Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power 9780748640218

Citation preview

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:55

Page i

BORDER POLITICS

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:55

Page ii

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:55

Page iii

BORDER POLITICS The Limits of Sovereign Power

Nick Vaughan-Williams

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:55

Page iv

For Ning

© Nick Vaughan-Williams, 2009, 2012 First published in hardback in 2009 by Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com This paperback edition 2012 Typeset in Palatino Light by Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northampton, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4485 8 (paperback) The right of Nick Vaughan-Williams to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:55

Page v

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction The concept of the border of the state in contemporary political life A blind spot in International Relations theory? The vacillation of borders The quest for alternative border imaginaries Map of the book 1 Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be: Security, Territory, Law Borders and security: the United Kingdom’s ‘new’ border doctrine Borders and territory: the European Union and the rise of Frontex Borders and law: the United States’ naval base in Guantánamo Bay The need to rethink what and where borders are 2 The Study of Borders in Global Politics: From Geopolitics to Biopolitics Limology: a brief history and current ‘state of the art’ Assuming the concept of the border of the state Acknowledging the concept of the border of the state Further problematising the concept of the border of the state

vii 1 2 4 6 8 10

14 16 24 29 32

38 40 44 47 51

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

vi

4/12/11

09:55

Page vi

BORDER POLITICS

3 Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order: Problematising the Limits of Sovereign Power Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida: cartographies of violence Carl Schmitt: sovereignty, territory, limits Michel Foucault: the ‘how’ of power Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: the smooth space of Empire 4 The Generalised Biopolitical Border: Security as the Normal Technique of Government Politics, life, and sovereign power Reconceptualising the limits of sovereign power Generalised border politics: the case of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

65 66 72 77 83

96 97 108 117

5 Alternative Border Imaginaries: The Politics of Framing Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border Ethical–political implications of the generalised biopolitical border The politics of framing

130 132 136 146

Conclusion

163

Bibliography Index

171 185

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:55

Page vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to express my gratitude to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan for the Research Studentship that funded the PhD thesis on which this book is based; the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University), and the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, for providing an intellectually challenging yet supportive environment in which to work on the original thesis; and more recently the Department of Politics, University of Exeter, for enabling me to complete the project in final book form. Additionally, I wish to acknowledge the following colleagues, mentors and friends. At Aberystwyth I enjoyed four years as both a doctoral student and temporary Lecturer in International Theory and Security. I would like to thank: Jenny Edkins, for belief in me and the thesis, inimitable good humour and company, and outstanding qualities as a supervisor, mentor, and confidante; Hidemi Suganami, for taking me on as a supervisee somewhat late in the day, and never ceasing to challenge and provoke (and talk about causation); Colin McInnes, for supervisory support in the formative stages of the thesis and professional advice and encouragement as Head of Department; Andrew Linklater, who acted as my internal examiner and provided helpful feedback and advice; Tom Lundborg, for valued discussions and friendship in Aber and for introducing me to the ‘dark precursor’; Cian O’Driscoll for promenade-based pursuits and engaging, though usually just-war-based, conversation; and Columba Peoples for showing us all how it should be done. Outside Aberystwyth, I owe a huge debt to: R. B. J. Walker, for his comments on my thesis as external examiner and intellectual and professional generosity since the viva; Maja Zehfuss, for introducing me to Jacques Derrida, inspiring me to vii

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

viii

4/12/11

09:55

Page viii

BORDER POLITICS

pursue doctoral research, and persuading me that life in West Wales wouldn’t be that bad; Noel Parker, for friendship and intellectual comradeship in Copenhagen and beyond; and James Brassett, Dan Bulley, Angharad Closs Stephens, Debbie Lisle, Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Andrew Neal, Mustapha K. Pasha, Rens van Munster, and Chris Rumford for their ideas, collegiality, and friendship. Most recently, I have been exceptionally lucky to have found some excellent colleagues at the University of Exeter, who offer an enviable intellectual context and a lively social scene in equal measure. Particular thanks are extended to: Tim Cooper, Michael Delashmutt, Tim Dunne, Robin Durie, Jonathan Githens-Mazer, John Heathershaw, Bice Maiguashca, Alex Murray, Andy Schaap, Dan Stevens, and Colin Wight. Also, I must express my appreciation to Rory Carson, Ollie Deakin, and Owen Rawlings for reminding me from time to time that life does exist beyond academia. The transition to academic life over the past ten years would not have been possible without the unstinting support of my family. Thanks are due to my mother and father, and especially to my grandmother to whom this book is dedicated, for their unconditional love: they are my backbone and I suspect they do not know how much I value them. I especially want to thank Madeleine for her patience and understanding while I was working on the book, her compassionate and intelligent companionship, and most importantly our relationship. There are also a number of people who have made this book possible in a more practical sense. I wish to express my thanks to: John Williams and Yosef Lapid for providing constructive feedback on draft chapters and their generous support of the book; two other anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript; Nicola Ramsey, Senior Commissioning Editor at Edinburgh University Press, for her outstanding support and lightness of touch in seeing this project through to completion; Neil Curtis for his fastidious attention to detail in the copy-editing process; and Henning Lindahl for his characteristically excellent work on the jacket design. Finally, parts of the book have appeared elsewhere at earlier stages in the project and I would like to acknowledge these publications as follows. The discussion of Frontex in Chapter 1 was originally developed in an article I published as ‘Borderwork beyond inside/ outside? Frontex, the Citizen-Detective, and the War on Terror’, Space

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

Acknowledgements

4/12/11

09:55

Page ix

ix

and Polity, 12 (1), (April 2008), pp. 63–79. Elements of Chapter 3 were published as ‘Borders, Territory, Law’, International Political Sociology, 4 (2) (December, 2008), pp. 322–38. My treatment of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Chapter 4 is an abridged version of the article ‘The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: New Border Politics?’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32 (2) (April–June 2007), pp. 177–96, which also appears in A. Closs Stephens and N. VaughanWilliams (eds), Terrorism and the Politics of Response (Abingdon and New York: Routledge). Finally, parts of the exegesis of the work of Jacques Derrida at the end of Chapter 5 are based on a section in my article ‘International Relations and the “Problem of History”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34 (1), (2005), pp. 115–36. I am also grateful to Thales International and to the London Metropolitan Police for permission to reproduce Figures 1 and 3. Falmouth September 2008

01 pages i-x prelims:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:55

Page x

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 1

INTRODUCTION

Borders are ubiquitous in political life. Indeed, borders are perhaps even constitutive of political life. Borders are inherent to logics of inside and outside, practices of inclusion and exclusion, and questions about identity and difference. Of course, there are many different types of borders that can be identified: divisions along ethnic, national or racial lines; class-based forms of stratification; regional and geographical differences; religious, cultural, and generational boundaries; and so on. None of these borders is in any sense given but (re)produced through modes of affirmation and contestation and is, above all, lived. In other words borders are not natural, neutral nor static but historically contingent, politically charged, dynamic phenomena that first and foremost involve people and their everyday lives. Ostensibly, this book focuses upon one particular type of border: the concept of the border of the state. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, as I hope will become obvious, different types of borders inevitably fold into one another: the notion of maintaining sharp, contiguous distinctions between anything is impossible and inevitably breaks down. In a common understanding of the term, the concept of the border of the state refers to ‘external’, ‘interstate’ or ‘international’ borders that delimit and delineate states as independent entities in the state system.1 According to what John Agnew has referred to as the ‘modern geopolitical imaginary’, state borders are taken to be territorial markers of the limits of sovereign political authority and jurisdiction, and located at the geographical outer edge of the polity.2 Accompanying this imaginary is a well-known historical account of the emergence and supposed ossification of such borders associated with the transition from overlapping jurisdictions in medieval Europe to the emergence of the modern sovereign state characterised by strict 1

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

2

4/12/11

09:57

Page 2

BORDER POLITICS

territorial delimitations.3 Irrespective of conceptual or historical accuracy, there is little doubt that this imaginary, underpinned by the concept of the border of the state, has had, and indeed continues to have, significant political and ethical influence on the practice and theory of global politics. THE CONCEPT OF THE BORDER OF THE STATE IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL LIFE Like all concepts in the practice/theory of global politics, the concept of the border of the state is politically and ethically charged: its usage in all kinds of discourses must be seen as in part constituting the modern geopolitical imaginary it purports merely to describe.4 One obvious example of the work that the concept of the border of the state does is to allow for a familiar spatial and temporal compartmentalisation of global politics into two supposedly distinct spheres of activity: history and progress inside, and timeless anarchy outside.5 In turn, such a compartmentalisation permits a problematic division of labour between scholars of politics on the one hand and international relations on the other.6 It is clear that the concept of the border of the state does a lot of work, epistemologically and ontologically, in shaping thinking about diverse issues in global politics. The concept of the border of the state underpins the arrangement of, and indeed the very condition of possibility for, both domestic and international legal and political systems. Domestically, it is integral to conventional notions of the limits of internal sovereignty and authority, reflected in Max Weber’s paradigmatic definition of the state as: ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory’.7 In the international sphere it enables the principle of territorial integrity, enshrined in Article 2, Paragraph 4 of the United Nations (UN) Charter which, since the end of World War II, has acted as the cornerstone for regulative ideals such as: the legal existence and equality of all states before international law; protection against the promotion of secessionism by some states in other states’ territory; and territorial independence and preservation.8 As such, and despite historical and contemporary examples of derogations of these regulative ideals, without the notion of territorial integrity reliant upon the concept of the border of the state there would simply be no ‘domestic’

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Introduction

4/12/11

09:57

Page 3

3

and ‘international’ juridical–political orders to speak of in the first place. As a central feature of the architecture of global politics, the concept of the border of the state can be thought of as a sort of compass. It orients the convergence of people with a given territory and notions of a common history, nationality, identity, language and culture. In this way, it is a pivotal concept that opens up – but can also close down – a multitude of political and ethical possibilities. Not only does this particular border delimit states but also different forms of subjectivity or ‘personhood’ that are produced by the domestic/international juridical-political order. Like the modern sovereign state, the modern political subject is also conceived of as being fundamentally bordered in terms of autonomy before the law.9 Hence, discourses of rights and responsibilities presume the subject of contemporary political life to be an individual whose status is clearly demarcated: a citizen. Seen in these terms, the concept of the border of the state is central to the production of citizen-subjects whose identity derived from citizenship provides a series of convenient answers to difficult questions such as Who am I? Where do I belong? What should I do? The concept of the border of the state has also framed the way global security relations are commonly conceptualised. Although the study of security is a fundamentally contested terrain, the modern geopolitical imaginary has had a bearing on the trajectory of the field. This influence has been especially, though not exclusively, due to the relative dominance of realist and neo-realist approaches in security studies. Such approaches, with their emphasis on states’ survival in an anarchical self-help system, rely on the concept of the border of the state in order to frame their reading of the key elements of security: the referent object of the threat (national security); the source of the threat (other states in the context of anarchy); and the likely means of overcoming that threat (interstate warfare). Indeed, the concept of the border of the state frames dominant notions of who and where the ‘enemy’ of the state is. As has been pointed out elsewhere, realist and neo-realist perspectives understand security in terms of the history of the defence and/or transgression of states’ borders.10 Although the insights of this approach have been questioned over recent years, particularly so since the end of the Cold War, aspects of such thinking undoubtedly continue to permeate security practices. Indeed, the rise of the notion of ‘homeland security’ in the context of Western governments’ attempts to counter the threat of international terrorism

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4

4/12/11

09:57

Page 4

BORDER POLITICS

has led to a reinvigoration of border protection initiatives: ‘the new age of the wall has begun’, writes Guardian columnist Julian Borger, ‘ramparts and stone fortifications, regarded until recently as national relics and tourist attractions, are back with a vengeance’.11 A BLINDSPOT IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY? Despite the ubiquity of borders in political life, and the particularly privileged position of the concept of the border of the state, a number of writers with very different perspectives have bemoaned what they consider to be the paucity of reflection on these matters in the theoretical literature produced by the discipline of International Relations (IR). For Chris Brown, ‘neither modern political theory nor IR theory has an impressive record when it comes to theorising the problems caused by borders’.12 Similarly, Robert Jackson has argued that: ‘it is remarkable that state borders are usually taken for granted by international relations. They are a point of departure but they are not a subject of inquiry.’ 13 Others in IR who have written in a similar vein include Mathias Albert,14 Yosef Lapid,15 Andrew Linklater and John MacMillan,16 R. B. J. Walker,17 and John Williams.18 Similar complaints have been made about the strange absence of theoretical reflection on the role of borders in political life in a number of other disciplinary contexts such as political anthropology,19 political sociology,20 and political geography.21 Williams neatly sums up the basic point made by all these writers: that borders between states are all too often treated as if they were merely the ‘fixtures and fittings’ of the international system.22 One of the purposes of this book is to contribute to efforts to address this deficiency within the extant literature. My motivation to write, however, is not only framed by what has hitherto remained unsaid about borders. It also stems from a dissatisfaction with what I consider to be the largely unreflective usage of the concept of the border of the state in diverse claims about global politics. In this context it is possible to identify two basic, prominent and competing discourses: the first is the claim that borders between states are a thing of the past; the second is the assertion that borders between states are here to stay. According to the first discourse, the transformation of global

