Ari Jerrems GERI Junio 2013

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Ari Jerrems

Universidad Autnoma de Madrid

FIRST DRAFT

CHAPTER 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL BORDER STUDIES

1. Introduction

In this chapter I will analyse what Critical Border Studies (CBS) is, what it tells us about

emergent bordering practices in the post-Cold War era and which are the main perspectives.

CBS offers models for understanding bordering in its entirety. It reads diverse forms of

bordering as part of greater assemblages of interrelated practices. These emergent practices

are neither completely independent of each other nor completely dependent upon

overdetermining structures; they emerge within complex relational webs. The different

perspectives provide a series of maps of the regularities and connections between multiple

borderscapes.

CBS is an analytical tool that can be used for reading and resisting bordering practices. In

Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the

Study of World Politics1 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson differentiates between philosophical wagers

behind International Relations theories, one of them being analyticism. According to Jackson,

for analyticism, theoretical proposals are of use to make sense of reality, not as a depiction of

iron-clad laws, but rather as tools to act. Theorists provide maps that draw out regularities in

practice in order to facilitate certain actions. This is precisely what CBS attempts to do.

Whilst agreeing on the usefulness of this approach I wish to study such interpretations

reflexively. Reflexivity is another of the philosophical wagers identified by Jackson. It is based

on the belief that what we can know about the world is limited by specific contexts and social

relations. These contexts and social relations structure how we think and act. Despite the

tension between the two philosophical wagers they are not mutually exclusive but potentially

complementary. Whilst analyticism provides tools for reading politics and acting politically,

reflexivity provides tools for going about this cautiously. Without analyticism reflexivity

becomes overly introspective and irrelevant and without reflexivity analyticism becomes

overly ambitious and nave.

Reflective analyticism is a useful way to approach emergent bordering practices. To study

these practices we need interpretative tools provided by situating them in certain structures

1 JACKSON, Patrick Thaddeus, Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its

Implications for the Study of World Politics, Routledge, London, 2011.

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and processes. However, we should never forget that these structures are theoretical models

used to understand concrete things. In this chapter I will outline what CBS tells us about

borders and the different perspectives that situate these practices. I will attempt to study the

perspectives reflexively in order to draw out the political and philosophical assumptions they

are based on. The aim is to outline what each perspective tells us about bordering and its

limitations. This is not to decide which is the most useful model for understanding a particular

instance of bordering practices rather I will argue that all of them are useful but inadequate.

By themselves they are of little use for understanding concrete circumstances.

2. What is Critical Border Studies?

CBS is an indeterminate zone that crosses into numerous academic territories. It builds on

developments in IR theory, especially International Political Sociology (IPS) and Critical Security

Studies (CSS), whilst also drawing on other disciplines such as Geopolitics, Sociology,

Criminology, Anthropology, Political Theory and specialized areas such as migration, refugee

and citizenship studies. This interdisciplinarity and ambiguity makes it difficult to classify. It has

even led one of the authors of its original manifesto to question its existence2.

Border Studies is not something new. 19th century Germany geographer Friedrich Ratzel is

considered by many as its founding father. CBS, however, is most closely related to

interdisciplinary developments that have occurred over the last 20 years. Willem Van Schedels

studies on Borderlands3 as well as the work of geographers such as Anssi Paasi and Henk

Van Houtum are concerned with similar themes. Paasi notes that The 1990s and the first

years of the new millennium have witnessed a dramatic increase in boundary studies all over

the world, but particularly in Europe. Particularly important topics of research have been the

diverging forms of cross-border interaction, emerging new regionalizations and region-building

2 Noel Parker questioned my enthusiasm about talking about something called Critical Border Studies

saying that it didnt really exist. Vaughan-Williams on the other hand believed that it was an analytical tool that provided a way of framing things. See PARKER, Noel and VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Nick, Lines in the Sand? Towards and Agenda for Critical Border Studies, Geopolitics, Vol. 14, n3, 2009, pp. 582-587 and PARKER, Noel and VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Nick, Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the Lines in the Sand Agenda, Geopolitics, Vol. 17, n4, 2012, pp. 727-733 For other useful introductions to Critical Border Theory see BISWAS, Shampa and NAIR, Sheila, Introduction: International Relations and states of exception in BISWAS, Shampa and NAIR, Sheila, International Relations and States of Exception: Margins, Peripheries, and Excluded Bodies, Routledge, Oxon, 2010, JOHNSON, Corey et al, Interventions on rethinking the border in border studies, Political Geography, Vol. 30, 2011, pp. 61-69, RAJARAM, Prem Kumar and GRUNDY-WARR, Carl, Introduction in RAJARAM, Prem Kumar and GRUNDY WARR, Carl, Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys Edge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008, SALTER, Mark, At the threshold of security: a theory of international borders in ZURIEK, Elia and SALTER, Mark, Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity, Willan Publishing, Cullompton, 2005, SALTER, Mark, Theory of the/: The Suture and Critical Border Studies, Geopolitics, Vol. 17, n4, 2012, pp. 734-755, and ZAPATA-BARRERO, Ricard, FERRER GALLARDO, Xavier, Fronteras en Movimiento: Migraciones Hacia La Unin Europea en el Contexto Mediterrneo, Bellaterra, Barcelona, 2012. 3 See VAN SCHENDEL, Willem, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, Anthem

Press, London, 2005.

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projects4. In this period, Paasi continues, Geographers have expanded their traditional ideas

of political boundaries. They are no longer understood as frozen lines. Geographers, similar to

CBS, have thus begun to map the roles and functions of boundaries as institutions, symbols

and discourses that are spread everywhere in society5. Previous studies in IR were also

concerned with the changing nature of borders in International Politics in the post-Cold War

era6.

CBS is a particular useful body of literature as it studies numerous emerging political spaces

within contemporary society. In this thesis political space is understood in a similar way to

Jacques Rancires concept politics as it is developed in in Disagreement: Politics and

Philosophy7. Rancire differentiates between two states, police; governing mechanisms

which maintains a certain order of things and politics; the acts of those marginalized by this

order that challenge its limits. This notion is similar to what Partha Chaterjee refers to as the

politics of the governed8 or what Ranabir Samaddar simply refers to as autonomy9. The

border sites studied by CBS are of interest as they are an example of the interaction between

increasingly transnational tendencies of policing and the attempts of the marginalized to make

life bearable despite their position.

This chapter will be divided into two main sections. Firstly, it will discuss what CBS is able to

tell us about bordering practices. It will outline three borderscapes discussed in the literature:

internal, differential and offshore borders. Secondly, it will analyse the major perspectives that

have been adopted to interpret these developments: the state of exception, everyday policing,

autonomy of migration and postcolonialism.

3. What does Critical Border Studies tell us about Bordering Practices?

It is now apparent that, despite prediction in the 1990s, borders have not disappeared, a

borderless world has not materialized; instead, a complex process of re-bordering10 is

4 PAASI, Anssi, The Changing Discourse on Political Boundaries: Mapping the Backgrounds Contexts and

Contents, in VAN HOUTUM, Henk et al (eds), B/ordering Space, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2005, p 17. 5 PAASI, Anssi, The Chanding Discourse on Political Boundaries, Op. cit., p 18.

6 ALBERT, Mathias; JACOBSON, David y LAPID, Yosef (eds.), Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking

International Relations Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001. EDKINS, Jenny; PIN-FAT, Vronique y SHAPIRO, Michael (eds.), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Routledge, Nueva York, 2004. BIGO, Didier, Globalized (in)security: the field and the Ban-opticon en Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes, The (in)security games, LHarmattan, Paris, 2006. HUYSMANS, Jef, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, Routledge, Londres, 2006. 7 RANCIRE, Jacques, El desacuerdo: Poltica y filosofa, Nueva Visin, Buenos Aires, 1996.

8 CHATTERJEE, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World,

Columbia University Press, New York, 2004. 9 SAMADDAR, Ranabir, The Materiality of Politics: Subject Positions in Politics, Sage, New Delhi, 2007.

