Police dogs and border violence in Europe

The violent employment of canines against migrants at contemporary European borders has as its backdrop the continual process of militarisation and policing of the European – and, in particular, European Union (EU) – borders which has been intensified since 2015, when a discourse of ‘migrant crisis’ has been advanced and crystallised in Europe.Footnote ¹⁵ The coming of Global South migrants, most of them fleeing conflicts, invasions, political persecutions, and extreme forms of poverty, was quickly turned into a major political and security issue by both the media and European politicians.Footnote ¹⁶ The movement of people from the Global South towards Europe has been portrayed as an unprecedented migrant ‘crisis’ that necessitated an immediate security response. In such a scenario, practices of violence against migrants have become more and more normalised, leading to thousands of migrant deaths, disappearances, and traumas.Footnote ¹⁷ Many such modes of violence and governance at the European border have been scrutinised by migration and border security scholars, including carceral practices of detention and confinement,Footnote ¹⁸ surveillance,Footnote ¹⁹ dispossession,Footnote ²⁰ etc.

Despite having become particularly pervasive at Europe’s borderzones, however, the use of police dogs by border authorities to police, surveil, and attack migrants has thus far received little attention within border and migration studies.Footnote ²¹ In a report published in 2022, one can see that cases of violence and intimidation with the use of police dogs at European borders have consistently grown since 2017, with hundreds of cases being reported over the past years.Footnote ²² Although those cases cut across multiple borderzones in Europe, the use of police dogs as a weapon against migrants has become particularly pervasive in land-pushback operations in the Balkans, particularly at the EU borderzones in this region.Footnote ²³ This is not a coincidence: the so-called Western Balkan route is, after all, one of the main migratory paths into Europe and has been marked by the increasing use of border violence as a form of ‘deterrence’ against migrant crossings.Footnote ²⁴ EU countries such as Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Hungary have been especially committed to the use of police dogs in their pushback operations, employing K-9 forces to police, intimidate, and punish migrants.Footnote ²⁵ The standardisation of such practices has led to the profusion of ‘dog bite wounds’ in migrants, especially on their limbs.Footnote ²⁶

The increasing reliance on police dogs in border operations as a weapon of physical and psychological violence in this region has been described by NGOs as ‘a policy designed to render migrants physically incapable of crossing the border’Footnote ²⁷ and a ‘way for police to make the passage as inhospitable as possible’.Footnote ²⁸ In a particularly gruesome case in Croatia on 2 December 2019, six Syrian migrants, including two children, were attacked by one unmuzzled police dog – likely a Belgian Malinois – after having crossed the border between Bosnia and Croatia. Despite the group’s attempts to explain that they had the intention to claim asylum in Croatia, armed border authorities told the migrants to lie on the ground and then ordered an unmuzzled police dog to attack and bite them, causing serious wounds to some of the migrants and almost reaching a major blood vessel in one of them. After several minutes of indiscriminate attacks by the police dog, the migrants were then loaded into the back of a van and forced to disembark on a small road at the border between Croatia and Bosnia.Footnote ²⁹

The use of dogs as a weapon to inflict violence also becomes visible in another pushback case from Bulgaria to Turkey. In this case, a Syrian migrant reported that while a police dog bit his legs, ‘the officers were saying “bravo bravo” to encourage the dog. I managed to move the dog away from my legs but the officers brought it back and made it bite me again.’Footnote ³⁰ In their statements, migrants often emphasise that the attacks are not accidental. In other words, they do not occur due to a certain incapacity of the dog handler to supposedly control a ‘disobedient’ police dog. On the contrary, in most instances, migrants state that they are ordered to lie on the ground before the attacks beginFootnote ³¹ and that border and police authorities ‘don’t stop them (the dogs). They smile and congratulate them’Footnote ³² during the attacks.

The incorporation of police dogs into pushback operations also seems to be predicated on an attempt to intimidate migrants, generating strong reactions of fear and terror and discouraging them from recrossing the borders.Footnote ³³ As BVMN reports, canines – often unmuzzled – are routinely used by police officers to threaten and scare migrants. In a pushback report from Slovenia to Bosnia in June 2021, for instance, five unmuzzled police dogs (two Malinois, two Rottweilers, and one German Shepherd) were used to intimidate Algerian migrants captured at the border. Forcing migrants to sit on the floor, police officers would keep ‘the dogs on the leash but suddenly let it go a little bit and then abruptly pull[ed] the dog back again’, in a clear attempt to terrorise migrants.Footnote ³⁴ The use of police dogs as a weapon of intimidation also becomes clear in the words of an Afghan migrant – part of a group of 12 people – pushed back on the Bulgarian border in April 2022:

Here it is central to note that, although oftentimes dogs and dog handlers belong to the national state police where they are employed, Frontex itself has not only offered a dog-handler manual and training to EU countries since 2009 but also has its own ‘canine battalion’.Footnote ³⁶ The so-called Frontex K-9 Team is an international team of dogs and dog handlers who are sent to the EU to participate in border patrols, often assisting national border forces to intercept migrants who try to cross illegally.Footnote ³⁷ As a result, it has not been uncommon for Frontex itself to be involved in cases of violence against migrants inflicted by its police dogs. In a case of K-9 attacks against migrants in Hungary’s frontier with Serbia in October 2016, for instance, the dog handler and the dog involved in the incident were not part of the Hungarian national border force but instead members of Frontex from Finland.Footnote ³⁸ In this episode, a woman who was part of a group of four migrants was severely attacked and bitten by an unmuzzled Frontex patrol dog. The internal report filed by Frontex to justify the aggression, however, states that the migrant attacked appeared suddenly from the bushes, scaring the animal, which then ‘reacted by biting, which is a natural defence reaction for service dogs’.Footnote ³⁹ The report also adds that ‘due to long leash, darkness and very limited vision, dog handler didn’t manage to see person before the dog’.Footnote ⁴⁰

This case is illuminating for many reasons. It exposes, for instance, how police dogs have also been used by Frontex to evade their responsibilities in cases of violence and torture. Because dogs are not fully ‘controllable’, there is always the risk that they can ‘overreact’ or simply react in unforeseen ways, leading to cases of violence that were not ‘intended’ by Frontex dog handlers. As troublesome as it may be, there is, in this case, an implicit responsibilisation of the victim – it is her ‘sudden appearance’ that ‘caused’ the dog to react aggressively by biting – and of the police dog itself, who, after all, can never be fully ‘governable’. What is left out of the equation here is not only that the dog was already unmuzzled before the coming of the victim but also, and more importantly, the fact that it is Frontex itself that decided to train and deploy police dogs as bordering devices, making the agency fully responsible for the behaviour of the dogs.

A symbol of terror and brutalisation for migrants, police dogs are – not without a dose of irony – often portrayed in Frontex’s publicity on social media as amicable and docile. Posts thanking their ‘four-legged friends for their service in Frontex operations’ usually praise the canines for their courage, loyalty, and companionship. These posts are often accompanied by photos of dog handlers with their dogs in which both look relaxed and happy to be together.Footnote ⁴¹ Behind these posts, there seems to be a desire to detach the image of the police dog and the dog handler as symbols of terror and power and replace it with the unconscious image of the pet and the pet owner, attracting support from the public, who sympathise with both the dogs and the dog handlers. This handler–dog bond, however, is an essential part of the process of weaponisation of dogs, as Harriet Smith et al. argue.Footnote ⁴² As the authors explain, ‘the central pillar in the training relationship is forming the bond between the dog and handler, which is built through the joint actions and care expressed through shared “knowing” and shared objects’.Footnote ⁴³ This bond of trust between handler and dog, thus, is in actuality a condition for the policing work of intimidation, dissuasion, and, of course, violence performed by police dogs at borderzones.

Dogs, thus, have been weaponised by EU member states and Frontex and deployed as tools to attack and intimidate migrants who are caught while crossing the borders.Footnote ⁴⁴ Selected and trained to operate as bordering devices in land pushbacks, canines are made to play the role of brave – albeit amicable – guardians of Europe’s borders. They operate as a relentless watchman who never sleeps, watching the gates of the territory, barking when someone approaches, and ferociously biting whoever dares to trespass. In light of that, my next section first contextualises the weaponisation of police dogs against migrants as part of Europe’s anxious attempts to secure racial order by reinforcing colour lines. It then points to the necessity of bridging contemporary post-colonial scholarship on migration and border security and animal studies for a better and more nuanced understanding of the racial and colonial underpinnings of this process of weaponisation of dogs at Europe’s borders.

(Post-)colonial borders and the intimacies between race and animality

The generalisation of police-dog attacks against migrants at European borderzones is situated within a much broader process of intensification of practices of policing, governance, and, of course, border violence in Europe associated with Europe’s so-called migrant crisis. This process has been recently addressed by post-colonial scholarship in both IR and migration and border studies writ large. For post-colonial scholars, in order to understand Europe’s contemporary ‘migrant crisis’, it is indispensable that we treat it not as a moment of exceptionality, but as ‘part of Europe’s ongoing encounter with the world that it created through more than 500 years of empire, colonial conquest, and slavery’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This involves questioning the very ‘crisis’ parlance invoked by European politicians and the EU itself, which often frames the arrival of Muslimified, Black, Brown, and non-white migrants from the Global South as a process of ‘invasion’, as if Europe were ‘under siege’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This narrative, it is argued, often evades Europe’s historical – and current – responsibility for creating and maintaining the very conditions that prompt migrants to seek asylum in Europe in the first place, contributing to the consolidation of a framing of this historical moment that is centred around Europe’s ‘innocence’.Footnote ⁴⁷