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Introduction

4/12/11

09:57

Page 5

5

production, involving the growth of multinational companies, a twenty-four hour market and post-Fordist industries, has rendered the notion of a national economy obsolete.23 On this view, economic change is said to have ushered in new patterns of governance, in which the role of the modern, sovereign, territorially bordered state has also diminished.24 The emergence of the European Union, with its self-portrayal as a ‘borderless area of freedom, security and justice’, could be cited as an example of this transformation. Consequently, it is sometimes argued that the erosion of state borders over recent decades threatens the very idea of the Westphalian territorially defined international state system.25 By contrast, the second discourse maintains that national economies have been left intact if not actually strengthened by globalisation.26 According to this perspective, the modern state continues to remain the primary political entity in world politics.27 Moreover, especially since the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, there have been challenges to the concept of globalisation and discourses relating to borderlessness.28 In the face of mounting American military aggression, and various reassertions of territorial sovereignty, some writers, as we have already seen, argue that state borders are more important than ever.29 Despite the fact that an array of evidence can be collected and mounted in defence of both positions, by now the above debate has reached something of an impasse. This implies the need for an alternative approach that does not reify the contours of the debate by simply arguing in favour of one side over the other. How might this be done? A preliminary and very straightforward observation concerning the debate is that, despite the apparent irreconcilability of the two competing discourses, both rely upon a particular understanding of the concept of the border of the state. This understanding not only reflects, but works within and further entrenches, the modern geopolitical imaginary. What the debate excludes is precisely the possibility that the concept of the border of the state has undergone transformation in contemporary political life. A focus on whether borders between states are merely ‘present’ or ‘absent’ is blind to dynamics in political practices that challenge the very imaginary within which those claims about ‘presence’ or ‘absence’ are able to make any sense at all.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

6

4/12/11

09:57

Page 6

BORDER POLITICS

THE VACILLATION OF BORDERS Étienne Balibar has written about the way in which borders in contemporary political life are not necessarily where they are supposed to be according to the modern geopolitical imaginary: ‘We are living in a conjecture of the vacillation of borders – both of their layout and function – that is at the same time a vacillation of the very notion of the border, which has become particularly equivocal.’ 30 The significance of Balibar’s argument, especially when related back to the impasse of the debate above, is that the vacillation of borders is not conflated with their disappearance. On the contrary, for Balibar borders are being ‘multiplied and reduced in their localisation, […] thinned out and doubled, […] no longer the shores of politics but […] the space of the political itself’.31 As such, Balibar offers a provocative starting point for engaging with the debate about the presence/ absence of borders between states without reifying either side. Instead, he implies the need to think more imaginatively, and perhaps even outside the modern geopolitical imaginary, to begin to grasp what is going on in global politics: ‘borders […] are no longer at the border, an institutionalised site that could be materialised on the ground and inscribed on the map, where one sovereignty ends and another begins’.32 In this context, it is difficult to overstate the enormity of what is at stake, conceptually, historically and politically, in Balibar’s seemingly paradoxical formulation that ‘borders are no longer at the border’. The notion that both the nature and location of borders have undergone some sort of transformation requires a quantum leap in the way we think about bordering practices and their effects. It also radically challenges the kinds of orientation hitherto provided by the modern geopolitical imaginary underpinned by the concept of the border of the state. In turn, this raises particularly difficult questions about how issues relating to juridical–political order, citizenship, subjectivity, identity, security and so on might be framed otherwise. Thus, Balibar’s pithy formulation highlights an urgent need for the development of alternative border imaginaries apposite to the study of the changes he diagnoses. In his call for generating different ways of conceptualising borders, Balibar is certainly not alone. Rather, it is possible to identify similar concerns expressed by a number of writers working with various

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 7

Introduction

7

perspectives from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. For example, R. B. J. Walker, who has systematically interrogated the logic of inside/ outside upon which the modern geopolitical imaginary underpinned by the concept of the border of the state rests, issues a similar injunction to Balibar throughout many of his texts.33 Walker argues that: ‘We have shifted rather quickly from the monstrous edifice of the Berlin Wall, perhaps the paradigm of a securitized territoriality, to a war on terrorism, and to forms of securitization, enacted anywhere.’ 34 Likewise, Achille Mbembe has insisted: ‘[I]n [the] heteronymous organisation of territorial rights and claims, it makes little sense to insist on distinctions between “internal” and “external” political realms, separated by clearly demarcated boundaries.’ 35 In the same vein, Eyal Weizman writes: ‘New and suggestive cartographic representations of today’s world [are required] […] a departure from the traditional view of a world that consists of a series of more or less homogenous [sic] nation states separated by clear borders in a continuous spatial flow.’ 36 Moreover, albeit in different ways and contexts, many other writers have made equivalent claims about the need for alternative border imaginaries in the study of global politics, including Didier Bigo,37 David Campbell,38 Zaki Laïdi,39 Yosef Lapid,40 Noel Parker,41 Chris Rumford,42 Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby,43 Michael J. Shapiro,44 and William Walters.45 Yet, despite these repeated calls, there has been a noticeable reticence when it comes to the task of conceptualising such alternative border imaginaries and then putting them to work against different backdrops. As Walker has argued, this reticence is perhaps unsurprising given the stakes involved: Better explanations – of contemporary political life – are no doubt called for, but they are unlikely to emerge without a more sustained reconsideration of fundamental theoretical and philosophical assumptions than can be found in most of the literature on international relations theory.46 Nevertheless, there is a real danger of a growing disjuncture between the increasing complexity and differentiation of borders in global politics on the one hand, and yet the apparent simplicity and lack of imagination with which borders and bordering practices continue to be treated on the other. This raises the fundamental question: How

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

8

4/12/11

09:57

Page 8

BORDER POLITICS

might it be possible to develop alternative conceptualisations of borders without reproducing the modern geopolitical imaginary? THE QUEST FOR ALTERNATIVE BORDER IMAGINARIES This book responds to the challenge issued by Balibar, Walker, Mbembe, Weizman and others to develop alternative border imaginaries. To address the central question above the analysis steps outside the literature in IR and related disciplines and draws upon hitherto largely untapped resources for extended thinking about the problem of borders found in post-structuralist thought. The term ‘post-structuralism’ is highly problematical and it is with hesitation that I use it throughout as a heuristic device to refer to a heterogeneous body of social, political, and philosophical work. Indeed, one of the many problems with the term is that some of the authors whose work is often labelled as ‘post-structural’ simply do not subscribe to or even recognise it as an approach.47 Nevertheless, with these necessary caveats in mind, I will argue that the thinkers under consideration, primarily Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, are particularly apposite to the task in hand because they all share a common interest in critically questioning both the logic and practice of borders in a general sense. By this I mean that an area of overlap between them is an insistence on detailed analyses of how different entities, such as concepts, subjects, communities and, indeed, states, become produced as separate phenomena to begin with. In other words, rather than taking such entities as somehow distinct from the outset and then merely analysing the relationships between them, attention is drawn to their production as supposedly singular entities in the first place.48 Moreover, as subsequent discussions will seek to illuminate, this prior move to produce entities as distinct relates intimately to questions about force, violence, power, authority and legitimacy, thus necessitating interrogation in its own right. On this basis, it is precisely how borders work – and how they might be identified, interrogated and sometimes resisted – that is of central concern to the thinkers I have chosen to focus upon. From this general theoretical starting point, the insights of the authors above are used initially to problematise the concept of the border of the state. Here the use of the term ‘problematisation’ relates

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Introduction

4/12/11

09:57

Page 9

9

to the method Foucault developed in his various studies of madness, sexuality, discipline, and surveillance and other aspects of social and political life.49 Instead of asking questions like ‘What is madness?’ Foucault was more interested in exploring how different understandings of madness change over time through an analysis of the field of relations around the concept.50 As a method, problematisation interrogates the way that a concept is used in discourse, how that usage is connected to questions to do with power relations, and the way in which it is also productive of particular forms of subjectivity. Therefore, rather than ask ‘What is the concept of the border of the state?’, my analysis draws upon the insights of Agamben, Foucault and Derrida together with other thinkers, such as Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, to think about the work that this concept does: that is to say what is enabled, constrained or even concealed by the modern geopolitical imaginary it underpins and sustains. In particular, the analysis seeks to consider the relationship between the concept of the border of the state and our understanding of practices of sovereignty, violence and (bio)power in contemporary political life. As well as problematising the concept of the border of the state, however, the book also draws on the above thinkers in search of critical resources for developing alternative border imaginaries. In this regard, the move from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon of thinking, initially inspired by Foucault and then taken in new and provocative directions by Agamben, opens up crucial lines of enquiry. I argue that much promise is to be found in Agamben’s oeuvre for a reconceptualisation of the limits of sovereign power: not as fixed territorial borders located at the outer edge of the state but rather infused through bodies and diffused throughout everyday life. On the basis of Agamben’s analysis, I develop the concept of the ‘generalised biopolitical border’ which, as a critique of the modern geopolitical imaginary, can be read as a response to those who call for a more pluralised and radicalised view of what and where borders are in contemporary political life. Finally, in addition to drawing upon the insights of poststructuralist thought to problematise the concept of the border of the state and develop alternative border imaginaries, the book also uses the problem of borders to explore some of the limitations of the poststructuralist work under consideration. While the concept of the generalised biopolitical border is shown to be one suggestive response

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 10

10

BORDER POLITICS

to the need for different thinking about borders, problems with this approach are identified in the light of aspects of the work of Derrida. In this way, as well as a contribution to thinking differently about borders in political life, the book can be considered as a critical introduction to and commentary on some of the key thinkers associated with a post-structualist perspective.

MAP OF THE BOOK The book is organised into five chapters. The first chapter seeks to illustrate Étienne Balibar’s point that borders are vacillating and not necessarily where they are supposed to be in contemporary political life. To do this I look at three examples of bordering practices that challenge the modern geopolitical imaginary underpinned by the concept of the border of the state: the emergence and implementation of the United Kingdom’s new global border security doctrine; the recent activities of Frontex, the new European Union (EU) border management agency, in Africa; and the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at the United States Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These illustrations provide a crucial empirical backdrop that demonstrates the overall importance of developing new ways of identifying and interrogating borders in the light of contemporary practices. Chapter 2 then provides a tour d’horizon of the study of borders in IR, critical geopolitics, and the interdisciplinary subfield of border studies. The aim is to offer an impression of the current ‘state of the art’ of existing literature that deals in various ways with the concept of the border of the state. To this end, the primary purpose of the survey is to accumulate, in a positive fashion, different insights and perspectives from a range of writings that can be mobilised to assist in conceptualising emerging practices of the kind outlined in Chapter 1. I argue that it is possible to detect the beginnings of a shift in border studies from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon of analysis but that, while this has opened up new and exciting avenues of enquiry, these have yet to be fully exploited for: 1. interrogating the concept of the border of the state; and 2. developing different ways of conceptualising what and where borders are. As such, there is still much work to be done. On this basis, I situate the book as a contribution to

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Introduction

4/12/11

09:57

Page 11

11

ongoing interdisciplinary efforts to employ a biopolitical approach to the study of borders. Chapter 3 moves away from the IR and related literature to explore potential resources in post-structuralist thought for an interrogation of the concept of the border of the state. Developing some of the insights of the literature outlined in the previous chapter, I seek to highlight and examine the relation between state borders and practices of violence, sovereignty, and (bio)power. First, the work of Benjamin and Derrida is drawn upon to analyse the violent foundations of the juridical–political order and the work that borders do in upholding such violence. Second, I use Schmitt’s paradigmatic account of sovereignty and later treatment of the relationship between spatial ordering and law to offer an interpretation of borders as exceptional spaces. Third, Foucault’s treatment of (bio)power and notion of biopolitics are explored more fully, which offers further scope for a critical interrogation of the concept of the border of the state away from the confines of the modern geopolitical imaginary. Chapter 4 traces Agamben’s engagement with and development of Foucault’s understanding of the biopolitical structures of the West in order to explore the possibilities of his approach for developing alternative border imaginaries. It begins with an exegesis of Agamben’s work although departures are made from extant interpretations in respect of his concept of bare life, the importance of what he calls a ‘logic of the field’, and the spatial dimensions of his thought more generally. Building upon Agamben, I develop the concept of the generalised biopolitical border as an alternative to the geopolitical concept of the border of the state. Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border unties an analysis of the limits of sovereign power from the territorial confines of the modern state and relocates such an analysis in the context of a global terrain that spans and decentres notions of ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ space. Chapter 5 begins by assessing what the implications of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border might be and how this differs from the concept of the border of the state. It does so by returning to the examples of the work that the latter does in contemporary political life in respect of framing our understanding of juridical–political order, the production of identities of citizen-subjects, and global security relations. By rereading these examples in the light of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border, I then explore how this alternative