10 FERRER, Gallardo, Xavier, The Spanish-Moroccan Border Complex: Processes of Geopolitical,

Functional and Symbolic Rebordering, Political Geography, Vol. 27, n3, 2008, pp. 301-321, SUREZ-NAVAZ, Liliana, Rebordering the Mediterranean: Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe, Beghahn Books, New York, 2004.

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underway. To understand this multifaceted process of re-ordering it has become evident that

the notion of the border, as traditionally defined, has become inadequate. Centring ourselves

on the presence or absence of certain stable immovable lines between states reveals little

about changes taking places. To come to terms with the re-bordering and re-spacing of global

politics, the incipient literature in CBS, has sought to widen the borders definition in order to

identify border like practices and spaces of negotiation and differentiation between political

entities. These authors have drawn attention to the implosion and explosion of bordering

practices11, in which border policing is implemented to control a greater space of global

(in)security12 leading to the appearance of numerous novel borderscapes13 that defy

traditional understandings of territoriality. Nick Vaughan-Williams conceptualises three

nascent borderscapes that are useful to categorize these practices; internal, differential and

offshore bordering14.

For these authors borders are studied as practices and not as stable objects, Noel Parker and

Rebecca Adler-Nissen affirm that bordering practices are activities which have the effect of

constituting, sustaining or modifying Borders15. Bordering is understood as a series of

practices that delimit political space differentiating between community and outsider. Drawing

on this definition the literature suggests that borders have folded inwards via internal police

checks targeting irregular immigrants16 and practices of deportation17 that seek to eliminate

the presence of unwanted members within the community. Internal walling separating some

parts of cities from others and gated communities protecting privileged residents from dangers

perceived to be very close18. On the physical borderline new techniques ensure that only

wanted visitors/immigrants arrive; there has been a proliferation of walls19, fences, border

patrols as well as biometric technology20 aimed at speeding up the path of desired guests and

business whilst weeding out the unwanted. Finally, borders work pre-emptively stopping

undesirables before they reach the physical border and thus denying them rights they may

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SQUIRE, Vicki, The Contested Politics of Mobility: Politicizing Mobility, Mobilizing Politics in SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p. 2. 12

13

RAJARAM, Prem K. and GRUNDY-WARR, Carl (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys Edge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007. 14

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Nick, Border Politics: the Limits of Sovereign Power, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2009, p. 16. 15

PARKER, Noel and ADLER-NISSEN, Rebecca, Picking and choosing the Sovereign Border: A Theory of Changing State Bordering Practices, Geopolitics, Vol. 17, n4, 2012, pp. 1-24, p 4. 16

INDA, Jonathan Xavier, Borderzone of Enforcement: Criminalization, Workplace Raids, and Migrant Counterconducts, in SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011. 17

DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010. 18

ANTONIOLI, Manola and CHARDEL, Pierre-Antoine, Reterritorialisation et Obsession Scuritaire dans la Mondialisation, LHomme et la Socit, n165-166, 2007, pp. 177-188. 19

BROWN, Wendy, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Zone Books, New York, 2010. 20

AMOORE, Louise, Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror, Political Geography, Vol. 25, n3, 2006, pp. 336-351.

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have on arrival. Travellers data is analysed prior to departure meaning that certain passengers

become irregularized21 before arrival, whilst boats carrying immigrants are pre-emptively

stopped or removed from peripheral territories such as islands22 and immigrant processing

centres externalised to third countries23. In their totality, these processes of re-bordering posit

a two track reality in which the movement of some is increasingly facilitated whilst others are

encircled more than ever.

Authors have proposed we understand emergent bordering practices within certain topologies

of the International. This allows us to conceptualise borders in ways that defy the simplistic

differentiation between inside and outside. Didier Bigo has conceptualised a global field of

(in)security where security specialists such as police, border control officers and the military

coincide in interests and no longer divide clear differentiated spheres of action24. Nick

Vaughan-Williams has coined a generalized biopolitical border25 to comprehend how

sovereign acts of exception are carried out in a seemingly unrestricted space that defies state

boundaries. Nicholas De Genova and Natalie Peutz identify a deportation regime26 to situate

deportation within a particular topology of the International. All of these models come

together in a migration-security complex27 a complex dispositif28 that Koslowski has

identified as a global mobility regime29. Nicholas De Genova has gone further pointing

towards a Incipient Global Security State30. A topological focus, by defying stable levels of

analysis, reveals new configurations of authority, interconnections and political practices. For

example it permits the definition of a transnational domain of concepts and practices in which:

[R]efugees, organized crime, drugs-smuggling, terrorism and people trafficking are

seen as occupying a security field that opened up at the demise of the Cold War.

21

NYERS, Peter, Forms of Irregular Citizenship, in SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011. 22

RAJARAM, Prem K., Locating Political Space through Time: Asylum and Excision in Australia, in RAJARAM, Prem K. and GRUNDY-WARR, Carl (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys Edge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007, pp. 263-282. 23

ANDRIJASEVIC, Rutvica, From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportation Across the Mediterranean Space in DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010. 24

BIGO, Globalized (in)security, Op. cit. 25

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Border Politics, Op. cit. 26

DE GENOVA and PEUTZ; The Deportation Regime, Op. cit. 27

WALTERS, William, Putting the migrant-security complex in its place in AMOORE, Louise and DE GOEDE, Marieke (eds), Risk and the War on Terror, Routledge, London, pp. 158-177, p 159. 28

MEZZADRA, Sandro, The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration and Social Struggles in SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p 124. 29

KOSLOWSKI, Rey, Global Mobility Regimes, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2011. 30

DE GENOVAS, Nicholas, Alien Powers: Deportable Labour and the Spectacle of Security, SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p 93.

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Increasingly these figures constitute the new enemy, the new threat under writes

the politics and policies of security31.

By pursuing such topologies of the International and organizing worlds in innovative ways 32

we are able to identify this transnational domain of security and study how it transversally

impacts on political spaces, reconfiguring the relationship between state, citizenship and

territory33. We will outline the nature of this topology by drawing on Vaughan-Williams

nascent borderscapes; internal, differential and offshore borders.

Evidently, Vaughan-Williams borderscapes are not the only way of conceptualising these

developmenst. It could also be useful to adopt the classifications developed by William Walters

in The Frontiers of the European Union: A Geostrategic Perspective. Walters identifies four

geostrategies associated with the European frontier: networked (non)borders, march,

colonial frontiers and limes. For Walters a geostrategy is the space of calculation concerning

lines of defence and attack; it concerns such problems as the movement and deployment of

troops across territory, the defence of strategic zones and places34. Thus with his

geostrategies Walters identifies four ways that bordering practices are executed. First, the

networked (non)border refers to the neoliberal imperative to remove obstacles to the free

movement of people, goods and services. In order to foment this movement new forms of

regulation such as cross-border police cooperation, mobile surveillance teams operating within

an extended border strip, information exchange etc. are put in place. Networks of control

substitute the functions that were previously physically concentrated at the border35. Second,

march refers to refers to something like an interzone between powers. For Walters the central

and eastern European countries find themselves located within this framework of which they

constitute a buffer zone, insulating the EU from the chaotic space beyond36. Third, the Colonial

frontier is the space into which sovereign power expands. It is thus a space of interaction,

assimilation, violence and pacification, a creative zone, where values are spread through

settlement, expansion and colonisation. It is an attempt to re-make the neighbouring countries

within its image37. Finally, limes is more like an edge, fringe or limit it takes shape between

a power and its outside. In contrast to the Colonial frontier limes does not envisage a

progressive or eventual subsumption of the exterior and its inhabitants. Instead it is a cut that

effects the institutionalisation of asymmetries of economy, culture and order. It draws a

31

WALTERS, William, Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 8, n3, 2004, pp. 237-260, pp. 240-242. 32

HUYSMANS, Jef and PONTES NOGUEIRA, Joao, Editorial: International Political Sociology: Opening Spaces, Stretching Lines, International Political Sociology, Vol. 6, n1, 2012, pp. 1-3, p 3. 33

Ibid. 34

WALTERS, William, The Frontiers of the European Union: A Geostrategic Perspective, Geopolitics, Vol. 9, n3, 2004, pp. 674-698, p 678. 35

WALTERS, The Frontiers of the EU, Op. cit., p 680. 36


WALTERS, The Frontiers of the EU, Op. cit., p 687.