For post-colonial scholarship, thus, Europe’s fortification and militarisation of its outer borders is fundamentally embedded in racial and (post-)colonial dynamics.Footnote ⁴⁸ More simply put, post-colonial scholarship convincingly argues that to understand the violent targeting of Global South migrants who seek sanctuary in Europe, it is central that we go beyond a concern with ‘sovereignty’ and indeed seriously reckon with the legacies of colonialism and racial capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁹ The combat of Global South migration in Europe is seen primarily as a racial issue, that is, a phenomenon that relies on an implicit – and sometimes overt – construction of migrants as ‘racial others’ whose arrival purportedly threatens to disrupt Europe’s (white) social fabric. Post-colonial literature, thus, suggests that the already-institutionalised practices of border violence against Global South migrants are not simply limited to a purported attempt to preserve or take back ‘sovereign control’. The fact that border violence is directed almost exclusively at racialised migrants coming from the Global South is not coincidental but can be seen as an anxious attempt to (racially) demarcate the bodies that matter from the ones that can be violated, abandoned, and left to die.Footnote ⁵⁰ Border violence, in other words, operates by marking and reinforcing racial hierarchies between Europe and its racialised others, perpetuating a colonial understanding that non-white bodies are not properly ‘human’ or at least ‘not as human’ and can therefore be subject to violence and exclusion.Footnote ⁵¹ In doing so, Europe’s borders reaffirm and demarcate the racial lines between those whose bodies are ‘human’ enough to be welcomed on European soil vis-à-vis the ones who can and should be excluded from Europe’s space of ‘shared humanity’.Footnote ⁵²

Race, thus, has been a central issue in the post-colonial literature on border security in Europe, as a force that shapes and informs dynamics of violence, exclusion, and (de)humanisation at the border.Footnote ⁵³ That said, although race appears as a focal point in this literature, there has been less attention to the ways in which race and animality entangle and reinforce each other at the border. This has led to a certain elision not only of the role of animals in practices of racial violence and (de)humanisation but also of how notions of animality inform and undergird processes of violence and racialisation at the border. This becomes particularly important in the context of police dogs at the European borders, where, as I have shown, canines are weaponised to attack migrants and patrol Europe’s (racialised) borders, essentially operating as tools to secure racial order and further (de)humanise migrants. Bridging the gap between post-colonial and critical race scholarship within IR and border and migration studies and animal studies, thus, can be seen an important step to advance our current understanding of border security and governance.

Combining post-colonial border studies and animal studies involves two main steps. First, it requires remaining open to the role of animals within security dynamics of governance, policing, and violence. As IR scholars on animal studies have demonstrated over the past decade, non-human animals are not ‘outside’ the domain of politics. Quite the contrary, they have been deeply embedded in social structures of power and security as both political ‘agents’ and/or targets.Footnote ⁵⁴ As scholars have noted, animals have been a ‘lively matter in the institutions and practices of warfare’,Footnote ⁵⁵ border security, and policing globally, having been integrated into systems of violence and governance.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the case of police dogs at the European borderzones, thus, this involves inquiring into the roles and political and racial effects of the weaponisation of dogs in order to threaten, police, and physically punish migrants at the borderzones.

Second, and central here, bridging this gap involves inquiring about the complex interaction between animality and race within colonial and white supremacist orders. As I have briefly noted above, post-colonial scholarship in IR and border and migration studies has been deeply concerned with how racialisation operates by partially or fully excluding Global South migrants from the modern contours of Western ‘shared humanity’.Footnote ⁵⁷ As post-colonial thought and critical race scholarship have shown us, despite its universal connotations within liberal and cosmopolitan paradigms, the idea of modern humanness has been racialised from its very inception and, hence, is not simply ‘available’ to everyone.Footnote ⁵⁸ The very notion that we can talk about a ‘shared humanity’, as Sabrina Axster explains, is ‘blind to the colonial racial hierarchies underpinning who has historically been considered “human” in the first place and who could thus ascend to the space of our “shared humanity”’.Footnote ⁵⁹ More simply put, while modernity and Enlightenment produced a purportedly ‘universal’ category of humanness based on ideas of freedom, rationality, autonomy, etc., this category was in actuality constructed through the partial and sometimes full exclusion of racialised and colonised bodies, who were continually produced as either non- or sub-human.Footnote ⁶⁰ Racialisation, in other words, has been often described ‘a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans’.Footnote ⁶¹

