The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement
A podcast series
The criminalisation of freedom of movement is key to the formation of racial apartheid in Europe and globally.
This podcast is based on the online community course on Resisting the Criminalisation of Facilitation (Spring 2023). Syllabus.
The idea to do this course and this podcast emerged at a workshop held in Palermo in fall 2023, in conversation with associations and activists involved in the struggles for freedom of movement, including the Captain Support Network. There, a consensus emerged on the need to create spaces of mutual learning and materials to counter the discourses of ‘smuggling’ and ‘trafficking’ that mobilise public support for criminalisation, incarceration, pushbacks, and other forms of border violence.
In this podcast, we look at how the concept of ‘facilitation’ allows us to reflect on the continuum of criminalisation, without fabricating differentiations between the migrant activist, the boat driver, the sea rescuer, or the lorry driver.
Placing the focus on the practices that are criminalised, rather than on the actors themselves, brings to light that most forms of facilitation are a necessary product of the international nation-state system, border violence, and the criminalisation of migration.
From this perspective, we can build a decolonial, abolitionist analysis: the abolition of borders requires the decriminalisation of any form of facilitation of migration.
Freedom of Movement! Free Them All!
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis
Music composition, sound editing and design: evi nakou
Episode List (Release Dates)
Episode 1: Feminist perspectives on prison abolition and border abolition (4 September 2024)
Episode 2: Facilitation, smuggling, or solidarity? A contested narrative (18 September 2024)
Episode 3: Victimisation, patriarchal ‘protection’ and white saviourism (2 October 2024)
Episode 4: Neo-colonial borders: externalisation and criminalisation (16 October 2024)
Episode 5: Legal and political struggles in court (30 October 2024)
Episode 6: Underground railroads: the road towards abolition (13 November 2024)
Episode 7: #FreePylos9 Teach-In (27 November 2024)
Episode 1: Feminist perspectives on prison abolition and border abolition
We cannot imagine a world without borders, if we do not imagine a world without prisons. The two regimes are entangled and mutually constitutive of patriarchal and white supremacist forms of power, violence, and control.
In this episode, we discuss how borders and border regimes are punitive and carceral institutions; they require criminalisation and exploitation of people on the move to create regimes of immobility. Similarly, the prison industrial complex operates as a bordering mechanism, which produces and reproduces racial, social, and economic apartheid by criminalising and incarcerating communities of people on the move as well as Black and Brown people, poor people, trans and gender non-conforming people, and sex workers. Therefore, our struggles for a world without institutional violence and without prisons, needs to be extended to the abolition of all forms of carceral institutions that are constitutive of bordering regimes, including detention centres, humanitarian camps, pushbacks and deportations, as well as endless waiting time for asylum.
Audio extract: De Verbranders, Episode 2: No one is illegal. With Maryama Omar from We Are Here.
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis
Music composition, sound editing and design: evi nakou
Recorded: April 5, 2023
Published: September 4, 2024
Suggested citation: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement: A Podcast Series, Episode 1: Feminist Perspectives on Prison Abolition and Border Abolition, 2024, 50 mins.
Episode 2: Facilitation, smuggling, or solidarity? A contested narrative
In our abolitionist struggles, we need to contest narratives of innocence and guilt, that inform who is deserving and undeserving of punishment, or of protection and solidarity. Are any of these narratives present in our struggles, and, if so, how can we challenge them?
In this episode, we critically engage with those practices named as ‘facilitation’, ‘smuggling’, and ‘solidarity’. By bringing into conversation people who directly experienced criminalisation, we question how the process of criminalisation, as well as resistance to it, might label some actions as benevolent and humanitarian, whilst others as potentially dangerous and deserving punishment.
