EXBO advances a ground-breaking path of research on the extractive and predatory dimensions of border politics by proposing an innovative conceptualisation of the border as a tool of extraction. This constitutes an ambitious attempt to move beyond the current state of the art. In fact, whilst interdisciplinary academic literature on borders has historically described them as instruments of control, demarcation, connection, classification, exclusion, and “illegalisation”, inadequate attention has been placed on the ways through which border practices allow and sustain accumulation dynamics. EXBO will contribute to a deeper understanding of extractive processes at stake in border practices by exploring accumulation enabled by governmental techniques of forced mobility and immobilisation, both at the formal and the informal level. EXBO will thus have a great impact on academic scholarship on borders and migration, which will reach well beyond the duration of the project thanks to its innovative research objectives and approach.
In conceptual terms, EXBO will be highly influential as it will introduce and develop the notion of extractive borders to emphasise the increasing predatory character of bordering processes. The conceptualisation of the border as a tool of extraction is destined to have long-lasting effects on interdisciplinary debates on borders. In the latter, critical scholarship has long called into question approaches that interpret the border in primarily negative terms, as a device that stops, delimits, proscribes, excludes, and that can be successfully represented by metaphors like the wall or the line. Scholars in several disciplines have increasingly stressed the productive character of borders by showing how they also connect, discipline, filter, differentiate, and exhaust. Along similar lines, borders have been approached as techniques of “illegalisation”, which allow a constant supply of cheap and deportable migrant labour that can be exploited in receiving countries.
EXBO goes one step forward in the analysis and definition of the productivity of borders as these are neither interpreted solely through the paradigm of control/exclusion, nor through that of “illegalisation”/exploitation, but through the paradigm of extraction. Such a novel understanding of the border enables one to interpret contemporary border regimes as rent machines that increasingly profit from migrants regardless of their exploitation as workers and their incorporation into the host society as consumers. This constitutes a key scientific contribution that has the potential to impact significantly on the ways in which bordering processes are interpreted and the politics of migration management is examined.