More-than-Human-Bordertextures. Rethinking Animals and Viruses as Co-Constitutive Border Agents

Abstract

In the course of 2020, two viruses, COVID-19 and African swine fever, set in motion powerful border (de)stabilizations. This chapter makes the case for an understanding of borders which integrates the complex interactions between humans, viruses, animals, objects and technologies. It develops an approach to bordertextures that regards them as more-than-human compositions, spanning a multitude of both human and nonhuman actors. These actors are bound up in relations of power; relations that subsequently materialize in border (de)stabilizations. The chapter places a special focus on two groups of living nonhumans that have yet to receive the attention they deserve from border researchers: viruses and animals. How do they shape, respond to and operate independently from border control?

Full text

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To be published in the edited volume by Wille, Christian / Fellner, Astrid / Nossem, Eva (2022): Bordertextures.
A Complexity Approach to Cultural Border Studies. (Edition Cultural Studies), Bielefeld, transcript. Online
Preview: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-3895-0/bordertextures/
Larissa Fleischmann, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
More-than-Human Bordertextures. Rethinking Viruses and Animals as Co-
Constitutive Border Agents
Abstract
In the course of 2020, two viruses, COVID-19 and African swine fever, set in motion powerful border
(de)stabilizations. This chapter makes the case for an understanding of borders which integrates the complex
interactions between humans, viruses, animals, objects and technologies. It develops an approach to bordertextures
that regards them as more-than-human compositions, spanning a multitude of both human and nonhuman actors.
These actors are bound up in relations of power; relations that subsequently materialize in border (de)stabilizations.
The chapter places a special focus on two groups of living nonhumans that have yet to receive the attention they
deserve from border researchers: viruses and animals. How do they shape, respond to and operate independently
from border control?
1. Introduction
When viruses such as H5N1 (avian influenza), H1N1 (swine flu), African swine fever and
COVID-19 cross territorial borders, they frequently cause moral panic. At the heart is often the
fear that mobile pathogens will move around the globe within the blink of an eye and ‘get out
of control’ before we have the time and chance to react. Such moments of panic have long been
met by political responses designed to ‘regain control’ by limiting and slowing down the
viruses’ wayward movements through neat spatial demarcations and barriers (cf. Everts 2013:
822; Hinchliffe et al. 2013).
In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 onwards, a special importance was
placed on national borders. Scholars have pointed out how the spatial spreading of the virus
initiated profound (re-)bordering processes that contributed to a strengthening of nationalism
and national borders across Europe (Cresswell 2020; Nossem 2020; Radil, Castan Pinos & Ptak
2020; Wille & Weber 2020). At around the same time, several European states, including
Denmark, Germany, France and Bulgaria, built fences along their national borders in response
to another infectious disease. These barriers were designed to prevent the spread of African
swine fever, also known as pig Ebola, a highly contagious virus that is fatal for pigs but not for

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humans and, at this point in time, was framed as the most threatening global animal disease of
the 21st century (see for instance The Guardian 31/10/2019). These political interventions at
national borders targeted ‘unwanted’ border crossers of a nonhuman kind: wild boars that could
act as disease reservoirs and pass the virus to pigs in national factory farms. In the course of
2020, two viruses, COVID-19 and African swine fever, along with the animals acting as disease
reservoirs of the latter, set in motion powerful bordering processes that (re)produced both
physical and symbolic borders around European nation states.
What do these examples reveal about the formation and (de)stabilization of borders?
This chapter makes the case for including living nonhumans – particularly viruses and animals
– in the study of borders. In what follows, I suggest that the concept of bordertextures offers a
fruitful analytical lens for this endeavour. It has the ability to capture the multitude of bodies,
objects, discourses, practices and knowledge that are interwoven into a more-than-human
composition. These more-than-human bordertextures not only include humans but also span a
variety of nonhuman elements, such as objects, technologies, animals, plants, viruses and other
organisms. From this perspective, bordertextures are webs of complex interactions between a
multitude of (non)human actors that effectuate border (de)stabilizations. Border
(de)stabilizations, on the other hand, are the result of the complex interwoven entanglements
and relationships between humans and nonhumans in bordertextures.
While the role of objects and technologies in border surveillance and border control is
a frequently discussed topic in border studies (see for instance Amoore, Marmura & Salter
2008; Schindel 2016; Olwig et al. 2019), less attention has been paid to the agency of living
nonhumans in shaping and co-constituting borders. Therefore, in this chapter, I place a special
focus on two groups of living nonhumans, animals and viruses, which have so far not received
the attention they deserve from border researchers. In order to address this lacuna, I
conceptualize animals and viruses as co-constitutive agents in bordertextures. I examine the
multiple ways in which they shape, respond to, and operate independently from border control.
As I will illustrate, a more-than-human understanding of bordertextures enables us to regard
animals and viruses as actors that hold agency in shifting and (de)stabilizing borders rather than
being mere backdrops of border control. In this way, the concept of bordertextures contributes
to an ontological and epistemological broadening of the agenda of border studies beyond the
anthropocentric.
The chapter starts off by scrutinizing recent contributions in the field of more-than-
human political geographies, a line of thought that offers fruitful starting points for engaging

