The everyday reality of "bordering" practices in the re-bordered Europe

Over the past decade, European borders have returned to the centre of the political agenda of EU institutions and member states. It has been especially the case with the internal borders of the Schengen area, which underwent a "re-bordering" process. The reintroduction of identity checks at the internal European borders, acted upon since 2015 by some states in the context of the “refugee crisis” first (Kasparek 2017), and implemented in a generalized manner in that of the COVID-19 pandemic later (Brunet Jailly and Carpenter 2020), has triggered a lively debate about the alleged “crisis of the Schengen system” (De Genova 2016) and the need for its reform (Guild 2016). In the academic literature, the “crisis” discourse when it comes to the re-bordering of internal EU boundaries has recently been criticized. In the migration field, it has been explored as a policy aimed to address the risk of “secondary movements”, rather than their effective containment (Karamanidou 2022). In the pandemic context, it has been claimed that the unilateral implementation of internal border checks has become the “new normality” in the European Union (Gulzau 2021). In general terms, these insights suggest the perspective that re-bordered boundaries within the Schengen area are there to stay, and that academic interest in this state policy is likely to grow.
Based on an ethnographic investigation carried out in 2021 in the Upper Susa Valley, at the Italian-French border, this work aims to contribute to the exploration of the everyday reality of re-bordered internal European boundaries. Theoretical framework is the "bordering approach" in Border studies (van Houtum and van Naersser 2002), that investigates state boundaries as social processes resulting from tangible and intangible policies, as well as practices implemented by state and non-state actors. The case study has been addresses to explore the extent to which the border is produced, reproduced and contested at the daily level by agents embodying the state sovereign power, as well as formal and informal social groups, whether local and transfrontalier. Finally, building on the tradition of anthropological research on borderlands (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 2016), this work helped to outline a "geography of bordering", so as to highlight the spatial, temporal and social dimensions of the contemporary reality of re-bordered Europe.