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

12

Page 12

BORDER POLITICS

frame might entail new modes of practice/theory. Drawing on Derrida’s account of the politics of framing, however, I end on a note of caution about the way in which thinking in terms of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border runs the risk of foisting the same problematic sense of form, shape, and coherence on ‘global politics’ as a totality in the same way that the concept of the border of the state has done. NOTES 1. See Anderson, Frontiers, 1996; and Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries, 1987. 2. Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap’, 1994. See also Jackson, The Global Covenant, 2000; and Williams, The Ethics of Territorial Borders, 2006. 3. See Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap’, 1994; Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, 1998; Ó Tuathail and Dalby, Rethinking Geopolitics, 1998; Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 2003; and Walker, Inside/outside, 1993. 4. In this sense it is what William Connolly refers to as ‘onto-political’; Connolly, ‘The Irony of Interpretation’, 1992. See also Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 1993. 5. Bartelson, The Critique of the State, 2001; Walker, Inside/outside, 1993. 6. Camilleri et al., The State in Transition, 1995, pp. 1–4. 7. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, 1948, p. 78. 8. See Elden, ‘Contingent Sovereignty’, 2006 and ‘Blair, Neo-Conservatism and the War on Territorial Integrity’, 2007. 9. See Butler, Precarious Life, 2004, p. 32. 10. Linklater and MacMillan, Boundaries in Question, 1995, p. 12 11. Borger, ‘Security Fences or Barriers to Peace?’, 2007, p. 23. 12. Brown, ‘Borders and Identity’, 2001, p. 117. 13. Jackson, The Global Covenant, 2000, p. 316. 14. Albert, ‘On Boundaries’, 1999, p. 54. 15. Lapid, ‘Introduction: Nudging IR Theory in a New Direction’, 2001, pp. 6–7. 16. Linklater and MacMillan, Boundaries in Question, 1995. 17. Walker, ‘Editorial Note’, 2000, p. 2. 18. Williams, ‘Territorial borders’, 2003, pp. 25–46. 19. Donnan and Wilson, Borders, 1999. 20. Rumford, ‘Introduction: Theorising Borders’, 2006. 21. Kolossov, ‘Border Studies’, 2005; Newman, ‘Boundaries, Borders and Barriers’, 2001; Paasi, ‘The Changing Discourses on Political Boundaries’, 2005. 22. Williams, ‘Territorial borders’, 2003, p. 27.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Introduction

4/12/11

09:57

Page 13

13

23. Brown, ‘Globalisation’, 2005, p. 167. 24. Strange, ‘The Westfailure System’, 1999. 25. Held and McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader, 2002, p. 39; Scholte, Globalisation, 2000, pp. 135–6. 26. Hirst and Thompson, Globalisation in Question, 1996 and ‘The Future of Globalisation’, 2002. 27. Carlson et al., ‘Foreword’, 2006, pp. 1–2. 28. Coward, ‘The Globalisation of Enclosure’, 2005, pp. 105–34; Newman, ‘Borders and Bordering’, 2006, p. 181. 29. Starr, ‘International Borders’, 2006, pp. 3–10. 30. Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, 1998, p. 217. 31. Ibid., p. 220. 32. Ibid., pp. 217–18. 33. Walker frequently implies the inadequacy of the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state. See: Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, pp. 20, 159, 161; ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community’, 1990, p. 180; ‘Foreword’, 1999, p. xii; ‘On the Immanence/Imminence of Empire’, 2002, p. 343. 34. Walker, ‘International/inequality’, 2002, p. 17. 35. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 2005, pp. 11–40. 36. Weizman, ‘On Extraterritoriality’, 2007, p. 13. 37. Bigo, ‘The Möbius Ribbon’, 2001. 38. Campbell, Writing Security, 1998; National Deconstruction, 1998; Moral Spaces, 1999. 39. Z. Laïdi, A World Without Meaning, 1998, p. 97. 40. Lapid, ‘Introduction’, 2001, p. 2. 41. Parker, ‘A Theoretical Introduction’, 2008. 42. Rumford, ‘Introduction’, 2006. 43. Ó Tuathail and Dalby, Rethinking Geopolitics, 1996, p. 29. 44. Shapiro, Challenging Boundaries, 1996; Violent Cartographies, 1997; Moral Spaces, 1999. 45. Walters, ‘Mapping Schengenland’, 2002; ‘Border/Control’, 2006. 46. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, p. 159. 47. Jacques Derrida, for example, is ‘eager to maintain [the concept of poststructuralism] as suspect and problematic’, see: Derrida, ‘Deconstruction: the Im-Possible’, 2001, p. 16. 48. As Noel Parker puts it: ‘post-structuralism leaves in question the solidity of entities themselves’, see Parker, ‘A Theoretical Introduction’, 2008, p. 11. 49. Foucault, ‘Problematization’, 1991. 50. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, 2001 [1959].

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 14

Chapter 1 BORDERS ARE NOT WHAT OR WHERE THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE: SECURITY, TERRITORY, LAW

Borders between states have affected, and continue to affect, people’s lives in different ways according to their citizenship, economic status, ethnic background and so on. Moreover, the affects of such borders on different people do not remain static but may change according to individual and broader historical and political circumstances. Today, especially in the West, many people seem to experience what might be considered a globalised borderless world whereby entering and exiting a state is a mere formality, and mobility is taken as almost a given. But for others, such as those in South America or Africa, notions of borderlessness do not make much sense at all as their movement is subject to intense scrutiny and methods of control. In other words, different people experience border politics differently depending on who they are, where they are coming from and going to, and what their motivation for travelling might be. When we think about borders in contemporary political life, a number of iconic images perhaps come to mind: the Berlin Wall; the United States–Mexico border; the straight lines dividing the African continent. According to this picture, paradigmatically represented by Mercator’s map, global politics is characterised by territorial borders that separate states into sovereign political entities. On this view, ‘the border’ is a marker of the limits of the sovereign power of the state located at a fixed site at its geographical outer edge. Such a view corresponds with what John Agnew has famously referred to as the modern geopolitical imaginary which, he argues, constitutes a ‘territorial trap’ underpinned by three problematical assumptions: that states have exclusive power within their territories as represented by the concept of sovereignty; that domestic and international spheres 14

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 15

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

15

are distinct; and that the borders of the state define the borders of society so that the latter is constrained by the former.1 The question of whether borders between states are here to stay or about to disappear forever has preoccupied many theorists of global politics over the last fifty years or so. Irrespective of which side of the debate one might consider most convincing, however, a simple focus on the ‘presence’ or ‘absence’ of such borders is a rather unhelpful starting point for thinking about border politics to begin with. For a start, it distracts attention from the politics of different border experiences according to people’s varying subject positions. Perhaps more fundamentally still, it is a framing that is blinkered to the possibility that the concept of the border of the state might be changing in terms of both its nature and its location in contemporary political life. Indeed, there are many current bordering practices that challenge the commonsensical image of what and where borders in global politics are supposed to be according to the modern geopolitical imaginary, and in many respects the concept of the border of the state appears to be undergoing spatial and temporal shifts of seismic proportions. This Chapter takes as its starting point Étienne Balibar’s pithy observation that ‘borders […] are no longer at the border’.2 My aim is to illustrate this seemingly paradoxical and otherwise abstract formulation by investigating emerging reconfigurations of the concept of the border of the state in current political practices. Such an empirical focus is significant for the study as a whole because it establishes from the outset a need for more sophisticated conceptualisations of both the nature and location of borders and bordering practices. With this in mind I offer three illustrations of how the concept of the border of the state is being played out in unexpected directions with significant consequences for thinking about what studying borders might mean. The first considers how developments in global border security, with specific reference to the emergence of the United Kingdom’s new border doctrine, decentre our understanding of borders. The second analyses this decentring in relation to the territorial location of borders by looking at the recent activities of the new European Union border management agency Frontex. The third points to the increasing disjuncture between territorial limits on the one hand and the limits of law on the other in the context of the detention of suspect terrorists held at the United

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

16

4/12/11

09:57

Page 16

BORDER POLITICS

States’ naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Taken together, the illustrations raise fundamental questions about the interplay between borders, identity, subjectivity, security, sovereignty, power and authority, which frame the context of the rest of the book. BORDERS AND SECURITY: THE UNITED KINGDOM’S ‘NEW’ BORDER DOCTRINE Within one month of his accession to the UK premiership on 27 June 2007, and in the aftermath of the attack on Glasgow airport, Gordon Brown announced a new series of measures designed to ‘increase national security and combat the threat of international terrorism’.3 At the heart of Brown’s first ‘Statement on Security’ was a reliance on the notion of three lines of defence: the first located overseas ‘so that terrorist suspects can be identified and stopped before they board planes, trains and boats to the United Kingdom’; the second to be found at the ‘main points of entry’ where biometrics are already in place and a new unified border force will be in operation; and third ‘within our borders […] to help prevent people already in the country using multiple identities for terrorist, criminal or other purposes’.4 This emphasis on borders as a central tenet of emerging UK homeland security policy was further enshrined in the Borders Act, which came into force in October 2007, and more recently in the National Security Strategy (NSS) unveiled in March 2008. Furthermore, the establishment of the new United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) in April 2008, with a budget of £2 billion and eight thousand officers, represents a key milestone in the implementation of nascent border policy. While Brown’s first year as Prime Minister has witnessed a feverish push towards heightened border security, however, this marks a continuation of, rather than a departure from, Labour’s policy in government. Indeed, the primacy of the development of UK border security can be traced to the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. This trajectory was, of course, given added impetus in the wake of the London bombings on 7 July 2005 and subsequent thwarted bombings across Britain. In December 2006 the first in a series of documents outlining radical changes to the UK border was released: the ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’. This was followed with the publication of ‘Securing the UK

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 17

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

17

Border: Our Vision and Strategy for the Future’ in March 2007 and the lengthier ‘Security in a Global Hub: Establishing the UK’s New Border Arrangements’ in November 2007. Emerging from this growing corpus of literature, which has so far received little academic attention especially when compared with the study of American homeland and border security,5 are several key themes that imply a shift in how the Home Office (HO), the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and 10 Downing Street conceptualise what and where the UK border actually is. Reflecting something of a departure from the modern geopolitical imaginary, the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office invoke what is presented as an outdated model of the border against which new plans for improved border security are outlined: The border has been traditionally understood as a single, staffed physical frontier, where travellers show paper-based identity documents to pass through.6 This philosophy will not deal effectively with the step change in mobility that globalisation has brought to our country. We believe that a new doctrine is demanded.7 As the second of these quotations demonstrates, the need for the development of a new UK border doctrine is partly framed in terms of the acceleration of mobility arising from conditions of globalisation. The ‘exponential growth in global movement’ is presented as both a potentially good and bad phenomenon for the UK. On the one hand, it ‘brings great opportunity’, such as the contribution to gross domestic product of those working legally. On the other hand, it ‘creates new challenges’ including identity fraud, illegal immigration, organised crime and international terrorism.8 Therefore, this duality is said to necessitate an approach that balances economic prosperity with security imperatives: ‘The goal is to find the optimal relation between an appropriate degree of security, and the free flow of people and goods.’ 9 In this way, security and prosperity are taken to be separate from the outset and the new UK border doctrine is tasked to keep out ‘risky’ subjects (potential fraudsters, illegal immigrants, criminals or terrorists) while simultaneously welcoming in profitable and trusted subjects (business people, tourists, ‘bona fide’ asylum

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 18

18

BORDER POLITICS

seekers, legal economic migrants): ‘The aim of border control is to sort traffic into legitimate and non-legitimate and maximise the effort directed against movements that would, without action by the state, be detrimental to the UK, while minimising the burden on those that would not.’ 10 Hence, rather than a barrier or obstacle in the physical sense, the concept of the border at work here is one that privileges permeability: a portal that depends upon – rather than prevents – the circulation of people, services, and goods. Yet, as well as increased mobility resulting from globalisation, the need for a new border doctrine for the UK is also framed and justified in terms of broader changes to the security environment. Although it is recognised that threats from immigration, crime and terrorism are not ‘new’, the government argues that what has changed is the intensity of those threats: ‘the UK faces threats […] of an unprecedented level of virulence, sophistication and variety’.11 Against this backdrop, the attacks on the World Trade Center, Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London, and Glasgow are cited as factors both leading to and reflective of that intensification.12 Crucially, enhanced border security measures are presented as the most adequate and appropriate response to international terrorism.13 How has the UK border been transformed from a static physical frontier and in what ways does it respond specifically to the threat of terrorism? To address these questions, it is instructive to identify three key interlinked innovations reflected in the new UK border doctrine: offshoring; identity capture; and pre-emption.