Whilst each of these actors is affected by criminalisation differently, by addressing the facilitation of migration in all its forms as the object of criminalisation, we take distance from scrutinising the individuals who are criminalised, evaluating their ‘guilt/innocence,’ or whether they are ‘deserving/undeserving’ of criminalisation and therefore of solidarity. This brings to light that most forms of facilitation are a product of, and a necessity derived from the creation of borders and the criminalisation of migration. From this perspective, we can build a decolonial, abolitionist analysis: the abolition of borders requires the decriminalisation of any form of facilitation of migration.
Episode Transcript [coming soon]
Roundtable with: Amara Kromah and Jelka Kretzschmar (El Hiblu 3 Campaign), Kathrin Schmidt (Iuventa Crew), Papamadieye Dieye (Captain Support Network), Afewerki Gebremedhn, Meles Tesfaldet and Federica Nunzi (ColtivAzione).
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis
Music composition, sound editing and design: evi nakou
Recorded: April 19, 2023
Published: September 18, 2024
Suggested citation: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement: A Podcast Series, Episode 2: Facilitation, smuggling, or solidarity? A contested narrative. 2024, 62 mins.
Episode 3: Victimisation, patriarchal ‘protection’ and white saviourism
Women’s ‘protection’ and narratives of vulnerability and victimhood are often a carceral flag under which gendered and racialised punitive regimes are enforced and legitimised. The war on smugglers is informed by state-centred narratives of the dangerous criminal, the smuggler, exploiting and harming vulnerable people who are said to be at their mercy. The ‘women-and-children’ trope is often mobilised to legitimise border militarisation and border violence, in order to protect vulnerable victims. Here the state pretends to play the role of the protector, but in fact controls, detains, deports and kills ‘women-and-children’ as well as ‘men’ and people of all genders and ages on a daily basis.
In this episode, we argue that we need a feminist analysis in order to understand how the language of protection and of vulnerability is mobilised to legitimise the criminalisation of those addressed as perpetrators, in this case fellow migrants, rather than the border regime. We also need a feminist analysis to keep acknowledging the forms of victimisation border crossers are subjected to, due to state violence and global injustice.
Episode Transcript [coming soon]
Roundtable with: Enrica Rigo (Clinica Legale Roma 3), Angelica Pesarini and Cristina Lombardi (Black Mediterranean collective), Francesca Esposito (scholar and activist, University of Bologna).
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis
Music composition, sound editing and design: evi nakou
Recorded: April 12, 2023
Published: October 2, 2024
Suggested citation: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement: A Podcast Series, Episode 3: Victimisation, patriarchal ‘protection’ and white saviourism. 2024, 76 mins.
Episode 4: Neo-colonial borders: externalisation and criminalisation
What is happening in Sudan, Palestine, Congo, and Kanaky is a reminder that when we talk about ‘migration control’ we cannot limit the analysis or resistances to the European context. In this episode, we discuss two African contexts: Morocco and Niger. We ask, how are states using control and criminalisation of migration in relation to other countries in Africa and to the Global North. European colonial externalisation policies are targeting different countries as ‘transit countries’: this label impacts the way states targeted as such have changed how they control mobilities, both of entry and exit. The nexus between development, management, and security has created new laws that intensify criminalisation of support and facilitation of mobility, impacting both ‘nationals’ and ‘foreigners’.
At the time of the recording, the coup d’état in Niger of July 2023 had not yet happened. Since then, thanks to the relentless resistance and struggle of numerous activists such as those of the Alarm Phone Sahara, the infamous 2015-36 law that criminalised the facilitation of migration had been abrogated.
Episode Transcript [coming soon]
Roundtable with: In this episode, we are in conversation with Imane Echchikhi (Alarm Phone Morocco) and Moctar Dan Yaye (Alarm Phone Sahara).
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis
Music composition and sound design: evi nakou
Recorded: 26 April 2023
Published: 16 October 2024
Suggested citation: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement: A Podcast Series, Episode 4: Neo-colonial borders: externalisation and criminalisation. 2024, 95 mins.
