Abolition is a tool which allows us to understand the violence of state control in relation to borders and global movement. Borders are the site of a contemporary locus for the spectre of the migrant, the refugee, the other, the stranger. In her book, Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed explains how the stranger has been constructed as a figure of fear:

the figure of the ‘stranger’ is produced, not as that which we fail to recognise, but as that which we have already recognised as ‘a stranger’

Immigration is often blamed by governments, think tanks, and societies at large for many of the ills of society. Journalists in particular bear a profound responsibility for how we report on the global movement of people and of state actions that profess to protect borders. Despite what the Refugee Council calls a “tiny” proportion of UK asylum seekers, “2024 was the deadliest year on record for Channel crossings, with at least 69 deaths reported.”

Figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) from 2022 show that more people are leaving the UK than arriving into it. Amnesty International Refugee and Migrant Rights Director Steve Valdez-Symonds said:

Migration is economically, socially and culturally enriching but a toxic political debate on immigration is doing pointless harm – both to specific communities and to the wider country as a whole.

A political obsession with numbers is going hand-in-hand with racist Government policies and hateful rhetoric, particularly against those seeking asylum.

The British movement for the abolition of borders is a growing response to the tragedy of refugees dying whilst trying to get to safety. It is also a response to the inaction, and sometimes outright hostility of governments towards immigrants and refugees.

How Do Borders Work?

In Against Borders: The Case for Abolition, Gracie May Bradley and Luke de Noronha explain:

What do borders do? In conventional accounts, borders establish where one country ends and another begins. They are lines on maps, permanent and taken for granted. Borders delineate a country’s territory and mediate the movement of people and goods in and out.

Borders may feel as though they have always existed but they are a modern construction: a way of separating global capital and the direct product of colonialism. The abolition of borders is intended to eventually make borders a thing of the past, with free movement of people. Whilst this is an ambitious goal, we must remember that goods and labour already have free movement. Products for sale, and cheap labour from underpaid and mistreated workers, are a key part of modern capitalism. Border abolition is not something that can be achieved immediately, it is an alternative vision of the future and, as Bradley and de Noronha argue:

It is concerned with presence: the presence of life-sustaining goods, services and practices of care. And it is concerned with absence: of violent state practices such as detention and deportation. In a world like this, borders would become obsolete.

Abolition of borders means working towards a vision of the future where people can rely on their communities, and work and live together without states imposing borders that exacerbate racial violence, capitalist excess, and border-related conflicts.

What Can Journalists Do?

The media has no small part to play in setting the tone for how we discuss borders, refugees, and government policy on immigration. A 2022 paper in the academic journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found that:

media representations turn refugees into ‘migrants’ and portray them as either a threat to the national economy and security or as passive victims of distant circumstances.

A report from the Runnymede Trust also found that:

large sectors of the media and parliament engaged in widespread hostility towards migrants long before the announcement of the ‘hostile environment’ was made by Theresa May in May 2012.

In order to investigate how journalists can report on borders whilst using a framework of decolonial and anti-racist practice, I led a project at Opus Independents called Give Over. We were a small group of journalists and artists who researched and produced work to encourage more journalists to write more equitably about borders and immigration.

Our toolkit provides comprehensive advice for journalists interested in expanding their definitions of objectivity and using critiques of capitalism and colonialism in their work. This is certainly not a new innovation – many journalists of colour have been producing innovative journalism that provides robust critiques of state power and visions of alternative futures. The stakes are too high to continue to allow racist reporting on immigration and global movements to set the political agenda.

The toolkit provides a set of guidelines for how journalists, and anyone interested in how immigration is discussed in the media, can engage with theories of border abolition. Importantly, the toolkit is centred around understanding how traditional Western models of ‘good journalism’ are inherently tied up with ideas of being neutral and unbiased. Instead, Give Over is an exploration of how expressions of grief, pain, and loss from racialised minorities have a place within journalism.

The Question of Palestine

Midway through our project, it became increasingly clear that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Palestine. And, every day there was footage of Palestinian journalists being hunted down for doing their jobs. Here we had a prime example of exactly what our research had been trying to explore. Borders cannot be understood without also reckoning with colonialism and capitalism. As Harsha Walia explains:

Borders maintain hoarded concentrations of wealth accrued from colonial domination while ensuring mobility for some and containment for most—a system of global apartheid determining who can live where and under what conditions.

States spend increasingly significant amounts of money and resources on defending borders. But, state safety is built upon keeping people out, keeping resources scarce, and maintaining the lie of invading immigrants. Abolition brings together critiques of capitalism and colonialism to become a tool that can meet the heavy burden of modern-day geopolitics. These were the conclusions we were reaching in our research, and there they were playing out in tragic fashion in Palestine.

At the end of our project, the ceasefire in Gaza has been announced and Palestinians are finally given a moment to breathe. It may well be a moment only, given Israel has killed more civilians in violation of the ceasefire, but it is a crucial moment nonetheless. After 470 days of genocide in Palestine, there are finally images of joy, relief, and grief in Gaza as people are able to take stock and embrace their loved ones. Amongst the images from the early days of the ceasefire have been numerous Palestinian journalists symbolically removing their press vests as they are able to pause reporting.

What we have witnessed over the past 15 months has been a hugely costly lesson in journalistic practice and ethics. Palestinian journalists have risked their lives and their families’ lives to report on the genocide of their own people. Without them documenting and reporting on the atrocities carried out by the Israeli army whilst their own colleagues were brutally killed around them, the world would know much less about the unrelenting atrocities carried out by the Israeli army.

However, such journalism is not lauded in the West where objectivity is the yardstick for prestige in journalism. Mainstream media in the UK often reach for a standard of objectivity rooted in the separation of the journalist from society. I led the project Give Over at Opus Independents alongside journalists and artists to use the abolition of borders as a framework to encourage more journalists to write more equitably about borders and immigration.

The full toolkit can be read here.

Maryam Jameela

The Give Over Toolkit: The Case Against Borders