Books by Ruben Andersson
University of California Press, 2019
War-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrants—from the A... more War-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrants—from the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote “danger zones.” Instead of buying into apocalyptic visions, Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world’s rich and poor. Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders, with national and global politics riven by fear. Andersson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us whether we live in Texas or Timbuktu. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us.
Despite mass investments in advanced border controls, refugees and migrants keep arriving along s... more Despite mass investments in advanced border controls, refugees and migrants keep arriving along southern European shores under increasingly desperate circumstances. Outside Italy, hardly a week has passed in summer 2014 without news of boat tragedies; in Greece, refugees have launched hunger strikes in crammed detention camps; and in Spain, migrants have clambered up border fences or drowned while trying to swim into the country's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
What has gone wrong at Europe's frontiers – and who is responsible for the mess? asks anthropologist Ruben Andersson in his new book Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. Based on mobile fieldwork, the book gives a rare ethnographic account of Europe's border control landscape, showing how the "fight against illegal migration" has created absurd incentives and devastating consequences. At the continent's southern frontiers, an "illegality industry" has emerged to halt the migrant boats, involving an expanding range of sectors: European and African border forces, defence conglomerates and intelligence agencies, international and humanitarian organisations, research institutes and media outlets. When another tragedy occurs, when another boat sinks, the industry grows yet again. But this industry is not the "solution" to the crisis at the borders, the book shows – it is rather a fundamental part of the problem.
Papers by Ruben Andersson
Cultural Anthropology, 2022
This concluding reflection of the Colloquy on Mobile Livings [Cultural Anthropology 37(1), 2022] ... more This concluding reflection of the Colloquy on Mobile Livings [Cultural Anthropology 37(1), 2022] considers how the bioeconomy, as an analytical lens, may cast light on processes of colonization beyond the territorial frame of spatial domination, settlement, and exploitation. Examining the power to colonize with special reference to the politics and policing of migration, it shows how certain migrants have come to serve as a laboratory in the quest to extract value from life itself—which itself links back to historical colonizations. What we may call a “new anthropology” is taking shape at the confluence of algorithms of artificial intelligence, mechanisms of finance and surveillance, and the multipolar geopolitical world emerging amid the Western project’s demise. Understanding the new frontiers of value extraction of this piecemeal yet powerful (quasi) science of humankind constitutes a crucial analytical task for us “old anthropologists,” and the bioeconomy may serve as a tool in this endeavor.
Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, 2015
Este artículo plantea los problemas y contradicciones del llamado «efecto globo» en los procesos ... more Este artículo plantea los problemas y contradicciones del llamado «efecto globo» en los procesos migratorios y la necesidad de partir de una visión global e interconectadas de los flujos poblacionales a través de las fronteras para la elaboración de políticas migratorias justas y efectivas. La revisión de las «crisis» en las fronteras del Mediterráneo, desde las primeras «pateras» que cruzaban Gibraltar hasta la presente «crisis de refugiados», evidencia el hecho de que la presión sobre unas rutas potenciales de entrada no disuade de la voluntad de cruce de frontera sino que desplaza a los emigrantes o refugiados en otras direcciones. Los datos etnográficos muestran cómo por ejemplo el ahora muy elogiado modelo español de gestión de los flujos migratorios en el Mediterráneo no acabó con el problema sino que provocó el desplazamiento de los flujos migratorios hacia caminos más peligrosos en el Sahara y en el norte de África. El problema de España pasó a convertirse en el problema de Italia y, a medida que se desplazaba las rutas, después en el de Grecia, un círculo vicioso que manifiesta el fracaso de las políticas europeas. El autor sigue las historias de personas con las que trabajó etnográficamente, desde Senegal hasta Marruecos, que en sus tránsitos africanos se han visto atrapadas entre vallas, fronteras, dispositivos tecnológicos y mafias de «pasadores». Las experiencias de los inmigrantes señalan un proceso en progresivo aumento: la globalización y mercantilización de las rutas irregulares que emergen paralelamente a los dispositivos migratorios.