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distinction38. Whilst different than Vaughan Williams, Walters conceptualisations would also

be useful for plotting emerging transnational spaces of government, it shares the same

concern for offering a much more nuanced and topographical account of the production of

geopolitical space39.

4. Internal Borders

The first tendency identified by the literature can be described as internal bordering. Within

this broad category are a range of different phenomena, such as document checks pinpointing

dangerous or illegal subjects and police raids in workplaces and other public spaces. We

may also draw parallels between these policing measures and creation of walls within cities

separating some parts of the city from others and gated communities that ensure the safety

of privileged residents.

The location of these internal borders is ambiguous. Whilst their implementation in uncertain

they tend to target certain types of subjects. This converts everyday life into a borderscape for

those that live in a condition that Enrica Rigo refers to as illegal citizenship40. For these

individuals bordering is a daily threat that produces a position of precariety within society that

in accentuates associated boundaries. Nevertheless this borderscape does not refer to a mere

exclusion rather irregular migrants are incorporated into society within a differential regime.

As Anne McNevin has suggested irregular migrants are incorporated into the political society

as economic participants but denied the benefits of insiders. They therefore occupy the

position of immanent outsiders41. Rigo is thus able to argue that in internal borderscapes

bordering differentiates between individuals within the same legal and political space42. Similar

to McNevin, Rigo points out how irregular migrants are integrated into the economic and legal

system as an externality43. Whilst there is a conceptual divide between citizens and irregular

migrants they both inhabit the same space. For this reason Sandro Mezzadra argues that

irregular migrants are simultaneously produced as insiders and outsiders44.

In this shared space government attempts to continually manage the transit and circulation of

labour forces by implementing a series of mechanisms that continuously differentiate between

migrants access to rights45. Thus inclusion and exclusion in constantly revised through the

status of work permits and other temporary authorisations. Thus even regularised foreign

workers live in a state of precarious partial inclusion. Rigo points out that most national

38

WALTERS, The Frontiers of the EU, Op. cit., p 690-691. 39


RIGO, Enrica, Citizens Despite Borders: Challenges to the territorial order of Europe in SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p 199. 41

Cited in MEZZADRA, Sandro, The Gaze of Autonomy, Op. cit., p. 126. 42

RIGO, Citizens Despite Borders, Op. Cit., p. 207. 43

RIGO, Citizens Despite Borders, Op. Cit., p. 208. 44

MEZZADRA, The Gaze of Autonomy, Op. cit., p 131. 45

RIGO, Citizens Despite Borders, Op. Cit., p. 206.

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legislations link the authorisation to enter and reside in a territory to the employment status of

migrants. The ejection from the job market thus threatens migrants with irregularity46. This

position and the negative connotations associated with irregular migrants impact on other

parts of society. Jonathan Xavier Inda cites that, in the USA, one in ten Latinos reported being

stopped by police or other authorities in the past year to be asked about their immigration

status; one in seven said that they have had trouble finding or keeping a job because they are

Latino; and one in ten reported difficulties finding or keeping housing47. Thus we can see

beyond the more visible aspects of raids and deportation policing mechanisms create a sense

of unease and precariety amongst targeted populations.

The ambiguous nature of bordering practices and the position of irregular migrants within

society often causes migrants to be caught in the labyrinth of immigration bureaucracy48. In

some cases migrants may not even be conscious of their position as immanent outsiders. For

example Susan Bibler Coutin shows how Salvadorean children deported from the USA often

had assumed, seeing as they had spent all or most of their life living in this country, that they

were members of US society prior to deportation49. Thus in this interior borderzone migrants

live in an ambivalent condition where they do not belong either outside or inside. Nevertheless

borders can quickly be enacted, if a migrant is detected or if they become irregularized and

then those that thought themselves to be well integrated or even part of the host country

soon discover their position as an outsider50. Aashti Bhartia in referring to similar legislation

that produces this uprootedness argues that legal and undocumented migrants alike are

condemned to the machinelike operations of a bureaucratic apparatus, squashing migrants

claims for legal subjectivity with the bureaucracys objective discharge of business

according to calculable rules and without regard for persons51. According to De Genova the

position of migrants is a form of labour subordination52. Precariaty and deportability are

understandable in relation to a broader dynamic of labour subordination where legal

vulnerability and illegality facilitates the production of undocumented migrants as highly

exploitable workforce53. In another article De Genova describes this produced precariety as a

deportation regime to refer to the marginality of the incorporation within society as

exploitable subjects54. Sunaina Maira argues that this division facilitates capitalist exploitation

46

RIGO, Citizens Despite Borders, Op. Cit., p 208. 47

INDA, Borderzones of enforcement, Op. Cit., p 83. 48

BHARTIA, Aashti Fictions of Law: The Trial of Sulaiman Oladokun, or Reading Kafka in an Immigration Court in DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010, p 329. 49

COUTIN, Susan Bibler, Legal exclusion and dislocated subjectivities: The deportation of Salvadoran youth from the United States, SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p 173. 50

COUTIN, Legal exclusin, Op. Cit., p 174. 51

BHARTIA, Fictions of Law, Op. Cit., p 334. 52

DE GENOVA, Alien Powers, Op. Cit., p 91. 53

DE GENOVA, Alien Powers, Op. cit., p 94. 54

DE GENOVA, Nicholas The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and Freedom of Movement, DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010, p 37.

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as it ensures cheap docile labour that cannot protest in the same way as citizens55. It is

necessary to emphasise the complexity of migrants position as immanent outsiders. There

incorporation within a complex interior borderscape is multifaceted and should not be

reduced to the necessity of labour relations or any determinate factor.

Constant raids in public spaces are one of the ways that this precariety is produced. Inda

argues boundaries of immigration policing have migrated inwards to countless spaces in the

interior of the United States from workplaces and homes to public spaces56. He affirms that

such raids became commonplace during the presidency of George W. Bush57. Through these

practices certain spaces of everyday life most notably workplaces but also individual homes

and a variety of public spaces have been identified as strategic sites and become subject to

intensified policing. The increased preoccupation with policing the interior of the US was

notably signalled with the DHSs publication of Endgame: Office of Detention and Removal

Strategic Plan, 2003-201258.

Policing is also associated with contemporary construction of security and legality. Inda

emphasises how migrants are policed as threats to the overall well-being and security to the

social body. Their precarity threatens the model of the self-caring neoliberal subject and they

are associated with such cultural, social, and economic maladies as overpopulation,

deteriorating schools, urban crime and decay, energy shortages and national disunity59.

Additionally migrants are often associated with organized crime and terrorism thus policing

measures often seek to target the most dangerous immigrants. Walters argues that

deportation has always been used as an instrument to be used against the political enemies of

the state60. The current assemblage focuses on governing access, targeting weak points and

risk factors, preventing intrusion, tracking movement, verifying identity and detecting the

undetected61. Bhartia highlights this production of risk noting how in In January 2003 in the

USA a Special Registration program required noncitizen men from twenty-five designated

countries, mostly Arab and Muslim, to register with the government. Of those who voluntarily

came to register in response to the program, 2,747 were detained62.