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with the role of nonhumans in political processes. I then propose a more-than-human
understanding of bordertextures and ask how human-nonhuman entanglements in
bordertextures effectuate border (de)stabilizations. In the fourth and fifth sections, I focus
specifically on viruses and animals and conceptualize them as co-constitutive agents in
bordertextures. I wrap up with a concluding section on the value of a more-than-human
approach to bordertextures.
2. Towards a More-than-Human Political Geography
During the past two decades, posthumanist approaches have risen to prominence across the
social sciences. Related works challenge the traditional primacy of the human and integrate
animals, plants, objects and technologies into the study of socio-political processes. As heralds
of a posthuman turn (Braidotti 2016), they have set conceptual and empirical impulses within
and across a range of disciplines, including human geography (Castree & Nash 2006; Panelli
2010; Andrews 2019), social and cultural anthropology (Ingold 2011; Lowenhaupt Tsing 2017),
philosophy (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2016), and cultural and literary studies (Clarke 2008;
Huggan & Tiffin 2015). Posthuman modes of inquiry share an interest in the co-constitutive
relationships between human and nonhuman entities.
As a discipline traditionally rooted at the nexus of social sciences and natural sciences,
geography has a long history of examining processes that comprise both social and natural
components (cf. Barua 2018). Posthumanist thinking, which is also characterized by a shared
interest in human and nonhuman elements, has thus emerged as a vibrant and dynamic line of
inquiry in human geography since the early 2000s (cf. Buller 2014).
This thorough geographical engagement with posthumanism has led to the emergence
of a new research field called more-than-human geographies (see for instance Braun 2005;
Whatmore 2006; Lorimer 2010; Panelli 2010; Greenhough 2014; Peters 2014; Asdal, Druglitro
& Hinchcliffe 2016; Eriksson & Bull 2017). More-than-human geographers stress that social
and spatial processes are not only brought about through humans and their meaning-making
processes, but are always a product of more-than-human co-fabrications shaped by humans and
a multitude of nonhuman actors, such as animals, plants, objects, and technologies. Influenced
by Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory or DeLanda’s (2006) assemblage thinking,
scholars thus examine how humans relate to other living beings and objects and how the
interaction between these actors co-constitutes our living together in more-than-human worlds
(cf. Panelli 2010). A special emphasis is placed on the question of how our interactions with