Offshoring the border Throughout the various documents outlining the UK’s new border doctrine are numerous references to the need to ‘offshore’ bordering practices: Border control can no longer be a fixed line on a map. Using new technologies […] we must create a new offshore line of defence.14 The aim is to create a new offshore line of defence to check individuals as far from the UK as possible and through each part of their journey.15

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 19

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

19

We want to extend the concept of exporting our borders around the world.16 The concept of ‘offshore’ bordering, through not unique to the UK context, has come to underpin the Brown government’s approach to ‘security in a global hub’.17 Central to this concept is the notion that it is simply too late to wait for ‘risky’ subjects to arrive at traditional border crossings, such as ports and airports, on UK territory. Rather, the stated innovation of the UK’s new border doctrine is to take the border to the perceived locus of threat before ‘it’ departs in the first place. In one sense, there is quite literally an ‘exporting’ of the border so that it is physically transported to territory overseas through ‘juxtaposed controls’ whereby the UK monitors mobility in other states and vice versa. For example, since 2001 the UK has taken its border to sites in Boulogne, Brussels, Calais, Coquelles, Dunkerque, Frethun, Lille, and Paris ‘to detect and deter potential clandestine illegal immigrants before they are able to set foot on UK soil, fundamentally altering the way the UK operates at its border’.18 In this context, as well as traditional forms of border control reliant on paper documentation, new technologies such as carbon dioxide probes, X-ray scanners, heart-beat sensors, and heat detectors have been rolled out in order to detect the illegal entry of people concealed in freight.19 In another sense, offshore bordering relates to other forms of control on movement that are increasingly not related to territory in any straightforward way but rather more ephemeral, electronic and invisible. These practices enable the expansion of UK border operations beyond reciprocal ventures with fellow European Union member states. Indeed, one of the main objectives of the new UKBA is to reach beyond Europe in an attempt to ‘globalise’ the UK border.20 One recent innovation in this area is the development of a global network of overseas border security advisers including Airline Liaison Officers (ALOs). The role of ALOs, of whom there are fifty-five working across thirty-two states worldwide, is to work with local intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to ‘detect and deter inadequately documented passengers’.21 Another dimension of offshore bordering practices is the implementation of the new ‘e-Borders programme’. This initiative, which involves data capture prior to travel

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

20

4/12/11

09:57

Page 20

BORDER POLITICS

and analysis undertaken at the new Joint e-Borders Operations Centre (J-BOC), aims to count ‘most foreign nationals’ in and out of the UK by December 2008.22

Identity capture and management at the border At the heart of the range of measures designed to transform UK border security is risk-based identity capture and management: ‘We want […] to fix people’s identities at the earliest point practicable, checking them through each stage of their journey, identifying those presenting a risk and stopping them coming to the UK.’ 23 The principle of the ‘integrity of identity’ underpins new technologies put in place for risk assessment. Whereas paper-based passports and visas allowed for identity fraud and the use of false aliases, it is argued that new forms of biometrics ‘lock applicants into an identity at the earliest possible point in their journey, allowing authorities to track more easily their previous and future dealings with the UK.24 By checking biometric data against Immigration and Asylum databases, it is then possible both to cross-reference back to any previous application that might have been made and to discover any history of criminality to allow or refuse travel.25 Such data are defined as ‘information about external characteristics’ and can include fingerprinting and features of the iris or any part of the eye.26 While these systems are designed primarily to deter some travellers deemed to be illegitimate, they can also be used to ease the journeys of others. Thus, ‘Project Iris’, for example, is a biometrically controlled automated border entry system that enables preregistered passengers to ‘proceed through automated gates at the border rather than queuing to present their passport to an officer at the control’.27 Again, in this way we see the double functioning of the technologies put in place intended both to hinder and to facilitate movement according to decisions about the legitimacy of the subject in transit. The rolling out of identity capture and management systems has relied heavily upon private enterprise and investment. With a step change in both the intensity and scope of border security measures, new business opportunities have coalesced around homeland defence thereby creating a multimillion pound industry. Contracts for designing and delivering the technological infrastructure central to the government’s border transformation programme were put out for

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 21

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

21

Figure 1 The Thales ‘Identity Life Cycle of a Citizen’ 30

tender in 2007 and have been won by global multinational corporations such as Trusted Borders, British Telecom and Thales.28 For example, the international defence firm Thales has developed second generation digital identity technologies which are designed to supersede current paper-based documentation.29 Whereas the latter is based on a static capture of physical identity valid for ten years and reliant upon trust, the former provides constantly updated forms of identity capture using biometry and cryptography. The life cycle of the citizen is reflected in the life cycle of the identity smartcards which automatically register changes in physical appearance, status (for example, if someone has got married, divorced or had children), and can therefore be read as continually evolving ‘life histories’ of the subject (see figure 1). Anticipating criticism from civil liberties campaigners such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of the group ‘Liberty’, Thales makes an analogy between its second generation digital identity solutions and mobile telephones. The latter is a technology that can be traced and involves a potential loss of privacy but is deemed by the majority of populations to be acceptable because of the benefits it affords. Similarly, Thales argues, the former will be based on the same principle whereby new digital identity data can be used by ‘customers’ to ‘assert their identity’ and gain access to an array of services (such as health and social security benefits). On the one hand, this view of identity presupposes that identity ‘is’ something that people possess, can be captured, and then used in particular forms of governance, and clearly this under-

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

22

4/12/11

09:57

Page 22

BORDER POLITICS

standing permeates recent UK government literature on border security. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the second wave of identity technologies, such as those developed by Thales, reflects an awareness of the challenges faced by the task of capturing something that does not ‘exist’ straightforwardly. Moves towards a constantly updated method of identity capture, in tandem with subjects’ life cycles as depicted in figure 1, point towards a recognition of the need for a less static and more dynamic and contingent understanding of identity.

Pre-emptive bordering practices The emphasis given to fixing identities ‘at the earliest point practicable’ through offshore bordering practices points to the emergence of a broader principle of pre-emption that also underpins the UK’s new border doctrine. Whereas the ‘traditional border philosophy’ referred to by the government perceived threats at ‘a single, staffed, physical frontier’ at ports, airports, and other border crossings, an alternative vision has been outlined that tackles these threats before they reach UK territory.31 According to this vision, the traditional border did not act early enough in preventing the ‘wrong’ sort of travellers to the UK: ‘it can be too late – they have achieved their goal in reaching our shores’.32 What does the principle and practice of ‘pre-emption’ entail in this context? The five foundations for the UK’s new border doctrine, as outlined in ‘Security in a Global Hub’, comprise: 1. Act early; 2. Target activity; 3. Manage bottlenecks; 4. Maximise depth and breadth of protection; and 5. Reassure and deter. Pre-empting the arrival of ‘risky’ subjects by preventing them from embarking on their journey to the UK most obviously relates to the first of these foundations: ‘the most effective […] way of addressing risks to the UK is to identify those movements which present a threat and to stop or control them before they reach the UK’.33 Indeed, referring back to Brown’s statement on security, pre-emptive bordering constitutes the first ‘ring of defence’ envisaged by the UK government.34 On this basis, pre-emption involves gathering information and identifying risk before travel begins: ‘The earlier that risk is identified and can be acted upon, the greater the chance of it being successfully resolved, and the less it usually costs to do so.’ 35 Moreover, inno-

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 23

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

23

vations in biometric forms of data capture, together with the rolling out of the new e-Borders Programme, are also designed to use deterrence as a form of pre-emption: ‘In addition to the opportunities to collect data and intervene, border controls represent an important opportunity to deter criminality.’ 36 While it is noted that such deterrence is difficult to measure, it is nevertheless a form of pre-emption considered to be just as, if not more, important than more formalised methods: ‘Border controls should therefore strike a balance between actions to improve the effectiveness behind the scenes – such as information and intelligence sharing leading to targeted activity – and actions that provide a visible presence at certain key locations.’ 37 Pre-emption also connects with the second of the five foundations above, because the targeting of activity involves the prior construction of risk profiles out of ‘a single pool of information about suspect identities and risky individuals’.38 While recent documentation from the Cabinet Office, Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office makes frequent reference to the importance of ‘intelligence-led risk management’, however, it remains unclear precisely on what grounds an individual or group will be deemed ‘risky’ under the UK’s new border doctrine. Indeed, the criteria upon which decisions about the legitimacy of travellers are made have not been made public and very few clues are given in the relevant policy literature. On the one hand, assurances have been made that the level of harm posed by individuals will be determined by ‘reliable’ forms of intelligence: ‘Our ultimate vision is to use intelligence, risk assessment and analysis to apply scrutiny based on individual risk rather than nationality.’ 39 On the other hand, there is an obvious presumption that those from inside the European Economic Area (EEA) are low-risk ‘trusted travellers’ whereas non-European Union nationals are automatically treated as high-risk targeted travellers.40 Such a privileging inscribes a border that ultimately creates two zones of travel to the UK which, despite statements to the contrary, necessarily builds nationality inextricably into the logic of inclusion and exclusion in this context. As we have seen, new technologies have facilitated innovations in the ways in which the UK government attempts to secure its borders both spatially and temporally. Thus, while ‘traditional’ forms of border control are still evident at conventional border sites, such as ports and airports, technology has enabled the rise of different thinking in government and policy-making arenas about what/where

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

24

4/12/11

09:57

Page 24

BORDER POLITICS

the border of the UK should be in an ‘interdependent world’.41 Recent literature outlining the new UK border doctrine emphasises that borders are not necessarily to be found at the outer edge of the state. In turn, this challenges the idea that the territorial limits of the UK are somehow coterminous with the location of the UK’s borders and, more significantly still, the government’s attempts to control them. Similar dynamics, which raise significant conceptual issues to be explored in later chapters, are also evident in the efforts of Frontex to secure the European Union’s borders.

BORDERS AND TERRITORY: THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE RISE OF FRONTEX The main role of Frontex, which was established in Warsaw in 2004 as a decentralised EU regulatory agency with financial, administrative and legal autonomy, is to promote a ‘pan-European model of integrated border security’.42 This pan-European model comprises three basic tiers: tier one involves the exchange of information and cooperation between member states on issues relating to immigration and repatriation; tier two incorporates border and customs control focusing on surveillance, border checks and risk analysis; and tier three encompasses co-operation between border guards, customs and police in non-EU states. Article Two of the founding Regulation outlines the principle tasks of Frontex as follows: (a) To co-ordinate operational co-operation between member states in the field of management of external borders; (b) To assist member states on training of national border guards, including the establishment of common training standards; (c) To carry out risk analyses; (d) To follow up on the development of research relevant for the control and surveillance of external borders; (e) To assist member states in circumstances requiring increased technical and operational assistance at external borders; (f) To provide member states with the necessary support in organising joint return operations.43 The intention here is not to provide a detailed account of the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 25

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

25

establishment of Frontex or its areas of legal competence but rather to outline and illustrate: 1. how the notion of ‘integrated border security’ has emerged as one of the European Union’s responses to the threat of international terrorism since 11 September 2001; and 2. how the recent activities of Frontex in this context challenge what and where the borders of the European Union are.44 In this way parallels will be drawn between the United Kingdom and European Union cases as illustrations of the increasing complexity of borders in contemporary political life.