Nick Vaughan-Williams highlights the potentially radical implications of these bordering

practices in his study of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. For Vaughan-Williams the

55

MAIRA, Sunaina, Radical Deportation: Alien Tales from Lodi and San Francisco in DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010, p. 300. 56

INDA, Jonathan Xavier, Borderzones of enforcement, Op. cit., p. 75. 57

INDA, Jonathan Xavier, Borderzones of enforcement Op. cit., p 74. 58

INDA, Borderzones of enforcement, Op. Cit., p 79. 59

INDA, Borderzones of enforcement, Op. cit., p. 77. 60

WALTERS, William, Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens in DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010, p 85. 61

WALTERS, William, Putting the migration-security, Op. cit., p 170. 62

BHARTIA, Fictions of Law, Op. cit., p 335.

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shooting of the Brazilian citizen by UK anti-terrorist officers on the 22nd of July 2005 on the

underground train in south London is the extreme incarnation of bordering practise and the

production of insecurity associated with it. According to authorities De Menezes had been

acting suspiciously and refused to obey instruction63. Within a short period of time De

Menezes had been positively identified, incorrectly, as a terrorist and was shot64. There was

an evident correlation between his foreign appearance and the possibility of being a mortal

threat to society. Vaughan-Williams sees this as an extreme example of the innovative ways

in which, temporally and spatially, attempts are made by sovereign power to reproduce and

secure the politically qualified-life of the polis65. In order to conserve the political order De

Menezes was produced as a life that should be eliminated thus finding itself outside of

conventional law and subject to exceptional practices66. Gallina Cornellise argues that such

practices are attempts by the sovereign state to preserve the status quo of the global state

system and the ensuing territoriality of the Rule of Law67. Migration and other forms of

irregularity provoke threats to a territorial order that must be maintained at all costs68.

There are other forms of securitisation, independent of the state, that create internal borders

and seek to keep at bay the perceived dangers of global mobility. Manola Antonioli and Pierre-

Antoine Chardel identify the segregation of inhabitants within the city as one such example.

They argue that there is an involuntary separation of the poor and visible minorities in Ghettos

and the voluntary segregation via gated communities in which growing numbers of inhabitants

of cities in the USA, Asia and Latin America close themselves off from perceived dangers69.

Wendy Brown points out that whilst gated communities have sprung up everywhere in the

USA they are especially prevalent in Southwestern cities near the wall with Mexico.

Additionally, Israel is riddled with walls trying to secure settlements and the mayor of Padua in

Italy recently built the Via Nelli Wall to separate white middle-class neighbourhoods from the

so-called African ghetto where most new immigrants live70.

5. Differential Borders

The second borderscape draws attention to the impact of new technologies used at the

physical border. Evidently national borders have always been differential to some extent so

the novelty here is slight. CBS emphasizes how at physical border sites new technologies have

appeared in an attempt to assure that only desired immigrants and travellers pass. Walls,

63

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Border Politics, Op. Cit., p. 117. 64



VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Border Politics, Op. Cit., p 121. 67

CORNELISSE, Galina, Immigration, Detention and the Territoriality of Universal Rights in DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010, p 103. 68

CORNELISSE, Immigration, Detention, Op. cit., p 104. 69

ANTONIOLI and CHARDEL Reterritorialisation et Obsession Scuritaire Op. cit., p 178. 70

BROWN, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Op. cit., p 19.

11

fences and border patrols have proliferated as has the implementation of biometric

technology. All of these seek to increase the speed of some travellers and business whilst

weeding out the unwanted.

Again these developments are subtler than simple exclusionary measures. They are

bestsummed up by Benjamin Muller when he suggests that policy makers have tried to

combine increased security after 9/11 with a continuing commitment to neoliberal

globalisation71. Mathew Sparke delves into how smart border technology on the US border

seeks to come to terms with this paradox in his chapter Fast Capitalism/Slow Terror: Cushy

Cosmopolitanism and its Extraordinary Others where he analyses the development of NEXUS

and related programs. Sparke maintains that heightened cross border security post 9/11 was

challenged by business who claimed that the country faced an economic disaster. Thus

there was a call for technological solutions such as NEXUS72. This is echoed by Didier Bigo who

argues that blocking movement was widely conceived of as protectionist and it was argued

that borders must be opened to be profitable73. There was a demand for techniques of

surveillance and control to stop people and check them independent of speed74. For Sparke

the NEXUS arrangements grow out of policies that were already in place prior to 9/11 such as

the PACE and CANPASS lanes for pre-cleared travellers. These lanes helped to differentiate

between supposedly safe travellers deemed fit for high speed travellers, what Sparke labels as

the private mobility rights cherished by neoliberal visionaries and the rest75. He argues that

even if these PACE lanes were deemed unfit after 9/11 the basic concept of pre-cleared

primary travellers and secondary travellers remains the basis of smart border management

technologies76. NEXUS continues to allow fast track travellers to deal with little of the normal

customs and immigration questioning with pre-clearances operating on the basis of photo ID,

bio-metric proximity cards or iris scans77. Those that are willing to submit to self-policing and

self-coding win access to the fast lane designed for the business classes78. The rest of travellers

do not have the same experience at the border. Sparke argue that whilst other travellers are

slowed down these only result in minor annoyances for the travelling middle class whilst the

worlds working classes and for those subject to security risk codification, in contrast, being

in the kinetic underclass has altogether more oppressive and more unpredictable outcomes 79. This point is emphasized by numerous other authors including Kim Rygiel who argues that e-

71

MULLER, Benjamin, Globalization, Security, Parados: Towards a Refugee Biopolitics, Refuge, Vol. 22, n1, 2004, p 50. 72

SPARKE, Mathew, Fast Capitalism/Slow Terror: Cushy Cosmopolitanism and its Extraordinary Others, in AMOORE, Louise and DE GOEDE, Marieke (eds), Risk and the War on Terror, Routledge, London, 2007, p 140. 73

BIGO, Didier, Freedom and Speed in Enlarged Borderzones, SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p 32. 74

BIGO, Freedom and Speed, Op. cit., p 34. 75

SPARKE, Fast Capitalism/Slow Terror, Op. cit., p 138. 76




SPARKE, Fast Capitalism/Slow Terror, Op. cit., p 149.

12

borders and intelligence driven border control programs respond to the need for flexibility in

bordering to facilitate a high degree of controlled circulation80.

Didier Bigo seeks to link these practices to liberal governmentality of mobility based on

freedom of circulation. This brings together a combination of different techniques such as

biometric identifiers and personal databases that are given the name of smart borders81.

Charlotte Epstein emphasizes that The biometric passport82 is only a minor piece in a vast

border protection system centred on biometrics83. Within this assemblage border guards are

seen as the last line of defence and not the first. The everyday surveillance at the border is

preceded by a dataveillance system that makes judgements about degrees of risk before the

physical border checkpoint84. Through these systems Epstein argues, drawing on the US Visit

program, that individuals are analysed not as the carriers of rights but as live mobile objects85.

Louise Amoore identifies factors interconnected with biometric borders that are worth

repeating here. Firstly, she draws our attention to the fact that risk profiling is used as a means

for identifying legitimate and illegitimate movement. Secondly, within this framework identity

is assumed to be a useable means of prediction and prevention. Finally, surveillance is

increasingly outsourced to private operators86.

Risk profiling is a technology for weeding out unwanted individuals. Amoore re-emphasizes

what we have already stated above. That is how governments consider that bordering

practices must respond to a globalizing society of simultaneous opportunities and threats.

Technologies are developed to differentiate between the positives and the negatives. How can

the legitimate transborder activities of the global economy secured from illegitimate threats?

