Ieva Jusionyte

About Ieva's Work

Ieva Jusionyte is a cultural anthropologist exploring the political and moral ambiguities of border regions, where state policies regulate historically shifting distinctions between legal and illegal practices. Her ethnographic accounts are based on years of fieldwork and immersion among people whose occupations give them frontline vantage points on the ways border policies play out in the lives of individuals and communities. From these rarely observed perspectives, Jusionyte reveals how security mechanisms and cycles of violence perpetuate states of emergency and social fracture.

Jusionyte’s first book, Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border (2015), focuses on the tri-border area connecting Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. She examines the nuanced codes of silence that local journalists navigate in their coverage of crime, violence, and border security in this region. For her second book, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2018), Jusionyte embedded as a volunteer among U.S. and Mexican emergency responders working on both sides of the border wall that separates Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico. She chronicles the competing legal and ethical demands these paramedics and firefighters face daily. They cooperate across borderlines, fraught politics, and national security mandates to save lives and care for migrants injured by hostile terrain and the security infrastructure of the state. Jusionyte’s most recent book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (2024), traces the staggering volume of firearms that flow southward from the United States to Mexico. For this work, Jusionyte draws on the experiences of U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms special agents; a former member of a Mexican drug cartel; American gun dealers; gun smugglers; and a Mexican hunting enthusiast, among others. In an illicit line of trade that perpetuates cycles of violence, gun smugglers purchase guns from weapons dealers in the United States, then traffic the guns to Mexican organized crime groups that supply American consumers with drugs. Although legal gun sales in Mexico are limited, these trafficked weapons fuel high homicide rates throughout the country. Her captivating narrative reframes public understanding of the U.S. gun industry and gun violence as a transnational issue by exploring how permissive U.S. gun laws affect not only the United States but neighboring countries as well.

Jusionyte’s work demonstrates the power of ethnographic fieldwork to produce nuanced forms of knowledge. By grounding her research in different types of worker cultures, Jusionyte sheds light on places and policy effects that are largely overlooked in broader discourse about border security.