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nonhumans materialize in space and, conversely, how they are shaped and co-constituted
through spatial configurations (see for instance Braun 2005). Scholars also take their cue from
work in a field of philosophy called new materialism, highlighting the agency of technologies
and other materials, while decidedly criticizing a poststructuralist emphasis on language and
representation (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010). Taken together, more-than-human geographies
break with dominant binary thinking, actively challenging the divide between nature/culture,
human/animal and object/subject.
The advent of posthumanism in human geography has also led to the reinvention of a
field of inquiry that focuses on human-animal relations. Animal geographies have risen to
prominence from the late 1990s onwards (see for instance Wolch & Emel 1995; Wolch & Emel
1998; Buller 2014; Srinivasan 2016; Hovorka 2018; Gibbs 2020). A seminal work by Philo
and Wilbert (2000: 110) called on scholars “to explore the complex nexus of spatial relations
between people and animals”. What is crucial here is that animals are no longer seen as mere
objects of human meaning-making processes but rather as agents in their own right (Buller
2014: 308). Animal geographers, however, were repeatedly criticized for their lack of interest
in questions relating to the political, while human geographers engaging with political
phenomena, such as territorial borders, have been blamed for turning a blind eye to nonhumans,
in particular, animals (Hobson 2007; Srinivasan 2016).
Very recently, however, there has been a swirl of interest in nonhuman forms of political
agency in political geography, the subdiscipline traditionally engaged with the study of borders
(cf. Braun, Whatmore & Stengers 2010; Dittmer 2014; Müller 2015b; Shaw 2016). As Müller
(2015b: 415) points out: “materials experience an emancipation from their role as passive
objects of political deliberation […] they co-articulate agency and shape political practices, the
art of governing, the constitution of sovereignty in crucial, often unexpected ways.” Recent
discussions in this emerging field of a more-than-human political geography revolve around
the question of how objects and materials, such as cameras, wiretaps or oil pipelines, extend
and shape the performance of state power (Barry 2013; Meehan, Shaw & Marston 2013;
Darling 2014; Meehan 2014; Dittmer 2017). Others point to the role of new technologies, such
as drones, robots or algorithms, in shaping the spatial arena of the political (Braun, Whatmore
& Stengers 2010; Shaw 2016; Del Casino Jr et al. 2020). A number of works also seek to
integrate assemblage thinking into political geography and critical geopolitics (Allen 2011;
Depledge 2013; Dittmer 2014; Müller 2015a). Furthermore, political geography has taken on

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new terrain by integrating elements such as air (Adey 2015) and water (Steinberg & Peters
2015).
Nonhuman beings have also been considered to be relevant actors in the area of political
geography, albeit to a lesser extent. A number of works scrutinize the contours of a political
animal geography (Hobson 2007; Srinivasan 2016; Margulies & Karanth 2018; Swann-Quinn
2019). Others investigate the role of viruses, plants, and other living matter in political and
spatial processes (Barker 2010; Dobson, Barker & Taylor 2013; Ingram 2013; Head et al. 2014;
Theriault 2017; Klinke 2019). Thus, as Hovorka (2018) outlines, nonhuman beings are crucial
elements of networks of power and are entangled in asymmetrical hierarchies with humans and
other species (see also Crowley, Hinchliffe & McDonald 2017; Minor & Boyce 2018).
In summary, the emerging field of a more-than-human political geography provides
fruitful conceptual starting points for understanding nonhumans as co-constitutive agents in
political processes. A more-than-human reformulation of border studies, however, is still
underway. Below, I address this void by scrutinizing works that have looked at the role of
nonhumans in bordering processes, while putting forward a more-than-human approach to
bordertextures.
3. The More-than-Human Composition of Bordertextures
This section approaches border (de)stabilizations as the outcomes of more-than-human
bordertextures. Such an understanding stresses the relational co-fabrication of territorial
borders. It poses the question of how humans, animals, viruses, plants, objects, and technologies
are bound up in the co-constitution of borders and border (de)stabilizations. I thus conceptualize
bordertextures as webs of complex interactions between a multitude of human and nonhuman
actors. This conceptualization moves beyond a focus on border representations since it makes
room for the inclusion of not only human-induced discourse, but also nonhuman materialities,
bodies and practices that effectuate border (de)stabilizations. At the same time, bordertexturing
as a methodological approach complements work in the field of more-than-human geographies.
It provides opportunities to focus on the question of how border (de)stabilizations coincide
with, effectuate or transgress distinctions between nature/culture, human/animal and
object/subject.
This interpretation of bordertextures takes its cue from works that highlight the
performative dimensions of borders. From such a perspective, borders are constantly emerging,
and continually being made and (de)stabilized through social and political processes (cf. Paasi

