to returning to academia, Kate worked for several years for Canadian refugee non-profits and remains an active volunteer in this sector. This blog post is based on Kate’s MA Thesis, Containment & COVID-19 in the Settler State: Indigenous Incarceration and Immigration Detention in Canada and Australia. A blurred Australian flag waving behind a barbed wire fence. Image: Shutterstock At a time when social distancing is among the most effective means of preve ..read more

Guest post by Kristin Bergtora Sandvik (S.J.D Harvard Law School 2008). Kristin is a professor of legal sociology at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo and a Research Professor in Humanitarian Studies at PRIO. Her work focuses on refugee resettlement, legal mobilization, humanitarian technology, innovation and accountability. This piece was first published on the Peace Research Institute Oslo blog, available here.  Photo: European Union / ECHO / Oleksandr Ratushniak A striking imagery coming out of Ukraine is that of a mass flow of displaced pets, accompanied by continuous upda ..read more