Integrated border security in Europe According to the Frontex website, the origins of the agency lie in the broad context of a series of moves designed to implement the principle of the free movement of people as originally provided for under Article Three of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. In 1985, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed the Schengen Agreement, pledging to apply the free movement principle by abolishing controls within their common borders. Two years later the Single European Act (SEA) came into effect stipulating that: ‘the internal market should consist of an area without internal frontiers in which the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty’. A Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement was drafted and signed in June 1990, and in the following six years Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Denmark, Finland and Sweden joined the original five member states. It was not until the realisation of the Amsterdam Treaty in May 1999, however, that the Schengen acquis was incorporated into the first pillar of the European Union. This incorporation went hand in hand with the expressed aim of establishing the Union as a borderless ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ (Article 2, Treaty of the European Union). Accompanying the abolition of internal borders was a series of ‘compensatory measures’, including closer co-operation between the police, customs and judiciary across member states via the Schengen Information System (SIS), the implications of which for immigration and asylum have been covered extensively.45 Thus, ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ have been established as antithetical values requiring a ‘balanced’ approach, and it is in precisely these terms that the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

26

4/12/11

09:57

Page 26

BORDER POLITICS

operation of Frontex has been framed: ‘Frontex complements and provides particular added value to the national border management systems of the member states and to the freedom and security of their citizens’.46 In this way, the security imperatives of Frontex are supposedly tempered by the Union’s commitment to freedom. On the one hand, the development of Frontex can be located within this broad historical trajectory of the Europeanisation of member states’ borders: ‘a further institutionalisation in the ongoing process of a technocratically-driven integration project’.47 On the other hand, the role of Frontex and integrated border security has also been presented as a specific solution to the problem of the need to respond to the threat of terrorism in the European Union since 11 September 2001. In the ‘Declaration on Combating Terrorism’, published on 25 March 2004 in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, Article Six stresses that the solidarity of the Union must go hand in hand with the need to strengthen border controls. Similarly, the ‘Council Declaration on the EU Response to the London Bombings’ declared that ‘its immediate priority is to build on the existing strong EU framework for pursuing and investigating terrorists across borders’. Moreover the ‘Revised EU Terrorism Action Plan’ of 9 March 2007 refers to the role of Frontex in conducting ‘effective risk analysis’ of Europe’s borders (Article 2.5) and impeding terrorists’ movement by maximising ‘the capacity of existing border systems to monitor, and, where relevant, counter the movement of suspected terrorists across our internal and external borders’ (Article 3.2). Moves towards integrated border security have nevertheless complicated how the traditional separation between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ realms referred to above plays out in practice.

Is the border of the European Union no longer at the border? According to one news report, there were 16,404 documented cases of illegal immigrants arriving from Africa into Spanish territory between January and September 2006.48 On average during this period between a hundred and four hundred Africans were attempting to enter the European Union via the Canary Islands every day. Many travelled (and continue to travel) on overcrowded cayucos – Senegalese fishing boats – each carrying seventy to a hundred and fifty people. Lists compiled by UNITED of some of those who did not make it alive into the Union are accessible by typing ‘dead refugees in fortress Europe’

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 27

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

27

into Google. The ‘headline’ style makes for particularly uncomfortable reading and offers a stark illustration of the way in which border politics is not an abstract phenomenon but one that involves peoples’ experiences, their bodies and often ultimately deaths: Found dead: 16/12/06 Number: 126 Name: Not known Country of origin: West Africa Cause of death: Reportedly drowned, missing, boat capsized on way from Djiffer (Senegal) to Spain. Found dead: 5/10/06 Number: 24 Name: Not known Country of origin: Maghreb Cause of death: Drowned after their rubber boat broke up trying to reach Canary Islands. Found dead: 17/9/06 Number: 1 Name: Not known (man) Country of origin: Sub-Saharan Africa Cause of death: Died of lack of medical care in police custody after his boat landed in Los Cristianos.49 As Sergio Carrera has pointed out, the situation in the Canaries was presented by the European Union and Spanish officials as an ‘unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the whole of Europe’.50 The institutional response to this crisis was the deployment of Frontex personnel from France, Portugal, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK between 17 July and 31 October.51 This operation, known as HERA I, was intended to ‘support the Spanish authorities in [the] identification of the migrants and [the] establishment of their countries of origin’.52 In this way, the first phase of Frontex activity in the Canary Islands reflects what might be considered to be conventional ‘borderwork’ at traditional border sites associated with the implementation of a control on movement of subjects at airports, ports and the geographical outer edges of sovereign territory.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

28

4/12/11

09:57

Page 28

BORDER POLITICS

The second phase of the Frontex operation from 11 August to 15 December departed from this orthodoxy, however. HERA II brought together technical border surveillance equipment from several member states with the expressed aim of preventing ‘migrants from leaving the shores on the long sea journey’.53 To achieve this, Frontex mobilised patrol boats supplied by Italy and Portugal off the West African coast near Mauritania, Senegal, and Cape Verde.54 Moreover, surveillance planes from Finland and Italy were flown along the coast and deeper into African territory in an attempt to deter would-be migrants from making the journey to the European Union in the first place.55 In his analysis of Frontex operations in Africa, Carrera refers to this deterrence of movement as a form of ‘pre-border surveillance’.56 Nevertheless, as a control on the movement of subjects into or within the Union, it is perhaps more accurate to see these missions as European border performances, albeit hundreds of miles away from member states’ territory and the geographical outer edge of the Union. What is interesting about the HERA II operation is that it highlights the way in which borderwork undertaken by Frontex not only occurs at what might usually be understood to be typical ‘border’ sites. Rather, as the pre-emptive measures in African territory illustrate, Frontex increasingly polices the EU’s borders by taking its bordering practices directly to the populations it deems to pose the greatest threat. This ‘offshoring’ of the border, reminiscent of the UK’s new border doctrine, complicates the straightforward notion of an alignment between the territorial limits of the Union on the one hand and the limits of its ability to attempt to control movement on the other. This disaggregation illustrates that the relationship between borders and territory is not static but increasingly dynamic. That is to say, the territories that borders supposedly delimit are not necessarily the only territories within which borders can control movement. The case of America’s detention of suspected terrorists in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, offers another illustration of the increasing complexity of the relation between borders and territory as well as a provocative case for thinking about the implications of this for law.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 29

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

29

BORDERS AND LAW: THE UNITED STATES’ NAVAL BASE IN GUANTÁNAMO BAY The United States government established the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002 to hold suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan. Since its establishment, approximately 520 detainees from forty different countries have been held there, including cab drivers, farmers, and thirteen-year-old children.57 A recent United Nations report on the ‘Situation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay’ highlights the conditions under which they are detained. Detainees are housed in 8-foot by 8-foot cells with wire walls, metal roofs and permanent electric lighting. Interrogation methods, approved by the Secretary of Defense, consist mainly of: the use of stress positions (like standing) for up to four hours; isolation for up to thirty days; sensory deprivation; removal of comfort items; forced grooming; use of individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.58 Other policies include: degrading treatment (such as the removal of clothing – sometimes in the presence of women); cultural and religious harassment (such as using female interrogators to perform ‘lap dances’ and deliberately mishandling the Holy Koran by kicking it); and beating detainees who resist.59 Moreover, the uncertainty generated by the indeterminate nature of confinement has, according to the United Nations, led to serious mental health problems: as of 13 June 2006 there have been three suicides and many more attempted suicides.

Legal challenges to indefinite detention Detainees in Guantánamo are held in what Amnesty International calls a ‘legal blackhole’.60 Under the ‘Military Order on the Detention, Treatment and Trial of Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism of 13 November 2001 (the ‘Military Order’), the United States government has denied most detainees the right to challenge the lawfulness of detention before a court and the right to a fair trial by a competent, independent and impartial court of law.61 According to the US Defense Department, the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists in Guantánamo is a ‘military and security necessity’ in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’: The law of war allows the United States – and any other country engaged in combat – to hold enemy combatants without charge or

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

30

4/12/11

09:57

Page 30

BORDER POLITICS

access to counsel for the duration of the hostilities. Detention is not an act of punishment but of security and military necessity. It serves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing to take up arms against the United States.62 As the UN report points out, however, detention ‘without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities’ amounts to a radical departure from established principles on human rights law.63 Further still, as far as the United Nations is concerned, the global struggle against international terrorism ‘does not, as such, constitute an armed conflict for the purposes of the applicability of international humanitarian law’.64 Yet, despite these findings, human rights lawyers acting on behalf of detainees and their families continue to find it difficult to mount effective defences. Seeking grounds on which the camp might be closed down, the report of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention sets out the international legal framework that its assessment of the United States’ treatment of detainees is based upon. According to this document, the relevant provisions under international law to which the United States is party fall under two main categories: first, a series of human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Convention against Torture) and the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD); second, international humanitarian law treaties, such as the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Third Convention) and the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (Fourth Convention).65 On the issue of the scope of the United States’ obligation to international law, the report invokes Article Two of the ICCPR, which declares: ‘each State Party […] undertakes to respect and to ensure all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the ICCPR without distinction of any kind’.66 Prima facie the applicability of the provisions of this Article could be called into question owing to the seemingly anomalous territorial and juridical status of the United States’ naval base at Guantánamo Bay. After all, this land, which has been the site of colonial struggle for almost a century, is not strictly part of US territory but has been leased from

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 31

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

31

Cuba since February 1903 for ‘any and all things necessary to fit the purposes of coaling and naval stations only, and for no other purpose’.67 Therefore, it might be suggested that, while the provisions of Article Two of the ICCPR apply in the rather more conventional context of sovereign practices within bounded territorial states, they make little sense in the case of Guantánamo Bay. Seeking to clarify the phrase ‘all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction’, however, the report refers to two recent international legal opinions that challenge this commonsensical view. First, the authors note the view of the Human Rights Committee that monitors the implementation of the Covenant that: ‘a State Party must respect and ensure the rights laid down in the Covenant to anyone with the power or effective control of that State Party, even if not situated within the territory of the state party’.68 Second, the United Nations report highlights the position of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the ‘Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’.69 On the one hand, the ICJ recognised that the jurisdiction of states is primarily territorial. On the other hand, the ICJ also acknowledged that the ICCPR extends to ‘acts done by a State in the exercise of its jurisdiction outside of its own territory’.70 On this basis, the UN report concludes that the United States government has the same obligations under Human Rights law in Guantánamo Bay as it does within its own territorial borders.

The folded limits of territory and law The case of the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists by the United States on Cuban territory, and the legal arguments deployed for and against their release, are fascinating for thinking about the contemporary relationship between state borders, territory and law. One dimension of this relationship in the context of Guantánamo is obviously the way in which the United States government has relied upon, and attempts to maintain, the principle that limits in law and territory are coterminous (in other words, the idea that a state cannot be held legally responsible for actions that take place on another state’s territory). Such a view, reinforced by military capability, has allowed for the treatment of detainees in Cuba in ways that would otherwise be considered unlawful within the traditional territorial borders of the United States. Indeed, it is because of the seemingly

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

32

4/12/11

09:57

Page 32

BORDER POLITICS

anomalous nature of the naval base, with its own complicated colonial history, that detainees held indefinitely there do not have the same recourse to domestic and international law that either Cuban or American citizens enjoy. Another interesting dimension of the Guantánamo case, however, is precisely the way in which the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has sought to erode the grounds of the United States’ position by mobilising international legal opinion that the relationship between law and territory makes no difference to states’ obligations under human rights treaties and humanitarian law. The notion that a state is obliged to uphold international standards of human wellbeing only in relation to those within its own territory is challenged by the United Nations ruling. Rather, the argument put forward by the United Nations is that if states exert control over subjects beyond their territorial borders then, irrespective of the location of those subjects, a given state is still responsible for them under international law. The situation of detainees in Guantánamo Bay is therefore interesting because it indicates that the limits of territory are not necessarily coextensive with limits in law in contemporary political life. Indeed, the case points to a disaggregation between juridical space on the one hand and the space of the sovereign territorially delimited state on the other. Such a disjuncture, which may also apply to the United Kingdom and European Union cases as ‘offshore’ bordering becomes an integral part of homeland security, challenges dominant assumptions about the nature and location of authority in global politics as reflected in the norm of ‘territorial integrity’ enshrined in the United Nations Charter. THE NEED TO RETHINK WHAT AND WHERE BORDERS ARE The three examples considered demonstrate that a commonsensical picture of the concept of the border of the state as something fixed territorially at the geographical outer edge of the sovereign state is somewhat chimerical. In each case, this concept has been shown to shape, enable and constrain practices across domestic and international terrains in ways that imply a ‘thickness’ to borders that thin lines on maps do not otherwise represent. Furthermore, each illustration points to interesting divergences between the limits of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 33

