ITV: Noah Hatchwell, Head of our partner charity, Collective Aid

An Art & Residency Space, a Charity Preventing Border Violence, Worlding Together…

On paper, it doesn’t make much sense, this partnership between us and Collective Aid.

However, we may be more complementary than we thought. The events we organised seamlessly brought together art and civil justice, proving that our missions in a London space are complementary, while our “field” work can be substantially different.

Interview with Noah Hatchwell by Joana P. R. Neves, co-founder of Worlding

Using our artistic tools in line with civil justice is a challenge and pleasure in equal measure. This proximity with Collective Aid led to a sobering acknowledgement of the discrepancy between the importance of what they do and the invisibility of their impact, not to mention the tragedies they handle and witness on a day-to-day basis.

Joana P. R. Neves: How does one come to work with displaced people and preventing violence against them? What did you study, and where?

Noah Hatchwell: I very peculiarly got rejected from every university except Cambridge. I applied to five universities and got rejected from four.

JPRN: No way.

NH: It was Cambridge or nothing! I applied for the HSBS course: Human Social Political Sciences. It spans a range of subjects across the humanities: politics, sociology, anthropology, psychology. I started after a gap year, during which I worked in landscape conservation in Madagascar. When COVID started, I ended up spending the rest of that year with Collective Aid.

JPRN: Did you adjust your studies to that newfound line of work?

NH: I always had an interest in displacement—what drives it, how it’s managed, and how deaths and disappearances at borders are handled at policy and governance levels. During my degree, I focused specifically on border technology and surveillance and wrote three dissertations on the development of surveillance tactics within Europe and the NATO area. That work led me to the Balkans, where I was invited to help develop the international programme at Collective Aid.

I remain involved with different research projects not only with surveillance on borders and the role technology plays in death and disappearances, but also humanitarian and human rights activists in Serbia, in Bosnia, and in Greece. There’s important work being done to uncover how activists, working on migrant rights or environmental issues, are surveilled.

JPRN: Studying and working at the same time is insane! Was it frowned upon at Cambridge or did you keep it separate?

NH: You’re technically not supposed to work during term time. It’s a soft rule now, but it’s generally discouraged. Even typical student jobs are frowned upon. So I kept it quiet, at least in an official capacity with my tutors and supervisors!

JPRN: I’m curious about the distinction, and whether it makes sense, between urban surveillance, online surveillance, and then border surveillance?

NH: There’s a PhD in that to be sure! This was the fundamental question at the core my work at university. There is a difference between infrastructure and the technology used. Surveillance in the UK is generally framed around addressing serious harm and crime. In that sense, when it functions as intended, it is seen as working. At borders, between Greece and Turkey, or Hungary and Serbia, the purpose is very different. Surveillance is used to push people into the sea, to sink boats and kill people. It facilitates pushbacks that put lives at risk.

More broadly, many researchers are sceptical of the idea of “border technology” as a distinct category. Borders themselves are technologies. Technology and surveillance are a tool for enforcing a political agenda. There are political agendas and policies that are good, and political agendas and policies that are bad. In the UK, there is a strong policy agenda to reduce violence against women; surveillance functions to achieve that, in some cases. On the vast majority of the world’s borders, surveillance is used to enforce a racist agenda that kills people and does very little to prevent human trafficking. In this way, they are similar. It’s a tool.

JPRN: Collective Aid, how did it start, before you arrived, in a small kitchen in Belgrade, and how did it become this international registered charity operation?

NH: It started with a group of friends who had been working in Greece. While travelling home through Serbia—a route few people took at the time—they stopped in Belgrade. They were struck by the city and decided to stay, partly out of curiosity and partly because they became aware of people passing through along the Balkan route. They visited sites where people on the move were staying, including Obrenovac, the main government-run reception centre. It was, and still is, under-resourced, with limited services.

JPRN: These centres are government-run? What drives countries to create them?

NH: Incredible question. So, why have reception centers? There used to be far more reception centres in Serbia and Bosnia than there are now. In Serbia, in 2023, they closed a huge number of them and continue to do so. In Bosnia, they started being shut down this year. We’re worried with this trajectory towards winter, as the negotiations to join the EU have progressed for both countries. Their ability to process and displace people, to defend “their” borders has been politicized by the EU accession process and funding, even though it’s not supposed to. In 2017, the political argument was “we don’t want people passing through to Hungary, Croatia or the rest of Europe, to stay here”. But the EU established that if a crossing was registered in Bosnia or Serbia, and the person tried to claim asylum in France, they would be sent back there. So, despite legally having to register people passing through, they gave asylum, NGOs provided food, but there was no record kept, from 2016 to 2023. That has changed. With EU accession processes and funding, there’s been increased investment in registration systems, biometric data collection, and stricter border enforcement. As a result, borders are much harder to cross and much more dangerous.

JPRN: I see. So, please do continue the history of the organisation.

