 Hello, everyone. Hello, my name is Manan Ahmed. I work in an adjacent building. And I am of an adjacent field. I'm a historian. And I wanted to start by congratulating Laura and Dare for just a wonderful set of talks and panels all day. And at least for me, has been tremendously both inspiring but also generative. So thank you for all of the work that has gone on to it. We have our last panel before our keynote. And I know we're running slightly behind. So what I'll do is quickly introduce our two speakers who are both representing two teams. All members are not here precisely because in one case, I've been told as a result of border crossing. And so I think that we can add that to our list of questions to raise. So this panel is concerned with cities without borders, with odds and frontiers. And what's interesting to me listening to the last two panels since Wendy's excellent keynote is that mapping, which is perhaps the, I would argue, the first and most successful colonial technology that has done more to shape both colonized bodies and colonized geographies, remains an unsettled presence in our midst. And part of that unsettlement is that maps and lines on maps are always embodied and material. And borders are perhaps the most manifest reality of that embodiment and that reality. So we have two, as I said, two speakers representing two collectives. Let me introduce the two speakers who will be speaking. We'll have Sebastian Cobarubias, who is an assistant professor at the Global Studies Department at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, the PhD in human geography from UNC Chapel Hill. And we have Lorenzo Pezzani, who is an architect and a researcher, and a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London, and is the co-founder with Charles Heller of Watch the Med platform. And Sebastian is the co-founder with Maribel Casas-Cortez, who's not here, who's also at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So please welcome the first speaker. Lorenzo, right? Charles. Who'd go for it? Thank you. And oh. So it's mine. So they did sit up on that first. Oh, OK. So it's really good. All right. OK. Sorry. We are confused. We thought, like, was the other way around. Yeah, yeah, sure, no worries. All right, thanks a lot for the introduction and for the invitation, especially Laura. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be here. And as you know, we have been following and admiring the work of the Center for many years. So it's really great to be here with you today. And as it was said, I mean, it was a bit of like last minute surprise that it was that I'm here on my own and that Charles Heller, who is my partner in this project, could not come. And obviously, the bitter irony of a panel on border having his members kind of out by border control, it will not be lost, hopefully. So these reflections really emerge that I'm going to share with you today emerge from the context of a project called Forensic Oceanography, which is the kind of bigger umbrella in the frame of which we have worked on this project, what you made that was mentioned earlier, which Charles and I have initiated in 2011 in the wake of the Arab uprisings. And it's a project that somehow tries to document and analyze the special and aesthetic conditions that have led to more than 30,000 deaths over 30 years across the Mediterranean Sea. And so it's a project that sits somehow across different disciplines and impetus and between investigative journalism and activism and scholar research and spatial analysis. But really at the core of this, it's an attempt to somehow expose the violence that we would argue it's a structural product of border control and try somehow to attribute responsibility for it. What I'm going to do today is also try to link, to kind of address the context, the specific context of this conference, try to link it to a new project or rather I should say the project of a project that we are somehow starting with Charles and that tries to establish some sort of parallel between the space of the sea and the space of the city. So it goes like this. In May 2012, the then UK Home Secretary Theresa May announced in an interview to The Daily Telegraph the introduction of new groundbreaking legislation in the field of immigration control. The aim of these new measures she emphatically declared with language that the journalist that was interviewing her described as uncharacteristically vivid is to create and I'm quoting, sorry is and I'm quoting her to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration. Work is underway, she further explained to deny illegal immigrants access to work, housing and services, even bank accounts. So with the passing of two successive bills in subsequent years, getting a job, renting a flat, using a bank, driving a car, getting access to medical care and education, all those activities and services one might argue the intensity of which has been taken by some as an index, as a measure somehow of urbanity as have been transformed into a crucial tool of border control. While the legislation obviously extend across the whole country, it is in urban areas that it works best. If the urban can be understood in the words of Abdul Malik Simon as a huge intersection of bodies in need and with desire, sorry, as a huge intersection of bodies in need and with desires in part propelled by the sheer numbers of them or as argued by Rosarito Adams as an apparatus of circulation, it is clear that it is the intensity and speed of urban interactions and the data, especially the data that these interaction generate that is of interest to the government here and that makes of the urban a perfect locus of border enforcement. So as somebody who as I was saying for the past six years has been invested in analyzing the multifarious ways in which the Mediterranean Sea has been progressively but relentlessly transformed into the deadless crossing in the world, the epicenter of those landscape of death that global borders represent, the turning of cities into hostile environments carry a nearer resemblance, which does not only make possible but I would argue even demands that we forge a conceptual language and somehow a conceptual optics that would allow us to see and understand these processes together as different but intimately interconnected expression of the same apparatus of border control and of its expansive multi-scalar reach as Sebastian will also I'm sure argue later. Here the distinction between what is supposedly natural and what is artificial between cities understood as human feats on the one side and ocean, deserts and mountains as natural accidents on the other is fundamentally put in question and blur. So this emerges very clearly for example and has been most fully theorized in the context of the Mexico-U.S. borders where the notion of prevention through deterrents was adopted by U.S. border guards as early as 1993. This enforcement strategy calls for the deployment of massive numbers of agents along the sections of the border that are easier to cross, usually around urban areas. These concentrations in turn lead migrants who attempt to cross in deserts or other inhospitable areas often leading to cases of death. So prevention through deterrents somehow reveals how the desert and its physical characteristics have been enlisted, deployed and earnest as a crucial mechanism of border control. These terrains constitute my argue an already natural boundary due to their physical characteristics but at the same time those very characteristics are weaponized in order to turn them into a style environment. So there is a process of design at work in the becoming deadly of the deserts, ocean and mountains ranges that have been taken as border lands, right? And there is a concept that Elizabeth Gross uses of geo-powered, she calls this geo-power referring to