In the last few years, RWF is supporting Pushbackmap collective through our Special Focus program. The collective’s focus is on documenting and revealing systemic, institutional violence and pushbacks at the internal, external borders of the European Union and other places. By illegal and violent expulsion as well as denying them asylum procedures and international protection, the officials are destroying the dignity of people on the move.
This collective, along with a transnational approach, is looking to prevent such practices which also include psychic and physical violence, oftentimes leading to death. With Olja Nikolić Kia we talked about militarization of borders, about institutionalization and legalization of racist practices and xenophobia.
The mapping and documenting of violation of human rights of people on the move is an important and useful project. How do you gather information and what do you do with it? How did the application change your work on mapping?
Our map is focused on three kinds of sources of information: media texts that bear witness of concrete cases of pushbacks, reports from activists and people on the move from the field with the application, and second and first hand reports. When it comes to media reports, we use press clippings, we follow different social networks accounts that feature large numbers of texts about migration, and some of them refer to pushbacks and violence at the borders. Members of our group follow these pages in various parts of the world. For example, in our region, we follow but also write content for some of them, while others administer the accounts.
In order to get to second hand accounts, we follow accounts of activists from the field who work on monitoring and interviewing people, and we follow their organization’s accounts and pages who deal with rights of the people in movement, such as Border Violence Monitoring Network or Klik Aktiv. In addition, we maintain continuity and direct contact with organizations and collectives who are reporting from the field about pushbacks, via email, since the very beginning of mapping. When we are in the field, we interview people who have experienced pushbacks.
By exchanging and gathering this data, we upload them on the map-website, and then we link the pages of friendly organizations. The procedure of uploading data is pretty complicated because for each text or report (the pining), we need to log into the website, pin the location, fill in the questionnaires that then helps us in filtered searchers, and we need to link these data to adequate texts and reports. This is the most burdensome part of the work of the members of the collective given that we see a more sophisticated technology of persecution of people where shooting and killing people at the borders is no longer a precedent.
Personal reports of human rights’ violations and violence, come via email through application, and we put them on the website. When we are on the field, which is rare, we can see an increase of direct reports, however, as soon as there is nobody to promote the map and talk with people, the number of reports decreases. So, the influence of application on the map is not as high as it could be. If it were different, if we spent more time in the field, application would have a greater influence, mostly by empowering the survivors to influence the change of discourse. The fact that others speak in their place leads to degradation and weakening of feelings of the possibility of change either by individual or collective agency. Oftentimes there is a gap in informing the people on the move and they lack knowledge that someone is engaging for their right to movement. We have also noticed that with corona and restrictions on activists to spend time at the borders, the resistance is diminishing; there are no protests, nor marches of people who wish to arrive at the desired location. Everything is reduced to individual acts.
Could you tell us more about the new network This is How Police Tech Look Like? This new initiative focuses on police in different contexts and their practices of Kafkian enjoyment of power.
Our collective has planned to open a special channel of acting that would address the infrastructure of violence; everything that exists behind violence, that supports it and makes it possible. Money and technologies represent a significant background of these practices. However, we did not have enough resources to start this endeavor. This is why the invitation to participate in this network has brought us encouragement. At the beginning, it seemed like it was going to be just one online meeting, but now it seems like a long-term project.
The point of this network is empowering each single initiative and strengthening its reach in public. We understand that technologies are not innocent, that they precisely give power to perpetrators and instructors of violence, we connect with groups that approach this problem from different perspectives. Some have an anti-repression alarm phone, and work on monitoring the police, their surveillance technologies, but these organizations also work on education on digital rights, they come to the courts as legal observers and reports of the happenings, they report arrests of activist, they research the money flow and where it is invented in the infrastructures of harassment, abuse, and pushbacks. Some work on racial profiling, and practices of search and seizure. Most of them work locally (Poland) or regionally (Wales).
This network is one more initiative for stopping police brutality and reducing militarization, especially in the light of the Ukraine war, selling of weapons, war profiteers, and other radicalized conflicts.
We hope this new cooperation will give us a breath of fresh air since we have found ourselves helpless in the face of pushbacks where they keep happening, and we see an increase of new fences and legalization of dehumanization.
Oftentimes you mention that the personal contact with people on the move is the most important aspect. Why does it matter that people do not become just numbers?
We believe, following the old slogan Not about us without us, that struggle against borders and its militarization is possible only side by side with the most threatened people. Unfortunately, in activism we face different lines of division, us and them, activists and refugees. Oftentimes we see infantilization of people in the movement be it with taking away their voices or by cultural relativism. And honestly, most initiatives do not include people in the movements. There is a huge barrier in establishing cooperation and contact, and also, people who have more resources concerning spaces, have more success in collaboration. I will quote myself from the text Biopolitics of exclusion from the right to the city
“According to Agamben, the main concepts of politics are not production nor work, but inoperativity and use, but not its utilitarian meaning, but parting from the original Greek verb chrestai that received its meaning depending on the preceding word. For example, chrestai logo, to use language, meant to speak, and chresthai gynaiki, literary, to use a woman, having sexual intercourse with a woman. This etymology matters to understand the medial meaning for the verb that explains nontransitive nature from subject to object, but is equally in the subject and object expressing relation with oneself that we get when in relation to others. From this, we have deduced transformation of ontology of the subject not constituted through the use of the object but in relation to it. Ethical and political subjects are constituted with a non utilitarian use bearing witness to traits of the body in relation to the others. This approach leads to the theoretical affective turn where we question the capacity of the body in relation to their others as well as its cultural, economic and political transformation. According to Sara Ahmend, cultural politics of emotions cerates otherness and produce social bonds of rhetoric of the nation by equalizing bodies within the community and marginalizing others.”
Corona did influence these lines of division and oftentimes it seems unthinkable to reflect on coexistence of different bodies in different spaces which would reduce unification and make possible politics based on diversity with mutual inclusion. We do not know the people’s reality with less power and we need coexistence to understand that.
What are future plans for the collective? Where do you see the space for intervention in public life?
We see it in the new network I mentioned above, in promotion of present activities, in debates and creating bigger strategies with local communities and existing movements. However, we do think if there is no possibility in acting within direct actions, and direct contact with people at borders or camps, we could lose these collectives. Along these lines, it is necessary, at least in our country, to create one space where people on the move would feel at home, and that space does not need to be a humanitarian space, but space of friendship or space for alternative economy, where we could potentially create new politics of existence with others, without conditions.
Interview by Djurdja Trajković
