The border as a space of contention: the spatial strategies of protest against border controls in Europe

This article analyses the spatial dimension of social movements mobilising against border controls. Focusing on the case of the protests against European border controls, this paper shows that new spatial strategies of protest have emerged since the beginning of the 2000s. Movements construct collective actions that aim to identify border controls and occupy specific border sites. These new strategies are related to a transformation of the material and symbolic dimensions of border controls in the last decades. As they have become more diffuse and organised through a selective power, social movements strategically locate their protest in order to document the existence and nature of border controls. In doing so, they disrupt the exclusionary logic of citizenship.