Borders of Perception. Author: Hyunsoo Cho

In 2015, Syrian swimmers Yusra and Sara Mardini successfully pulled a stalled refugee boat across the Aegean Sea for three hours, saving the lives of all 18 passengers (Shah 2022). The story of their journey was later made into a film called The Swimmers. But the film failed to show that, in reality, these two heroes were still treated as intruders.

Several years later, the Russian–Ukrainian war began in Europe. In 2022, immediately following the Russian invasion, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians crossed the Polish border within days (Ridgwell 2022). Within three months, 5 million people settled in Europe (Mixed Migration Centre 2024).

These two events raise a question: Despite both events being the result of war and involving people seeking asylum, why are some refugees welcomed while others risk their lives? Borders are not geographical lines but ways of interpreting bodies.

Nirmal Puwar (2004, pp.117-118) argues that what often appears to be an objective or universal space is, in fact, structured by power and bodily norms. Space is constructed around whiteness, masculinity, and middle-classness (Puwar 2004, p.117), and Puwar (2004, p.8) terms the body within which these standards operate a “somatic norm”, which refers to a body that appears natural and unmarked but functions as the unspoken standard by which others are judged and excluded. Any body, or person, that deviates from this norm is immediately labelled a invader.

Belonging is not a right that is equally granted to all but a privilege that is permitted by those whose bodies fit the dominant norm (Puwar 2004, p.8). The whiteness and European embodiment of Ukrainian refugees make their presence appear ordinary and unproblematic as they are perceived naturally belonging to Europe. In contrast, the bodies of Syrian refugees are outside this norm. Minority bodies are not invisible, but hypervisible. They are bodies that draw intense scrutiny and become symbols of representation or disruption within the established order (Puwar 2004, pp.86, 141-144). These bodies remain unseen as competent and legitimate subjects of rights (Puwar 2004, pp.138,141).

In the film, the 2015 Syrian rescue experience is portrayed as a symbol of hope and courage, but Sarah is later arrested for the same act and faces a lengthy trial (Shah 2022). The same plea for life and survival is rewarded recognition and authority for those within the system, while for those outside, is delegitimised and subjected to intensified surveillance and sanction. The contrast illustrates how the same act is differently valued depending on who performs it and where their body is positioned within the social order.

Puwar’s (2004) analysis primarily focuses on institutions such as parliaments, not explicitly address borders. However, while parliaments determine who deserves to be represented, borders determine who deserves to belong to the community. In this sense, parliaments and borders are different scales of the same mechanism. In parliaments, an uncomfortable gaze and burden of suspicion prevail (Puwar 2004, pp.64-66), while at borders, this exclusionary logic escalates into expulsion and potentially death. The difference lies in the intensity of the violence, not the structure of the logic. This pre-legal logic of exclusion —the power to read and classify bodies (Puwar 2004, pp.8, 65-66) — operates in any space. From this perspective, the notion of invading is not an attribute, but a category produced by space.

But what enables certain bodies to be translated into threats? Donna Haraway (1991) analyses modern society as operating through the metaphor of immunity. Just as immunology distinguishes the self from the non-self, society too divides us from the other (Haraway 1991). Immunity is a rhetoric of self-definition, and the state maintains its identity only by excluding external invaders (Haraway 1991 pp. 223-224). Within this process, migrants become pathogens, borders become immune barriers, and deportation becomes a ritual of purification.

Haraway (1991, p. 223) identifies the core of this logic: the colonized was perceived as the invader. Syria was once a French colony. When civil war erupted in 2011, France and other European nations intervened, supporting rebel groups. The war intensified, and in 2015, Syrians fled the war, heading towards Europe, but they were not welcomed. Those who were formerly colonised were pushed outside the boundary once again. Ukraine is different, however. Ukraine never colonised Europe. Rather, it was a victim of the Soviet Union. Being white and Christian, Ukrainians are perceived as part of lost Europe-not invaders, but an extension of Europe.

But what enables this imagination of a white, Christian Europe? What has been forgotten? Paul Gilroy (2005) describes the psychological aftermath of imperial decline as postcolonial melancholia – a condition marked by the failure to confront or mourn the loss of empire. He argues that, instead of working through the unsettling colonial history, societies have tended to diminish, deny, and forget it (Gilroy 2005). Such forgetting produces a collective nostalgia that erases imperial violence and idealises lost greatness. In this melancholic longing for a pure Europe, the memory of colonialism is eradicated, and migrants and refugees come to be perceived as alien intrusions who threaten the integrity of the national body (Gilroy 2005).

This amnesia is not limited to France. Brexit’s “Take Back Control” and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” both express collective nostalgia for an impossible past. But the pure past never existed. Rather, Great Britain’s great period was the imperial era of colonial exploitation, while America’s great period involved a time when racial segregation was legal. However, society continuously creates new invaders to fill the void, sacrificing today’s other to restore past glory. This is the politics of melancholia.

The discourse of the invader is complete with the overlapping of the three layers: Puwar’s physical norms, Haraway’s metaphor of immunity, and Gilroy’s postcolonial melancholia. Yet this prejudice is not natural but is learned, so we should reject this prejudice and resist old habits. Prejudice can be unlearned through memory, education, and solidarity. Schools can bring back the colonial histories that Europe chose to forget, journalists can recognise violence even when it hides behind the language of policy, and citizens can treat empathy as a political practice, not a private feeling. To remember is to resist, and to speak differently is to redraw the borders built into perception.

References

Gilroy, P. 2005. Postcolonial melancholia. The Wellek Library Lectures. New York: Columbia University Press.

Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.

Shah, F.  2022. The Swimmers: An interview with Syrian Olympian Yusra Mardini’  Available at: https://www.amaliah.com/post/66146/the-swimmers-yusra-mardini-interview-netflix  [Accessed 6 November 2025].

Mixed Migration Centre. 2024. The temporary protection of Ukrainian refugees Available at: https://mixedmigration.org/temporary-protection-ukrainian-refugees/ [Accessed: 1 November 2025].

Puwar, N. 2004. Space invaders : race, gender and bodies out of place. Oxford ;: Berg. doi: 10.5040/9781474215565

Ridgwell, H. 2022. Poland under pressure as over 1 million refugees flee Ukraine. Voice of America Available at: ://www.voanews.com/a/poland-under-pressure-as-over-1-million-refugees-flee-ukraine-/6469675.html  [Accessed: 3 November 2025].