the ways in which natural environment kind of, you know, sustain or put in danger life. And I would argue, let's say here we see how this process of design kind of deploys geo-power according to very specific policies and practices. So these processes are particularly visible in the area in which, as I've already mentioned, my research has been focusing over the past few years, i.e. the Mediterranean Sea. There are obviously many factors that have contributed to this weaponization of the Mediterranean, some of which start very well before the physical location of the border, right? And of course, you know, one of the main factor is the denial of visa that push people into this both that then shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, I've spoken in more detail about how the complex and overlapping jurisdictions at sea that you can see represented here play a fundamental role in creating the conditions that structurally led to the death of migrant at sea. Today, however, I like to focus more specifically on the role of media and surveillance technologies and even more specifically on the ways in which these produce selective conditions of appearance and disappearance, of audibility and inaudibility, of visibility and invisibility, and how this aesthetic regime is crucial in the process of weaponization that I've just mentioned. So contrary to the popular representation of the maritime territory as a no more genius and empty expanse, the sea appears today, and that's something that, you know, we're very concerned with in our work, the sea appears today, in fact, as a technologically mediated space, thick with events and complex relations between people, environments, and data. A vast sensing apparatus constantly records, transmits, and store, and broadcasts information about what happens at sea. So many of these technologies were not originally deployed with the purpose of water control, but still there are somehow integrated into it, and you see here, you know, kind of classic oceanographic observational techniques, and, you know, an example from how, you know, meteorological data is also collected and used. Vessel tracking technologies such as this one, and I'll talk a bit more about AIS, this specific asset tracking technology later. This is like a screen for a chart plotter on board one of the fishing vessels of the trolling fleet in the south of Sicily, in Mazzara del Vallo, where basically they record with GPS all the kind of, you know, the places where they've been fishing over the past few years. Others of these means are specifically geared at detecting illegalized border crossing. So you see here, like optical cameras, radars of various sorts, coastal radars that are deployed along the coast of Italy, in this case, as well as satellite imagery that is also routinely used to, you know, to detect illegalized migration. All of these different sources and different kind of feeds of information are there combined and contribute to create what's, you know, in jargon is called an integrated maritime picture where, you know, again, all these feeds are, you know, brought together and displayed on a cartographic background, let's say. The sensorium, then, has come to play also a very important role in the context of the policing of migration across the Mediterranean. Insofar as states use it to shed light on acts of unauthorized border crossing. However, despite the optimistic promises of full spectrum visibility that are ubiquitous in state agencies and surveillance companies' community case, the Mediterranean scopic system does not produce a totalizing panoptic view, but rather operates a form of incomplete and patch surveillance that constantly run up against the frontiers of information quantity and resolution. And here you see, like, an old slide from the European Commission Joint Research Center that shows the kind of intensity with which satellite imagery is acquired over specific areas of the sea, as opposed to others where, basically, there is none over a certain amount of time. This is why, similar to what happens along the US-Mexico border, as I was mentioning earlier, the control of the US maritime frontier also focused on what security consultancy companies have defined as focal roots, which they say account for more than 70, 80% of the tactic cases of illegal immigration by sea and whose location are dictated by geography. So it's usually, let's say, straight or narrow passages where European countries lie close to almost touching the coast of Northern Africa or the Middle East, right? So Gibilter and the Sicily Channel as well as the EGM. These places of somehow logistical tension are the ones where the surveillance required, and again, I'm quoting from this kind of consultancy companies writing, I was saying where the surveillance required is highly intensive, detailed, and semi-permanent in virtually constant areas. Rather than stopping the inflow of illegalized migration, however, the increasing militarization and surveillance apparatus of the easiest point of crossing has instead resulted in the splintering and funneling of migration routes toward longer and more perilous areas. This is one of the main factors leading to death on a structural basis, the fact of turning the sea into an unwilling killer, while at the same time distancing the death of migrants further from the eyes of the European public and presenting them as natural, ultimately shifting the blame for them onto the sea itself, right? So usually these are really presented as somehow natural catastrophe for which no one is really responsible, right? Yet the sea can also be a witness, and our work of the last years has really been geared to try to make this point in a sense, right? BIDIA becomes both the tool to harness the geopower of the sea, but also to address and to try to contest its daily effects. AIS, a vessel tracking technology that is mandatory for sheep over a certain size and that is freely accessible on specialized online platforms, has been central to this endeavor, especially since 2014 when the involvement of merchant ships mandated to carry AIS started to be increasingly called upon by Coast Guard agencies to rescue migrants in distress in the Mediterranean. So it was at that point that tangled and zig-zag tracks unequivocally, significantly and ongoing rescue operations started to become more and more ubiquitous on online vessel tracking platforms. Thus making of AIS a privileged observation point of the shift and more generally of what was happening at sea, right? So here you see some examples. So each one is a truck of a commercial sheep, in this case, all products tanker and you see this kind of zig-zag, right? That is somehow in opposition to the usual tracks that you would see on this website, right? Where commercial traffic is going on a straight line from point A to point B. And you could really see at this moment in 2014 like this becoming more and more ubiquitous of the coast of Libya, so which is like the coast down there. Obviously, in order to carry out the rescue operation ships have to divert their course, slow down and start a kind of search pattern and turn around, return on a certain point, et cetera, et cetera. So each of these somehow became an indicator that a rescue operation was happening or had just happened. In our death by rescue report, which we published in 2016, we used this data to demonstrate how this increasing involvement of merchant ships was the direct consequence of the used decisions to deliberately shut down state-led search and rescue operations, thus leaving a large rescue gap that shifted the burden of extremely complex search and rescue operations onto commercial vessels. These are, however, these vessels as the shipping industry representative had warned on several occasions were unfit for the task and their intervention led to repeated tragedy