Exotic No More: Anthropology for the contemporary world, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press), 2019
In parallel with migration’s rise to the political prominence, ‘migration studies’ has turned int... more In parallel with migration’s rise to the political prominence, ‘migration studies’ has turned into a vast field of study. This trend comes with various risks, including those of ‘methodological nationalism’, policy capture and the risk of framing migration as a problem to be solved – but also, more subtly, the risk of reinforcing the political visibility of certain kinds of human movement. Using my own research on one such kind, high-risk African migration towards Europe, I reflect in this chapter on how anthropologists may build on longer trajectories in the study of migration to forge a distinct voice in this crowded and problematic field. Combining various streams of anthropological work over the decades – from studies of internal African migrations to the ‘transnational turn’ and the recent shift towards security and mobility regimes – I argue that anthropologists are extremely well-placed to offer fresh vantage points on migration at the intersection of high politics, meso-level structures and intimate life-worlds. Going further, I argue for the need radically to de-centre the migrant in studies of migration and (im)mobility. Despite the gradual shift towards structural and systemic perspectives, scholars are still principally training their gaze on specific migratory subjects, leaving other parts of the global mobility picture relatively invisible. De-centring the migrant does not mean ignoring the struggles of those who are visibilised as migrants in problematic ways; instead it can, in an ethnographic vein, build on their own analyses to offer a fundamental rethinking of how power and motion intersect in a world unequally on the move. (Chapter in Exotic No More, 2nd ed., 2019)
Saferworld report, 2019
Drawing on extensive research, this report analyses the European Union’s and European governments... more Drawing on extensive research, this report analyses the European Union’s and European governments’ outsourcing of migration controls in ‘partner’ countries such as Turkey, Libya and Niger. It explores who benefits from this system, exposes its risks and explains who bears the costs. It also provides recommendations for European leaders on how to move toward a humane model for migration. (Report co-authored with David Keen for Saferworld, July 2019)
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2019
Remoteness has returned to world politics. Instead of the flat world’ once proclaimed by leading ... more Remoteness has returned to world politics. Instead of the flat world’ once proclaimed by leading liberal voices, the world map today looks more rugged and uneven than it has in a long time. While some areas are smoothly connected to global capital and cultural flows, others are becoming more marginalised and ‘distant’, at least from the viewpoint of global centres of power. In this introduction, we build an analytical approach to remoteness as a social and political process rather than a primordial condition. We emphasise three key aspects of remoteness: its deep entanglement with forms of connectivity; its economic usefulness; and its amenability to ‘remote control’. In considering these aspects, we bring anthropology’s long heritage of studying ‘marginal’ societies to bear on the political resurgence of remoteness in a new world disorder of proliferating global dangers, lucrative frontier economies and heritage-making.
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2019
The Malian town of Timbuktu, long considered the epitome of remoteness in the Western imagination... more The Malian town of Timbuktu, long considered the epitome of remoteness in the Western imagination, has undergone a dramatic transformation from tourist outpost to terrorism- haunted site of a UN peacekeeping intervention, in a shift accompanying conflict-hit Mali’s wider relabelling as a ‘danger zone’. Casting an eye on this distressing turn, this article considers the ‘cartopolitics’ of distance and danger from a historical perspective while analysing the machinations of foreign interveners and cartographers. It shows how Mali’s insertion into the ‘war on terror’ drew on colonial and precolonial mappings intermixing desire and danger, domination and fear, science and fantasy. Concluding, the article argues that if military strategy was once seen as paralysed by a ‘Vietnam syndrome’, today we see something akin to a ‘Timbuktu syndrome’ as Western powers obsess about controlling perceived dangers emanating from remote sites yet increasingly fear entering these ‘Timbuktus’ of a revived geographic imagination.
(Part of special issue, 'The return of remoteness', in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(2), 2019)
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2019
Afghanistan has come to be seen as emblematic of the security threats besetting peace and securit... more Afghanistan has come to be seen as emblematic of the security threats besetting peace and security operations, and in this article we consider the response to such threats via the ‘bunkering’ of international staff. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative survey with aid and peacebuilding officials in Kabul, we illustrate how seemingly mundane risk management procedures have negative consequences for intervening institutions; for the relation between interveners and national actors; and for the purpose of intervention itself. Bunkering, we argue, is deeply political – ‘imprisoning’ staff behind ramparts while generating an illusion of presence and control for ill-conceived modes of international intervention.
Political Geography, 2018
This paper compares the security paradigms for combating terrorism, drugs and irregular migration... more This paper compares the security paradigms for combating terrorism, drugs and irregular migration and argues that while these have largely failed on their own terms, they have also proven rather successful for the actors shaping them. Through a spatial political economy analysis of systems of intervention, the paper shows how vested interests have helped perpetuate counterproductive approaches, while risks (including that of human suffering) have routinely been 'exported' into geographical 'buffer zones'. In analysing the stakes in such systems , we deploy the metaphor of games. This term allows us to highlight divergences between 'official' goals, such as 'winning the war,' and unstated aims, such as perpetuating security investments, relocating risk or stoking fear for political gain. Equally important, game terminology helps us highlight the spatial and social dynamics of collaboration, conflict and rule-manipulation within the system. In exploring these dynamics, the paper puts focus empirically on the complex collaborations between Western states instigating intervention and poorer 'partner states,' showing how a skewed geopolitical distribution of risk may tilt security interventions in the instigators' favour while maintaining 'skin in the game' for less powerful actors. [Co-authored with David Keen]
Public Culture, 2018
This article starts with an observation made by many migrants and refugees stuck at Europe's bord... more This article starts with an observation made by many migrants and refugees stuck at Europe's borders: that reception and detention facilities have become a money spinner and a racket. In conversation with the extensive literature on the biopolitics of borders, the article approaches this business as a " bioeconomy " to highlight how migration controls (sometimes framed in the idiom of care) facilitate profiteering and predation. Rather than focusing on the production of cheap, deportable labor, the bioeconomy perspective developed here is concerned with the extraction and generation of financial and other value from life itself. Visiting the US-Mexico and Euro-African borders in turn, it considers biotechnologies for surveillance and detection; detention and " warehousing " ; and risk strategies for deterring migration, in each case delving into the political economy of human vitality in both its physical and psychological dimensions. The article concludes by asking whether irregular migrants may be " canaries in the coal mine " of an increasingly prevalent mode of profiteering from life itself.
