External resources relating to Border militarisation

King Abdullah II of Jordan is meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday, for working talks that the Jordanian Embassy describes as covering "the strategic partnership" between the two countries. In addition to discussing the flood of Syrian refugees into Jordan — there are now 750,000 of them — the Embassy also says that the two will "tackle global efforts to combat terrorism and extremism across the Middle East, Africa, and the world." The White House mentions the talks in the president's daily schedule, noting the two will discuss "efforts to counter ISIL (and) resolve the Syrian conflict," using the US government's favorite acronym for the Islamic State group.

But that's a very reductive description of what the monarch and the president are likely to talk about. There's a major war going on across the Hashemite Kingdom's northern and eastern border, and much about Jordan's military role in that war won't likely be the subject of press releases. But the border is undoubtedly somewhere buried in the briefing books. The Obama administration is spending close to a half a billion dollars to build a sophisticated electronic fence along Jordan's northern and eastern borders, a wall which US strategic planners hope will stem the flow of refugees and also wall off the increasingly important American base from the disintegration of Syria and Iraq.

The refugee crisis has illuminated how “Fortress Europe” acts as the complementary side of a neoliberal, deeply antidemocratic, and authoritarian “European integration.” It has killed the hopes of a left which believed it was possible to break from neoliberalism within the framework of the EU, as “European values” became an alibi for the display of imperialist violence and hypocrisy.

The Mediterranean’s role as the graveyard of Fortress Europe — and southern Europe’s role as its guards — is not new. The “externalization” of the EU border started in the early 1990s and acts as the indispensable supplement to the “free movement of capital, goods, and people” inside the EU — with the movement of “people” always posing the most problems.

Concretely, externalization means the militarization of the border, with the support of increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance; and the transformation of the external and the internal periphery of the EU into a vast “buffer zone” which acts as a lethal barrier, a filter, and a prison for all those lives excluded from the full humanity of the white, European, Western citizenry...

Abstract: While the democratic paradigm of governance and its constituent political processes are well established in Australia, consistently negative media representations of people seeking asylum may be viewed as justification for institutional decisions allowing continued punitive treatment of people seeking asylum on Australian shores. Historically, notions of Australian sovereignty exist as a changing discourse with reference to land claims and the Australian Indigenous population (O’Dowd 2011; Due 2008). However, in terms of contemporary political claims about Australia’s need to enforce border protection policies, notions of sovereignty are consistently framed through the themes, images and language of military discourses. Media scholar, John Street suggests that although there is disagreement about whether specific political outcomes can be attributed to press influence, the role of television in politics has been more comprehensively established as shaping broader world views in regards to ideas, values and practices that are considered ‘common-sense’ (Street 2011; Craig 2013). This paper argues that the increasing role of the military in the treatment and processing of people seeking asylum may be justified, through repetitive negative media representations of asylum seekers which secures public support for such practices, thereby undermining the very principles of the democratic paradigm, and indeed the role of the media or ‘fourth estate’(Schultz 1998) in a functioning democracy.

Private security companies in Israel play an active role in the occupation of Palestinian land and control over Palestinian people. Private security guards operate checkpoints and guard settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These security guards have policing powers, they bear arms and are entitled to use force in performing their duties. In the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the private security guards, who are hired by the state of Israel to guard the settlements, de facto serve as a private police force that serves the settlers population. The employment of private security guards enables state authorities to provide security services only to the settlers, without acknowledging or meeting the security needs of the Palestinian communities around the settlements. This situation creates an inherent inequality between the Palestinian and the Jewish population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Under the severe military regime that has been in place in the occupied territories since 1967, some three and a half million Palestinians are denied basic rights and liberties and subjected to repressive violence by Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers, under the protection of different security bodies. The power of the Israeli authorities over the Palestinian people is imposed, among other means, by restrictions on the movement of Palestinians through various mechanisms, such as checkpoints, curfews and detentions.

In the West Bank, over two million Palestinians are divided between dozens of fragmented enclaves, which are surrounded by a system of roadblocks, walls and checkpoints, as well as by Israeli settlements and roads designated for the exclusive use of Israelis. The Palestinians who live in these enclaves are deprived of basic rights and needs, such as the right to have a home and a family and the right to work, acquire an education and have access to basic healthcare services. Large areas of the West Bank are either closed off to Palestinian movement altogether or require extremely rare entry permits.

The Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian territory (hereinafter: oPt) is implemented through various security and police forces. In recent decades, many military responsibilities were handed over to private civilian companies, turning the private security industry into one of the fastest growing industries in Israel. Private security companies guard settlements and construction sites in the oPt, and some are also in charge of the day-to-day operation, security and maintenance of Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza.

This report aims to expose and describe the involvement of private security companies in West Bank and East Jerusalem checkpoints and settlements. The report analyzes the privatization of the checkpoints, mainly along the Separation Wall, the operation of checkpoints and the outsourcing process in West Bank settlements. It highlights the role of private security guards in the systematic oppression of the Palestinian population.

This infographic uses news stories from September and October 2015 to highlight key examples of excessive use of force by Israeli soldiers and police against Palestinians in the latest escalations across the OPT.

On August 27, the new Australian Border Force (ABF) put out a press release explaining that, as part of something called Operation Fortitude, ABF officials would be stopping passers-by in inner-city Melbourne and demanding to see their visas...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced the start of construction of a fence along Israel's border with Jordan after calls for Tel Aviv to take in Syrian refugees.

Netanyahu said on Sunday that he would not allow Israel to be "submerged by a wave of illegal migrants and terrorist activists".

"Israel is not indifferent to the human tragedy of Syrian and African refugees... but Israel is a small country, very small, without demographic or geographic depth. That is why we must control our borders", he said at the weekly cabinet meeting according to his office...