as in April 2015 when two shipwrecks occurred at the very moment of rescue by merchant ships leading to more than 1200 deaths in a single week. So relying on AAS data, we were able to reconstruct these instances of death by private rescue and to denounce the little effects of the use policies of an assistance. And this is one of the cases that we documented, a shipwreck that happened on 18th of April 2015, and which is the largest recorded shipwreck that has happened in the Mediterranean where more than 800 people died on a single occasion. And again, you kind of see this kind of tangle of ship tracks, right? This was the ship that was mandated to go and rescue the migrants. So you have to imagine this kind of meeting point at night in the middle of the sea between this 150 meter long commercial cargo ship with 15 people of crew and a small fishing vessel, 20 meters long, more or less, with 800 people on board. And this is another map that we created for this report where I was talking earlier about this idea of design being a crucial somehow element of this turning of the sea into an hostile environment. And here you can see really a kind of design of operational zones. So in green is the operation that had been started by the Italian government called Marinostrum that was really at its main task, operating rescue. This was then accused of constituting what people were calling a pull factor. And so was interrupted and was replaced with another operation called Triton, which you see here highlighted in purple, which was patrolling much further north and with a lot less means. And especially this operation was really geared towards border control rather than rescue, right? So this is what then led to the shipwrecks that we document in our report. Vessel tracking technology is just one of the many technologies and techniques that we have used to offer an alternative reading of the ocean, transforming it, as I was suggesting, into a witness of sorts. This meant mobilizing against the grain, the vast and technological mediator sensorium which I've just described. While these technologies are often used for the purpose of policing migration, we have used them in this case as well as in many others to reconstruct and denounce the violence of the border regime instead of replicating the technological eye of policing and its untenable promise of wood spectrum visibility which shows to exercise what we call the disobedient gaze, redirecting somehow the light shed by the surveillance apparatus away from illegalized migration and back towards the act of policing itself. And again, trying to show how this was leading and it's still leading to death on a structural basis. This was somehow also made possible that by the multiplication of different sources that were kind of non-state sources of information and images and data, right? And this has to do somehow with a process that on firm land has been called citizen media and the spread of course of like smartphones, et cetera, et cetera. But also by new kind of activist practices such as the alarm form which is a project that we have been helping somehow to put in place which is a somehow emergency activist emergency outline that kind of responds 24 hours a day to distress calls from the Mediterranean as well as the ways in which more and more cameras, let's say are present at sea, right? And this is a case that we are investigating right now where there was a kind of almost violent confrontation between an NGO that was doing rescue at sea and the so-called Libyan Coast Guard which is empowered and sustained by the European Union. And so migrants were somehow in the middle and getting on board of the NGO ship meant being brought to Italy, getting onto the Libyan boat meant going back to Libya in conditions that we know are horrific. And so a kind of violent confrontation somehow ensued from this. And this is a reconstruction that we are doing based on the multitude of cameras that were installed on this NGO ship, right? And I don't know if I can play this. Oops, no, sorry. Can somebody hear? Oh, right, okay. Well, this was a video just to show you it's really kind of work in progress but just to show the kind of forest of cameras that was present on this event and that really is allowing us to reconstruct this case, right? Oh yes, now it's playing, sorry. So each of this frame is basically a picture that was taken in a short timeframe and there are also a lot of kind of GoPro videos because all the NGOs that do search and rescue kind of have mounted GoPro's on their helmets. Kind of skipping this. However, something interesting started to happen over the last year and the point I guess I'm trying to make here is that no actor has final ownership over these images, right? This kind of multiplication of media as well that has happened at sea, neither over the use of AIS or other sensing technologies. This was proven to us very clearly during the last few months in a period in which various far right groups started to use some of the very tools that we had ourselves somehow used and developed for very different purposes. You see a video that was published by a think tank called Gephira which you can see, you can read the kind of the interpretation of this, right? And it uses AIS to somehow suggest kind of conspiracy theory by which there would be, let's say, NGOs that are trying to somehow provoke an invasion of Europe by African migrants, right? That's a kind of narrative that they, you know, put onto these video and these images. Another disturbing use of AIS was the ways in which identitarian, so-called identitarian groups launch an anti-migrant, defend your own campaign and deploy their own anti-search and rescue vessel, the C-STAR that you see here, to hamper search and rescue NGOs operating in the central Mediterranean. And one of the search and rescue NGOs that they targeted proactive open arms denounced at some point the hacking of its AIS signal transmitted by its rescue vessels and the emission of a false position, right? So there is a kind of, you know, there was a process of spoofing by which they kind of, you know, transmitted the false position again to kind of make this point that NGOs are, let's say, responsible for the invasion of Europe or something like that. So here you can see clearly how somehow the battle for the opening or closure of the Mediterranean frontier was fought through AIS, through the kind of, you know, this media technology, which after having been used for several years by poor migrant activists and human rights organizations, became one of the tools employed by these far-right groups to demand even stronger exclusionary measures. So I guess one, my lament here, the fact that, you know, this kind of constant circulation of these practices and tactics might represent, but I also recognize that their multifarious contested and unstable life is the very condition for them to shape the war. And this was another very interesting use of AIS where the Italian government as well, a commission of the Italian Senate also used AIS data to kind of, you know, to show the role that NGOs, and again, it was in a process of criminalization of NGOs conducting search and rescue at sea. So where does this leave us, right? I guess, you know, I don't have like, it's a very kind of anti-climate conclusion because I don't have any major or grand point to make, but I'd just like to conclude with some questions and trying to, you know, also hopefully kind of get some input and feedback in regards to how I guess the question for us now is how can we think about some of these tools that we have used and we have engaged with in the space of the sea and bring them back to the space of the city considered as an hostile environment, right? So if border controls becomes diffused and multi-scalars, also migrants' rights and solidarity activism must