Ghosh, Sahana. 2023. A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh–India Borderland. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-9573-2.

Keshavarz, Mahmoud and Shahram Khosravi (eds.) 2022. Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below. London: Pluto Press. 216 pp. Pb.: £19.99. ISBN: 978-0-7453- 4161-3.

Shih, Elena. 2023. Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 288 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-7970-1.

The abolition of borders is among the more visionary of political demands to have gained traction in twenty-first century radical circles. The idea is not that an induced combustion of border checkpoints would in itself trigger society's spontaneous reconstitution along more just and egalitarian lines. Instead, border abolitionism calls for undoing the apartheid-creating functions of border regimes, and for building a world where militarised border controls are redundant (Anderson et al 2011; Bradley and De Noronha 2022; Tazzioli and De Genova 2023; Walia 2021).

Can anthropology play a role in such a project? I believe it can. In fact, researchers working in what can broadly be termed a critical anthropology of borders have an established track record of contesting border securitisation and the regulatory bifurcation of border crossers. Moreover, anthropology – and ethnographic research more broadly – is well placed to document the everyday violence of border regimes and the practical abolition-from-below of dispossessed border crossers. These are social phenomena that state-centric disciplines, macro-level research methods and adherents to the cult of policy relevance typically miss.

A critical anthropology of borders – an anthropology against borders – should in my view do the following: expose the violence of border regimes; contest the rationalisation of border apartheid; and adopt the analytical vantage point of marginalised border crossers. In saying this, I claim no novelty. This research agenda is more or less evident, if only implicitly, in many critical ethnographic works on border formations published in recent years. Still, it is worth being explicit. And it is worth naming, for those of us engaged in the critical ethnography of borders, a shared abolitionist orientation.

It is with such an orientation in mind that I review herein three recent ethnographic works on border formations. My aim is to draw out from these texts the aforementioned research agenda. The books are A Thousand Tiny Cuts, by Sahana Ghosh (2023), Manufacturing Freedom, by Elena Shih (2023) and Seeing Like a Smuggler, edited by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi (2022). Each of these texts presents intimate ethnographic accounts of how mobile individuals have sought to circumvent, or at least manage, securitised border regimes. In line with an abolitionist research agenda, they each advance a critical anthropology of borders – that is, an anthropology against borders.

Yet, as ethnographic works attentive to the social messiness of everyday bordered life, these books also unsettle facile polemics against borders that operate at high levels of abstraction. Their authors show, for example, how marginalised borderlanders find ways to benefit from securitised geopolitical demarcations, and thus come to see the border as less a threat than a resource; how clandestine border crossing, far from enacting abolition from below, has in cases bolstered the very border regimes that render such travel so dangerous in the first place; and how right-wing actors have likewise laid claim to an abolitionist lineage, but have done so to advance a carceral politics at odds with emancipatory struggles against border enforcement. These conflicting developments do not negate a project of border abolition. They do, however, call for sober engagement with the contradictions of bordered life by those of us who wish to act in solidarity with dispossessed and displaced border crossers.

In A Thousand Tiny Cuts, Sahana Ghosh escorts us through villages, down roads and into homes on both sides of the India–Bangladesh border, where West Begal's Cooch Behar abuts Rangpur Division in northern Bangladesh. Her interlocutors are mostly Bengali Muslims and lower caste Rajbangsi Hindus – women and men whose cross-border family histories, kin networks and livelihood strategies disrupt the nationalist fiction of geopolitically contained identities. Refusing a methodological nationalism that would analytically begin from the border as a taken-for-granted territorial demarcation, Ghosh instead theorises bordering as the everyday production of relational social hierarchies. The book's eponymous thousand tiny cuts is thus a metaphor for the manifold harms that this relational bordering inflicts on borderlanders.

Elena Shih's Manufacturing Freedom is a critical ethnography of anti-trafficking organisations that seek to (as they see it) rehabilitate women involved in sex work. Shih conducted her research in Bangkok and Beijing, rather than along a geopolitical boundary per se. Border regimes nonetheless shape the lives of the migrant women whose fraught encounters with post-sex work ‘rehabilitation’ Shih (2023: 22) documents. Under China's hukou system, for example, migrant women from rural areas are denied access to social welfare and public services in Beijing (Shih 2023: 12). And in Thailand, migrant sex workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia are ‘more vulnerable to abuse from employers and clients because they have no right to assistance from Thai police and they fear deportation’ (Shih 2023: 152). The main target of Shih's critique is the pernicious and paternalistic conflation of sex work with sex trafficking. This ideological move enables foreign Christian missionaries to push moralistic anti-sex work projects in Asia under the banner of anti-trafficking. By channelling funds and political energy into ‘rescuing’ rather than supporting sex workers, these actors systematically divert resources away from labour organising and other initiatives that might improve working conditions for the individuals who choose to labour in this industry. Moreover, as Shih demonstrates, dominant anti-trafficking initiatives have adopted a carceral approach that, by collaborating with the police, works against anti-carceral abolitionism while reinforcing bordering practices at sites far from a given country's territorial margins. Foreign sex workers, for example, are presumed to be victims of trafficking and deported, while the border regimes that exacerbate the vulnerability of undocumented sex workers remain unchallenged.

