Shahram Khosravi writes:

In 1986, I was 19 and behind bars in a small prison on the border between Iran and Pakistan. I had been arrested while attempting to cross the border irregularly into Pakistan. Everyone I met in that prison had been detained in connection with the border. It was a small space, the cells overcrowded and unsanitary, but it held an extraordinary diversity of people: local smugglers, large-scale drug-traffickers, undocumented migrant workers, and refugees; Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, as well as Baluch men whose communities had crossed these lands freely for generations but who were now being punished for violating the territorial order of the nation-state. Multiple languages were spoken at once. Different histories, geographies and ways of inhabiting the world converged within the same confined space.

Yet we all shared one thing. We had refused, for different reasons, to respect the border. The state saw us through a single imaginary: as criminals, trespassers or illegal bodies to be contained. We, however, were animated by different imaginations. Each of us had imagined a life that exceeded the border and acted upon that imagination. In that sense, the prison did not simply contain border-crossers; it brought together people whose aspirations had collided with the territorial imaginary of the nation-state.

That prison experience was perhaps one reason I became a scholar of borders. It remains, even today, the most important school of border studies I have ever attended. The conversations in the cells and during brief moments in the prison yard revolved around borders; how they operated, how they were enforced and, above all, how they might be circumvented. The prison became an unlikely site of knowledge-production: not simply the sharing of survival strategies but the enactment of an imagination that paid no heed to prison walls or state borders. [Continue reading…]