Topography of power. Visual domination and the geography of pursuit on Alpine borders

Since the militarization of the French-Italian Alpine border in 2015 to control illegalized migration, border police agents have targeted migrants through mobile patrols across the mountain range. Drawing on fieldwork data — including observations of police practices, reconstructions of migrants’ journeys through the mountains, and GIS-based visibility analyses — this article shows that border control forces use visibility as a strategic tool. Building on the literature on the visual dimension of power at borders, the article analyzes the spatial relationship between border patrols and illegalized migrants through the concept of visual domination , characterized by an asymmetry of visual capacity: the threefold ability to control what one sees, how one is perceived, and how others are seen. Law enforcement agents instrumentalize the mountain topography, controlling the border through a strategic combination of vertical and horizontal tactics that revive the logics of asymmetric warfare, thereby exposing people on the move to environmental violence. However, the mobile nature of the control system and the Alpine terrain show that visual domination is constantly challenged by migrants' attempts to evade the police gaze, creating a mobile geography of pursuit in which both sides—border police and migrants—seek to see without being seen and to move beneath each other's threshold of detectability. Solidarity practices at the border further challenge visual domination by transforming spatial and topographic knowledge into a site of resistance.