Lorenzo Vianelli

Research project EXBO (Extractive Borders: Profiting from Migrants’ Forced Im/Mobility)

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EXBO investigates accumulation processes enabled by border practices that seek to govern migrants through immobilisation as well as forced mobility. It aims to understand the extent to which border management has increasingly become a new terrain for extractive processes and how the governance of migration and asylum is transformed as a result. Drawing on a multi-sited qualitative analysis of three case studies, EXBO will contribute to the development of a ground-breaking path of research on the extractive and predatory dimensions of border politics. This will be achieved by conceptualising the border as a tool of extraction through which migrants are made profitable even before, or regardless of, their exploitation in the labour market. By attending to the extractive character of bordering processes, EXBO will therefore go beyond the current state of the art in which insufficient attention has been placed on the ways through which borders promote and sustain accumulation dynamics.