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2001, 2009; Parker & Vaughan-Williams 2009). Thus, border researchers have focus on
practices of “border-making” (Brambilla et al. 2015), “acts of bordering” (van Houtum & van
Naerssen 2002; Newman 2006; Andersson 2014) and “border work” (Rumford 2008;
Bialasiewicz 2012). A more-than-human approach to bordertextures adds to this work by
illustrating how bordering processes are not only enacted by humans but also shaped by our
relationships with nonhumans, including animals, viruses, plants, objects and technologies. As
a result, bordering processes not only take place at the ‘margins’ of states and territories, they
play out in a range of practices that gather together humans and nonhumans which may be
located far away from the actual borderline (Amilhat Szary & Giraut 2015). This more-than-
human account of bordertextures opens up different lines of inquiry for the study of borders
beyond an anthropocentric scope.
First, a more-than-human approach analyses nonhumans, such as viruses and animals,
as a locus of border control. There is a body of fruitful work that stress the role of nonhumans
in governing and controlling territorial borders. For instance, Mather and Marshall (2011)
illustrate how territorial boundaries were (re)configured and (re)territorialized after the 2005
outbreak of classical swine fever in South African pig farms. They argue that, in the context of
this viral disease, governmental actors implemented biosecurity measures that re-actualized
territorial borders set up during the Apartheid era, for instance, around the former homeland
Transkei. Pearson (2016) explores the enmeshment of smuggling and customs dogs in the
historical creation of the territorial border between France and Belgium. He argues that
“animals are significant, if neglected, agents in the construction and contestation of borders”
(ibid: 50). Chuengsatiansup and Limsawart (2019) explore a transborder tuberculosis screening
project in Myanmar and Thailand, arguing that microbes set in motion a border-making process
that could be interpreted as efforts by the Thai state ‘to enact’ a territorial border to its
neighbouring country.
Second, a more-than-human approach to bordertextures stresses the agency of
nonhumans in effectuating border (de)stabilizations. Animals, viruses and other nonhuman
entities constitute not only objects of border control but also subjects who respond to, actively
challenge, or obstruct the control and governance of territorial borders. Thus, nonhumans can
be conceptualized as mediators who also catalyse events that resist the original intentions of
border enforcement. A handful of fruitful works illustrate this capacity of nonhumans to
challenge and resist border control (see Sundberg 2011; Squire 2014; Boyce 2016). Curiously,
a majority of these studies examine U.S. border enforcement, while less attention has been paid

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to the more-than-human contestation of border control elsewhere in the world. Sundberg (2011:
2) “makes the case for addressing nonhumans as actors in geopolitical processes such as
boundary making and enforcement.” She shows how the ocelot and jaguarondi, endangered cat
species living in the border area between Texas and Mexico, together with a range of actors
who gathered to protect their habitat, challenged and altered the operational plans of the U.S.
Border Patrol. Building on this case study, she argues that agency is always a “doing-in-
relation”, one that unfolds between a range of actors, including humans, plants, animals and
other natural elements (ibid: 331). Sundberg thus underscores the value of including nonhumans
in the study of borders: “addressing nonhumans as actors allows me to tell different and more
complex stories about the politics of boundary enforcement, stories rooted in daily practices
involving lively encounters between embodied beings at specific sites of action” (ibid.: 332).
In another article, Boyce (2016) analyses the failed implementation of the U.S. border
enforcement technology SBInet at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. He argues that the
highly complex technology engaged in an act of “technological rebellion”, resisting and
refusing the straightforward cooperation between border enforcement (ibid: 249). Moreover, he
stresses the role of other nonhuman actors in the failure of the border enforcement technology,
arguing that “the climate, topography and inhabitants of the border region have never fully
cooperated. Instead, even as they pose formidable obstacles to unauthorized crossers, these
same forces, objects, and conditions continuously disrupt, frustrate, and constrain enforcement
operations” (ibid: 257). Boyce thus concludes that, in the context of border enforcement, “the
state seeks to tame and digest a chaotic exterior that continuously withdraws from its gaze”
(ibid: 259). In another article entitled “Desert Trash”, Squire (2014: 11) draws on Barad’s
(2007) concept of “intra-action” and explores how “bordering processes between states resonate
with bordering practices between the human and non-human”. She focuses on the things left
behind by border crossers in the Sonora desert at the U.S.-Mexican border and explores their
role in enforcing and challenging border enforcement. Taken together, these works attest to the
agency of a multitude of nonhuman actors in resisting, challenging and altering border control.
Third, more-than-human bordertextures can be understood as constituting contact zones
and sites of encounter between human and nonhuman actors. This perspective highlights the
fact that borders also enable contact because they are continuously transgressed by both humans
and nonhumans and, thus, rendered permeable. A number of works have examined such an
interpretation of borders as sites of encounter and transgression. For instance, Valdivia,
Wolford and Lu (2014) explore the making and unmaking of borders around Galápagos