somehow do the same, right? Against an idea of integrated border management that it's a jargon with which, you know, agencies like Frontex ascribe border control, that so they talk about integrated border management as something that operates at before and after the border, we also need to oppose a sort of like a form of solidarity that becomes nomadic and that could, you know, travel and accompany people, let's say, as they move across different spaces. And so this slide here just shows some of the initiatives that have been emerging in the UK in response to this hostile environment legislation. And I guess, you know, one of the aim of this kind of project in the making or in the thinking somehow would be to engage with that and try to see how spatial analysis could contribute to some of the things that they are doing in order to oppose this hostile environment legislation. And I conclude with that. Thank you. I think one question before we start, how do I get a video started? When you click next, it'll open up. Okay, thank you. All right, excuse me. Good afternoon, I'm Sebastián Cuarruvias. I wanted to say thanks also for the invitation to come and for Laura and Dare with all the back and forth and Manan for the introduction. We were excited to learn about the center while we find a lot of potential synergies with a lot of the work we're hearing about. It is very different. So it's been a lot of eye-opening as well as getting accustomed to new sorts of terms or perhaps jargon. While we don't tend to use the city or the scale of the urban as our analysis per se, hopefully we can get toward the end to some questions that we think will be relevant to think through in urban space. What we're gonna kind of do is sort of think about that when Lorenzo ended at that before and after the border. I guess we'll be talking about the before in a way. Unfortunately, as Manan mentioned, my research companion and also my wife, Maribel Casas Cortes, couldn't be here. She's kind of the other half of this research. Partly this is due to care duties and the fact that maybe our institutions as well as our cities aren't up to the task of taking on reproductive tasks that we all need to do. But also because of border issues in this case it had to do with, we were advised if you were to go that her legal presence is up, and which means that you're not supposed to travel or drive and things like that. So now we're solving that. Hopefully in our case it won't be too difficult. But we thought it was very good to have that embodied critique that the panel on borders, both for internal borders and the external borders had hacked off half of the panel. All right, but we'll get to hear her voice shortly. So what I'll be talking about is a process called border externalization or kind of how the border work, specifically the border work of managing or controlling human mobility of nation states is displaced to regions that are far from their kind of traditional or territorial boundaries. And this is based on the work we've been doing since 2010 and specifically on some maps and visuals that we gathered together for an exhibition called It's Obvious from the Map curated by Thomas Kinnum and Sohrab Mahdi. Oh, thank you. I'll play a kind of brief two and a half minute video that we used there. A bit amateur, we're not very savvy with this stuff, but that kind of helps give an introduction to what border externalization is. If I can figure out how that works. Nope, there's just talking to radio show about that stuff and now what? How do... Is that happening? Oh, it is, okay. Migration control increasingly takes place beyond the borders of destination countries. Migrant journeys are traced using advanced technology and paramilitary deployment that target migrants supposed places of origin and transit. Over the last five years of refugee crisis, the European Union has increased its bilateral agreements with non-EU countries for the containment of migration flags, strengthening collaboration with third countries on border patrolling, surveillance, and interception. Frontex, the European agency in charge of external borders, is reinforcing near real-time data sharing on border movements through national coordination centers in EU member states and partner countries. For this sharing of communication, Frontex European National Border Guards and independent research organizations, such as the ICNPD, are providing technical cooperation and training support to countries at and beyond the external frontiers of Europe. Those border practices that involve acting beyond territorial lines and in coordination with third countries are referred to as border externalization. The origins of this process of outsourcing border control, including its law-abiding tendencies, has its roots in the United States' interdiction of Haitian refugees in the early 80s. The conventional understanding of migration control has been that each nation state is in charge of their own borders at their territorial lines and through the management of visas in national embassies abroad. This traditional approach is considered incomplete among EU migration policy circles. Speaking in terms of efficient migration management, the next step is to go beyond the place and time of the entry point. It is necessary to establish a transnational cooperation for border work to track exactly where the migrant is. This system of remote control aims at tracing and managing the entirety of the migration journey. This is how the route has become a migration management concept and strategy. Illegality is constructed in ways that target border crossing before any border is crossed, making someone illegal at the very moment and place where she or he decides to migrate. Is there a mouse? Oh, someone's doing that robotically. Okay, cool. Or remotely, sorry. So the video, there's a bit of a mismatch between the audio and the visual. The visual is kind of the promo video for Euro sewer, which is what the EU and Frontex, the kind of border management coordination body of the European Union promotes as it's kind of real time, as explained, data sharing border crossing surveillance system. What we focus on specifically is kind of what happens, the information that is shared before kind of, or that builds into the information of those different coordination centers mentioned in the video, and specifically what they call border cooperation projects between countries that are designated destination, transit and origin, which are official terms. Examples of the externalization can be anything from development projects, exporting biometric technology for national ID cards to paramilitary operations. And one more final general comment, externalization can include both border work outsourced to other countries, or the ability to intervene legally or not in another country. Again, with the goal that you are enforcing your migration policy elsewhere. And that's kind of where all the dilemmas and the legal slippage begins to happen. Much of our analysis is focused on two operations, the Seahorse Project and the West Sahel Project, kind of headed by the Spanish gender arm corps, we could say, in cooperation with various North African, West African and other EU states. The next few slides then are specifically what the Guardia Civil, the Spanish gender arm, use when talking about these operations. The reasoning behind them, also specifically kind of the spatial thinking behind them, which is what I really want to get at. So when they're presenting this in different think tank or border guard meetings, there's actually like an official European day for border guards and it's fun to get all the visuals on how they imagine space. It's EU4BG. This is kind of how they present the reasoning why we have to do this, the massive immigration, as they call it. And it's sometimes important to take a step back and you see