NH: In Obrenovac, no one was providing food. So, an empty building eventually became the Azadi Center because this group of friends managed to get funding and start providing food to the huge number of people passing through. The main route into Europe was through Belgrade, then through Hungary or up north, through Croatia. Eventually, they were invited by an organisation operating on the northern border, to set up a team there. Then they were invited to set up a kitchen in Bosnia, a year later. People who failed to get into Hungary or Croatia would go into Bosnia where it was slightly easier to cross because it wasn’t a EU border. There was a large number of people staying in Sarajevo as well, so we set up a kitchen there too. Over time, as other organisations established themselves there too, the focus shifted away from food onto clothing and NFI (non-food items, such as clothes).

JPRN: Why is it harder to provide NFI as opposed to food?

NH: Because it’s much more difficult to source large amounts of NFI consistently. Clothes are expensive, they require large storage spaces and they’re difficult to distribute, especially if people are living in informal squats due to the reception centre shut down. They have been pushed into more and more desperate circumstances, so large amounts of clothes have to be taken to ever more remote places. Donations are easier, but they require shipping. Within the EU it’s feasible, but getting them across the border into non-EU countries demands more permits, more taxes, fumigation. We’ve been doing it for a long time, which is why we developed this expertise that a lot of organisations lack.

JPRN: We’re talking about clothes, but Collective Aid’s overall mission is to prevent deaths and border violence. This can surprise people. The media doesn’t cover these issues enough. Can you introduce the notion? And how do you operate at that level?

NH: What is border violence? When we started, in 2017, pushbacks weren’t part of the public conversation or of the global understanding of borders. When people think about refugees and asylum seekers, the understanding is that people cross borders relatively easily, they declare themselves as refugees or asylum seekers, and then there are legal processes that the police activates. This is not what would happen. The police would illegally push people back, chase them through the forest, detain them, take them back to the border, and push them back onto the other side. People would report to the media, but it wasn’t taken seriously as a widespread, structural phenomenon. Not until organisations, like us, started collecting that data systematically. And even though we have shown border violence systematically being used as a deterrent across Europe’s borders, the media doesn’t really pick up the meaning of that, of the tactics used.

JPRN: It’s hard to convey, I suppose?

NH: When you see statistics about tens of thousands of pushbacks, when you read our reports of about 6,000 shipwrecks last year, it’s easy to imagine police being boisterous and pushing someone across a road or arresting someone. It doesn’t capture these thousands of stories: someone being chased and bitten by dogs to such an extent where they couldn’t walk for days afterwards, parents who’ve lost children in a shipwreck or a child who had to cover their mouth so that they couldn’t be heard breathing by a drone that was flying over them–the sheer scale of violence behind each of those individual data points. The fear deliberately instilled by chasing people with dogs, sinking the boats to create a culture of fear: that’s what border violence is. It’s not just a series of statistics or regrettable bad eggs in different border forces. It’s police being trained to shoot people’s legs. It’s tens of millions of euros going into drone programs to track people in mountains. Our analysis, different from a lot of organisations, is that this is a humanitarian problem, a human rights problem, and a civil society problem.

JPRN: Could you explain how?

NH: Some of the most dangerous points in people’s journeys are in the Balkan route. We met people on the road for years in Serbia and Bosnia, without access to clothes when temperatures reach -10 C. All they’re thinking about is running away from police or making it across the border without getting caught or attacked. A jacket, a sleeping bag, a fresh pair of shoes, dry socks offer a sense of normalcy. And, with border enforcement violence, people are taking dangerous routes. That’s the role that NFI plays–the humanitarian dimension: medical and hygiene supplies to simply survive. So many people experience this border violence, and no one believes them. We couldn’t do what we do without talking to people, taking them seriously, and rigorously cataloguing what we hear, to at least record history. To say that thousands of people in these locations have gone through the same experience, treated the same way and reporting it. The civil society dimension concerns the organisations doing this humanitarian work being criminalized, put under pressure by their states, by the police– being intimidated. We have colleagues who have been imprisoned, physically attacked by the police. They’re not the main characters in this, and they don’t want to be, but it is a fact that when people disappear, the situation becomes far worse for displaced people. That’s why this dimension is equally vital.

JPRN: What is your take on a society that watches these topics as fiction, film, but perhaps is not connecting those to reality?

NH: There’s a cynical and a more gentle take. The cynical take is that people consume ideas about resisting tyranny, violence, but can only imagine it if it happens to them or those who look like them. A lot of people, friends and family who know the work that I do, try to engage and understand it when it comes to Ukrainian refugees as opposed to those who are not from white countries. The gentler take is that people don’t know. Popular culture about state violence tends to be flashy, obvious and clear. Whereas the state violence that we see operates in deniability and invisibility, pushing people into places where the public can’t see them. We have to show the harm that is happening, make it visible to the public.

JPRN: Tell me how you see our partnership, which doesn’t really make sense on paper…

NH: The more I think about it, the more time we spend in partnership, the more it makes sense because it’s community and people. What we do, as different organisations, working in very different fields, originates from the same fundamental faith and enjoyment of what people do, are capable of and want to do in the future.