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National Park on the Galápagos Islands. They show how these borders ‘leak’; introduced plant
species, such as guava and blackberry, constantly cross the boundaries between protected and
unprotected areas and have successively overrun the national park. The authors thus propose
conceptualizing borders as “sites where the articulation of different worlds, networks,
assemblages becomes evident and their asymmetries and differences available for intervention”
(ibid: 687). In another article, Hinchliffe et al. (2013) analyse practices of border control in
response to infectious diseases. They suggest regarding them as struggles to enforce the myth
of straight demarcations, separating ostensibly ‘pure’ spaces of health and disease. The impetus
is thus “largely to ‘keep out’ certain things while allowing others to circulate […] through the
selective restrictions on the circulation of plants, animals, people, issues and such like” (ibid:
531). The authors then go on to problematize the spatial assumptions underpinning this myth
of straight demarcations between health and disease, arguing that viruses and other pathogens
do not stay neatly outside of established borders. As they put it: “the permeability of walls is a
requirement for life to live, to circulate” (ibid: 535). Rather than thinking of borders as straight
lines, they thus call for an awareness of the complex borderlands of disease control; spaces that
are detached from geographic territory and co-constituted by a multitude of human and
nonhuman elements working together. The territorial borders that are constantly (de)stabilized
by more-than-human bordertextures might thus be better regarded as filters rather than as
hermetic seals that close off territories.
Finally, a more-than-human interpretation of bordertextures draws attention to the
question of how borders channel, slow down or accelerate cross-border mobilities. More-than-
human bordertextures also produce and (de)stabilize subject positions, identifying human and
nonhuman border crossers as either ‘rightful’ or ‘risky’ (cf. Law 2006). This chimes with the
recent ‘mobility turn’ across the social sciences. Related works illustrate that not only humans
are highly mobile, but also things, goods, capital, technologies and ideas (cf. Sheller & Urry
2006; Urry 2007; Cresswell & Merriman 2011). In this context, there is also an emerging
interest in animal mobilities. Related works attest to the fact that living beings beyond humans
are also constantly moving in space (Bull 2011; Cresswell 2014; Hodgetts & Lorimer 2018). A
more-than-human approach to bordertextures adds to these works by illustrating that nonhuman
mobilities also become obstructed, channelled, filtered, accelerated or slowed down by
territorial borders.
In the following two sections, I focus on two specific groups of living nonhumans, viruses
(Section 4) and animals (Section 5), which merit further attention as agents in bordertextures.

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4. Rethinking Viruses as Border Agents
In this section, I make the case for including viruses in the study of bordertextures. Such an
approach regards viruses as political actors that initiate, shape, and challenge border
(de)stabilizations through their many interactions with humans and nonhumans. The intrinsic
microbiological features of viruses most tellingly illustrate this need to account for the complex
web of interactions between a multitude of human and nonhuman actors in bordertextures.
Whether they should be defined as beings in their own right is a matter of continuous debate
among microbiologists (see for instance Rybicki 1990; Xue et al. 2010; Casiraghi et al. 2016).
Since viruses are unable to survive on their own and depend on other living organisms to act as
hosts in order to replicate their genetic material, some would not consider them as ‘being alive’,
while others make the case for classifying them as autonomous living beings based on their
evolutionary history1. Microbiologist Rybicki (1990: 182) thus compellingly calls viruses
“organisms at the edge of life”. The question of what counts as a living agent is thus inscribed
into the very existence of viruses.
Viruses are therefore always beings-in-relation; they need vectors and hosts in order to
spread spatially and to cross and (de)stabilize territorial borders. Their intrinsic microbiological
features compellingly illustrate the need to adopt a relational understanding of bordertextures,
one that accounts for how agency unfolds between the interactions of a range of different actors.
As Sundberg (2011) puts it, agency in the context of border-making is always a “doing-in-
relation” (ibid: 331), one that unfolds in-between a range of different actors, including humans,
plants, animals and other natural elements. In the context of infectious diseases, border
(de)stabilizations are effectuated by the viruses’ continuous merging with humans and other
nonhumans (cf. Scoones 2010; Andrews 2019). Hinchliffe et al. (2013: 537) thus call for a
focus on the relations that underpin infectious diseases, arguing that “pathogens not only mutate
as they move, they also drift (through accumulating mutations) and reassert through all manner
of transfections, transductions and transformations”. For instance, during the COVID-19
pandemic of 2020, border control increasingly took on a filtering role designed to identify,
target and isolate human-virus-conjunctions. Around the same time, the measures designed to
prevent and combat African swine fever targeted moving wild boars, which were depicted as
reservoirs and vectors of the pig virus.
1 For an overview of the two contrasting positions see, for instance, Brown (2016).

