Desecuritizing Strangeness

Chapter 6 recovers vernacular counter-narratives of the border and alternative border imaginaries at work in citizens’ conversations. Beyond dominant narratives of crisis, securitization, abjection, and control, the analysis shows how some vernacular accounts mobilized border logics that questioned portrayals of obsessive walling practices as immutable and inevitable and thus disrupted elite scripts of the ‘crisis’. It is argued that another reason why populist calls to ‘take back control’ flourished despite augmented border security is that actually existing alternative imaginaries among citizens were subjugated in wider public discourse. The discussion begins by recalling the ‘affective atmospheres of welcoming’ that swept across the EU during the summer of 2015. While some vernacular narratives arguably perpetuated a problematic politics of pity akin to many elite governmental narratives of humanitarian crisis, others made arguments about EU citizens’ duties to new arrivals based on a politics of equality and/or of an awareness of the legacies of European colonialism. From here, the analysis considers a range of vernacular narratives that in various ways challenged the notion that there is ‘no alternative’ to tougher deterrent border security and walling. Finally, the chapter mines citizens’ vernacular narratives that do not start with abstract arguments about ‘borders’ at all. In such narratives we find glimpses of what Kristeva (1991) refers to as an ‘ethics of strangeness’: refusals of sovereign mastery of control, the fantasy of ontological security, and the desire to be ‘bordered’. This disrupts the grip of the dominant elite ‘crisis’ narrative and offers new grounds to engage the challenges wrought by increased arrivals and deaths at sea.