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

33

security, law, and authority on the one hand, and the territorial limits of the sovereign state on the other hand. To some extent it might be objected that borders between states have never conformed to the commonsensical image of them associated with the modern geopolitical imaginary. Nevertheless, irrespective of its historical accuracy, as an idealised picture of global politics this imaginary has had, and continues to have, significant symbolic value with important ethical and political implications as I will go on to consider in greater detail in Chapter 2. Another objection might be that the bordering practices looked at here are not actually ‘new’ but rather continuations of broader historical modes of inclusion and exclusion. Prima facie, the UK government’s designation of its ‘new border doctrine’ as something ‘new’ is perhaps dubious when considered against the backdrop of colonial and imperial legacies. Indeed, given the historic work of British Embassies and Consulates overseas in upholding the global visa regime, together with travel advisories and foreign policy more generally, it could be argued that recent notions of ‘offshore’ bordering in the UK and EU contexts reflect much older bordering practices. Similarly, the extent to which Guantánamo Bay is an innovation is equally questionable in light of the history of the projection of American influence abroad, for example, in the context of the regulation of transnational economic activities and extension of rights to citizens overseas.71 Taking a broad historical view, the attempt to striate space, create territory and produce b/ordered subjects is arguably something rather familiar to the modern geopolitical imaginary and marks more a continuation than a departure from it. Nevertheless, while it would be churlish to overstate the novelty of the logic in the examples under consideration, technological developments have enabled the proliferation of new kinds of bordering practices. Moreover, these practices are increasingly electronic, invisible and ephemeral and, while not completely de-territorialised, complicate straightforward understandings of the relationship between borders and territory. This is illustrated most vividly with the development of second generation biometric ID cards that actively track the life cycle of the subject. When these new forms of identity capture and management are allied with moves to ‘offshore’ borders as in the UK case, then it is possible to see how the concept of the border of the state is in some sense being reconfigured. Such reconfiguration,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

34

Page 34

BORDER POLITICS

which reflects Balibar’s comments about the vacillation of borders – ‘multiplied and reduced in their localisation, […] thinned out and doubled, […] no longer the shores of politics but […] the space of the political itself’ – raises two sets of questions that frame subsequent chapters of this book.72 First, the concept of the border of the state has acted and continues to act as a lodestar for diverse aspects of the practice/theory of global politics, as outlined in the Introduction. The reconfiguration of this concept radically calls into question some of the most settled and comforting assumptions, narratives and logics in contemporary political life. This inevitably generates a series of questions about the implications of a critique of the modern geopolitical imaginary: Is this imaginary being replaced or is it coexistent with other ways of thinking? What is at stake in the vacillation of the concept of the border of the state for ethical–political practice? How does the vacillation of this concept necessitate changes to theorisations of global politics that otherwise depend upon it? Second, as well as a critique of the modern geopolitical imaginary, the reconfiguration of the concept of the border of the state in current political practice necessitates the development of alternative border imaginaries. In turn, this begs questions such as: What resources exist to conceptualise the reconfiguration of the concept of the border of the state? What epistemological, ontological and methodological insights are apposite to the task of rethinking what and where borders are in contemporary political life? How is it possible to radicalise and pluralise what studying borders in global politics might mean? NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap’, 1994. Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, 1998, p. 217. Brown, ‘Statement on Security’, 2007. Ibid. Extant treatments of the phenomenon of integrated border management systems have tended to focus on the EU and US contexts. See: Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders’, 2006 and ‘Vigilant Visualities’, 2007; Bigo, ‘When Two Become One’, 2000; Carrera, ‘The EU Border Management Strategy’, 2007; Doty, ‘States of Exception on the Mexico–US Border’, 2007; Guild, ‘Danger: Borders Under Construction’, 2005; Walters, ‘Border/control’, 2006.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 35

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

35

Home Office, ‘Securing the UK Border’, 2007, p. 3. Ibid., p. 3 (emphasis added). Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’, 2006, p. 7. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, p. 28. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’, 2006; Home Office, ‘Securing the UK Border’, 2007. Home Office, ‘Securing the UK Border’, 2007, p. 2. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, p. 31. Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’, 2006, p. 11. There are obvious parallels between the ‘offshoring’ of the UK’s border and US Homeland Security initiatives as well as the activities of the new EU border management agency, Frontex. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, p. 38. Ibid., p. 38. Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’, 2006, p. 11. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, p. 38. Tom Dowdall, Director, European Operations Border Force, presentation at the ‘Homeland and Border Security 08’ conference. For further information on the ‘e-Borders Programme’, see: http://www.ukba. homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/technology/eborders/ (accessed 9 July 2008). Home Office, ‘Securing the UK Border’, 2007, p. 3. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, pp. 32–3. Ibid., p. 33. UK Borders Act, 2007, p. 10. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, p. 42. For further information on ‘Project Iris’, see: http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/ managingborders/technology/iris/ (accessed 9 July 2008). These observations and those that follow about the relationship between border security and corporate enterprise are based on my experiences as a delegate at the conference ‘Homeland and Border Security 08: Working Together, Securing the Nation’, 3 July 2008, QEII Conference Centre, London. All references to Thales are based upon a presentation given by Paul Fenton, Denise Walker and Olivier Monsacre, entitled ‘Thales: The Identity Integrator – Assuring Identity, Protecting People’, at the ‘Homeland and Border Security 08’ conference.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

36 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

4/12/11

09:57

Page 36

BORDER POLITICS

‘Thales: The Identity Integrator’. Home Office, ‘Securing the UK Border’, 2007. Ibid., p. 3. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, p. 9. Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’, 2006, p. 6. Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub’, 2007, p. 48. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 48. Home Office, ‘Securing the UK Border’, 2007, p. 9 (emphasis added). Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’, 2006, p. 11; ‘Securing the UK Border’, 2007, p. 5. Cabinet Office, ‘The National Security Strategy’, 2008. http://www.frontex.europa.eu/ (accessed 6 August 2008). Frontex, ‘Council Regulation’, 2004. For more on the background to the establishment of Frontex see: Carrera, ‘The EU Border Management Strategy’, 2007; Guild, ‘Danger: borders under construction’, 2005; Jorry, ‘Construction of a European Institutional Model’, 2007. See, for example: den Boer, ‘Moving between bogus and bona fide’, 1995; Geddes, Immigration and European Integration, 2000; Huysmans, ‘Migrants as a Security Problem’, 1995; Walters, ‘Mapping Schengenland’, 2002. Frontex, ‘Annual General Report’, 2005. Neal, ‘Securitization and Risk’, p. 24. Bailey, ‘Stemming the Immigration Wave’, 2006. http://www.united.non-profit.nl/pages/campfatalrealities.htm (accessed 6 August 2008). Carrera, ‘The EU Border Management Strategy’, 2007, p. 12. http://www.frontex.europa.eu/ (accessed 6 August 2008). Ibid. Ibid. Bailey, ‘Stemming the Immigration Wave’, 2006. Ibid. Carrera, ‘The EU Border Management Strategy’, 2007. ‘Response of the United States of America’ 2005, p. 52. UNESCCHR, ‘Situation of Detainees in Guantanamo Bay’, 2006, p. 24. Ibid., pp. 24–5. http://web.amnesty.org/pages/guantanamobay-index-eng (accessed 8 August 2008). In June 2004 the Supreme Court held that US courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of detention of foreign nationals in Guantánamo. As the UN report highlights, however, not a single habeas

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 37

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

37

corpus petition has been decided on the merits by a US Federal Court. UNESCCHR, ‘Situation of Detainees in Guantánamo Bay’, 2006, p. 15. Ibid., p. 3 (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 4 (emphasis added). Quoted in Gregory, ‘The Black Flag’, 2006, p. 411. Human Rights Committee, ‘General Comment No. 31’, 2004. International Court of Justice, ‘Legal Consequences’, 2004. Ibid. (emphasis added). Gregory, ‘The Black Flag’, 2006, p. 407. Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, 1998, p. 220.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 38

Chapter 2 THE STUDY OF BORDERS IN GLOBAL POLITICS: FROM GEOPOLITICS TO BIOPOLITICS

Bordering practices that are seemingly at odds with the modern geopolitical imaginary, such as those explored in Chapter 1, demand a stocktake of what critical resources might be available for new ways of thinking about what borders are, where they come from, and what they do in contemporary political life. A first port of call for such an enquiry is the interdisciplinary subfield of border studies, known as ‘limology’, a tradition of thought encompassing the work of anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and political scientists.1 Especially over the past three decades or so, paradoxically at a time when pronouncements of globalised borderlessness have been at their loudest, there has been a remarkable growth in border studies. Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson attribute this dramatic increase to defining ‘border events’ of the period, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and the trajectory of European integration.2 Any attempt at making generalised comments about a field or subfield of study is fragile and open to dispute. Nevertheless, many writers have commented that there has traditionally been a primarily empirical focus in border studies. Moreover, of the two to three hundred land borders between states recognised over the past century, certain sites have tended to attract most attention. These include: the British/Irish border; the United States/Mexico border; the post-World War I borders of central Europe; the borders of Africa; and more recently the borders of the European Union. Scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds echo the complaint made by some IR theorists, however, as we saw in the Introduction, that the concept of the border of the state has typically lacked adequate theoretical 38

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 39

39

attention. David Newman argues that ‘the bulk of material has been descriptive and case study oriented and has not translated into the construction of meaningful boundary/border theory’.3 Similarly, Vladimir Kolossov writes: ‘despite the accumulation of abundant information and important theoretical publications, border studies have suffered from a lack of theoretical reflection’.4 For John Agnew, ‘boundary studies [have] long been one of the most torpid sub-fields […] largely oblivious to theorising about geographies of political identity and the spatialities of power’.5 On this basis, according to Anssi Paasi, ‘the major challenge is to develop critical approaches to understand the changing – contextual – meanings of boundaries’.6 Superficially, it is perhaps understandable why so many writers not only in IR but other related disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have pointed to a lack of theorisation of the concept of the border of the state. For many scholars of border studies ‘the border’ is all too clearly defined as an area for study located at the geographical outer edge of the state. Consequently, the prospects for finding critical resources apposite to the task of characterising and grappling conceptually with some of the practices identified in Chapter 1 appear somewhat slim. On the other hand, when taken collectively, the comments on the paucity of theoretical literature on borders generally are in danger of somewhat overstating the case, particularly in light of more recent scholarship. Indeed, especially over the past five to ten years or so, there have been notable attempts at acknowledging and offering theoretically reflective accounts of borders in global politics, not only in border studies but in the overlapping literature in political geography, critical geopolitics, and IR as well. In many ways, as I shall seek to outline, this advance can be usefully characterised in terms of a shift, albeit one that is far from complete, from the study of borders as primarily geopolitical institutions to an understanding of bordering practices as biopolitical phenomena. In other words, rather than fixed, static lines on maps, borders are increasingly theorised as portable machines of sovereign power that are inseparable from the bodies they performatively produce and sort into different categories. Nevertheless, as well as outlining such a shift, in this chapter I will ultimately argue that more work needs to be done in this area: first, to develop the move towards a biopolitical theorisation of borders even further; and, second, to reflect on the implications of such a move for thinking about global politics more generally.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

40

4/12/11

09:57

Page 40

BORDER POLITICS

LIMOLOGY: A BRIEF HISTORY AND CURRENT ‘STATE OF THE ART’ According to Vladimir Kolossov the formal study of borders emerged during the late nineteenth century.7 Early limologists, such as Jacques Ancel, Richard Hartshorn and Ewald Banse, were primarily interested in the evolution and contemporary characteristics of specific land borders.8 As such, their focus was almost exclusively on the collection of empirical data, mapping economic and social structures through case studies. Later, in the early twentieth century, Lord Curzon, Charles Fawcett and Thomas Holdich sought to develop border typologies and classifications for the purposes of applied geopolitical strategy.9 By the 1960s border studies scholars, such as J. R. V. Prescott, Julian Minghi and Gerald Blake, broadened their analysis to include flows of people, services and goods as well as the relationship between natural and social landscapes.10 Nevertheless, in this scholarship, the understanding of what and where borders are epitomises the assumptions of the modern geopolitical imaginary. For example, at the heart of Prescott’s landmark texts, The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries (1965) and Political Frontiers and Boundaries (1987), is a focus on the boundary as a line that delimits state jurisdiction and territory: ‘the only function of the boundary is to mark the limits of sovereignty’.11 Moreover, according to Prescott, the primary role of the boundary scholar is to study different cases because first and foremost boundaries are concrete empirical phenomena.12 Indeed, Prescott largely confines theoretical discussion to the rather more prosaic matter of typologies and vocabularies: ‘boundary’ is his preferred term for the line of demarcation between states; ‘frontier’ refers to the region surrounding the boundary; while ‘border’ denotes a narrower zone. On these matters, Prescott argues that each term has a precise meaning and warns ‘there is no excuse for geographers using the terms “frontier” and “boundary” as synonymous’.13 Nevertheless, other border scholars, such as Malcolm Anderson, have since disagreed with Prescott, pointing to the historically and culturally contingent (and ultimately somewhat arbitrary) usages of such terms.14 The growth of the subfield of border studies is tied inherently to developments in the discipline of geography. Whereas, until the 1960s border scholarship was mainly characterised by positivist epistemology, empiricist methodology and/or historical mapping, the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 41