the numbers under IMM, 20 people, 92 people. And they're not seeing kind of the, I guess what you could say, the cognitive dissonance between what they're calling massive and what is really not that massive. But you can see the reasoning they're beginning to use that, well, we're not able to really manage this issue either at the limits of the continent or even at the limits of possessions like the Canary Islands there towards the upper right of the map. And that we somehow have to intradict these long, in this case maritime journeys. And to do that, we will displace our borders, right? That kind of coastline, that similar coastline that includes Southern Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal. And the ideas, these are kind of images that they use in their power points to talk about what they should deploy. If you can look kind of briefly, you'll see drones, satellites, naval frigate, as well as kind of more Coast Guard vessels. And you can see what they're aiming to get are those small kind of pateras, as they call them, fishing boats or cajucos. And kind of showing the excessive deployment to find what is really very small vessels, right? The Killa Mosquito with a sledgehammer approach. And not only temporary deployments, but also the building of what they call, again, these are specifically their slides, system architectures of communication. The large orange or red and kind of bright yellow ones are the central ones in Madrid and the Canary Islands. And then coordinate with various others, the ones that are shown here in Mauritania, Senegal, Cape Verde and Portugal. And there's been others deployed in Morocco and they were hoping, I don't know if it's been successful to get them into Mali and to Niger. So the idea of kind of communication, the communication tends to go from a cooperating country to the Spanish border guard. So there's a little horizontal communication in this case. But for what they consider to be police interdiction, it's been very effective. So for them, they say how de facto this is where the border is. And then that architecture helps to coordinate these sorts of operations, right? What looks like this sort of battleship map is actually not kind of, you can see the Spain and Mauritanian flag is not Spanish and Mauritanian boats facing off each other, they symbolize joint patrols. When you see both flags it means you have armed border guards jointly patrolling. And so then of course all the legal issues of well if a boat interdicts you under whose jurisdiction then are you interdicted? Do you fall under Mauritanian asylum law or Spanish asylum law? And all of that becomes very vague of course, right? And again that massive deployment all to get that boat. And I believe that mumbo jumbo, I apologize. Basically what they're talking about is target and they talk about the names of the different operations they're doing. I'm not sure why that slide got all fumbled up there. This is again another iteration of that logic. These operations are coordinated by Spain but they have the support of the EU Border Management Agency in this case Frontex. And Frontex is at least up until the time we finished our research. Their longest standing operation was this one off the coast of Western Africa. At times including Gambia at times not but at least Mauritania, Senegal and Cape Verde. And again that similar idea of what kind of means you deploy, what you're trying to aim at but also sort of the naturalness, right? When we, this started in 06, when we wrapped up some of the field work it was like 14, this was all the time. So it was really de facto what you might call a homeland policy having there, right? So all kinds of debates, all the agents would reply back to their interior ministries even though they're deployed in these coastal waters. The agreements with the countries were not official treaties so there was no way to get kind of open information on them but they were neither classified documents, it was very strange terrain. And so lawyers couldn't really do much either. That was just a graphic of Frontex in case people weren't familiar that's their office in Warsaw. It's the only central or eastern European country that's gotten an EU agency main office. They get the border guards. So when we were gathering documents for that exhibit in Los Angeles, Thomas and Soharab suggested why don't you grab the top 10 of these images that show kind of how border guards visualize this border as being far from their territory and how they conceive of themselves as operating in it. And as we were gathering it we mentioned this kind of old dusty document from the late 90s called the EU strategy paper on migration and asylum. And it kind of got us all excited and we thought of trying to, well with their support we were able to get Tim Stallman, a cartographer from the counter cartographies collective to help us do a quick visual of it. Because what we see here is an early geographical imaginary of concentric circles where the entire world and all the countries of the world are put into a circle of mobility and what kind of access to mobility each circle should have. I'll give a little bit of background on it before kind of getting into each circle. This was, the EU has a rotating presidency every six months and in this case this was during the Austrian presidency in 1998. We have a very geographical vision and a kind of simple geographical vision of Europe that scandalized a lot of other EU authorities and EU member states. It seemed like a very restrictive and discriminatory approach to migration because in a sense it was put out there, right? And we were sometimes reluctant to use this map and we'd seen it mentioned sporadically by some authors but we specifically noticed it was a Moroccan scholar Abdul Karim Belgandu's writing about how Morocco's policy was changing in the face of, well during the early 2000s and he says it mentions the importance of foundational importance of the spatial imaginary of this document. And so we began to engage in a bit more. And so we wanna kind of share how this document proposes how mobility should occur throughout the world divided into four concentric circles, right? The geographical imaginary very literally puts the Europe in the center, so it's Eurocentric in a very literal sense. And kind of the idea that there should be a, not exactly a diktat but kind of a suggestion of who should be able to move, who should not, towards what circle. And despite the fact that it was kind of voted down we found that it really begins to underpin a lot of the other operations that we found happened later on. It was criticized, a lot of other non EU countries criticized it of course but then it gets pursued through informal channels. One very famous one called the high level working group on migration, chaired by Germany and Holland. We didn't wanna make too much of a big deal about it initially because we thought it looked kind of like conspiracy theory. But we found that a lot of the logic kind of seeps in to a lot of the one-off operations or framework policies that we then kind of critique as happening here and happening there and then we point to a trend. We don't even need to identify the trend. They set up the strategy for us. It's not a representation of what happens on the ground but it does tie a lot of loose ends together for us. So we wanted to show how slowly but surely this spatial vision became kind of an organizing, informal organizing framework of the EU's policy of migration management. And while many of the plans and operations fail on the ground, right, we don't claim that this is what the EU border regime looks like. We think that it's designation of spaces in the world beyond the EU kind of holds intact for the most part with friction of course, in terms of there's a pushback but in terms of how the EU visualizes it or at least