Search

Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but instead illustrate how both positions reproduce a powerful anthropocentrism that effaces the entanglements and coordinations between humans and nonhumans in border spaces. Drawing from fieldwork with customs officers, immigration officers and airport managers at a UK and a European airport, we illustrate how border agents navigate a turbulent ‘cycle’ of automation that continually overturns assumed hierarchies between humans and technology. The coordinated practices engendered by institutional culture, material infrastructures, drug loos and sniffer dogs cannot be captured by a reductive account of automated borders as simply confirming or denying a predetermined, data-driven in/out decision.

What happens when violence disappears? What is left in the backwash of crisis? Who attends to the emotional, material and ideational detritus of closing borders? Like many, we are working in the aftermath of the recent and deadly intensification of EU migration. We contest the widespread account that the ‘crisis’ is now over – that policymakers have effectively ‘solved’ the problem of migration by gathering undocumented subjects into infrastructures of containment. We focus instead on the painful traces of EU migration that continue to be produced by global structures of citizen/alien, legal/illegal, friend/enemy. We do not produce a comprehensive diagnosis, normative argument or critical framework. Instead, we rest awhile in the aftermath of the crisis – specifically on the Greek island of Kos – to think about questions of abandonment, erasure and displacement. This is a visual essay representing a conversation between two researchers as they interact with the aftermath of the refugee crisis on Kos. Reflecting on select images from September 2016, we present a dialogue that directly speaks to a core theme each image raises. In doing so, we question some of the basic assumptions about how to do critical analysis on migration, security and borders, and therefore seek to disrupt dominant modes of academic writing as well as the practice of research itself.

This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism responses that brought the everyday lives of tourists and tourism workers, as well as the material infrastructure of the tourism industry, within the orbit of a global security apparatus waging a ‘war on terror’. Drawing on critical work in international relations and geography, this article understands the securitization of tourism as part of a much wider logic in which the liberal order enacts pernicious modes of governance by producing a terrorist threat that is exceptional. It explores how this logic is reproduced through a cosmopolitan community symbolized by global travellers, and examines the measures taken by the tourism industry to secure this community (e.g. the physical transformations of hotel infrastructure and the provision of counter-terrorism training).

This paper explores the Late Photography of War created in the aftermath of conflict, violence, and atrocity and makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that the belatedness, absence, and ruin central to the Late Photography of War have the capacity to trouble the ethical viewing relations underscoring one of the dominant interpretive frameworks of war photography—that of pity. Rather than reproducing a familiar logic in which benevolent viewers are privileged over foreign landscapes and abject victims, these photographs foreground a more ambivalent set of viewing relations which elongates the moment of encounter between the viewer and the picture. Secondly, the paper explores this ambivalence through a common but unexamined motif in Late Photography: the juxtaposition of leisure and war. Focusing on the material detritus of leisure facilities that populate the photographs of Simon Norfolk and Angus Boulton (eg, bullet-marked hotels, wrecked swimming pools), the paper suggests that the tentative formations of solidarity between viewers and the ghosts populating these images constitute a provocative alternative viewing relation.

This article examines the role of contemporary art in a post-9/11 context through The American Effect exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2003. This exhibition displayed a range of artworks from around the world that specifically engaged with, commented upon and interrogated the USA's pre-eminent position as a global superpower. In the politically charged climate after 9/11, the exhibition offered itself as a critical voice amid the more obvious patriotic clamour: it was one of the places where Americans could ask (and answer) the question, `Why do they hate us so much?' Although The American Effect claimed to be a space of dissent, it ultimately failed to question, let alone challenge, US global hegemony. Instead, the exhibition articulated a benevolent patriotism that forced artwork from other nations into supplicating and abject positions, and it obscured the complex discursive networks that connect artists, curators, critics, audiences and art museums.

This paper examines how experiences of the sublime are regulated in the war exhibitions of modern museums. Ambivalence is a key feature of the sublime because subjects are forced to negotiate simultaneous feelings of terror and awe in the face of something unrepresentable like war. This paper analyses how war exhibitions dispel ambivalence by resuscitating a Kantian sublime full of resolution, catharsis and transcendence. In this context, potentially destabilising encounters with horrific objects (e.g. guns, bombs, shrapnel) are neutralised by didactic `Lessons of War' and celebratory narratives of victory. Using examples from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Imperial War Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution, this paper illustrates how conventional war exhibitions reproduce a politics of consensus by carefully managing the experience of the sublime.

Traditionally, the political murals of Belfast have been understood as expressions of either loyalist or republican communities, a reading that reduces the complex struggles of Northern Ireland into a simple conflict between two groups. This article rereads the murals through the specific context of the peace process, in which the “two communities” thesis is losing its relevance. It suggests that when the murals are understood through three, wider networks—production, signification, and reception—it is possible to see how they disrupt ongoing debates about public art, make explicit gestures to other international conflicts (such as the hunger strikers in Turkey), and encourage a new form of political tourism. Rereading the murals in this way reveals the multiple global networks that the city of Belfast is linked into, networks that are silenced by a traditional “two communities” framework.