It took us a while to figure out the frame of this blog. Dozens of e-mails later, we settled on a name and a conceptual approach. “Borderline Crimes,” a name that has a dual significance. As activists, we have had a lot of mud thrown at us. In a world where justice doesn’t turn a profit, it becomes easy to cross red lines–or at least to get very close to them. In that sense, the title of our blog is a preemptive measure in anticipation of the trolls that will inevitably come this way.

In the second formulation, we are thinking about the heinous crimes that occur at borderlines. One example of a borderline is the border that divides nation states. At these strange places, security forces that we must always smile to (they have the guns) enact the most atrocious kinds of racism, violence, and authoritarianism. It is a terrifying place because those acts are actually legal and legitimate there, while objection and disobedience are criminalized.

I think here of Syrian writer Zachariah Tamer’s introduction to Muhammad Maghout’s I Will Betray My Country (I just started reading it), where he says that in a world where nations belong either to tyrants or humans, “Loyalty to the nations of tyrants is a betrayal to humankind, while disobedience and rebellion against them is allegiance to humankind.” There are many variations on this principle that are equally powerful, but suffice it to say that the border asks us to suspend our indignation, our ethical guidance, in order to serve some other interests. In that sense it is a co-optation of certain values to serve interests opposite to those values: loyalty, law, patriotism, and so on.

The thing about the way that the border demands this of us, though, is that it doesn’t matter whether or not we’re on the border. Whenever there is a border, even at a distance from us, it makes this demand, no matter where we are. I can’t think of any other way to fully understand some of the stomach curling headlines coming out in the American press these days following a military coup that overthrew a democratic leader in Honduras. “Honduras coup could bring more business friendly government.” “Carnival: Coup in Honduras won’t affect cruise ship calls in Roatan.” What is it about the way we see the world that, upon hearing news of a coup in another land, our immediate question is how this will affect business and luxury? Weren’t we people with a sense of indignation, once? Is this what borderlines have done to us?

Though what I have said about the border’s disruptive qualities may seem obvious, it is actually only a starting point. The strange thing about borders is that we often assume they exist because they need to be there, that something after all must be there to separate. Instead, I say that borders are not simply where differentiating lines are drawn, though they often do relate to difference. They are not the unsurprising result of a naturally occurring social process, nor the arbitrary product of human behaviors. Rather they are, by design, mechanisms of control. They exist because they organize our lives in a certain way, according to the desires of a certain few. There is no other “natural” need for them.

Of course, I’m not talking only about the borders on the map that divide countries. It’s about all kinds of borderlines. I’ll be careful here to say that I am not trying to make an analogy: it is not a matter of imparting the qualities of “real” borders–like those between the United States and Mexico–to other social or cultural phenomena. There is nothing that makes these the “true” borders, and there is nothing more “real” about them, except that they have come to be associated with a physical place. In other words there is no physical border for whom the borders that “separate” other things are simply acting as metaphor–like rich and poor, black and white, boss and worker. These are divisions that in and of themselves organize our lives in a certain way, according to the desires of a certain few–consciously or not. It is not that one is a real, literal border while the others are simply parallels, understood figuratively as borders. Rather, they are all–by their intrinsic qualities and effects–borderline. Not a type of border, not kind of like borders, but just borders. Real, non-metaphorical, divisive borders that all share the characteristic of driving us to act in certain ways.

That is the starting point of this blog for me. It raises more questions than it answers, but that is a positive thing. My intention is not to put forth irrefutable claims or to exhaust all possible objections. That only matters if my goal is to be “right.” But the goal here is different: it is to start building a community around this blog, to arouse a critical sense of outrage about the way we encounter border regimes in our lives. Many of the pressing issues of our day have to do with political notions that are based on creating and enforcing borderlines like these, regardless of who gets hurt and even killed in the process. Hopefully, questions and discussions about issues like these can help create the bonds that threaten to subvert the border regime  and those who profit off of it.