The criminalisation of freedom of movement: an abolition feminist analysis

In EU policy debates and mainstream discourses, the criminalisation of migration and its facilitation are framed as necessary for the protection of ‘vulnerable victims.’ Building on abolition feminism as a critical epistemological and political foundation, we propose a critique of the criminalisation of facilitation and migration which synthesises border abolition with prison abolition, and which conceptualises it as part of global border apartheid. Focusing on Greece and Italy, we show how, whilst portraying themselves as patriarchal protectors, states amplify border violence rather than reducing it. In this context, ‘violent protection,’ ‘control as care’, confinement, and criminalisation form part of a continuum of carceral border violence that mobilises scripts of gendered and racialised violence. Moreover, we explore how by shifting the blame for border violence on its victims, the criminalisation of facilitation inverts perpetrators and survivors/victims, obscuring state accountability for killing and letting die people on the move, who defy and resist borders by crossing them through illegalised means. As part of this critique, we argue, it is crucial to deconstruct state-imposed differentiation between types of facilitation, some denoted as ‘humanitarian solidarity’, others as ‘smuggling’, as these differentiations reinforce border and carceral regimes.