That said, although current post-colonial literature in migration and border studies is often aware of the ways in which a racialised human/non-human divide informs migration and border dynamics, there is certainly less attention to the relationships between modern humanness, race, and animality. Animality, however, has been central to the production and delimiting of humanness in at least two main ways. On the one hand, humanness has often been produced either as either a negation of ‘animality’ or as an entity that is ‘less of an animal’ than the ‘true’ animals.Footnote ⁶² In other words, the denial of the animal status of humanness has been a way to differentiate humans from other species and produce and reinforce anthropocentricFootnote ⁶³ ideas that humanness is both exceptional in its nature and superior to animality. Often associated with ideas of bestiality, savagery, absence of rational/civilisational traces, and even disposability,Footnote ⁶⁴ animal lives have been historically produced as less worthy and therefore available for practices of commodification and exploitation.Footnote ⁶⁵

On the other hand, and central here, the idea of animality has been paramount in colonial and white supremacist contexts to the production and reinforcement of racial lines between a (white) human subjectivity and its non- or sub-human racialised others.Footnote ⁶⁶ Practices of animalisation have been central to the production of some bodies as ‘racially inferior’, essentially pushing them outside the boundaries of modern humanness. As Claire Jean Kim suggests, animality has always been ‘integral to the production of racial difference’,Footnote ⁶⁷ as a central mechanism to order racial hierarchies and determine the worthiness of bodies. In this hierarchical scheme, the modern human – a category historically conflated with whiteness itselfFootnote ⁶⁸ – has been systematically placed at the top, as the deserving master of nature, animals, and animal-like racialised Others. As Mollie Godfrey explains, animalisation has been a political tool ‘used to not only deauthorize black violence and dehumanize black people, but to authorize white violence and humanize white people’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Animalising certain bodies, in sum, has been a persistent colonial – and post-colonial – method deployed to create and maintain racial difference, perpetuating the idea that non-white bodies are not only ‘less human’ but also ‘disposable’.

This is not to say, however, that practices of animalisation have followed a unique pattern. Quite the contrary, animalisation has historically been a highly contextual endeavour insofar as animality itself is made to signify myriad things – including notions of bestiality, savagery, disposability, unruliness, and so forth.Footnote ⁷⁰ Animalisation, for instance, has been used as a justification for slavery.Footnote ⁷¹ Advancing the idea that Black people were purportedly ‘animal-like’ and consequently prone to unruliness and indiscipline was central to the legitimation of slavery. This association allowed for a portrayal of slavery as a process of ‘domestication’ of Black people, a process that required continual policing and surveillance on the part of slavers.Footnote ⁷² It was this same association of Black people with ideas of ‘animal bestiality’ in settler-colonial spaces like the USA, for instance, that was behind the generalised fear of Black men after abolition, who were seen as potential sexual predators and criminals. This process not only led to myriad episodes of lynching but was also central to the creation and institutionalisation of policing institutions in the USA.Footnote ⁷³ The association of colonised peoples with animality was also used as an excuse for imperial projects in Africa and Asia, which were often portrayed in Europe as civilisational projects that would essentially bring racialised ‘savages’ into humanity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Remaining open to the complex and multiple entanglements between animality and race, thus, is essential for a better and more nuanced understanding of processes of racialisation in IR and, more specifically, at the borders, as the next sections illustrate.

Post-colonial literature, thus, has played a paramount role in unearthing the role of race and colonialism in shaping contemporary practices of border violence against Global South migrants at Europe’s borders. Borders, it has been argued, have been central tools for the preservation of racial hierarchies and, centrally, for the continual (de)humanisation of racialised bodies, who are continually excluded from Western understandings of ‘shared’ humanness. The lack of engagement with animality within this literature, however, meant that we have missed central dynamics of racialisation and (de)humanisation at the border. This includes, on the one hand, the roles of animals in processes of border security and, on the other, the importance of registers of animality in processes of racialisation at the border. With that in mind, my next sections take seriously the entanglements between race, animality, and colonialism. I start by contextualising the current weaponisation of dogs against racialised migrants at Europe’s borders within a much longer colonial and white supremacist history that takes us to central moments in Europe’s colonial and racial projects of domination. Doing so, I show, pushes us to see the ‘reappearance’ of this practice in Europe today not as an exception, but as deeply embedded in colonial and white supremacist systems of domination that have not infrequently weaponised dogs to police a racial order predicated on the non- or sub-humanness of racialised persons. I then reflect more deeply on the (de)humanising and racialising effects of the exposure of people to dog bites and/or the threat thereof through an analysis of the links between edibility and humanness.