Finally, in Seeing Like a Smuggler, editors Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi present contributions by authors examining ten globally dispersed case studies of unofficial cross-border transport of people and things – ‘smuggling’ in more statist language. Cases range from Ethiopian migrants seeking employment in Saudi Arabia, to Mexican borderlanders who operate informal toll gates to profit from contraband entering Guatemala, to ambulatory Kurdish youth who convey on their backs anything from cigarettes to refrigerators as they traverse the mountainous hinterland between Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Invoking a history from below, Keshavarz and Khosravi advocate an ethnographic approach to ‘so-called smuggling’ that adopts ‘the subject position of those who find smuggling necessary in order to survive’ (2022: 2). Among the editors’ stated aims is to denaturalise the border – ‘to shift the attention from the spectacle of walls and fences to the details, techniques, and operations of borders’ (Keshavarz and Khosravi 2022: 8). In seeking to denaturalise the border in this way, Keshavarz and Khosravi echo Ghosh, for whom the border is ‘not a fixed thing in time and space’ but ‘an ongoing and historically layered process’ (2023: 5).

That border regimes are socially differentiating infrastructures of violence is a contention likewise shared across all three books. As noted, Shih writes that the illegalised status of non-Thai sex workers puts them at risk of deportation. Their resulting wariness of the police then leaves them without enforced legal protection from abuse by employers and clients. But police violence is also itself a threat to foreign sex workers, whose lack of documentation and extra-legal livelihood put them in a ‘more structurally dangerous’ predicament (Shih 2023: 152). Meanwhile, in her summative afterword to Seeing Like a Smuggler, Nandita Sharma notes that ‘extreme state violence has been unleashed in the name of “stopping smugglers” from moving people into nation-states that would deny them official permission to enter’ (2022: 172). The book's examples include Amin Parsa's description of ‘armed Iranian border guards – stationed atop mountains with a panoramic view of the kolbars’ [smugglers'] passage – who regularly shoot to kill and injure kolbars’ (2022: 81). Parsa adds hypothermia, avalanches and landmines to the list of border-crossing hazards. As for the India–Bangladesh borderlands, Ghosh notes in her book that there have been ‘spectacular acts of violence and border killings’ (2023: 220). But she takes a principled stand of refusing to narrate these events ethnographically. She instead turns her attention to the everyday harms – those eponymous thousand tiny cuts – that bordering inflicts on individuals who reside alongside and/or traverse the border. The book opens, for instance, with Indian Border Security forces interrupting a wedding in West Bengal and hauling its bride off to the police station ‘on suspicion of being an infiltrator, an illegal border- crosser’ (2023: 1). Ghosh tells, as well, of population displacements, settlements inundated by flooding and ‘the shifting value of land’, all ‘in relation to emerging architectures of border security’ (2023: 71). Yet, migration is a stubborn force. As these books show, violent border enforcement has never been effective at stopping clandestine cross-border mobility. It has only served to make such movement more dangerous, while rendering undocumented border crossers more vulnerable to manifold harms.

In the face of this violence, governments, mainstream media and conventional migration scholars share a state-centric, legalistic perspective that ideologically naturalises the border and legitimates border enforcement. Shahram Khosravi elsewhere calls this a racialised ‘border gaze’ (2010: 75–78). It is in contrast to this statist vantage point that the books reviewed here start from the subject position of marginalised border crossers. This methodological move is explicit in the title of Seeing Like a Smuggler. Therein, Keshavarz and Khosravi refuse ‘to follow the state's legal definition of smuggling’ and instead represent ‘everyday informal activities around borders as forms of tactical livelihood or “insurgent citizenship”’ (2022: 3, 5). Endeavouring to ‘unsettle state-centric perspectives’, Keshavarz and Khosravi (2022: 2) replace the border gaze with what Sandro Mezzadra calls a subversive ‘gaze of autonomy’ – that is, a perspective on migratory movements that privileges ‘the subjective practices, the desires, the expectations and the behaviours of migrants themselves’ (2011: 121). Ghosh, too, spurns a statist gaze, and instead advocates ‘paying attention to how people try to lead meaningful transnational lives as the grounds of those connections are devalued, criminalized, and actively reconfigured’ (2023: 7).

This choice of perspective – of which subject position to analytically start from – has important political stakes. Shih argues, for instance, that by portraying sex workers as passive ‘victims of trafficking’, Western Christian missionary organisations have sidelined sex workers’ agency, misrepresented the dynamics surrounding sex work and asserted ‘rescue’ as the only relevant political response. All of this feeds into a politics of control that works against sex workers’ political autonomy. Left out of this narrative are the ‘political economic factors that shape migrant workers’ decision to choose sex work’ (Shih 2023: 89). In any case, most of the women Shih interviewed did ‘not consider themselves victims of trafficking’ (2023: 108). The most prominent grievances that current sex workers expressed were also not about trafficking, but about poor treatment and managers’ theft of their wages (Shih 2023: 66). So, ‘rather than rescue,’ Shih writes, ‘sex workers across the globe have long asked for enforcement of policies concerning employer accountability, health and safety, and protection from police abuse’ (2023: 190). And against the influential voices of government officials and anti-trafficking organisations, Shih calls for ‘amplify[ing] workers’ voices and support[ing] their resistance’ (2023: 110).

