Podcasts - Feminist Autonomous Centre for research

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.

Episode Transcript

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

The criminalisation of migration is used by governments in the Global South both to control the population on their territory (nationals or not) and to present themselves as ‘legitimate’ partners of the international inter-states game. The increased criminalisation of migration in various countries is the result of the unbalanced political game played both by African and by European states in the expansion of the externalisation of the EU border regime in the Global South. In this episode, we address how those politics are creating new neo-colonial borders: by targeting all the means that people could use to organise their journey, states are trying to reborder and constrain their mobilities.

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

Can legal struggles and strategic litigation undermine the colonial balance inherent in the international legal system? What are the benefits and what are the limitations of those strategies? How can we move towards abolitionist forms of justice and accountability that are non-punitive and anti-carceral?

These are some of the questions we engage in this episode, drawing, also, on specific recent and ongoing legal defence cases. We discuss the challenges, dilemmas and contradictions that groups and organisations fighting against the criminalisation of migration experience, by referring to legal institutions, by staging people on the move defence in the court, whilst knowing that courts are constituting elements of the racist border regime, with its colonial logic and gendered power structures.

We also reflect on how to challenge the harms produced through legal systems and the law itself, and critically discuss how laws and courts can be used strategically, as well as the difficulties and contradictions of mobilising the law to address the violence that is produced by borders.

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.

This project was supported by IGNITE Community-University Partnership Funding from the University of Brighton.