Police in Hungary used tear gas on refugees trying to cross into the country from Serbia on Wednesday — the latest in several recent incidents in which member states of the European Union used force against asylum seekers, in what experts say may be a violation of international law.

Hungarian politicians resolved to send mounted police, dogs and even helicopters to the area in order to stem the tide of refugees pouring in each day, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said the lawmakers would debate a possible military deployment next week.

Hungary is not the only European country to turn its refugee crisis into a law-enforcement issue...

Fights broke out Tuesday among migrants on the Greek island of Kos, where overwhelmed authorities are struggling to contain increasing numbers of people arriving on rubber dinghies from the nearby Turkish shore.

Hundreds of protesting migrants demanding quick registration began blocking the main coastal road in the island's main town, staging a sit-in.

"We want papers! We want to eat!" they chanted...

Beefed-up security appeared to stem the number of migrants from a refugee camp in Calais traveling illegally to England via the Channel Tunnel on Thursday, as the British and French governments discuss emergency measures to stop them.

Police counted several hundred attempts to enter the premises of the Eurotunnel terminal in the French port city, down significantly from the roughly 2,300 registered the night before.

Authorities arrested about 300 of the roughly 800 to 1,000 migrants estimated to be present at the site...

Abstract: This article analyses a certain 'thickening of the border,' a term I coin to underscore a certain blurring of the insides and outsides of the United States with respect to Latin American, primarily Mexican, immigration.  In making this intervention, the article underscores the linkages among a dark legacy of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (ICRA), the militarization of Border Patrol policing practices in the southwestern United States, and "Secure Communities," a mammoth immigration policing programme across much of the United States.

With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, “You can’t go in there, give me back your badges.”

The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it...

It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar through significant parts of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Imagine instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of U.S. Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore.  There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash clothes on rocks.

One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards, carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were in a Middle Eastern war zone.

If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on the U.S. southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an import from the United States...

I mean, come on.  You knew it had to happen, didn’t you?  In a 2010 Department of Homeland Security report, wrested from the bowels of the secrecy/surveillance state (thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation), the Customs and Border Protection agency suggests arming their small fleet of surveillance drones.  The purpose: to “immobilize TOIs,” or targets of interest, along the U.S.-Mexican border.  Those arms would, of course, be “non-lethal” in nature.  It’s all so civilized.  Kinda like the Star Trek folks putting their phasers on “stun,” not kill.  And count on it, sooner or later it will happen.  And then, of course, the lethal weapons will follow.  Otherwise, how in the world could we track and eliminate terrorists in “the homeland” efficiently?...

Before September 11, 2001, more than half the border crossings between the United States and Canada were left unguarded at night, with only rubber cones separating the two countries. Since then, that 4,000 mile “point of pride,” as Toronto’s Globe and Mail once dubbed it, has increasingly been replaced by a U.S. homeland security lockdown, although it’s possible that, like Egyptian-American Abdallah Matthews, you haven’t noticed...

William “Drew” Dodds, the salesperson for StrongWatch, a Tucson-based company, is at the top of his game when he describes developments on the southern border of the United States in football terms. In his telling, that boundary is the line of scrimmage, and the technology his company is trying to sell -- a mobile surveillance system named Freedom-On-The-Move, a camera set atop a retractable mast outfitted in the bed of a truck and maneuvered with an Xbox controller -- acts like a “roving linebacker"...

On a particularly dark stretch on the two lane road that traverses the reservation, a group of men appear in the opposite lane in the headlights of our vehicle and are waving at us to stop. They are a group of people without papers from Chiapas—hungry, thirsty, and visibly injured—migrating north through the Tohono O'odham Nation. This Native American reservation is increasingly becoming ground zero for the Border Patrol on the Arizona-Mexico border.

The report, Preach What You Practice: The Separation of Military and Police Roles in the Americas, from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) provides a background briefing on key distinctions between military and police functions. It calls on the Obama Administration to change direction, and stop encouraging the military forces of other countries to take on roles that would be illegal for the U.S. Armed Forces to carry out at home. The authors, a team of WOLA’s regional security experts, set out specific steps to be taken by both United States and countries in the region.

South African special forces troops have begun a six-month deployment along the troubled border with Zimbabwe, where rape, robbery and other crimes are commonplace, and the flow of desperate migrants continues unabated.

"This is a battle to stop people coming across the border illegally - it is not a war. The soldiers know they [migrants] are just trying to survive. It's very different from what they are trained to do, and it is very difficult," Colonel Gert Faul, the South African National Defence Force commander in Limpopo Province, told IRIN.

Two companies of Parabats - elite South African paratroopers deployed in recent years to Sudan, DRC and Burundi as peacekeepers - have arrived at a highly porous border in the first phase of a deployment that will see soldiers from various units return to all South Africa's land borders in the next few years...

Abstract: The intensification of militarized violence, racist terror and destructive dehumanization across the globe makes it imperative to examine the corresponding formations of securocratic regimes in the centres of power.  With a focus on a united Europe, my essay interrogates the ubiquitous penetration of militarization into everyday life-worlds.  My research suggests that in these interior borderlands, emergent cultures of militarization are normalized by recourse to racialization, criminalization and securitization, which in turn gives rise to new intimacies of violence, dehumanization and othering within expanding networks of fortification in a self-proclaimed white society.

Under the agreement, Mexico will rapidly expand a programme under which migrants applying for asylum in the US wait out the process in Mexico. It has also pledged to reinforce its southern border with Guatemala with 6,000 members of its National Guard militarised police force.

Police and security guards secure the fences and fire the teargas. But many other organisations and individuals play just as essential roles in the Calais border regime. Click on the headings below to see profiles on some of the “key decision makers” involved...