their border management authorities visualize it. Briefly. One thing I want to mention is if you've been familiar with the critique of fortress Europe and the fencing or the detention centers, one thing that was very interesting in this document we found out was that already in 1998 the policymakers were suggesting we need to go beyond a fortress Europe. We need a global approach towards managing mobility. And so this is promoted as a kind of a global approach. Excuse me, I'm still recuperating from the flu. The first circle, and I'll kind of interspersed this with quotes from the document, is formed by EU member states, as well as states that do not cause emigration. Those are kind of the light gray, that was their understanding back then. States that were capable of fulfilling Schengen standards of control, Schengen about the free movement area in the EU. And countries in general that have become target countries on account of their advanced economic and political situation. The second circle would consist of what there are called transit countries, which no longer generate emigration they say are not significant, significant amounts, but on account of a relatively stable internal economic and political situation, except only very limited control procedures and don't accept much responsibility for migration policy, quote unquote. This second circle at the time would include some countries that then became later EU members, that were neighbors of Schengen and what they call perhaps the Mediterranean area. The idea that being that these country systems should be brought gradually into line with first circle standards. The third circle would form countries of both emigration and transit. They mentioned Soviet Union, or well former Soviet Union, Turkey, North Africa, and these countries would be required to facilitate primarily transit checks and combating smuggler networks. The role for different circles and for governments in different circles was distinct. The fourth one, the outermost, would consist of countries of emigration, apparently what they say are beyond European political muscle, this is the quote, and they mentioned specifically, again in quotes, the Middle East, China, and in the non-redacted version, Black Africa, that is the term they use. These countries are encouraged to eliminate push factors. You don't combat smuggling here, you eliminate push factors. Rewards would follow to each country if they meet the obligations arising from their designation in a circle, as they put it here, quote, for example, second circle countries must meet Schengen standards as a precondition for EU membership or for advanced trading status. For the third circle, intensified economic cooperation is linked to the fulfillment of their obligations, and the fourth circle, the extent of development aid can be assessed on that basis, on the basis of cooperation. So we see a very Euro concentric vision of mobility, very apparent, and what this helped us to do is, again, frame those single study cases into an overall, wait, that's not supposed to be there, but okay, an overall logic, right? We run into different projects and policy plans. This one is called the European neighborhood policy on the left, the first countries that will have advanced trading status with the EU, and the kind of migration policy they're supposed to have is supposed to be up to almost Schengen standards, at least in terms of control, not in terms of free movement. A project that we focused on, West Sahel, is all about combating facilitator networks or smuggling networks. So what we see is that even though these policies post-date that document by 10 years or more, they're really following that same logic of these concentric circles. Now, one thing is that the concentration circles seem a little bit static. What can come out of that would be interesting to follow, especially since countries are gonna move from circle to circle, right? This can't be all as the EU proposes, of course. And one of the, let me move quickly here. One of the ways that this spatial imaginary actually is operationalized is through something that we call, sorry, something that we study called migration routes management. This is a strategy that the EU proposes in 2005, where you see the kind of knowledge that emerges from the circle thinking, the concentric circle thinking, and how it kind of tries to predict future movement based on itineraries that are traced and then officially mapped. And we looked specifically at the work of a think tank called the International Center on Migration Policy Development, which is awarded a lot of funds to conduct this work and how they try to help the EU carry out this routes management approach. So the idea was if the concentric circles designate countries into a mobility zone, the route strategy tries to operationalize it by identifying relationships between circles according to what they identify as migrant itineraries, whether they actually reflect migrant mobilities as a whole nother question. So if a route traversed countries in various circles, then the idea was those countries had to cooperate as destination transit and origin countries and establish different strategies in each country in order to either lower the pressure of the route or to close the route as sometimes they officially explicitly say. So you kind of, in a sense, you're sort of chopping a lot of mobility, right? There's no intra-African migration here, which is much larger than the migration going towards Europe. It's mostly focused on identifying hubs, spokes, or sometimes what they call nodes, and then finding out where, if those are origins, transits, destination is only Europe, apparently. So that doesn't really account. And then articulating a kind of process of cooperation amongst countries along that route. So there's a lot that can be said about those maps and their visual work. Countries have no names. They only use ISO codes for that. But we can perhaps get to that later. What we kind of began to identify is that the route itself becomes a border zone, or even an itinerant border, right? If we talked about maps that move, maybe we can talk about borders that move here. And that the route hides all the... Just to reflect on something I said in the last talk by Lea, this kind of maps hide all the frictions, the time spent along the route, the blockages. And when we would bring some of this research into one of the... We were doing this mostly when we were living in Spain and participating with a migrant rights association, we would screen these maps to the people being mapped, right? And they would talk about that frustration and how they wanted to create, in a sense, a series of countermaps, mostly just to work through this process of what it meant to kind of be mapped. There are more examples. They have animated versions of the map where you can follow the development of routes. Frontex and other institutions also taken on this route's logic and kind of made it more dramatic, right? So this frontex, this is their version of the route and how you have this kind of overwhelming pressure towards especially Italy and elsewhere. There was a recent artistic exhibit in New York called The Unwanted Population that focused on actually planning together a bunch of these different maps from different agencies, such as the ICMPD, the International Organization Migration Frontex, and kind of creating more aesthetically pleasing clauses of it. I just mentioned that because it happened recently here. So this sort of logic of border agencies doing this kind of mapping has been sort of spreading to other agencies. Some of the slides kind of got a little misplaced, but let me mention one of the things that we sort of see here, and this is very incipient in terms of actually being created on something visual that could accompany it. It's very clearly a