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Seen from this perspective, disease itself is the product of a “viral-animal-human co-
evolution” (Leach, Scoones & Stirling 2010: 374). This becomes most visible in the context of
zoonotic diseases, when viruses and pathogens pass from animals to humans and vice versa. In
these cases, it is often problematized that many infectious diseases originate from an animal
(ibid. : 370). Human contact with wild animals such as bats, monkeys or birds is thus frequently
depicted as a risk factor for virus transgressions to humans, for instance, in the case of Ebola or
avian influenza. This became tellingly illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was
assumed that the virus had transgressed to humans through wild meat sold at an animal market
in Wuhan, China (Gibbs 2021: 7). Moreover, the immediate contact with domesticated animals
through backyard farming, especially in countries in the Global South, is often depicted as a
risk factor for virus spread. As Everts (2013: 812) points out, an outbreak of avian influenza in
Egypt was met by a set of responses that led to the mass culling of backyard and rooftop poultry
in favour of restocking large industrial companies.
Viruses and other pathogens not only merge with living (non)humans, they also interact
with technology. This happens, for instance, when bacteria develop resistance to drug
treatments (Thornber et al. 2020). Transport technologies have also increased their volume and
speed of spreading and border crossings. As a consequence of their interactions with
technology, viruses (and their hosts) do not necessarily travel linearly in space, they might also
‘jump‘ (Hinchliffe et al. 2013). Thus, the wayward spatial spreading of viruses always depends
on their complex interactions with animals, humans and technologies.
When viruses cross territorial borders in interaction with other (non)humans, they
frequently trigger political responses that aim to control and limit both these interactions and
the cross-border movements. Braun (2007: 15) claims that it is the intrinsic logic of viruses,
their unpredictability, slipperiness and elusiveness that is at the heart of such attempts to re-
gain control. There is a fruitful body of literature that engages critically with political
interventions that aim to produce ‘biosecurity’ (Bingham, Enticott & Hinchliffe 2008; Enticott
2008; Hinchliffe & Bingham 2008; Braun 2013; Dobson, Barker & Taylor 2013; Everts 2013).
Many point to the central role of border (de)stabilizations in this context (see for instance
Donaldson 2008; Hinchliffe et al. 2013; Enticott 2017; Chuengsatiansup & Limsawart 2019;
Enticott & Ward 2020). As Braun (2007: 22) puts it: “public health remains a geopolitical
exercise concerned with the sanctity of borders, dangerous migrations and foreign risks”. In a
case study, Donaldson and Wood (2004: 37f) illustrate how the political response to an outbreak
of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK was, to a large extent, built on “spatialized forms of

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control” such as the installation of zones with the aim of limiting and controlling all types of
human and nonhuman movement.
The demarcation of disease control zones, with varying degrees of ‘risk’ and
corresponding biosecurity measures, is a popular response to outbreaks of animal diseases. In
2020, it was a key measure in responding to outbreaks of African swine fever in European
countries, such as Poland, Germany and Belgium. These biosecurity measures targeted many
different kinds of (non)human actors who could act as vectors and hosts of the virus, including
pig farmers, hunters, pigs, wild boars and transport technologies. The aim of this zoning
approach was to enclose and eliminate ‘risky’ virus-animal interactions, to restore the health of
subpopulations of pigs, and to maintain the export of pig meat and other pig products. These
disease control zones were also frequently physically enclosed through the erection of fences
along their boundaries. These fences created spatial barriers that did not necessarily coincide
with national borders but nevertheless came with lasting effects on human and nonhuman
mobilities. In other instances, the erection of fences in response to the pig virus contributed to
the stabilization of national borders, as in the case of Denmark and Germany. Leach, Scoones
and Stirling (2010: 370) point to the feedback loops of such spatial tools of disease control in
that they might come with unintended and unexpected outcomes for both human and nonhuman
actors. Thus, fences – as objects in their own right – might themselves become nonhuman
elements in bordertextures and border agents that ‘strike back’.
5. Rethinking Animals as Border Agents
Animals also constitute co-constitutive agents in bordertextures. In contrast to viruses, their
border crossings are frequently desired, facilitated and accelerated by humans. This occurs
when animals or animal parts are integrated into bordertextures in the form of economic
commodities, as “lively capital” (Haraway 2008) or “animal capital” (Shukin 2009). Hence,
they become intrinsic elements of globalized capitalist economies (cf. Barua 2016, 2017; Barua
2019). For instance, the import and export of domesticated animals – dead or alive – is a crucial
requirement of international meat markets. Pigs and other production animals quite often travel
around the European Union (and beyond) before their parts are sold as meat in supermarkets,
being bred, fed, and slaughtered in different places and countries. Thus, borders become
destabilized for the purpose of enabling the smooth import and export of domesticated animals,
such as poultry, pigs and cows, as well as their products.