Amoore demonstrates how this is done by the US visit programme by enacting a series of

dividing practices in which individual subjects are broken down into calculable risk factors such

as student, muslim or woman which is put in relation with other characteristics such as

alien, immigrant and illegal. These allow for degrees of riskiness to be calculated and

objectivized according to their combination87. Epstein discusses the different ways that one

can be incorporated in databases that in turn define the level of risk. She states that biometric

80

RYGIEL, Kim, Governing borderzones of mobility through e-borders: the politics of embodied mobility in SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p 143. 81


Epstein states that Technically a passport qualifies as biometric if it stores (in an e-chip) a digitalized replica of the photo, which can then be retrieved by the border guard and matched to the printed photo to verify whether the document has been tampered with. EPSTEIN, Charlotte, Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders, International Political Sociology, Vol. 1, n2, 2007, pp. 149-164, p 158. 83

EPSTEIN, Guilty Bodies, Op. cit., p 157. 84

BIGO, Freedom and Speed, Op. cit., p 36-37. 85

EPSTEIN, Charlotte, Embodying Risk: Using Biometrics to Protect Borders in AMOORE, Louise and DE GOEDE, Marieke (eds), Risk and the War on Terror, Routledge, London, 2007, p 179. 86

AMOORE, Biometric Borders, Op. cit., p 336. 87

AMOORE, Biometric Borders, Op. cit., p 339.

13

manuals differentiate between positive enrolment and negative enrolment which divides

the world into two groups the trusted and the questionable. As she emphasizes:

Positive enrolment is where an individual voluntarily gives up personal

information to varying degrees of detail to be granted access to an employment,

or even to a credit card. This creates a pool of trusted subjects. Negative

enrolment by contrast Is a process of registration of questionable subjects to

form a database N. Before an individual can be deemed a trusted subject, s/he

must first be screened against available databases of questionable or risky

subjects88.

Epstein details how at different stages information has been accumulated from different

sources to form the basis of the database. A database of registered travellers was compiled

with existing criminal records from both national (FBI) and international (INTERPOL) records as

well as a new database created by the US military who collected unnamed fingerprints in

identified sites of danger abroad, such as Al Qaeda training camps. Under US Visit everybody is

fingerprinted and photographed indiscriminately89.

Despite the modern technologies the categories of classification are often quite old, as

Amoore suggests that identity is considered a legitimate means for prediction and prevention.

Sparke argues that on the other side of the political and cultural forces that are heightening

border surveillance there are more longstanding race and class preoccupations with restricting

access for non-white non-professionals90. Bigo concludes that it divides the population into

categories where the undesirables are integrated by way of assimilation or banned, excluded

or removed. Homogenous groups already sorted out through profiles of identical patterns

which prevent heterogeneous individuals, abnormals being mixed up in the flow91. This leads

to discrimination against some nationalities and different forms of islamophobia92.

Rygiel goes into detail regarding this construction of bodies. She argues that biometrics

construct bodies as a coded body where mobile unidentified populations are given certain

state approved tokens through the coding of their bodies. It is the producing of identities

through a power relation where the body is coded through. She argues that the biometric

capture of bodies, particularly those gendered, raced, sexed and bodies deemed as a risky,

should be situated within a longer colonial history of governing particular bodies of the global

South93. These technologies mark out certain bodies as risky including those with irregular

travel histories, migrant workers, asylum seekers and people of Middle Eastern nationalities

88






RYGIEL,Governing Borderzones of Mobility, Op. cit., p 151.

14

and or Muslim culture and or faith whilst being portrayed as a neutral administrative and

technical matter of verifying whether one is who she or he claims to be94. This overlooks that

bodies are in reality always produced through socio-political, cultural and economic

structures such as gender, race, class and heteronormativity95. However, as Bigo points out

this comes with the flipside that for normalized travellers the impression of control is very

light as they are not stopped and they wait only a minimal amount of time96.

Risk management is promoted as an objective form of differentiating between populations and

thus is considered as a specialized area of knowledge. Private companies are considered to be

more effective administrators in this sense. Amoore cites how soon after the terrorist attacks

of 9/11 a panel of commercial information technology experts proposed that technologies

designed to classify populations according to their degree of threat long available in the

commercial private sector should be deployed at the service of broader security. One

company Accenture stated that this way 9/11 could have been predicted and averted 97. The

means to govern risk had already been trialled on other occasions. Epstein points out that the

first large scale of biometrics by US law enforcement agencies occurred in January 2001

Superbowl in Tampa Florida98. As an immigration lawyer cited by Amoore states since 9/11

the public authorities have turned to the private authorities to design the architecture of the

systems, to make efficient systems so this is only ever treated as a technical problem, and

not a question of politics99. Private sector efficiency is what best serves security as the

Department of Homeland Security emphasizes On announcing Accentures contract, the

Department of Homeland Security said that by harnessing the power of the best minds in the

private sector it is possible to enhance the security of our country while increasing efficiency at

our borders100. This search for private sector solutions has made biometrics big business.

Epstein states that The private biometric industry is flourishing with a US$ I.56 billion market

in 2005 it is predicted to double to US$ 3.4 billion in 2007 and further expand to US$ 5.26

billion by 2010101.

Border walls are a cruder form of ensuring that some may cross the border and others may

not. They seek to ensure that all travellers must cross at established transit points and thus be

subject to the biometric technologies mentioned above. As Sparke has argued above Wendy

Brown states that border walls are symptomatic of a globalized world [that] harbors

fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and

reinscription102. Thus the same promotion of the right kinds of flows inverts the devotion of

94

RYGIEL, Governing Borderzones of Mobility, Op. cit., p 153. 95

RYGIEL, Governing Borderzones of Mobility, Op. cit., p 144. 96







BROWN, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Op. cit., p 7.

15

unprecedented funds, energies, and technologies to border fortification. She cites numerous

examples of this occurring around the world including the more well-known examples on the

US-Mexican Border, dividing Israel and Palestine and separating Ceuta and Melilla from

Morocco as well as many lesser known examples such as South Africas walling of Zimbabwe,

Botswanas walling of Zimbabwe, Uzbekistans walling of Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, Irans

walling of Pakistan, Chinas walling of North Korea and Thailand and Malaysias mutually

constructed wall103.

6. Offshore Borders

The final borderscape refers to the areas where borders work pre-emptively to stop undesired

subjects before they arrive at the physical border and in this way deny them of rights that they

may have after entering national territory. Travellers data is analysed prior to departure

meaning that certain passengers become irregularized before arrival, whilst boats carrying

immigrants are pre-emptively stopped or removed from peripheral territories such as islands

and immigrant processing centres externalised to third countries104.

There is a connection between the biometric technologies discussed in the previous section

and external bordering. As suggested above, the global databases of passengers allows for

irregulars to be stopped before arrival thus pushing the border regime into a global operating

space. Walters argues that the e-passport illustrates the emergence of new security spaces

and practices that are global in their aspirations whilst only operational in certain zones105. The

constitution of this transnational space of bordering can be studied via certain technical,

administrative or value forms that serve as conditions under which the global is constituted

as such through which the global is made106. For Rigo Migrants seeking to legally enter the

EU encounter the border when they first visit the embassy or consulate in their country of

origin in order to apply for an entry visa. Didier Bigo and Elseph Guild have recently used the

term police distance to describe the Schengen system of visa regulation107. Whilst Walters

argues that the efficiency of this global borderscape is often overstated it is nevertheless in

construction and visible in the creation of new databases, networks and agencies108. The

nature of these bordering technologies are discontinuous for a number of reasons including

the difficulties for coherent cooperation between states and non-state companies. One simple

factor that Walters points to is that the e-passport itself is not manufactured by one company

103

BROWN, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Op. cit., 8 and 19. 104

ANDRIJASEVIC, Rutvica, From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportation Across the Mediterranean Space in DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010. 105

WALTERS, William, Rezoning the global: technological zones, technological work and the (un)making of biometric borders, SQUIRE, Vicki (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, London, 2011, p 54. 106

WALTERS, Rezoning the Global, Op. cit., p 57. 107

RIGO, Enrica, Citizenship and Europes Borders: Some Reflections on the Post-Colonial Condition of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 9, n1, 2005, p 10. 108

WALTERS, Rezoning the Global, Op. cit., p 58.