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2017
Ever since the ‘refugee crisis’ hit European shores, policymakers, journalists and politicians ha... more Ever since the ‘refugee crisis’ hit European shores, policymakers, journalists and politicians have sought out knowledge on ‘unwanted’ migration and ‘what to do about it’. As influential people knock on academic doors – at times seeking out anthropologists, such as this author – how should we engage, and under what conditions? The seemingly endless rounds of panel debates, conferences and other policy-focused outreach pull academics towards ‘high-level’ engagements, while short-term or politically driven ‘emergency’ funding pushes us towards narrowly defined research objectives. Meanwhile, the ‘impact’ agenda – most developed in the UK, yet increasingly encroaching on other academic ecosystems – is shifting institutional incentives towards specific forms of scholarly activity. This article builds an ‘auto-ethnographic’ account of my own experiences of crossing the borders of anthropology at a time of perceived migratory crisis and increasing impact calls. Delineating the pitfalls and risks of ‘capture’ by policy agendas, the article argues for active navigation of the borderlands between academia and its various publics. For anthropologists to wrest some control, I suggest, we must be willing to take risks and get our hands dirty; strategically deploy our ethnographic sensibilities to the full; and stand ready to apply our analytical skills to powerful systems – including, not least, to the impact agenda itself.
The borders of 'Europe': Autonomy of migration, tactics of bordering (Nicholas De Genova, ed.), 2017
A seeming paradox defines the European Union’s response to irregular migration and refugee flows:... more A seeming paradox defines the European Union’s response to irregular migration and refugee flows: on the one hand, we hear about violence and distress at the borders; on the other, about 'humanitarian' action to safeguard life at sea. The divide between liberal and security approaches may seem deep – yet this book chapter (in The Borders of 'Europe', Duke 2017) shows that rather than contradicting each other, these approaches are in fact deeply enmeshed within Europe’s destructive ‘fight’ against unauthorized migration. The chapter argues for the need to place humanitarian measures firmly in the context of a larger assemblage of migration controls that now reaches well beyond the European external borders. Through ethnographic examples from the Spanish-African frontier, it shows how an industry has grown up around migratory routes in which punitive and humanitarian functions clash and sometimes merge with each other – which in turn makes any attempt at dismantling the border machinery or seeking an alternative increasingly difficult.
Anthropology of Our Times: An Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology, 2017
In this chapter about ‘migrants, illegality and the bordering of Europe’, which is based on e-mai... more In this chapter about ‘migrants, illegality and the bordering of Europe’, which is based on e-mail correspondence with Sindre Bangstad conducted in September and November 2016, Andersson discusses his work on migration and the bordering of Europe. Chapter in Bangstad, Sindre (ed.) Anthropology of Our Times: An Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology (Palgrave 2017).
This paper is concerned with the problems and possibilities that mobility poses for social scient... more This paper is concerned with the problems and possibilities that mobility poses for social scientific research, as seen through the lens of my own work on irregular migration from West Africa towards southern Spain. I begin with two contrasting vignettes from Europe’s borders that illustrate the paradoxical role of mobility in the continent’s escalating 'fight against illegal migration’ – as well as the challenges involved in grappling with such mobility ethnographically.
Here be dragons: Mapping an ethnography of global danger
Current Anthropology , Nov 2016
For a brief post-Cold War moment, it seemed as if global division would yield to connectivity as ... more For a brief post-Cold War moment, it seemed as if global division would yield to connectivity as marginal regions would be rewired into the world economy. Instead, the post–9/11 years have seen the spread of ever-larger “no-go zones,” seen as constituting a danger especially to Western states and citizens. Contact points are reduced as aid workers withdraw, military operations are conducted from above, and few visitors, reporters, or researchers dare venture beyond the new red lines. Casting an eye on this development while building on anthropology’s critical security agenda, this article draws an ethnographic map of “global danger” by showing how perceived transnational threats— terrorism, drugs, and displacement—are conjured, bundled, and relegated to world margins, from the sub-Saharan Sahel to the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Mali, it shows how a relationship by remote control has developed as Western interveners seek to overcome a fundamental dilemma: their deep concern with threats emanating from the danger zone set against their aversion toward entering it. As ambivalent sites of distance and engagement, I argue, such zones are becoming invested with old fantasies of remoteness and otherness, simultaneously kept at arm’s length and unevenly incorporated into a world economy of risk.