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Border (de)stabilizations in the context of industrial livestock farming depend not only
on human relations with animals but also on their relations with nonhuman elements, such as
technologies and infrastructure. Cresswell (2014) thus suggests looking at animal mobilities
through the lens of logistics, taking into account the highly technologized border crossings of
production animals. Borders are also (de)stabilized for certain animals if their lives are valued
as pets. In such cases they obtain animal passports, objects that merge with their bodies in order
to authorize their border crossings (Birke, Holmberg & Thompson 2013). Humans also
contribute to the (de)stabilization of borders when animals are illicitly sold as exotic pets on the
black market. The border crossing of these animals are ‘unauthorized’ and they are smuggled
across the borders (cf. Collard 2014).
In other instances, the border crossing of animals is framed as a problem or a risk factor.
As outlined in the previous section, this occurs when animals interact with viruses and other
pathogens and transmit infectious diseases. When they are framed as potential disease
reservoirs, animals are turned into ‘unwanted’ border crossers. Braun (2007: 18) illustrates how
the wayward spatial movements of birds became a major target of political responses to avian
influenza, arguing that “wild birds compose a ‘silent reservoir’ of viruses – a faceless, unseen
and unseeable enemy. […] Because birds migrate, they form ‘uncanny’ reservoirs that disperse
and move about”. Such ostensibly ‘risky’ animal categories set in motion border
(de)stabilizations, for instance, around zones or territories that are designated as ‘disease-free’.
In 2020, this became most apparent in the context of the political responses to African swine
fever, which resulted in the proliferation of national border fences across Europe. These fences
were designed to prevent and limit the cross-border mobilities of wild boars - animals framed
as a major risk factor for the transmission and spread of the pig virus.
Animals also turn into ‘unwanted’ border crossers when they are considered to be ‘pests’
or ‘invasive species’ that disturb the balance of ecosystems or pose a threat to ‘native’ species
(see for instance Robbins 2004; Dobson, Barker & Taylor 2013; Everts 2015; Everts &
Benediktsson 2015; Crowley 2017; Perkins 2020). In such cases, their relationships with
humans and other nonhumans are deemed detrimental and destructive. For instance, in the UK,
grey squirrels from North America are considered to be ‘a pest’ whose invasion was at the cost
of the native red squirrels. They thus constitute targets of systematic pest control efforts that
involve different culling techniques (Crowley, Hinchliffe & McDonald 2018). Scholars have
also frequently examined ‘invasive’ animal species and corresponding population control
efforts in Australia and New Zealand (Phillips 2011; Atchison 2019; Howard et al. 2019).

