FROM EXCEPTION TO EXTRA-LEGAL NORMALITY 17 and Melilla since the early 2000s (Gazzotti 2020); in Italy since the tightening of migration controls with the 2002 Bossi-Fini law and, at sea, since the 2008 bilateral agreement with Libya (Caponio and Capiali 2018); at the French–Italian border of Ventimiglia, following the Arab Spring and since the introduction of temporary internal border controls in 2015 (Aru 2021); in Hungary and Croatia since the closure of the Balkan route in 2016 (Augustová and Sapoch 2020; Karamanidou et al. 2020). Their prevalencesuggests they are embedded in the European border regime as yet another technology for impeding mobility into European territories (Ilcan 2021; Karamanidou et al. 2020; Mountz 2020). The systematic occurrence of pushbacks after 2015 at different European borders underlines our proposition that they constitute a default mode of border management, rather than being an aberration or exceptional practice. This conceptualization enables us to locate pushbacks within the European border regime and its inherently violent and racialized character. The institution of the border is structurally violent (Isakjee et al. 2020; Ilcan 2021; Topak 2021), rooted in violent processes of colonialism, global capitalism, racism and nationalism (Sharma 2020; Walia 2021). While in liberal democracies violence is disavowed unless legitimately exercised by the state, it is a structural feature of the governance of populations, in particular those gendered, marginalized and racialized, mirroring the governance of colonized territories in the past (Isakjee et al. 2020; Walia 2021). Technologies of border governance such as containment, detention, border surveillance and militarization, non-rescue, illegalization and bureaucratic classification are violent in that they result in loss of life and many physical, psychological and social harms for people on the move and migrant populations (Isakjee et al. 2020; Ilcan 2021; Schindel 2019). The liberal governance of EU borders illustrates these contradictions: on the one hand, it attempts to regulate and legitimate the use of violence through the establishment of a common border governed by legal frameworks adhering to European and international human rights norms, ostensibly protecting people on the move from the violent excesses of the national sovereign border. On the other, the same laws conceal rather than eliminate the violence innate to the institution of the border. Following Achiume (2019), we understand this as the inherent contradiction that underpins the tensions in the Europeanization of border policies: despite all attempts to “civilize” border work, the function of borders is to categorize people and to allow or deny entry into the territory based on this categorization. We may refer to this function as filtering, division or even differential inclusion. Yet confronted with the movements of migrants that challenge these categorizations, border work necessarily needs to resort to violence in order to enforce the categories and their consequences. The crisis of Schengen after 2010, and the Summer of Migration in 2015, have made that abundantly clear. Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/