Geographical landscapes of deserts, seas, rivers, and mountain passes have been harnessed by states and (intra) state authorities to both prevent and deter the arrivals of people on the move and to obfuscate accountability and responsibility for their deaths (Reineke and Anderson, 2016; Lynn Doty, 2011). In the context of the US/Mexico border, the Sonoran Desert was explicitly built into US border enforcement policy, termed ‘prevention through deterrence’. The use of geographical landscapes in the EU’s external borders acts insidiously. Hidden from view, this makes it harder to resist and renounce the situation at the EU’s borders which requires its own unique study. Situated in the field of critical border studies, using militant research practices, this research will investigate how three rivers at the EU’s external border form a salient part of border control and enforcement policies and have become, in and of themselves, political actants.
The research will investigate three river borders which have become sites that mobilise water flows at the EU’s exterior in the interest of border control policies: the Evros/Meric between Greece and Turkey, the Una (Sana tributary) between Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina, and the Swislocz between Poland and Belarus. These three rivers have been selected for their positioning in varying but interconnected entry points into the EU bloc, the high number of fatalities recorded at each in recent years, and the existence of local resistance networks in each region.

The main component of the field research will explore how local communities and people on the move are both affected by the politicisation and militarisation of border rivers, recentring the practices of resistance taking place in the form of documentation and memorialisation. One output of the project will be a conference allowing for discursive exchange and co-writing recommendations to policy makers and key stakeholders.