In sum, by denaturalising the border, exposing the violence of border regimes and adopting the vantage point of mobile populations, the works reviewed here variously contest the rationalisation of border apartheid – that is, the regulatory bifurcation and hierarchical segmentation of border crossers. In this way, they align with a critical anthropology of borders. But by attending to the contradictions of bordered life, these books also unsettle simplistic portrayals that romanticise migrant agency as always-already autonomous of and antagonistic to border enforcement. What such romanticisation obscures are the ways borderland residents and border crossers can become complicit in reproducing coercive border regimes. Ghosh likewise finds inadequate a ‘romance of resistance’, which yields, she contends, ‘little understanding of the messy ways residents live with the dispersed violence of border security and in surprising ways reproduce and further entrench its logics in their everyday lives’ (2023: 66).

Consider how borderlanders and those who traverse borders find ways to benefit from border regimes that otherwise segregate populations and inflict manifold harms. ‘This border [between Iran and Afghanistan] might be a terrible thing for most people,’ writes Aliyeh Ataei in Seeing Like a Smuggler, ‘but for [the smuggler] Mohammad Osman it's been profitable’ (2022: 56). It is in fact because of the geopolitical inequalities that underpin border violence that the ‘smuggling’ of people and things is able to generate value. So, while critical anthropologists may be committed to border abolition, marginalised individuals who leverage the border for profit do not inevitably share this politics. What is more, clandestine border crossing – the ‘smuggling’ of people and things – which may at first appear subversive, is often bound up with the very border regimes that render such travel so dangerous in the first place. Nandita Sharma reflects, ‘Smuggling, while often transgressive, is not always (or even usually) revolutionary [and] the logics of smuggling are [quoting Galemba (2022: 62)] “not necessarily in opposition to, or external to state logics, even if smugglers defy state regulations by subverting border controls”’ (2022: 175). To illustrate, she points to the transport of contraband between Iraq and Iran:

We can see this in the global geopolitical context of international sanctions when, for example, smugglers known as kolbar (those who move goods carried on their backs) in the borderlands of Iran and Iraq, transport goods that are legally prohibited by US-led sanctions against Iran. This benefits the Iranian government, which sees smuggling as a way to ease the intended devastation of US-led sanctions, even as Iran criminalises (and, not infrequently, kills) those moving the goods, with the knowledge that people will continue. (Sharma 2022: 175)

Rebecca B. Galemba, in her contribution to Seeing Like a Smuggler, observes a similar dynamic between, on one side, Mexican borderlanders who profit from outbound smuggling and, on the other, the Mexican state that criminalises such cross-border exchange. Galemba argues:

Smuggling does not necessarily undermine the state or espouse an alternative ‘ethics of illegality’. Instead, border residents’ and smugglers’ practices and discourses are integral to the maintenance and reproduction of the state as a ‘structural effect’, cloaking the power dynamics that uphold the division between the state and smugglers . . . The smuggler as a ‘figure of resistance’ does not exist outside of, or necessarily in opposition to the state. (2022: 62–63)

These are all important insights, though I do not believe they negate a project of border abolition. We just need to be wary of romanticising migrants’ subversive autonomy against border control. It would be more accurate to speak in such cases, following Maurice Stierl, of ‘border entanglements’, wherein migrant autonomy and border enforcement are ‘intimately and necessarily co-constitutive forces that fold into one another’ (2017: 212).

Partisans of the neo-abolitionist movement against prisons and policing identify the project as an emancipatory struggle aimed at dismantling the carceral state (e.g. Davis et al 2022). Border abolitionism parallels the latter struggle in seeking to undo securitised border regimes that subordinate mobile populations to carceral management. Yet, this distinction between abolitionist and carceral logics is upset where, as Shih (2023: xi) documents, anti-trafficking activists rebrand themselves as ‘modern-day abolitionists’ while advocating carceral responses to eradicating sex commerce. Shih offers the example of Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), an evangelical paramilitary organisation whose staff of ‘former US Army and Navy enlistees and former Seals, FBI agents, police officers, and special-operations military personnel’ carry out ‘civilian-led raid-and-rescue efforts around the world’ (2023: 136). In Thailand, OUR works to bolster the capacity of the country's Department of Special Investigations and the Royal Thai Police. But foreign sex workers ‘rescued’ in such raids have been ‘fined and then designated for deportation’ (Shih 2023: 154). In other words, these so-called modern-day abolitionists work directly against the aims of border abolitionism.

As shown, the books reviewed here each contribute greatly to a critical anthropology of borders. With ethnographic insight and analytical nuance, their authors privilege the standpoints of mobile populations, expose the violence of border regimes and contest the rationalisation of border apartheid. What they ultimately reveal is that the border is not simply a geopolitical demarcation; it is an unequal social relation enforced by violence.

STEPHEN CAMPBELL

Nanyang Technological University

Singapore

stephen.campbell@ntu.edu.sg