Winner of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Christine M Alder Book Prize 2013

Controlling border crossing has become an urgent concern under conditions of globalization, leading Western governments to introduce increasingly coercive control measures. Far from eradicating spontaneous border crossing, this defensive geography has fuelled illicit people-smuggling markets, and forced asylum seekers and illegalized travellers into increasingly hazardous journeys.

Drawing on data from official sources, media reports and lists of deaths collated by non-governmental organizations in Europe, Australia and North America, this book draws direct parallels between the border control policies adopted across the Global North, and a mounting death toll of illegalized border crossers. It analyses the political and material conditions driving contemporary border control policies and discusses the processes that mediate popular and official understandings of border-related fatalities. In seeking to account for, rather than merely count, border-related deaths the book is intended to shift the debate about contemporary border controls towards the acceptance of a more mobility-tolerant future.