41

increasing influence of political science, philosophy, sociology and social psychology had a significant bearing on the subsequent trajectory of the subfield.15 The 1970s saw the emergence of political geography, and writers such as Ted Gurr and Harvey Starr began examining the social construction of borders and their relationship to international conflict.16 This was followed a decade later with the application of world systems and geopolitical approaches, associated with David Newman, Anssi Paasi and others, with an emerging focus on territorial identities, the impact of globalisation and integration on borders, and the impact of debates about culture and security.17 From the 1990s onwards the rise of post-positivist, social constructivist and post-structural perspectives in limology, pioneered by writers such as Henk van Houtum and Olivier Kramsch, have drawn attention to the symbolic value of borders, the work they do in various social, political and economic discourses, and the dangers of territorially determined state-centric spatial logics.18 Indeed, as van Houtum has put it, since the 1960s ‘the attention has moved away from the study of the evolution and changes of the territorial line to the border, more complexly understood as a site through which socio-spatial differences are communicated’.19 Hence, there has been a move away from boundary to border studies reflecting a shifting research focus, no longer about where the border is but how it is socially constructed and (re)produced in terms of ‘symbols, signs, identifications, representations, performances and stories’.20 In many ways the shifts from boundary to border studies, to which van Houtum refers, cannot be divorced from the broader rise of critical geopolitics as an interface between geography, political geography, politics and IR. Over the past decade or so, the characteristics and assumptions underpinning the modern geopolitical imaginary have been the subject of intense scrutiny in the interdisciplinary field of critical geopolitics. Part of the critical geopolitical turn has involved a diagnosis of precisely what this imaginary consists of in the first place, whom it benefits and what is at stake in an unexamined reliance upon it. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, one of the leading figures of critical geopolitics, emphasises that, although the discourse of ‘geopolitics’ is shifting and unstable, it is nevertheless possible to identify certain tropes and priorities underlying the common usage of the term in both practices of statecraft and the academic study of it.21 Ó Tuathail problematises the modern geopolitical imaginary as a perspective that observes the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

42

4/12/11

09:57

Page 42

BORDER POLITICS

world as if it were a singular eye removed from the rest of the body.22 This eye supposedly ‘witnesses’ rather than ‘interprets’ the twodimensional field of vision it performatively produces: a geopolitical gaze that surveys the worldwide stage as if it were somehow separate.23 Despite its seemingly natural and neutral outlook, however, this gaze reflects ‘a deliberate construction of a perspectivist triangle of vision with the sovereign monocular eye/I at its base and the stage/spectacle/scene of history or international politics at the far wall of the triangle’.24 Indeed, the vision to which Ó Tuathail refers is colonial through and through, since ‘the geopolitical envisioning of the global scene is inseparable from the desire to use the displayed scene for its own purposes’.25 On this basis, Ó Tuathail characterises the modern geopolitical imaginary as privileging Western forms of knowledge to inform a particular type of geography that relies systematically on the forgetting of the violence and struggles that enable it to make any sense at all.26 It is precisely this connection between knowledge and power that informs John Agnew’s critique of the ‘territorial trap’ of the modern geopolitical imaginary referred to in Chapter 1. According to Agnew the main problem of thinking about the spatiality of power in terms of blocs and territorial presence as fixed identities, as typified by the idealised myth of the Westphalian system, is that it takes ‘the coercive power of territorial states for granted as a fixed feature of the modern world rather than seeing it as the outcome of a number of historical contingencies’.27 Such an account not only dehistoricises but implies a notion of power as monopoly of control exercised equally over anywhere within a given territory. According to Agnew this fundamentally glosses over the fragility of such power upon which the very legitimacy of the state rests. It has, he argues, something of the ‘we came, we knew, we conquered’ mentality; one that political geography has long serviced in a purportedly ‘objective’ manner for the sake of upholding modern statecraft.28 As well as problematising the modern geopolitical imaginary, critical geopolitics scholars have sought to put forward an alternative research programme. One of the earliest articulations of such a programme can be found in an article published in 1992 by Ó Tuathail and Agnew called ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’.29 In this piece international politics is treated as a spectacle, and four theses are advanced: first,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 43

43

that the stage of statecraft is not simply a backdrop but ‘an active component of the drama of world politics’; second, that practical reasoning is just as important as formal reasoning in the conduct of statecraft; third, that such reasoning constitutes a spatialised form of practice linked to different knowledge communities; and fourth, that rule making and rule following are more significant in the study of statecraft than an analysis of blind state power.30 Ó Tuathail refers to this formative article as the beginning of a wider ‘disorientation of (imperial) geopolitics’. In this context he cites the work of Simon Dalby whose article ‘Critical Geopolitics: Discourse, Difference and Dissent’ has come to define the distinctiveness of the subfield: To construct critical political geographies is to argue that we must not limit our imagination to a study of the geography of politics within pre-given, taken-for-granted, commonsensical spaces, but to investigate the politics of the geographical specification of politics. That is to practice critical geopolitics.31 The focus on the ‘politics of the geographical specification of politics’ means that critical geopolitics is intrinsically interested in borders and bordering practices. Its critique of the modern geopolitical imaginary calls into question the work that the concept of the border of the state does in upholding arrangements that benefit those who have most to gain from maintaining the status quo. Critical geopolitics scholars thus raise important connections between that concept and questions about violence, sovereignty and power which an unproblematised reliance on that imaginary otherwise ignores. Hence, for example, Ó Tuathail is less interested in supporting or refuting theses about the continued presence or imminent obsolescence of state borders but rather how different discourses are implicated in various relations of power/knowledge. On his view, the discourse of the ‘borderless world’ prevalent in the 1990s, together with its related vocabulary of globalisation, glocalisation, post-nationalism and transnationalism, constitute a neo-liberal ideology attempting to denaturalise and limit the power of states in order to bolster the virtues of friction-free markets.32 Thus, Ó Tuathail counter-argues: ‘“Borderless world” discourses are the fantasies of the few that can dream of becoming digital in a world where just being is a persistent struggle for so many.’ 33 Moreover, he argues that, instead of the simple

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

44

4/12/11

09:57

Page 44

BORDER POLITICS

demise of borders, territory or even ‘the end of geography’, we are witnessing the ‘restructuring, rearrangement, and rewiring’ of all three.34 On this basis, echoing Balibar’s argument, for Ó Tuathail borders are not vanishing so much as being reinscribed in different ways and at various locations in global politics. Therefore, as well as recognising that the modern geopolitical imaginary rests upon highly problematic assumptions about space and time, Ó Tuathail claims that new imaginaries are called for: This is not to suggest that world politics has necessarily transcended the imaginary of the territorial state but it is to admit the disintegration of its traditional mythic Euclidean forms and to acknowledge strange new (con)fusions of de-localised transnations […] 35 ASSUMING THE CONCEPT OF THE BORDER OF THE STATE The discipline of IR was born amid violent cartographic change following World War I and, since then, there has been a tradition, especially among international historians and analysts of global security practices, of the study of the defence and transgression of borders between states.36 More generally, the concept of the border of the state is central to IR in terms of permitting the very notion of international relations: it allows for the conceptualisation and analysis of relations between entities that are taken to be separate from each other to begin with. Further still, as I have already noted, this concept not only provides an important ontological, but also epistemological, framework within which some of the most familiar understandings of core terms, such as territory, sovereignty, power and authority, make sense. On this basis, it might be expected that the theoretical literature produced by the discipline of IR, perhaps even more so than other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, can provide critical resources for developing alternative ways of thinking about borders to the modern geopolitical imaginary. While, as we shall see, such resources certainly do exist, however, it is notable that, for much of the earlier mainstream literature in IR, borders between states have often been assumed, and the work that the concept of the border of the state does occupies something of a blind spot within those analyses.37 Thomas Biersteker refers to the way in which one of the prob-

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 45

45

lematic features of neo-realist writings, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s in Anglo-American IR, was the tendency to treat states as fundamentally similar units across time and space.38 In this context Biersteker cites Kenneth Waltz, for whom, in Theory of International Politics (1979), the anarchical structure of international politics accounts for its history of ‘striking sameness’.39 Indeed, as John Gerard Ruggie noted in his 1983 review of Waltz’s book, the assumption of the idealised Westphalian system as a given rather than as a particular historically contingent articulation of space–time relations meant that neo-realism offered few prospects for an account of change.40 As a feature of the Westphalian system, the concept of the border of the state is equally neglected in Waltz’s Theory despite his reliance upon it to distinguish states as separate units positioned in relation to one another within the international system to begin with. Nevertheless, as Biersteker also points out, these problematical assumptions are not exclusive to Waltz but permeate the work of other neo-realists, such as Robert Gilpin, and neo-liberals such as Robert Keohane.41 More promise for an appreciation of the historically contingent nature of the international system, and especially the relationship between borders, territory and sovereignty, can be found in the work of Hedley Bull. In The Anarchical Society (1977) Bull claims that ‘the starting point of international relations is the existence of states, or independent political communities each of which possesses a government and asserts sovereignty in relation to a particular segment of the human population’.42 Whilst Bull’s starting point seems similar to Waltz’s, however, the former rejects the idea that the history of international politics is the history of striking sameness: ‘Other forms of universal political organization have existed in the past […]; in the broad sweep of human history, indeed, the form of the states system has been the exception rather than the rule.’ 43 On the contrary, Bull opens up the possibility of a fundamental change to the Westphalian order: ‘it is reasonable to assume that new forms of universal political organization may be created in the future’.44 In the final part of his book Bull explores five possible alternative paths to world order: a system but not a society; states but not a system; a world government; a form of medievalism; or an entirely new arrangement ‘beyond our own imagination’.45 Each of these conjectures relies upon different configuration of the status and function of borders between states respectively: fewer activities across state borders; strict adherence to

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

46

4/12/11

09:57

Page 46

BORDER POLITICS

state borders as limits with little or no cross-border activity; the decline or absence of borders between states; indistinct or porous territorial borders; or possibly a more fundamental change in the concept of the border of the state (although Bull does not say this explicitly). Nevertheless, despite these tantalising glimpses of thinking otherwise, Bull tempers his remarks about possible alternative paths by concluding: The argument is an implicit defence of the state system. […] Despite the existence in principle of alternatives […] there [is] no clear evidence that the states system [is] in decline, or that it [is] dysfunctional in relation to basic human purposes.46 At the end of The Anarchical Society Bull argues that one of the reasons for the continued ‘vitality’ of the state system as he defines it is the ‘tyranny of concepts and normative principles associated with it’.47 Ultimately, it would seem that the concept of the border of the state constitutes as much of an unexamined tyrannical concept in Bull’s writing as it does in Waltz’s. Unlike Waltz and Bull, Alexander Wendt does acknowledge the concept of the border of the state as it relates to the social construction of territory. In Social Theory of International Politics (1999) Wendt argues that borders are required if territory is to be anything other than land.48 He notes that borders are not natural but historically contingent phenomena that vary in breadth, depth and degree of completion: ‘the construction of state boundaries is never a finished affair, even if it becomes unproblematic in some cases’.49 Despite these insights, however, Wendt argues that his pursuit of a sociology of the states system means that a fuller problematisation of the relationship between borders and territory is beyond the scope of his analysis: ‘an enquiry among states must take territory as in some sense given’.50 Indeed, the limited degree to which Wendt takes the implications of his own insights about borders seriously is illustrated in his portrayal of exchanges between two fictitious states alter and ego, designed to show how ‘identities and their corresponding interests are learned and then reinforced in response to how actors are treated by significant others’.51 According to Wendt, if ego begins with a gesture x this will prompt alter to ask questions like: What does this mean? How does it affect my relationship with ego? Consequently, alter will

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 47

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

47

make inferences that lead to counteraction y. If gesture x is the laying down of arms, then other outcomes may emerge. In this way ego and alter construct a definition of a given situation on the basis of their representations of Self and Other. For Wendt, states’ identities and interests are not only learned but sustained through such interactions: ‘Constructivism emphasizes that ego’s ideas about alter, right or wrong, are not merely passive perceptions that exist independently of ego, but actively and on-goingly [sic] constitutive of alter’s role vis-àvis ego.’ 52 Thus, it is only through its interaction with ego that alter derives its identity and interests and vice versa. Yet, indicating the limits of his own argument, Wendt ultimately assumes ego and alter to be separate entities from the outset. In other words, Wendt’s analysis of the formation of identities and interests of states depends upon the prior existence of those states as modern sovereign bordered territorial units in the same way as Waltz’s does. No attention is paid to the ways in which alter and ego are produced as separate entities through the (re)inscription of borders between them. Therefore, the concept of the border of the state is treated as something of a given in Social Theory: it establishes the elements of the system Wendt takes for granted as a ground on which his analysis can then proceed. ACKNOWLEDGING THE CONCEPT OF THE BORDER OF THE STATE One of the most significant book-length treatments of borders between states, spanning the disciplines of politics and IR, is Malcolm Anderson’s Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (1996). In this text, Anderson’s focus is what he calls the ‘inter-state frontier’, which is taken to be different from other sorts of borders on account of ‘the doctrine of sovereignty and the territorial principle’ accompanying it.53 For Anderson, frontiers are both an ‘institution and a process […] established by political decisions and regulated by legal texts’ and are central to global politics: ‘no rule-bound economic social or political life in complex societies could be organized without them’.54 He diagnoses four main dimensions to frontiers: 1. as instruments of state policy; 2. as constraints on governments’ control; 3. as markers of a nation’s identity; and 4. as a term of discourse ‘constantly reconstituted by those human beings who are regulated, influenced and limited by them’.55 On this view, as social constructions, frontiers