Episode 5: Legal and political struggles in court
Episode Transcript [coming soon]
Roundtable with: Valentina Azarova and Noemi Magugliani (de:border migration justice collective), Lorraine Leete (Legal Centre Lesvos), Nefeli Belavila-Trova, Christina Karvouni and Varvara Christaki (Aegean Migrant Solidarity) and Julia Winkler (borderline europe).
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis
Music composition and sound design: evi nakou
Recorded: 3 May 2023
Published: 30 October 2024
Suggested citation: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement: A Podcast Series, Episode 5: Legal and Political Struggles in Court. 2024, 79 mins.
Episode 6: Underground railroads: The road towards abolition
How can we draw on historical experiences of smuggling, facilitation, and solidarity in the context of the Underground Railroad to inspire today’s struggles against borders? How can our struggle for the decriminalisation of migration and facilitation be situated within a broader struggle for abolition of borders, prisons, sweatshops, and the gendered-racialized violence sustaining a bordered reality of global apartheid? How can we understand the present as bearing traces, inheritances, and reproductions of historical forms of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism? We discuss the parallels and divergences between, on the one hand, contemporary corridors of solidarity and mutual aid along migration routes, and on the other hand, the historical rebellions, maroon communities, and Underground Railroad established during struggles for the abolition of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Episode Transcript [coming soon]
Roundtable with: Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, Julia O’ Connell Davidson
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis
Music composition and sound design: evi nakou
Recorded: 10 May 2023
Published: 13 November 2024
Suggested citation: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement: A Podcast Series, Episode 6: Underground railroads: The road towards abolition. 2024, 75 mins.
Episode 7: Teach-In to #FreePylos9
In the early morning hours of 14 June, 2023, the overcrowded fishing boat “Adriana” sank in international waters around 50 miles from the port of Pylos, Greece. Hundreds of people, including all women (and people assigned ‘female’ at birth) and children on board, drowned under the watch of the Hellenic Coast Guard. Only 104 people who were on board survived, while more than 600 people, from the believed 750 passengers of Adriana died: either their bodies were never recovered or they remain missing. Nine of the survivors were accused by the Greek state of being part of smuggling organisations and of being responsible for the shipwreck. They were put in pre-trial detention for almost a year waiting for a trial that should never have taken place.
This episode is the #FreePylos9 Teach-In, which took place on 15 May 2024, in solidarity with the nine criminalised survivors of the Pylos shipwreck and with all people on the move facing spurious charges of “facilitation.” Listen to defence lawyers; the “Free Pylos 9” campaigners; and people who have been supporting survivors of the shipwreck and their loved ones, discussing how what the Pylos shipwreck is not unique or exceptional, contrary to how the Greek state and the European Union have tried to construct it. What led to the Pylos shipwreck is systemic border violence. The criminalisation, arrest, and incarceration of people on the move who are categorised as “facilitators of illegal entry” (or “smugglers”) is part of this violence.
In this episode, we learn about this injustice, how it unfolded, and draw connections to other cases of criminalisation, as well as ongoing campaigns, struggles, and practices of solidarity with people on the move.
Transcript [coming soon]
Roundtable with: Nefeli (#FreePylos 9 campaign), Vicky (Legal Centre Lesvos, one of the defense lawyers of the Pylos 9), Marion and Lorraine (Legal Centre Lesvos), Spyros (Aegean Migrant Solidarity), Lolo (Alarm Phone/Captain Support Network), Anne (Free Homayoun) and Nour (Refugees Platform Egypt).
Podcast by: Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot, Aila Spathopoulou and Anna Carastathis
Music composition and sound design: evi nakou
Recorded: 15 May 2023
Published: 27 November 2024
Suggested citation: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, The Criminalisation of Freedom of Movement: A Podcast Series, Episode 6: Teach-In to #FreePylos9. 2024, 79 mins.
This project was supported by IGNITE Community-University Partnership Funding from the University of Brighton.