very, at least in attempt, colonial ordering of populations and of territories. We also found interesting that in the initial iteration of the routes, the EU country designated in charge of a route was often designated to manage routes through former colonies that now doesn't currently hold, which is why this map has some issues, but we think it interesting to look at that process. What is that sort of struggle between a logic where you can kind of designate where people should move and order the populations they're in and sort of the pushback. And we just kind of end this idea of this debate on the circles and on border externalization with this quote from Ashile Mbembe, a recent magazine article, I guess, in this South African magazine. I can't remember what the name is. Sorry, I'm forgetting, but the link is in there called Scrap the Borders that Divide Africans. The next phase of Africa's decolonization is about granting mobility to all her people, reshaping the terms of membership in a political and cultural ensemble that is not confined to the nation state. Freedom of movement within Africa becomes a cornerstone of a new Pan-African agenda. And we end on that partly because what we're seeing on the part mostly of movements in places like Senegal, Mauritania, as well as even on the part of governments in different countries is a lot of debate and pushback on these externalization approaches. Sometimes there's cooperation and sometimes there's direct friction. Let me end now with maybe a few questions to bring it back to the scale of the city because we don't usually think that way, but one of the things that was happening in the organization we worked with was a campaign. As we were talking about these different kinds of research on externalization and how many of the members were sort of already othered well before they made any decision to, or at least any kind of itinerary in their migratory process or journey, there was a campaign called few that is in front of us, cities without borders. And what would it look like to have cities without borders? I can't make a direct link there, but we did begin to sort of ask those questions and start kind of a local campaign around there. And we sort of ended then thinking, well, how does externalization enable practices of bordering in urban places? If bordering works as a form of governing populations, what would be the structures and protocols that are constantly creating or recreating hierarchies among people? On the one hand we have things like how externalization marks you, like the video says, you are illegal from the point you are assumed to be on the move. How that then will condition your status once you arrive at whatever destination or country of residence you are at is the image of kind of a brum rush when California allowed driver's licenses to be more easily accessible and the intensity to try and achieve them. So how that changes kind of the access to different sorts of resources and services in an urban environment. But what we also don't tend to ask is what are the specific results on urban environments where externalization happens? So this change, externalization transforms things like the fishing industry into car. It creates a lot of jobs for new police forces as well. It makes hanging out as a group of young men much more difficult because you're profiled as a migrant. Very detailed work on this profiling practice, specifically in Senegal, has been done by anthropologist Ruben Anderson. It's very interesting to see where it's hard to hang out if you have backpacks. You have to hang out without backpacks now because if you have a backpack it means you're a migrant. And so the urban space are changing through the results of externalization. But they don't stay in place. Since the border's following the route, sometimes it moves along. And now we see this happening much more in places like Khartoum in Sudan. Itinerant housing that emerges on the outskirts of cities like Rabat. Morocco has been very cooperative with externalization, but now more recently is pushing back. So I'll close with those questions. And thank you very much. Lorenzo and Sebastian. In the interest of time, we're running a little, perhaps a lot behind. I will simply kind of ask a few questions and help you kind of remake some of the points. And then we'll go to our concluding keynote. So Lorenzo, let me start with your very sobering presentation. One of the things that I have a Google alert for is the reporting in Pakistan of Pakistani migrants who die in the Mediterranean. So there's a lot of identification of the migrant body that happens after the horror has occurred. And a lot of the national presses then have to do this kind of forensic at the other level where those who are supposed to be of Pakistani descent, whether they're Afghan or Pakistan or Iranian or whoever they might be. And the national presses then kind of recap those stories as stories of Pakistani deaths. And as I was listening to your presentation and the ways in which you were sort of framing the tension between tool as control and tool as emancipation and the narrative that either side of the tool can create. I was wondering if you could speak about sort of the ways in which the body, the migrant body, the movable and then immobile body goes through its own forensics. If you could tell us about what that forensics looks like after the accident has happened, after the horror has revealed. Because I suspect that similar politics of forensics that under-grid type of surveillance and type of mapping that you've been talking about happens on the body itself. And as Sebastian's work was sort of pointing out that that surveillance follows the young male as they kind of come together with a backpack. And so not just the border is following but a type of forensics is also following. That is switching them from a young man hanging out with his friends to a possible group of migrants who are going to now head off. And so the sort of necropolitics here of surveillance, I'm very curious if either of you can sort of speak very briefly about that. And to the question of the sort of movable borders, the CBP of course designates 100 miles from the sort of point of entry as a legal border zone for the United States. So we are currently in a border region where the CBP officers can of course deport me or anyone else here who can be deemed deportable. And when you fly, as I often do to South Asia, the United States, the CBP also has the border control in UAE and in Istanbul, so in these hubs where the architecture of the space is meant to mimic in its sort of material detail as if you were standing at Dallas or as if you're standing at JFK. So the very formal sense the airport is transformed with a different built environment to mock a U.S. border patrol and that's where someone like me would have to go through in boarding a flight, a connecting flight. So I'm also interested in both of your thoughts on this type of sort of mimicking of the border, both in sort of the we call post-colonized or hyper-colonized spaces, but also as sort of nodes on this larger global route. And finally, what I find sort of both your perhaps exasperated ending, what is to be done, and your kind of idealistic ending through membe, the border is what defines the nation states and not vice versa, although the technology would argue otherwise. And I wonder if there are points of intersection here and if both of you can kind of think about the ways in which the long history of EU actually forces us to rethink the ways in which border regimes are actually racial regimes and it's not that the border disappears in the EU Schengen, but actually new communities are made white as they clear a hurdle and that speaks also to the sort of now forgotten efforts of Turkey to proclaim their Europe-ness over a long period. So please feel free to