16

nor is it read by one system which means that tensions arise109. Thus the way this borderscape

functions is dependent on myriad details, including the performance of scanners, the training

of border officials, the manufacture of the passport and its chip, the way in which data is

stored and much else besides110. Additionally the technology that runs it is constantly being

fixed and rebooted111. External bordering works, as was the case with the other borderscape,

in an ambiguous state of constant reproduction.

Walters points to the construction of transnational technologies that create new spaces of

governmentality in which borders are exercised in a global space. A number of authors have

pointed to the separation of the physical borders from the sites where sovereign power is

exercised in the European case. Serhat Karayakali and Enrica Rigo for example suggest that

whilst the geographical extension of Europe may be defined through the territoriality of its

member states this does not coincide with the spatial dimensions of its political authority112.

Karayakali and Rigo build this suggestion on the idea that the European legal and Political area

is a space that is dedicated not to the sedimentary community but the government of mobility

both inside and outside EU boundaries. In this sense they suggest that the unity and

continuity of the European legal and political space may only be reconstructed through

migrants experience of its borders113. In tracing the space where they occur they conclude

that EU sovereignty is more of a continuum than a concrete border site. Nevertheless as Rigo

argues in another article this space is discontinuous and sovereignty is shared by different

public and private actors114. As Andrejisevic argues this is due to European integration and

enlargement. Lifting the internal borders of the EU meant simultaneously relocating the areas

of control towards the east and the south in a space not necessarily represented by the

borders of the states found in these areas115.

Andrejisevic echoes the concerns of Karayakali and Rigo in suggesting the need to broaden the

scope of analysis away from the site of the external EU border and into the broader

geographical space marked by delocalized control posts116. Analysis that takes into account

these delocalized control points paints a different picture of the southern EU border that

rather than being a linear and stable geographic demarcation, is a discontinuous and porous

space encompassing the area between southern Italy and sub-Saharan Africa117. In this space

109




KARAKAYALI, Serhat and RIGO, Enrica, Mapping the European Space of Circulation in DE GENOVA, Nicholas y PEUTZ, Nathalie (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010. p 127. 113

KARAKAYALI, and RIGO, Mapping the European Space of Circulation, Op. cit., p 127. 114

RIGO, Citizenship and Europes Borders, Op. cit., p 4. 115

ANDRIJASEVIC, From Exception to Excess, Op. cit., p 153. 116

ANDRIJASEVIC, From Exception to Excess, Op. cit., p 157-158. 117

ANDRIJASEVIC, From Exception to Excess, Op. cit., p 155.

17

again similar to Karayakali and Rigo she suggests that one should study the transformations of

sovereignty in Europe arising from the management of migratory movements118.

To do this these authors bring our attention to processes of externalization such as dislocating

asylum seeker reception facilities and the assessment of asylum application to the EUs

neighbouring countries. This provokes a Europe-wide decrease in asylum numbers, the

introduction of the safe-third-country rule, the construction of detention centres, and the

collective deportations to countries neighbouring the EU119. Rigo suggests that neighbouring

countries have become dynamic components of a new communitarized concept of borders

which extends throughout their territories. She outlines that the two mains instruments

through which EU countries have unloaded part of their responsibility for hosting migrants and

asylum seekers are the safe country principle and readmission agreements. The safe

country principle meant that immigrants arriving from countries deemed safe could be

returned there. This meant that these countries bordering the EU were converted in buffer

zones. Countries in Eastern Europe become responsible for preventing migrants from moving

further west120.

Readmission agreements ensure that irregular migrants can be returned to countries they

arrived from. Rigo argues that the expulsion of irregular migrants can thus be conceived in

terms of concentric circles. Recent and present candidate countries serve as stop off points

outside the core of member states. Rigo maintains that by tracing out these readmission

agreements, one effectively produces a map of the flows of expulsion121. Related to this

point Karayakali and Rigo draw our attention to proposed outsourcing policies in which all or

most asylum seekers who arrive or apply in member states would be sent to transit processing

centres located outside the EU for the processing of their application by EU appointed

officials122.

Suvendrini Perera identifies walls in the water, lines in the sea referring to Australian

patrolling of the seas to its North. She draws on the example of how Norwegian Vessel MV

Tampa, that had rescued a sinking boat of Afghani, Iraqi and Sri Lankan asylum seekers, was

denied access to Australian waters in 2001123. Then after a stand-off the ship was intercepted,

forcibly boarded and taken over by the military124. She furthermore draws our attention to

how following 9/11 Boats carrying asylum seekers, termed SIEVS (Suspected Illegal Entry

Vessels), were shadowed, intercepted, fired on, and instructed to turn around, with those that

118






PERERA, Suvendrini, A Pacific Zone? (In)security, Sovereignty, and Stories of the Pacific Borderscape in RAJARAM, Prem Kumar and GRUNDY WARR, Carl, Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys Edge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008, p 203. 124

PERERA, A Pacific Zone?, Op. Cit., p 204.

18

persisted being boarded by force and the occupants hauled off to deterritorialized camps in

the pacific125. Karayakali and Rigo point to similar developments in Europe. They state that in

2003 the European council adopted the virtual maritime border that meant that every vessel

suspected of transporting illegal migrants is considered as a virtual border when its nationality

is unknown or uncertain126. The development mentioned above lead these authors to question

whether peoples movements can be considered illegal when they have yet to reach one of

the EUs official frontiers127.

Prem Kumar Rajaram draws our attention to another example in which the legal status of the

border zone is very much undefined. Rajaram cites how when on the 4th of November 2003 the

vessel Minasa bone landed without authorization on Australias Melville Island (twenty

kilometres form Darwin. The ten Kurdish individuals128 plus the Indonesian crew were escorted

back to international waters near Indonesia. This expulsion was carried out based on an

amendment to the 1958 Migration act made in 2001. This amendment allows for parts of

Australia to be removed from a migration zone so that obligations toward asylum seekers in

these zones are different from those in non-excised parts of Australia129. After expulsion the

Australian government recognized that individuals on the boat made claims for asylum

however Minister Amanda Vanstone suggested that Its not news or relevant whether they

did or didnt make certain remarks because they were never in the migration zone. As

Rajaram suggests Melville Island was retrospectively excised from the migration zone130.

Suvendrini Perera points out how after 9/11 the Australian parliament also agreed to excise

from the migration zone such outlying territories targeted by asylum seeker boats as Christmas

Island, Ashmore Reef and Cartier and Cocos Islands131.

7. Theoretical Interpretations

There are numerous theoretical interpretations of these processes of re-bordering and for this

reason including them all here is not feasible. I will focus on what I consider to be the most

influential theories. In order to explain each interpretation I will firstly outline the

philosophical underpinnings before outlining how they are used to explain the bordering

process. Giuseppe Campesi differentiates between two perspectives, the first emerging in

Political Science and International Relations concerned with the states of exception created

by bordering practices and the second being forwarded by Sociologists and Criminologists and

125

PERERA, A Pacific Zone?, Op. Cit., p 204. 126



RAJARAM, Prem Kumar, Locating Political Space Through Time: Asylum and Excision in Australia in RAJARAM, Prem Kumar and GRUNDY WARR, Carl, Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys Edge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008, p 263 129

RAJARAM, Locating Political Space Through Time, Op. cit., p 264. 130

RAJARAM, Locating Political Space Through Time, Op. cit., p 265. 131

PERERA, A Pacific Zone?, Op. Cit., p 204.

19

emphasizing the everyday securitizations at border sites132. In her critique of approaches to

CBS Anne McNevin also cites the state of exception perspective but in this case comparing it

with autonomy of migration133. These three perspectives, state of exception, everyday

securitization and autonomy of migration, are the most widely adopted positions. Nonetheless

in this chapter I would also like to discuss the possibility of a fourth approach, postcolonialism,

that is less defined within the literature. Despite this I believe that such a perspective can be

re-constructed from the work of a number of different authors that may not define

themselves in this way.

