Images, borders, and their politics

Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical framework at the basis of this book. It brings into dialogue conceptualizations of images and borders to capture their entangled politics by building on scholarship in critical migration and border studies, poststructuralist and visual IR, critical security studies, as well as media and communication studies. Employing a critical poststructuralist perspective on images and borders, it understands (the meaning of) borders and images as socially constituted in discourses and other practices. This meaning-making becomes part of performative practices of bordering and has ramification for migration governance when central images in the discourse are mobilized in a way that they contribute to create conditions of possibility for certain migration and border policies. To conceptualize how images become affective and politically effective ‘at the border’, the chapter theorizes images and borders as sites where conflicted meaning-making about borders and boundaries of political communities takes place. It conceptualizes visual border politics as characterized by visual discursive practices of bordering ‘on the ground’, e.g. in policy discourses, that are anchored by a broader visual order.