‘Colonial dogs’ and the policing of racial hierarchies

In 1803, a ship containing 100 dogs coming from Cuba reached Saint-Domingue. Upon their arrival, the dogs were adorned with silk ribbons and cockades and taken for what could be best described as a parade. Celebrated by a multitude of people in the streets, the arrival of the canines was seen as an occasion for festivity and joy by the colonisers. The celebrations that followed their arrival, however, can be juxtaposed with the turbulent political atmosphere on the island. For this event took place during a period of massive and widespread turmoil in Saint-Domingue.Footnote ⁷⁶ A massive revolt was taking place locally due to fears that France would seek to restore slavery after reconquering Saint-Domingue. The fear was justified, for France had indeed re-established slavery in other insurgent colonies, after periods of revolt on the part of Black enslaved people.Footnote ⁷⁷

The dogs did not land in Saint-Domingue fortuitously. They were part of a new counter-insurgency strategy being tested by the French. The idea, by and large, was to use dogs as weapons of war against Black rebels, a weapon designed to hunt and devour them. The canine method, carried forward by General Donatien de Rochambeau, necessitated, however, a unique kind of training, that is, an exercise that could instil in the dogs a desire for ‘Black’ flesh. To do so, many exercises were introduced by the French army to train the dogs to associate Blackness with both the ideas of ‘food’ and ‘threat’. In one of these exercises, dogs ‘were kept in kennels and introduced to a dummy resembling a Black’ person.Footnote ⁷⁸ Inside the dummy – which simulated a Black person’s ‘body’ – soldiers inserted blood and entrails so as to make it more ‘attractive’ for dogs.

The attempt to forcefully make dogs crave Black bodies was first put to test in Saint-Domingue in a public spectacle of violence and terror. Witnessed by a crowd, hungry dogs – who had been purposefully starved for days – were unleashed and ordered to attack a Black prisoner. Reports of the time, however, suggest that despite the commands shouted by French soldiers, dogs simply stood still, completely unaware of what they were supposed to do. The Black prisoner did not seem to be regarded as ‘food’ nor as a menace. Irritated by the inaction of the canines and the public embarrassment caused by the scene, their handlers decided to take the first step and cut ‘open the victim’s stomach’ so that the ‘dogs warmed up to the scent of blood’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The strategy proved to be effective, as the dogs did not wait too long before starting to eat the prisoner, ‘to the roar of the crowd and the blare of military music’.Footnote ⁸⁰ To ensure that the ‘taste’ for Black flesh did not go away, the French army decided that dogs were to be fed with human flesh throughout the missions. As Sara E. Johnson aptly notes, the use of dogs to eat Black people can be seen, before anything, as a ‘staged performance of white supremacy and domination’,Footnote ⁸¹ wherein dogs were made to operate as the very ‘jaw and teeth’ of the empire, despite not infrequently resisting their weaponisation. Here it is central to note that, as Josh Doble explains, it is not that dogs do not naturally ‘see’ race, but they can be trained to do so, embodying and naturalising racist structures.Footnote ⁸²

The use of dogs to hunt and devour Black rebels in Saint-Domingue was not unique in the history of Western colonialism. Quite the contrary, dogs have been consistently weaponised by colonial powers to terrorise, dissuade, eliminate, surveil, and dispossess racialised populations, playing important roles in the production, reinforcement, and securing of racial order historically. For instance, canines had already been used by the Spanish empire in the Americas since the end of the 15th century as weapons to dominate and exterminate natives as well as to suppress local revolts and insurgencies against the empire. Wearing armour, ‘the dogs often preceded the horsemen in column, panting with “foam dripping from their mouths”’.Footnote ⁸³ During Spanish conquests in the Americas, mastiffs and greyhounds were trained by the colonisers to chase, kill, and eat Indigenous people, rapidly becoming a symbol of terror for the native populations. Dogs were trained to kill Indigenous people by ‘tearing out their throats’ with such a fierce bite that they would quickly ‘open their victims to the entrails’.Footnote ⁸⁴ For that, canines were not only starved for days before the battles but were also continually fed human flesh so that they would not lose their taste for it. Some reports of the time even pointed to the existence of ‘butchers’ in the Americas that, among other things, sold Indigenous peoples’ body parts, allowing the colonisers to continually feed their dogs on human flesh.Footnote ⁸⁵

Dogs also became a central tool in the management of slavery in the Americas, operating as a tool to protect a racial capitalist order based on continuous (de)humanisation, commodification, and exploitation of Black people. They were utilised in three main ways. First, they were deployed as a tool of surveillance. Dogs were trained to alert their masters by barking at or attacking Black people who either stopped working or were trying to escape the plantations. In doing so, dogs protected the slaver’s ‘property’ – here the Black enslaved person – by ensuring that they would not run away. Second, dogs were used by plantation owners for their acute sense of smell to track and hunt fugitives. Third, dogs were used as weapons of terror, on some occasions being ordered to attack, kill, and eat Black rebels with the purpose of punishing the fugitive and ‘teaching a lesson’ to the other enslaved people. Imported from Cuba and Germany, dogs were trained to only act ferociously when in contact with Black people.Footnote ⁸⁶ For that, enslaved Black people working at the plantations were forced to continuously beat puppies so that dogs would grow associating their ‘Blackness’ with threat and enmity.Footnote ⁸⁷