take any of these suggestions and respond and floor is yours. Thanks a lot. These are really interesting and thought-provoking ideas. I guess maybe to start with your first question about the forensics of the body. I mean, obviously there will be a lot to be said there and it obviously works in many different ways in different countries, in different places and in different temporal contexts. So it's very diverse, but maybe I mean one way of responding to that always in line with this idea that you were also mentioning that I was trying to put forward of how these different kind of media and technologies, etc. I used both as a tool of emancipation and as a tool of control. It was interesting for me, for us, let's say, to see also how to a certain extent a certain kind of recuperation of bodies and identification practices are also kind of part of the apparatus of control in the sense that, you know, especially after two huge shipwrecks that happened in the Mediterranean, one in 2013 and the other in 2015, which I talked about recently, the Italian government spent actually quite a huge amount of money to try to retrieve some of those bodies and to identify them, to kind of bring them back to the families, right? Which was something quite unprecedented, right? Because most of the people, in fact, are not identified, etc., right? So in a sense, of course, there was something positive in that, but at the same time, the kind of whole spectacle of compassion and, you know, I have pictures of, like, you know, how the anger of, like, the airport in Lampedusa and on, you know, this tiny island was transformed into a huge kind of media kind of space slash mortuary, right? Where all the, how do you say, like, the bodies basically were lined up, right? And so this kind of, like, compassionate, you know, face of the state was also the place where then, you know, European leaders, like, gave their speeches basically saying, oh, you know, we need to stop death, right? Nobody can accept death. So how do we do that? Well, we, you know, we grapple the budget of front-ex, right? We ramp up, you know, militarization, border control, etc., etc., etc. So in a way, it becomes a, you know, another ways in which the kind of spectacular visualization of death becomes another tool to reinforce, you know, once again, border control. Exactly. As in the, it goes to what Sebastian was pointing out, the origin, right? So the forensics of the body is actually to pinpoint the origin such that the origin can be then made a partner. So Australia, for example, does that very successfully for its capture and incarceration of migrants where they take out ads in newspapers in Urdu and in Pashto, particularly with faces of the captured to say, look, you know, you are the origins and at the origin we need to find partners and we need to stop this. So the forensics of the body, the compassion is one way of thinking about how it's the origin that's at stake and a body must be identified in order for the policing and for the, you know, sort of the necropolitics of the body to actually be played out. And maybe just briefly to say, you know, a kind of another connected by opposite somehow like processes, the ones by which instead, you know, the fact that actually in most of times bodies are not retrieved, right? And there is a kind of, you know, enduring absence that somehow, you know, becomes politically much more, you know, generative and interesting, right? There's a whole movement that Indonesia specifically that, you know, emerged out of this, you know, what they were called the disperu, you know, the disappeared, right? People who died at sea just after the revolution, right? And that kind of spurred a whole kind of, you know, social movement effectively of mothers and relatives of the people disappear to demand, you know, to the newly formed state as well to the EU and the Italian government, you know, what happened to our sons, right? So just wanted to contrast this. Yeah. Just to respond to a couple of those interesting points. One thing, I don't do surveillance studies, and perhaps this is something I already talked about a lot, but we talk about it a lot in cartographic theory. When we were talking about the surveillance of the border moving, sometimes I wonder, surveillance for me, it implies that you're watching something that is happening, and I think what's happening with, or externalization is that you're imposing the intent before it even happens, or at least imposing a directionality, right? We can't assume that someone, let's say, from Gambia that is working in Cote d'Ivoire is trying to get to France. I mean, unless they especially tell you and they have a ticket that says, you know, and so I think it's almost more than surveillance, it's imposing a regime of mobility and not really reflect the dynamic mobilities not only within, in the case of the African continent, but also between the EU and Africa, right? Migration from Spain to Morocco is net positive in more Spaniards migrating towards Morocco than vice versa for the past few years. That doesn't reflect at all in any of this, right? So it's a surveillance that really imposes an order. It's not seeing what's happening, it's seeing perhaps based on those former knowledges that we have and that we want to keep seeing as was discussed in Wendy's discussion. To reflect on what you were discussing, that feeling of the architecture that it follows you in the UAE and Istanbul or in Canada and Mexico and all kinds of places, I have seen those nodes, that kind of firm nodes in other places in different airports and things like that. What we're looking at here, I wonder if we can talk about kind of in a mimicry, not just of the architectural form but also kind of an itinerant mimicking of the border and its logics, which can take a very firm architectural form or something a bit more ephemerant. We use itinerant and we talk about itinerant bordering assemblages when we look at the different legal architectures that go into this and the organizational architectures because we often find while you might have different local associations or national groups you often will see funding agencies are coming from the same places, the sorts of training they get is the same, the sorts of ID cards they get and the company that makes the ID card that embeds the biometric data is the same and it's imported to country after country. So there's a mimicking of these infrastructures I guess you would say and also what they try to control. So one of the things that we saw happen both on the exasperated and the optimistic side in Morocco and different Moroccan researchers and activists would talk about this was the emergence of, if there were tensions you're a clearer racialized divide and the emergence also of an anti-racist movement in Morocco. So kind of that idea that you kind of ID people that they belong here, that they shouldn't be coming they're being pushed so that in a sense it's not that that was absent perhaps but that it becomes all the more real the more you survey it. And on the other hand though that imposition misses all that slippage. Both the fact that in those circles it's assumed that no one from circle one will ever go to two or three and we know that's not true. It assumes that people within two and three and four don't really move between each other and we know that's not true. It assumes that also the governments of circles two, three and four will always cooperate with number one or they'll always cooperate with the same intent and we know that's also not true. So there's in that also that export and mimicking of this infrastructure of the border there's points of slippage that I don't want to be overly optimistic but sometimes I have to be to not be too exasperated. Great. Well let's leave it at that and let me thank you both for a wonderful presentation. Thank you.