related links:

Reporters sans frontières
Noborder Network
Borderhack

Without borders – New Activism in Plugged and Unplugged Worlds

The globalised world turns out to be a world with more borders than ever protecting the rich against the poor. State-of-the-Art activism concentrates around overcoming all sorts of borders.

An update by Andreas Hirsch

Borders – a concept connected with private property and further on the nation state – in a world where nation states are considered more and more obsolete become an issue of human rights, i.e. almost a symbol of barriers that bloc people from their most basic rights: to have medical aid, to live and work where you want to, to say your opinion aloud and have access to uncensored media.

Doctors without Borders as an organisation founded in 1971 stand for the believe that nobody should be 'unplugged' from medical aid and that help should not be barred or obstructed by national governments. They also stand for a modern type of international help organisation that is organised as a network and regard their being witness in the political and humanistic desaster areas of the globe as an integral part of their work and thus speak up about what they encounter. Their work is also political and they act with clear awareness of that fact and with the aim to create public awareness. Doctors without borders serve as an example of the fact that humanitarian action, political work and use of the media to create awareness are no longer to be separated.

Freedom of expression and freedom of press are among the aims of the work of Reporters sans frontières . They work to realize those human rights and freedoms by creating awareness about censorship situations and the threats to the lives of journalists in different countries. Logically the 'Enemies of the Internet' are on their agenda, when governmental efforts bloc the free flow of information over the internet are concerned.

Special attention is also required, when the traditional borders of nation states are concerned, areas like the US-Mexican border or the different border situations of the fortress Europe, where the European Community – one of the few successful peace projects of the 20th century otherwise marked by wars and desaster – takes all measures to keep immigrants out. Chantal Akerman in her piece 'From the other side' - which she realized for documenta11 – deals with the situation of many thousands who attempt to migrate northwards across the US-Mexican border. Even at night they get hunted down by the Border Patrol and incarcerated by local rangers in improvised concentration camps. In an other area of the world the Spanish coast guard retrieves the bodies of thousands of men from Morocco, who die during the attemp to leave their country for Europe.

The increasingly restrictive asylum and immigration policy in Europe is confronted with a number of initiatives and the work of activist groups, that also improved their networking by forming the Noborder Network .They focus especially on two areas of activism: Border camps as a new form of resistance against the brutal politics and their consequences as mentioned above. Another field of resistance targets the politics and practices of deportation, especially by making the airlines who transport the deportees the object of their innovative actions.

A good example of such activism is the so called Deportation class that tries to make the German airline Lufthansa to quit their cooperation with government offices in that field. The ratio behind such projects is that commercial enterprises will drop an activity when it becomes unprofitable for them or creates more bad media coverage and image damage than the revenue made with it. Deportation Class also 'hacked' the Lufthansa brand by using graphical elements that resembled the Corporate Design of Lufthansa. They also employed means of 'virtual sabotage' with an online demo at the same time as the stockholders meeting by flooding the Lufthansa online booking facilities. This concept may not be new, but it may give the term 'sabotage' a new and constructive meaning, as Florian Schneider in his article Virtual Sabotage points out (in Eveline Lubbers, Battling Big Business, Green Books/Devon, 2002).

New forms of activism emerge, that combine on- and offline activities as well as concrete humanitarian help and political work and that try to fight neoliberal politics with their own means.






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