Dogs were also deployed during the European colonisation of Africa in the 20th century.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Italian empire, for instance, incorporated dogs into their armies and trained them to be aggressive towards ‘Arab-looking’ communities in Libya. One of their training methods involved using ‘dummy mannequins with “blood-filled bladders” around their neck’.Footnote ⁸⁹ In another training exercise, ‘a soldier dressed as an “Arab” would abuse the dogs and a soldier dressed in Italian uniform would reward and feed them’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similar patterns of training were also seen in South Africa under colonial control, where national police forces continually trained dogs to recognise the ‘scent’ of ‘Black African people’, to facilitate their hunting during policing operations.Footnote ⁹¹

The weaponisation of dogs at the hands of white supremacist and colonial orders, however, did not disappear with the formal ending of plantation society and colonialism. It remained in settler and (post-)colonial spaces and societies as a ‘key symbolic figure of racist violence that placed historical subjugation in conversation with the present’.Footnote ⁹² The emergence and dissemination of K-9 units all around the world illuminate the degree to which dogs have been – forcefully – embedded within state structures of policing and security, exercising roles of intimidation, detection, surveillance, the chase of criminals, and violence. The contemporary use of police dogs, however, relies on more complex and ‘advanced’ training methods that are often designed to look like ‘fun games’ for the dogs. Those methods, as Harriet Smith et al. explain, operate in a less confrontational manner and seek not only to enhance the dog’s capacity for violence and intimidation but also to turn canines into highly obedient and ‘objectified’ beings.Footnote ⁹³

Although dogs are no longer ‘taught’ to specifically target racialised bodies, their use still tends to follow racial registers. Police dog patrols in the Global North, for instance, are much more frequent in racialised communities, which are seen as more ‘likely’ to present criminal behaviour.Footnote ⁹⁴ The USA, not surprisingly, appears here as a major instance of this racialised and indeed racist deployment of canine forms of policing and brutality. One of the most illustrative examples of this phenomenon took place during the civil rights campaigns in the 1960s, when police dogs were systematically used by police forces to bite and lunge at young Black protestors in the South.Footnote ⁹⁵ Furthermore, in Los Angeles, for instance, where police officers were caught calling African Americans ‘dog biscuits’Footnote ⁹⁶ while ordering police dogs to attack them, only Black and Latino individuals were bitten by police dogs during the first six months of 2013.Footnote ⁹⁷ More recently, another emblematic case of overt violence with police dogs took place in 2020 in the USA, when Black protesters were subjected to dog chasing and bites during anti-racist demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd.Footnote ⁹⁸

The history of the weaponisation of dogs against racialised people by white supremacist and colonial powers shows us that there is a certain link between such episodes of racial violence with dogs, despite their temporal and sometimes geographical distance. The uses of dogs as weapons to exterminate Indigenous populations, massacre anti-colonial insurgents, police and punish enslaved people, attack racialised protestors, and now ‘protect’ European borders from racialised migrants have an important element of continuity in the ways in which dogs are recurrently used to enact, protect, and/or reinforce racial order. As the cases above show us, dogs have been weaponised to establish and reaffirm the dominance of whiteness and have been turned into important tools to police colonial and white supremacist orders of exploitation and subjugation. It is not a coincidence, for instance, that the exploitation of the dog’s capacity for violence has been particularly acute at times when racial order was at stake – e.g. anti-colonial and anti-slavery rebellions, anti-racist protests, etc. This is not to say, however, that the entangled history between racialised and colonised people and dogs has been limited to such instances. Indigenous and colonised populations, after all, have also nurtured relationships of companionship with dogs, which were however many times interrupted and undone by settler-colonial powers. As scholars have shown, ‘native’ canines, who had been domesticated by Indigenous populations for centuries, have been systematically killed by colonial settlers in the AmericasFootnote ⁹⁹ as well as in AustraliaFootnote ¹⁰⁰ and replaced by European dogs.

Looking at the history of the weaponisation of dogs by colonial powers to protect and enforce racial order is not simply an excavation practice. It allows us to see the contemporary use of police dogs to police, punish, and ‘bite’ racialised migrants at Europe’s racialised borders not as an exceptional phenomenon but as embedded within a much longer history of colonial and white supremacist weaponisation of canines to protect racial order. That said, there is another aspect of this phenomenon that requires more attention, which brings us back to our previous discussions regarding the links between race, animality, and modern humanness. It is not simply that dogs are made to operate as a security device in the name of racial order. There is in this systematic process of exposing bodies to the threat of ‘dog bites’ a further element of (de)humanisation and racialisation that needs to be accounted for. As I show below, this discussion takes us to the intimacies between humanness, animality, and ‘edibility’ under modernity.

