Entangled logics of enmity: race, geopolitics, and the lethal pushback regime at the Polish‑Belarusian border

This article explores the emergence and consolidation of the violent and lethal pushback regime at the Polish-Belarusian border from 2021 to 2025. Over this time, the Belarus regime has enabled crossings by migrants from the global South of its borders with European states, which have adopted restrictive policies and legislations and performed violent bordering practices. The article unfolds in three main sections. First, we discuss the concept of ‘instrumentalisation’ and the conditions of possibility for the instrumentalisation of migration by non-EU states. We propose to refer to the EU’s response to such practices as ‘counter-instrumentalisation governance’. Second, we trace how geopolitical and racial logics of enmity have become entangled within counter-instrumentalisation governance and resulted in the construction of postcolonial migrants as ‘threats’ and ‘weapons’. Third, we analyse the way these entangled logics materialise at the border in a veritable ‘architecture of enmity’ made of laws and policies, the militarisation of operations, infrastructures, technologies and geophysical elements. This architecture results in a regime of violent push-backs, in which both direct and indirect forms of violence as well as deaths and disappearances at the border have become normalised.