8. State of exception

The state of exception thesis gained much popularity in the aftermath of 9/11 in its

explanation of suspended jurisdictions such as Guantanamo Bay. Many decided to recover Carl

Schmitts suggestion that the sovereign is s/he who decides the exception134. However, it is the

work of Giorgio Agamben135, directly influenced by Schmitt, which has most impacted on CBS.

Agamben alters Michel Foucaults concept of biopolitics, that we will discuss in the following

section, by arguing that this inclusion/exclusion of biological life is the original practice of

sovereign power136. He traces this to the separation in Greek thought between zo, the

biological fact of living, and bios, political qualified life. He goes on to argue that this

separation has become increasingly indistinguishable in modern society137. In contemporary

society sovereign power generates a confused state where zo and bios become blurred and

thus the individual is exposed as bare life to be categorized at the whim of the sovereign

decision138. As the space of sovereignty is now confused and as the separation between public

and private is ambiguous, sovereignty is brought into existence through the creation of a state

of exception in which a law founding decision of inclusion and exclusion fills the legal vacuum.

It is this extralegal decision which allows law to be posited. Citizenship and political institutions

themselves depend upon a discriminatory law founding violence139. In this configuration bare

life is the founding element which is simultaneously included and excluded in the system

creating the appearance of unity whilst relying on the excluded other to give it meaning. The

idea that the implementation of law is a constant bordering decision is the key element drawn

upon by authors of CBS.

132

CAMPESI, Giuseppe, Migraciones, seguridad y confines en la teora social contempornea, Revista Crtica Penal y Poder, n3, 2012, pp. 1-20. In Campesis analysis these two perspectives are mapped onto two of the European Schools of CSS, the state of exception perspective corresponding with the Copenhagen school and the everyday securitizations explanation reflecting the Paris school. 133

MCNEVIN, Anne, Ambivalence and Citizenship: theorising the political claims of irregular migrants, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 41, n2, 2013, pp. 182-200. 134

SCHMITT, Carl, El Concepto de lo Poltico, Alianza Editorial, Barcelona, 2002. 135

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998 and AGAMBEN, Giorgio, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008. 136




VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Border Politics, Op. Cit., p. 99.

20

For example, Vaughan-Williams follows Agambens thought to create a new concept regarding

the bordering process: the generalised biopolitical border. This term implies that bordering

is a process of inclusion and exclusion of bare life in the political order. The sovereign decision

is constantly at work to create reason, in a zone of indistinction or camp that is not

necessarily restricted to any particular territory140. As the sovereign decision is not restricted

territorially, Vaughan- Williams argues that camps of exception exist both inside and outside

the traditional state141. The generalised biopolitical border refers to a sort of global

archipelago, where sovereign power produces bare life through decisions of inclusion and

exclusion on a global scale142. These bordering practices occur at different sites that we have

discussed already. To demonstrate his thesis Vaughan-Williams discusses the production of

Jean Charles De Menezes as bare life through his profiling and shooting in Londons tube as a

perceived terrorist threat serves as a clear illustration143.

If we compare the work of three authors that draw on Agamben in their theorization of

bordering practices, Prem Kumar Rajaram, Mark Salter and Nick Vaughan-Williams, we can

note at least three common concerns that indicate why they may draw on Agambens thought.

These aspects are not exclusive to them and may be shared with other perspectives. Firstly,

they suggest that the exercise of power and sovereignty no longer corresponds to a stable

territorial identity. Secondly, that the border is not a line at the edge of the state rather it is a

fundamental part of its constitution. Finally, that bordering does not occur along a border line

rather it is constituted by individual events and certain regimes of truth.

-

- 144

145

146

140





RAJARAM and GRUNDY-WARR, Introduction, Op. cit., p xiii. 145

RAJARAM, Locating Political Space, Op. Cit., p. 274. 146

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Border Politics, Op. cit., p 70.

21

147

148

149 -

-

150 -

151

-152

153

147

SALTER, Mark, When the exception becomes the rule: borders, sovereignty and citizenship, Citizenship Studies, Volume 12, n4, 2008, pp. 365-380, pp. 367-368. 148

RAJARAM, Locating Political Space, Op. Cit., p. 266. 149

SALTER, Mark, At the threshold, Op. cit., p. 42. 150

-

- 151

SALTER, Mark, The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Volume 31, 2006, pp 167-189, p. 175. 152

--

153 SALTER, At the threshold, Op. Cit., p 39.

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154

155

156

157

158 -159

-

-

-

- - - -

154

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Border Politics, Op. cit., p. 115. 155

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS, Nick, The UK Border Security Continuum: virtual biopolitics and the simulation of the sovereign ban, Environment and Planning D, Volume 28, 2010, pp. 1071-1083, p. 1072. 156

- 157

158

159

ARENDT, The Human Condition, Op. cit., p. 40.

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160

161

-

162

-

-163

164

9.

160

AGAMBEN, Homo Sacer, Op. Cit., p. 35. 161

AGAMBEN, Homo Sacer, Op. Cit., p. 35. 162

163

AGAMBEN, Homo Sacer, Op. Cit., p.105. 164

SCHMITT, El concepto de lo poltico, Op. Cit., pp. 56-57.

24

165

166

is a general and iterogenious set. It includes virtually everything; linguistic and

not linguistic, discourses, institutions, architecture, laws, police measures,

scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions, and so on. But, as he

presents, the dispositif or dispository itself is the result, the network, the wealth

established between those elements167.

168

165

FOUCAULT, Michel, Historia de la sexualidad, Siglo XXI de Espaa, Madrid, 1987, pp. 144-145. 166

FOUCAULT, Historia de la sexualidad, Op. Cit., pp. 146. 167

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, What is a dispositif? http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-dispositif/part-1/ 168

BIGO, Didier, Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices, Practices of Power, International Political Sociology, Vol. 5, n3, 2011, pp. 225-258, p 228.

25

169

170

171

172

173

174

- border guards, immigration officers,

border polices, customs, traditional military people believe that the border may be sealed to

defend national interests whilst neo-moderns such as antiterrorists squads, intelligence

services, antidrug services, counter subversive operators, database analysts question this idea

as an inefficient and illegitimate reaction to security threats175. The neo-modern concept of

security has gained explanational capital by truth claims founded

169

BIGO, Pierre Bourdieu, Op. Cit., p 235. 170

BIGO, Pierre Bourdieu, Op. cit., p 237. 171

BIGO, Pierre Bourdieu, Op. cit., p.237. 172

BIGO, Pierre, Bourdieu, Op. cit., p. 237. 173

BIGO, Freedom and Speed, Op. Cit., p. 31. 174

BIGO, Globalized (in)security, Op. cit., p. 7. 175

BIGO, Freedom and Speed, Op. cit., p. 35.

26

176 insisted on

the danger of sealing borders and have proposed smart borders to regulate the flow of

population and not territories. Bigo argues that this idea seems to have partly convinced the

neo-conservatives in the US, EU members, as well as the democrats in the US177. The growing

influence of this concept of security has actively shaped the practices defining how borders are

practiced.

The dispositif emerging from this battle between security experts and the increased influence

of neomoderns conceptualizes

178

179

180

181

182. He

suggests studying certain technical, administrative or value forms that serve as conditions

176

BIGO, Globalized (in)security, Op. cit., p. 7-8. 177

BIGO, Freedom and Speed, Op. cit., p. 35. 178

BIGO, Globalized (in)security, Op. Cit., p. 6. 179

BIGO, Globalized (in)security, Op. cit., p. 18. 180

See WALTERS, William, Governmentality: Critical Encounters, Routledge, New York, 2012 and LARNER, Wendy and WALTERS, William, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, Routledge, London, 2006. 181

WALTERS, Rezoning the Global, Op. cit., p. 52-53. 182

WALTERS, Rezoning the Global, Op. Cit., p. 54.

27

under which the global is constituted as such rather than assuming that this process of

construction has already succeeded.