The politics of edibility and the (un)making of humanness

One central feature of the type of violence inflicted through the weaponisation of dogs is the ‘dog bite’ or, at least, the threat thereof. As the historical examples above show, colonisers and slavers often trained dogs to bite – and sometimes eat – racialised bodies as a strategy of policing, governance, and punishment. This method, furthermore, has remained a capital part of today’s process of weaponisation of dogs by police, border, and military forces, where canines are trained to bite upon command. It is also particularly pervasive in the cases analysed here at EU borders in the Balkans, where dog bites have become generalised in practices of pushbacks, producing physical traumas and wounds and provoking fear.

To understand the terror and discomfort instigated by the imagery of the dog bite, however, one first needs to take into consideration the importance of the idea of ‘edibility’ for modern conceptions of ‘humanness’. The modern idea that humanness is separable from animality, that is, that humans are somewhat exceptional, has relied extensively upon a certain notion of ‘non-edibility’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Modern humanness, in its opposition to animality, has been historically predicated ‘on the disavowal of being an (edible) animal’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Humans can eat animals, and animals can always potentially eat other animals. Human flesh, nevertheless, is continually protected and detached from this food chain. For humans are not embedded in this cycle of consumption as equals. Rather, they are positioned within anthropocentric modernity as exceptional beings, non- or less-of-an-animalFootnote ¹⁰⁶ living beings who, unlike the others, should not be available for consumption. In such a modern scheme, neither non-human animals nor humans should be allowed to eat human flesh.

The modern attachment to the idea of human non-edibility has spurred disgust, horror, and indeed fear of potentially ‘cannibal’ Indigenous and Black populations on the part of colonisers.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The always-present possibility of the racialised other being a cannibal, committing the ‘sin’ of eating human flesh, has permeated the colonial imaginary.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The idea of anthropophagy was a central aspect of the discourse around barbarism and played a significant role in colonial descriptions of Indigenous populations in the Americas, corroborating ‘scientific’ dictates concerning the purported savage animality of non-white peoples.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Kant, for instance, once described Indigenous populations of Paraguay as ‘savages’ who are ‘dangerous cannibals’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Similarly, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland in their journey to the Americas describe some of the Indigenous populations as a ‘cruel and savage race …who eat(s) the flesh of men and boys, and captives and slaves’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Paul Lyon summarises this cannibal anxiety when he states that ‘if a cannibal cannot be distinguished from a non-cannibal, the whole chain by which “civilized” people distinguish themselves from the “non-civilized” comes apart’.Footnote ¹¹²

The colonial concern with the figure of the cannibal also represented a colonial and white fear of being incorporated by the racial other, both figuratively and literally. A fear, in other words, that the ‘exceptional civilization’ of whiteness could be ‘devoured’ by the ‘savage’ other.Footnote ¹¹³ This discourse is somewhat mirrored today in Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’, when racial anxiety over the possibility of being ‘incorporated’ by the racialised other’s culture can be often heard. Narratives around the dangers of acculturation by ‘Muslims’, conspiracy theories about ‘the great replacement’, fears over the purportedly higher birth rates of racialised communities, losing its resources, etc. all point to a certain white fear of being figuratively consumed by the racialised other, a dread of ‘becoming’ the other and therefore ‘losing itself’. This colonial fear of the potential cannibalism of the racialised other was already acknowledged by Frantz Fanon, who described the continual fear of the coloniser of being ‘devoured’ by ‘the negro’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

That said, although cannibalism has been more often addressed as a way to break with the modern commandment of human non-edibility, not much has been said about how the ‘animal bite’ itself destabilises and challenges this logic by bringing the edibility of the human body to the fore. Protecting the human body against the ‘animal bite’ has also been capital for the production and policing of modern humanness as something distinct and exceptional, either non- or less of an animal.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This is one of the reasons why dog bites spur such horrifying discomfort. Beyond the violence and brutality of the bites themselves, they encapsulate a very ‘human’ fear of becoming ‘edible’. They operate, in other words, as a reminder of human animality, a reminder that the human body, tantamount to the animal one, can also be eaten. The recent campaigns in the United Kingdom to ban American XL bullies after the breed was linked to several attacks illustrate this process of fear of being ‘bitten’ by dogs that inhabits discussions around the dog’s deservingness – or not – to share space with ‘humans’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

