Hostile environments

This viewpoint reframes the term ‘hostile environments’, first introduced in the migration debate in the UK in 2012, as a conceptual and analytical lens to unravel the interconnected nature of the so-called migration and environmental crises beyond these catastrophist and security-oriented perspectives. To do this, three different but interconnected instances of “hostile environments” are examined: the creation of atmospheres of surveillance through pervasive (border) policing tactics and administrative practices of exclusion; the weaponisation of terrains for the purpose of border enforcement; and instances in which resource frontiers encounter bordering practices. These different contexts can be understood, then, as different but intimately related expressions of the same logic of border control and of its expansive, multiscalar reach. In all these cases, the environment stops being simply a site of border control and rather becomes one of its modes of operation.