We Are All Jews: (In)Visible Outsiders and the Anthropology of the Border

The starting point of this chapter is, on the one hand, the Fanon’s thought about the potential of exclusion related to visible and invisible otherness and, on the other hand, the migration crisis (2021–2022) on the Polish-Belarusian border, which is also the border of the Schengen Area and the EU. Although multiple economic, social, and political processes related to globalization undermine the sovereignty of nation-states based on territory and its borders, in recent years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a renaissance of this idea. The border becomes a place where the essence of power reveals itself as the ability to divide and exclude. The wall erected by Poland on the border with Belarus has become a tool of necropolitics and then it activated ideological divisions between Poles: for some it became a symbol of regained national sovereignty, for others a reason for shame and guilt. The migrants trying to cross the Polish-Belarussian border embodied visible otherness. When, as a result of the Russian aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, the largest number of refugees from Ukraine fled to Poland, they were met with the hospitality of both the authorities and citizens. This was probably due to a less visible difference than in the case of people coming from the Middle East or Africa, as well as the desire to restore a positive image of the nation as an imagined community.