Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move

(Paperback)

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Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the world has appeared to enter a new age of tightening borders. But even before these cataclysmic events, forty thousand people had already died trying to cross international borders in the past decade, including high-profile deaths along the shores of Europe and between the US and Mexico. Reece Jones argues that these deaths are not exceptional, but rather the result of state attempts to contain populations and control access to resources and opportunities. We may live in an era of globalization, he writes, but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people. In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and their dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the aftershocks of decolonization, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. Newly updated with a discussion of Brexit and the Trump administration, Violent Borders is a carefully-wrought exploration of how the growth of borders is exacerbating climate change, wealth inequality and migrant deaths.

Reviews

Focuses helpfully on an uncomfortable and generally overlooked fact that in recent years border control regimes have become increasingly and often horrifically militarised in many parts of the world. Physical restraints in the shape of walls and security fences have multiplied; the body count is appallingly high. For Jones, this shows that the institutions of the modern state are essentially violent. -- Rowan Williams * New Statesman *
In an era of terrorism, global inequality, and rising political tension over migration, Jones argues that tight border controls make the world worse, not better. * Boston Globe *
I'd like an endless supply of Reece Jones Violent Borders to hand out to all the people I meet who flirt with an anti-refugee sensibility. This book is the antidote to the world of walls that we live in, an argument for a world of humanity. -- Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
From early modern land enclosures through Westphalian state formation to the current fortification of the USMexico frontier, Reece Jones explains what a boundary is, and how national sovereignty is being reinforced, in an age of capital mobility, by the crackdown on human movement across borders. -- Jeremy Harding, author of Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World
A much-needed counter to a thousand newspaper columns calling on us to secure our borders, Reece Jones Violent Borders goes beyond the headlines to look at the deeper causes of the migration crisis. Borders, Jones convincingly argues, are a means of inflicting violence on poor people. This is an engaging and lucid analysis of a much misunderstood issue. -- Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror

Author Bio

REECE JONES is a professor of geography at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and the author of Border Walls.