That said, my focus here is particularly on what can be seen as a process of forced exposure of racialised bodies to the ‘dog bite’ that has been historically conducted by colonial and white supremacist social orders, which I call here the politics of edibility. In light of the links between humanness and non-edibility, the subjection of racialised bodies to dog bites can be seen as a (de)humanising practice that marks its targets as edible. A method of violence, in other words, that operates by bringing their ‘animal edibility’ to the fore. The politics of edibility, thus, can be seen as a form of ‘bordering’ that polices and reinforces racialised human/non-human lines by reaffirming the non- or sub-human status of the racialised other. This is a phenomenon, thus, that pushes the racialised body towards an ‘animal condition’ by relegating it to an ‘animal’ space of edibility,Footnote ¹¹⁷ all the while reinforcing humanness as a space reserved for the white and colonial self. That said, it is important to clarify that the process of edibilisation of the body does not require that the bite happen. The very terror caused by the possibility of being ‘bitten’, that is, of being ‘eaten alive’, is already part of the process of becoming edible, that is, of having its ‘animal edibility’ brought to the fore and violently exposed. It is not a coincidence that the mere threat of dog bites by border and police forces – or sometimes even the very presence of police dogs – is often described by migrants as a terrifying and (de)humanising experience.

The concept of politics of edibility, therefore, is seen here as a racialising and (de)humanising mode of violence that relies on the weaponisation of the dog and aims both at enforcing colonial and white dominance and preserving a racial order predicated on the non- or sub-humanity of racialised bodies. The idea of edibility, I have argued, illustrates this process of animalisation through the denial or removal of the modern privilege of ‘human non-edibility’ that the bite operates – in both its actual and virtual status. This makes the politics of edibility into what can be conceptualised as a process of cannibalism-by-proxy that reinforces and indeed polices racial difference by simultaneously demarcating humans from non-humans; humans from animals; and whiteness from its racialised others. This is a process that, as Francis B Nyamnjoh would perhaps argue, operates by ‘literally, socially, and metaphorically’ producing racialised bodies as available for colonial and racial capitalist violent forms of ‘consumption’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Bordering humanity, securing Europe: The police dog and the protection of colour lines

The contemporary racialised use of police dogs by European states, with the warrant of Frontex, to police, surveil, and attack migrants at the borders should thus be seen as part of colonialism’s afterlives that continually haunt our present. This phenomenon, naturally, is not the only colonial practice that resurfaces in Europe today. As post-colonial scholarship has noticed, Europe’s border apparatus of security, especially over the past decade, has been marked by a broader process of readaptation of previous colonial and racial capitalist practices and rationales, which includes, among others, (dis)possessive practices of confiscation;Footnote ¹²¹ carceral technologies of confinement;Footnote ¹²² migrant camps;Footnote ¹²³ practices of naval interception, deportation, and disembarkation;Footnote ¹²⁴ etc. The import of previous colonial rationales and practices used to secure racial order in the colonies can be seen as part of Europe’s attempts to reinforce colour lines at a time in which the increasing migration from the Global South has been ideologically constructed as a (racial) crisis that purportedly threatens the dominance of whiteness.Footnote ¹²⁵

The redeployment of dogs at Europe’s borders as weapons to secure racial order by threatening, punishing, and expelling racialised migrants allows us to reassess this policy as another iteration of what I have called here ‘the politics of edibility’. The continual exposure of the migrant to the dog bite – or the threat thereof – in other words operates as a radical form of border violence that systematically constructs the migrant as an ‘edible body’, that is, an animalistic and less-than-human body that is fit for ‘animal consumption’. Centrally, thus, the deployment of this policy is not accidental. This can be seen as part of the broader process of (de)humanisation carried out by Europe’s border apparatus of security in the context of Europe’s so-called migrant crisis.Footnote ¹²⁶ The use of police dogs, more simply put, like other forms of border violence, enables Europe to demarcate and secure the lines between those whose lives are worthy and those whose lives are ‘disposable’ and do not fully belong within the contours of Europe’s liberal humanity.Footnote ¹²⁷ It does so not only by reinforcing Europe’s modern and human subjectivity – in opposition to the migrant’s non- or sub-human status – but also essentially by denying migrants access to ‘modern humanness’, further (de)humanising them.

It is worth noting, however, that by arguing that the contemporary deployment of police dogs to secure Europe’s post-colonial and racialised borders can be paired with previous forms of colonial and white supremacist violence, I am in no way affirming that those contexts are the same. There is something unique about each of the historical moments addressed here, and one cannot simply remove context from the analysis. That said, it is indeed my argument here that pairing today’s use of police dogs at Europe’s borders with previous colonial and racial capitalist episodes of canine weaponisation against racialised people allows us to challenge, in a post-colonial ethos, the always too quick subsuming of borders into mere sovereignty or inside/outside dynamics, centring instead the oft-hidden racial and colonial continuities underpinning bordering dynamics.Footnote ¹²⁸ It allows us, in other words, to bring to the fore the functions of borders as tools intended to reinforce and secure persistent (post-)colonial and racial hierarchies. Furthermore, juxtaposing those moments also helps us uncover the complex, continuous, and evolving entanglements between anthropocentrism and racism and the various ways in which they inform Europe’s practices of border violence today.