The purpose of this report is to analyse how the EU and its member states have conducted their bo... more The purpose of this report is to analyse how the EU and its member states have conducted their border politics since the abolishing of ‘internal’ borders at the time of the Schengen agreement in the 1990s. More specifically, the study analyses the ‘fight against illegal migration’ which has developed since the 1990s at and beyond the external borders. It discusses how, why and with what consequences certain kinds of migration gradually have come to be treated principally as a security and border problem. The trend towards this ‘border security model’ is not only European but global in scope, as the report shows by reference to research findings from the US-Mexico borders. However, the European case is today perhaps the best example of the deep problems generated by this security treatment. The report (in Swedish; policy brief in English) shows how border and migration management has gradually become more security-focused – as well as more expensive for taxpayers. However, the fight against irregular migration has not 'succeeded'. More border patrols, extensive surveillance and a deepening police collaboration with non-European states have rather sparked riskier routes and entry methods, as well as larger pro ts in a professionalising human smuggling business. These outcomes have in turn led to a reinforcement of the border security model and the development of a 'border' or ‘illegality industry’, whose workings the report analyses in detail. The failure of border controls, in other words, has led to a larger market for ever more controls.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2016
Despite Europe’s mass investments in advanced border controls, people keep arriving along the con... more Despite Europe’s mass investments in advanced border controls, people keep arriving along the continent’s shores under desperate circumstances. European attempts to ‘secure’ or ‘protect’ the borders have quite clearly failed, as politicians themselves increasingly recognise – yet more of the same response is again rolled out in response to the escalating ‘refugee crisis’. Amid the deadlock, this article argues that we need to grasp the mechanics and logics of the European ‘border security model’ in order to open up for a change of course. Through ethnographic examples from the Spanish-African borders, the article shows how the striving for border security under a prevailing emergency frame has generated absurd incentives, negative path dependencies and devastating consequences. At Europe’s frontiers, an industry of border controls has emerged, involving European defence contractors, member state security forces and their African counterparts, as well as a range of non- security actors. Whenever another ‘border crisis’ occurs, this industry grows again, feeding on its own apparent ‘failures’. This vicious cycle may be broken, the article concludes, once policy-makers start curtailing the economies of border security underpinning it – yet the challenges are formidable as the industry retrenches along with the political response to the drama it has itself produced.
Anthropology of this Century, Jan 2016
From the Mediterranean to the US-Mexico frontier, some thoughts on global trends in migration and... more From the Mediterranean to the US-Mexico frontier, some thoughts on global trends in migration and border controls.
Security Dialogue, Oct 19, 2016
Migration controls at the external EU borders have become a large field of political and financia... more Migration controls at the external EU borders have become a large field of political and financial investment in recent years – indeed, an 'industry' of sorts – yet conflicts between states and border agencies still mar attempts at cooperation. This article takes a close look at one way in which officials try to overcome such conflicts: through technology. In West Africa, the secure 'Seahorse' network hardwires border cooperation into a satellite system connecting African and European forces. In Spain's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, advanced border fencing has joined up actors around a supposedly impenetrable divide. And on the EU level, the 'European external border surveillance system', or Eurosur, papers over power struggles between agencies and states through 'decentralized' information-sharing – even as the system’s physical features (nodes, coordination centres, interfaces) deepen competition between them. The article shows how such technologies, rather than 'halting migration', have above all acted as catalysts for new social relations among disparate sectors, creating areas for collaboration and competition, compliance and conflict. With these dynamics in mind, the conclusion sketches an 'ecological' perspective on the materialities of border control – infrastructure, interfaces, vehicles – while calling for more research on their contradictory and often counterproductive consequences.
Uploads
Books by Ruben Andersson
What has gone wrong at Europe's frontiers – and who is responsible for the mess? asks anthropologist Ruben Andersson in his new book Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. Based on mobile fieldwork, the book gives a rare ethnographic account of Europe's border control landscape, showing how the "fight against illegal migration" has created absurd incentives and devastating consequences. At the continent's southern frontiers, an "illegality industry" has emerged to halt the migrant boats, involving an expanding range of sectors: European and African border forces, defence conglomerates and intelligence agencies, international and humanitarian organisations, research institutes and media outlets. When another tragedy occurs, when another boat sinks, the industry grows yet again. But this industry is not the "solution" to the crisis at the borders, the book shows – it is rather a fundamental part of the problem.
Papers by Ruben Andersson
(Part of special issue, 'The return of remoteness', in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(2), 2019)