By studying the processes of construction of global security, Walters, is more sensitive to

historical trajectories than many other events. Thus he avoids tracing the emergence of the

border regime from singular political causes. It is not a response to a political event such as

9/11 nor a necessary result of macropolitical phenomena such as globalization or

transnationalization but a particular and contingent form of problematization183.

Nevertheless, at the same time, security is situated within a greater complex, a historical

process that has seen the emergence of a relatively new domain of concepts and practices, a

space which is contributing to a redefinition of the relationship between state, citizenship and

territory 184. In this historical context he argues that much can be gained from approaching

questions of social security, internal security and welfare in the same frame of analysis185. He

considers that there is a common terrain of rationalities, subjectivities, knowledge and

spatialities that are set in motion across these distinct areas of government.186 The dispositif

that he is concerned with analyzing goes beyond the border regime. It is something at work in

many different institutions and situations spread out in several countries, working in a manner

not given in the map of social policies and prescriptions, planned as such by no one187. Thus it

is not reducible to the field of security experts but is at play across the whole of society.

By studying the changing nature of these rationalities, subjectivities and knowledge over time

he proposes a specific way of understanding what is different about our political reality. For

example, he suggests that this can be done by studying the changing significance the border

within political imagination. He argues that if we compare news reports about illegal

immigration with earlier reports about wetbacks it become clear that the position of the

border within political debate is quite different. As he states:

Public attention was far more focused on the living and working conditions of the

migrants than it was on the journeys they made to reach the US, or the fact they

had illegally crossed the border. Today the border becomes a privileged signifier:

it operates as a sort of meta-concept that condenses a whole set of negative

meanings, including illegal immigration, the threat of terrorism, dysfunctional

globalization, loss of sovereignty188.

183

WALTERS, Putting the Migration Security-Complex, Op. cit., p. 162. 184

WALTERS, Secure Borders, Safe Havens, Op. cit., p. 240. 185




WALTERS, Putting the Migration-Security Complex, Op. cit., p. 174.

28

The contemporary dispositif of bordering has its own particular way of governing flows, of

taping certain flows and suppressing others189. In the contemporary configuration [i]nsecurity

is bound up with themes of mobility: it is the movement, the circulation, the presence of

unauthorized bodies which have violated the borders of the nation state190. Similar to Bigo,

Walter argues that the

Dream is not to arrest mobility but to tame it; not to build walls, but systems

capable of utilizing mobilities, taping their energies and in certain cases deploying

them against the sedentary and ossified elements within society; not a

generalized immobilization, but a strategic application of immobility to specific

cases coupled with the production of (certain kinds of) mobility191.

We have to come back to the question of the location of power and resistance

and the impossibility to break down the atoms of power and resistance in order to

separate power on one side and resistance on the other side and then to attribute

them to different (good and bad) actors, as in theories of emancipation192.

189




BIGO, Freedom and Speed, Op. Cit., p. 45.

29

This leads into the last critique. This literature can depict these practices as everyday

securitizations because it overlooks those that are affected by them. Bigo states that

193

self-addiction for a surveillance in

which disciplinary aspects stay invisible and in which alienation is removed194.

10.

The Autonomy of Migration perspective is theoretically grounded in Autonomist Marxism and

especially related to the work of Italian authors associated with the Opereismo movement

such as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri. Tronti in his text The Strategy of

Refusal lays out some of the fundamental ideas of this approach. He affirms that the power

of workers resides in their potential command over production, that is, over a particular aspect

of society195 and that the working class gains radical potential when it refuses to function as

an articulation of capitalist society. It is most powerful when it refuses to act as a social

partner of the whole social process196. Due to the power wielded by the working class, through

their potential refusal to participate in the social process, Negri argues that the development

of the capitalist state only makes sense as a reaction to the initiatives of the working class via

constant attempts to harness its energy197. This is similarly portrayed by Tronti. Autonomist

authors argue that due to the capitalist states dependence on the working class it is in fact

subordinate to it. As Tronti affirms:

if there is no social relationship with out a class relationship, and there is no class

relationship without the working class... then one can conclude that the capitalist

class, from its birth, is in fact subordinate to the working class198 Exploitation is

born, historically, from the necessity for capital to escape from its de facto

subordination to the class of worker-producers199.

193

BIGO, Globalized (in)security, Op. Cit., p. 13. 194

BIGO, Freedom and Speed, Op. Cit., p. 45-46. 195

TRONTI, Mario, The Strategy of Refusal, http://libcom.org/library/strategy-refusal-mario-tronti 196

TRONTI, The Strategy of Refusal, Op. cit., p. 3. 197

HARDT, Michael, Into the Factory: Negris Lenin and the Subjective Caesura (1968-1973), MURPHY, Timothy and MUSTAPHA, Abdul-Karim, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, Pluto Press, London, 2005, p. 12. 198

TRONTI, Mario, The Strategy of Refusal, Op. cit., p. 4. 199

TRONTI, Mario, The Strategy of Refusal, Op. cit., p. 4.

30

There is thus a continuous political conflict between the creation of autonomous spaces by the

working classes and the harnessing of these spaces by capitalist states. Virno lays this out

theoretically by differentiating between the people, a calculable predictable body, and the

multitude that shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting

agreements200. For Virno the people and the multitude are not necessarily in conflict rather

the multitude is a particular type of politics that redefines the people201. Hardt and Negri argue

that the multitude is continual pushing and transforming political formations. The new form of

sovereignty they advocate, Empire, is the latest reaction to the autonomy of the multitude.

Trontis proposal, if logically continued into the realm of migration, would suggest that

migration is a strategy of refusal. It is an autonomous move that rejects the reproduction of

the social order. Thus the state reacts to this autonomy by implementing repressive measures

to harness and exploit it. In the same way that the capitalists exist as a parasitic class that

harness the autonomy of labour, the state is an apparatus that is brought into existence by the

harnessing of mobility. This re-reading of Tronti corresponds in many ways to the proposals

made by authors of these perspectives. Whilst the notion of Autonomy of Migration is usually

attributed to Yann Moulier-Boutang202 it was also crudely laid out by Hardt and Negri in

Empire. These authors argue that in the current political formation the circulation of migrants

act as a multitude re-appropriating spaces: Everywhere that these movements arrive, and

along their paths they determine new forms of life and cooperation. However, as this

movement re-configures the social landscapes it is re-captured by the capitalist apparatus

This movement is appropriated by capitalism is it possible to imagine US agriculture without

Mexican labour203. Thus whilst migration constantly opens new spaces of autonomy it is also

the driving force behind the global border regime that seeks to arrest and order it. These

mechanisms do not emerge within the part of an unfolding plan but as reactionary measures.

As they affirm:

Empire does not really know how to control these paths only criminalize those

that take them even when they are required for capitalist production. Empire

must restrict and isolate the spatial movements of the multitude to stop them

from gaining political legitimacy Empire can only isolate, divide, segregate.

Imperial does attack the movement with tireless determination. Patrolling land

and sea. Within each country it divides and segregates and it the world of labour it

creates a whole range of discriminations. However it has to be careful as the

productivity of empire depends on this movement204.

200

VIRNO, Paolo, A Grammar of the Multitude, http://libcom.org/library/grammar-multitude-paolo-virno 201

VIRNO, A Grammar of the Multitude, Op. cit. 202

See MOULIER-BOUTANG, Yann, De la esclavitud al trabajo asalariado: economa histrica del trabajo asalariado embridado, Akal, Tres Cantos, 2006. 203

HARDT, Michael and NEGRI, Toni, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 397. 204

HARDT and NEGRI, Empire, Op. cit., p. 398-399.

31

This crude schematic argument is similar to that forwarded by Dimitris Papadopoulous, Niamh

Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos in Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century.

These authors suggest that we should understand migration as a social and political

movement in the literal sense of the words, not as mere response to economic and social

malaise and as a constituent force in the formation of sovereignty205. Thus, similar to Hardt

and Negri, mobility and escape are defining forces in challenging particular historical and

political formations pushing t

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Ari Jerrems GERI Junio 2013