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Such practices of invasive species management and animal culling form an integral part
of bordertextures. Although they might be located far away from the actual borderline, they
nevertheless restore the myth of an ostensibly pure, static and untouched natural space enclosed
through hermetically sealed boundaries. As Everts (2015: 195) puts it, political measures
targeting species classified as ‘invasive’ often build on a “fixed understanding of space”. I
would thus suggest regarding the systematic killing of invasive animals, with the aim of
eliminating them from certain territories, as a practice that effectuates border (de)stabilizations.
As Gibbs (2021: 3) outlines, animals are rendered killable when they are perceived as being
‘out of place’. The mass culling of animals that are ostensibly ‘out of place’ is also a common
response to infectious diseases. Cassidy (2019) scrutinizes British debates over the systematic
culling of badgers, animals that are regarded as a vector of bovine tuberculosis in the UK. In
the context of African swine fever, European governments pushed for the systematic killing of
wild boars and sometimes for their complete removal from entire zones or territories. In the
case of an acute outbreak, governments also frequently mandate the culling of hundreds of
thousands of production pigs in factory farms, as was the case in Poland and Romania in 2019
and 2020. Such practices, I would argue, (re)produce borders since they attempt to restore neat
dividing lines between ‘healthy’ and ‘diseased’ spaces. What follows from this is that border
(de)stabilizations that are effectuated by animals in bordertextures not only take place at the
actual border but also at different sites and scales.
Bordertextures also filter the movements of animals and categorize them into
‘authorized’ and ‘unwanted’ border crossers. As Hodgetts and Lorimer (2018: 16) strikingly
put it:
“Fences, passports, visual surveillance, and forms of atmospheric deterrence work in equal
measure to police human and nonhuman citizenship. Some humans and animals […] experience
smoothed global networks, assisted passage, and permeable borders. Others are kept at bay by
deliberate exclusion […] or by the inadvertent effects of walls, fences and other bordering
technologies”. (Hodgetts & Lorimer 2018: 16)
Both humans and animals are thus governed through similar practices, objects and technologies
of border control in bordertextures.
However, animals are not only the objects of control but also agents that actively shift,
form and co-constitute bordertextures. For instance, the border (de)stabilizations that were
triggered in light of the responses to African swine fever included the installation of “scent
borders” along the German-Polish border (Land Brandenburg 2019). These borders were

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14
invisible to humans and were meant to keep out wild boars through off-odours, thereby
responding to the particular sensory and behavioural features of wild boars. Moreover, the
‘unruly’ border crossings of wild boars were a much-discussed issue in this context. During the
German outbreak of African swine fever in wild boars in September 2020, it was frequently
asserted that the previously erected temporary “mobile fences” along the Polish border, could
be easily crossed by infected wild boars, while plans for a more solid and permanent fence were
put forward (Pig Progress 30/9/2020). Critics of the Danish boar fence along the German border
also asserted that wild boars could easily swim around land borders through rivers and other
waters. This led the Danish government to extend its border fence to Germany through
“swimming tubes” in the sea (von Tiedemann 2018). In their paper on “animals’ mobilities”,
Hodgetts and Lorimer (2018) thus call attention to the lived mobilities and embodied
experiences of animals themselves. They suggest a tactical distinction be made “between
animal mobilities and animals’ mobilities […] where the latter (with an apostrophe) emphasizes
how movement (or its lack) is experienced by animals themselves” (ibid: 2). A more-than-
human approach to bordertextures should therefore also investigate how animals’ mobilities
shape the material design of borders and how animals themselves experience and react to
practices and technologies of border control.
6. Concluding Remarks
This chapter made the case for regarding bordertextures as more-than-human compositions. As
a complexity-oriented approach to border research, the concept of bordertextures offers a
particularly fruitful framework for integrating nonhumans in the study of borders. Such an
approach allows our complex entanglements with nonhumans and their role in effectuating
border (de)stabilizations to be taken into account. In this way, a more-than-human reading of
bordertextures enlarges the ontological agenda of border studies and enriches current
discussions on the study of borders. It opens up new lines of inquiry that direct attention to the
complex web of interactions between humans and nonhumans. While objects and technologies
are now frequently integrated into the study of borders, I have argued that living nonhumans
have so far not received the attention they deserve from border researchers. In the course of this
chapter, I thus scrutinized potential pathways for approaching animals and viruses as co-
constitutive elements in bordertextures.
What came through clearly in the course of this chapter is that a more systematic
integration of animals and viruses into border research through the concept of bordertextures

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15
promises to enrich our current understanding of infectious diseases. As beings-in-relation par
excellence, viruses and other pathogens need hosts and vectors in order to spread spatially and
to cross territorial borders. The border (de)stabilizations that occur in this context are therefore
contingent on the complex interactions between humans, viruses, animals and technologies.
The concept of more-than-human bordertextures thus offers promising pathways for
research that enables a better understanding of the profound social and political transformation
processes that occurred in 2020. The political responses to the wayward spread of two viruses,
COVID-19 and African swine fever, effectuated outcomes that are likely to have lasting effects
on our living together in a globalized world. A more-than-human understanding of
bordertextures should therefore also contribute to a critical reflection of the powerful border
(de)stabilizations that have gained momentum in this context.
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