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

48

4/12/11

09:57

Page 48

BORDER POLITICS

are not static and part of an immutable natural order but rather historically contingent phenomena: ‘different kinds of frontier existed before the modern state, and other kinds will emerge after its demise’.56 To illustrate this argument Anderson traces the development of the familiar understanding of frontiers associated with the modern geopolitical imaginary. The fall of Rome led to a period of overlapping loyalties and jurisdictions in Europe until the Middle Ages: ‘a village could depend on more than one lord; lords could owe allegiance to more than one ruler; manorial courts, royal courts and ecclesiastical courts dispensed customary, statutory and church law to the same populations’.57 With the strengthening of authority came the simplification of territorial organisation, however, and Early Modern Europe saw the rise of the state independent of the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor. Although Anderson notes that competing authorities were common until 1789, he argues that the development of the state system in Europe went hand in hand with the emergence of the concept of sovereignty and the notion of ‘single, supreme and independent’ rule over a given territory.58 Accordingly, the purpose of the frontier was to ensure that the sovereign could exercise exclusive legal, administrative and social control over its population in a given territory. On the one hand, Anderson’s historical and theoretical approach provides a rich resource for defining salient features of borders, which enables a framework for empirical border studies along the lines suggested in his own case studies of Africa, the United States and Europe. On the other hand, while Anderson notes ‘the increased permeability’ of frontiers as he defines them, ultimately his analysis focuses more on the desirability of the implications of such changes rather than on how they challenge the modern geopolitical imaginary and demand alternative theorisation of borders.59 In IR theory more generally, the importance of the concept of the border of the state is emphasised by Robert Jackson in The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (2000): ‘We could not get very far in trying to make sense of […] issues without an underlying assumption about territorial limits of specified normative significance which mark the divisions between independent states: international boundaries.’ 60 Like Wendt, Jackson asserts that borders between states are artificial social constructs designed to mark the furthest extent of the territorial jurisdictions of sovereign states.61 Illustrating this point, and echoing Anderson’s method of analysis, Jackson points to the way

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 49

49

in which, historically there have been sociopolitical arrangements that did not rely upon such borders.62 Jackson builds on the idea of state borders as institutions, however, by focusing on the normative role they play in international life.63 He draws on Bull to argue that such borders are a fundamental aspect of international society: ‘The sanctity and stability of inherited boundaries is [sic] a fundamental building block of international society and a principle behind which the vast majority of sovereign states rally.’ 64 On this view, borders between states not only delimit the spheres of national interests and security but also define sovereign rights and duties, such as those relating to non-intervention.65 Moreover, Jackson argues that state borders perform a key normative role in terms of distinguishing what he calls ‘insider groups and outsider groups in international relations’.66 Insider groups are said to exist on the plane of independence as sovereign members of international institutions such as the United Nations. Outsider groups, on the other hand, are those ‘residential groups which enjoy no legal existence as independent states’.67 According to Jackson, the fact that not every group is satisfied with its borders should not serve to obscure the overall point that borders between states represent a generally accepted point of reference.68 A related line of argument is pursued by John Williams in his book The Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand (2006) which also draws on Bull as well as Hannah Arendt to argue that borders between states play an important ethical role in world politics. For Williams, the study of territorial borders in IR and related disciplines has been impoverished because of an excessive empirical focus and positivist reification.69 According to Williams, state borders are ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘embedded’ in international politics precisely because they are in some sense a necessary facet of human existence: ‘The durability and depth of sedimentation of territorial borders as fences suggest that division, and division on a territorial basis, speaks to a deep-seated need of human identity and also in human ethics.’ 70 On Williams’s view, borders between states perform a normative role by acting as ‘fences between neighbours’ in such a way that ‘tolerates diversity’ rather than stifling difference.71 Moreover, the ethical significance of territorial borders derives from their ability to act as limits on violence:

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

50

4/12/11

09:57

Page 50

BORDER POLITICS

The role of territorial borders is in defining, temporarily and dynamically rather than eternally and fixedly, political space, playing institutional and normative roles that help to limit and restrict the politically mute voice of violence and that allows individuals to build, through their plurality, a distinctive political community.72 Without state borders, Williams claims, the international juridical– political system would not be able to ensure ‘state independence, limits on violence, the sanctity of agreement or the stability of possession’.73 Therefore, his argument is ultimately a defence of territorial borders in contemporary political life: ‘We need territorial borders and we should have and defend territorial borders because they are a part of the ways in which human beings confer meaning on their lives […].’ 74 Hence, Williams argues, ‘to remove, or even to re-conceptualise, territorial borders would mean the end of IR […] requiring a shift in the conduct of politics on the planet that is unimaginable.’ 75 Moving away from the focus on the normative dimension of borders between states towards a wider analysis of the role that they play in the theory and practice of global politics is the volume Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (2001), co-edited by Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid. In his introduction to the book, Lapid reflects on some of the insights of the critical geopolitics literature for IR theory, arguing that the modern geopolitical imaginary, identified and problematised by Ó Tuathail, Agnew and Dalby, has led to a particular ‘territorialist epistemology’ in IR: one that transposes the historically unique Westphalian system into a generalised model of sociospatial organisation.76 As Lapid puts it, ‘IR scholars have come to treat territoriality as a fixed, ahistorical parameter’.77 Yet, like Ó Tuathail, he argues that this entrenched territorialist epistemology is increasingly at odds with contemporary notions of flows and flux and so a reworking of the old coordinates is required, which is precisely the aim of the book.78 In response, Lapid develops what he calls an ‘analytical triad formed by the concepts of identities, borders, orders (IBO)’ upon which this reworking is based: ‘the dynamic nexus constituted by interrelated processes of bordering, ordering, and collective identity building opens a uniquely well-situated analytical window to observe issues of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 51

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

51

mobility, fluidity, and change in contemporary world politics’.79 According to Lapid, the IBO triad consists of key concepts in current social practice that are intrinsically interrelated and therefore best defined and used in relation to one another: Processes of collective identity formation invariably involve complex bordering issues. Likewise, acts of bordering (i.e., the inscription, crossing, removal, transformation, multiplication and/or diversification of borders) invariably carry momentous ramifications for political ordering at all levels of analysis. Processes of identity, border and order construction are therefore mutually self-constituting.80 For Lapid, however, the IBO triad is a model that can be applied transhistorically, so that it is only in the context of the Westphalian geopolitical imaginary that ‘identities’ are understood in terms of national states, ‘borders’ in terms of sharply drawn territorial lines between states, and ‘orders’ in terms of the international juridical– political system of modern sovereign states. On this view, thinking through the IBO triad is intended to allow for a more dynamic approach to theorising global politics that challenges the binary between fixity (the continued presence of borders between states) and flux (the imminent obsolescence of borders between states): ‘IBO analysis […] seems promising because identities, borders, orders signify three vital nodes of arrestation, where the “moving sands” of international relations come to be variably and temporarily stabilised’.81 As such, with the IBO model, Lapid aims to ‘nudge’ IR theory away from the Westphalian territorialist epistemology towards one that can potentially monitor reconfigurations between identities and borders, identities and orders, and borders and orders.

FURTHER PROBLEMATISING THE CONCEPT OF THE BORDER OF THE STATE Over the past two decades, the work of R. B. J. Walker has offered the most sustained engagement with the problem of borders, especially the relationship between the concept of the border of the state and sovereignty, at the intersection of IR and political theory. In his

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

52

4/12/11

09:57

Page 52

BORDER POLITICS

introduction to Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (1993), Walker writes: Theories of international relations […] are interesting less for the substantive explanations they offer about political conditions in the modern world than as expressions of the contemporary political imagination when confronted with persistent claims about and evidence of fundamental historical and structural transformation.82 The move Walker makes is to treat IR theory as something that is fundamentally part of, rather than divorced from, global politics so that the examination of texts reveals some of the dominant assumptions underpinning the way we think about contemporary political life. Once this move is made, the notion, discipline and practice of ‘international relations’, defined by the presence of sovereign states and the absence of sovereign authority, can be recast as in many ways constitutive of that which it seeks to explain.83 On this basis, the theories, concepts and logics used in the study of global politics, such as the concept of the border of the state, are not immune from, but indeed are complicit in, this act of constitution. For Walker, theories of international relations reflect ways in which we try to make sense of and/or resolve some of the mysteries of human existence and the problems they pose. At the heart of these attempted resolutions in IR theory is the historically and philosophically significant, but highly problematic, concept of sovereignty. According to Walker, sovereignty seems to be ‘quite uninteresting, the preserve of legal scholars and constitutional experts rather than the subject of heated exchanges among social and political theorists’.84 Often, he claims, IR theorists simply adopt the principle of state sovereignty as a relatively straightforward starting point in the analysis of contemporary political life: Sovereignty is read as an achieved condition, the inevitable destination of a road already traveled, a normative aspiration already become irresistible reality, the reality of the sovereign state, whose effects can then be read in the categories made by its achievement.85

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 53

53

Running throughout Walker’s oeuvre, however, is an emphasis on and a commitment to demonstrating the way in which sovereignty, or rather the problem of sovereignty, is anything but straightforward. Rather, as he argues with Richard K. Ashley, ‘the question of sovereignty […] is an intrinsically paradoxical problem that can never be named, rationally deliberated, and solved’.86 In part, sovereignty relates to practices that attempt to create something out of nothing: for example, the attempt to secure the ‘presence’ of the state as a particular form of political community in the ‘absence’ of any foundations. Yet, Walker emphasises: ‘The principle of state sovereignty did not appear out of thin air. It embodies an historically specific account of the ethical possibility in the form of an answer to questions about the nature and location of political community.’ 87 On his view, the principle of state sovereignty crystallised in early modern Europe amid growing cultural crises. The medieval world of hierarchies and continuities gave way to a modern one of autonomies and separations. Alongside the gradual dissolution of Christendom came the dissolution of spiritual frameworks in the face of the scientific revolution. An alternative was required to the so-called ‘Great Chain of Being’ (the Western medieval conception of the order of the Universe characterised by strict hierarchical links to God). According to Ashley and Walker, the principle of state sovereignty emerged as such an alternative somewhere between Machiavelli and Hobbes: it came to act as ‘a fundamental principle, a supporting structure, a base on which society rests, a fund of authority capable of endowing possibilities, accrediting action, and fixing limitations’.88 Yet, they argue, as a historically contingent resolution, ultimately it can only ever be considered ‘unstable and tentative’.89 More specifically, Walker argues that the principle of state sovereignty ‘offers both a spatial and a temporal resolution to questions about what political community can be, given the priority of citizenship and particularity over universalist claims to a common human identity’.90 The principle of state sovereignty gives a double resolution to the problem of universality and particularity. On the one hand, the existence of an international sovereign states system permits cultural particularity (‘citizenship’) within a broader framework of universal norms of interaction (‘common human identity’). On the other hand, the generalisation of the sovereign state as a particular cultural form cuts across all cultures in terms of human necessity. In

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

54

4/12/11

09:57

Page 54

BORDER POLITICS

other words the issue of one and many is resolved through the single formula ‘one world many states’. Moreover, this resolution enables and depends upon a spatial demarcation between inside and outside which, in the context of the Westphalian system and modern geopolitical imaginary, can be read as the concept of the border of the state. Spatially, according to Walker, the principle of state sovereignty ‘fixes a clear demarcation between life inside and outside a centred political community’.91 This allows for the human aims of reason, justice, democracy and so on to be aspired to inside the sovereign state against the backdrop of perpetual warfare and barbarism outside in the sphere of the international. It also permits notions of here and there, us and them, and affirms the presence of a political community. Temporally, these demarcations provide the condition of possibility for notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ inside states as defined against what happens outside them: ‘between states […] the lack of community can be taken to imply the impossibility of history as progressive teleology, and thus the possibility of merely repetition and recurrence’.92 As such, Walker argues it is precisely this spatial– temporal resolution provided by the logic of ‘inside/outside’ that makes ‘international relations’ and its theories distinctive. Walker’s diagnosis of the relationship between sovereignty and the inside/outside problématique adds an important dimension to any attempt to examine the concept of the border of the state. Following his argument, the many paradoxes and contradictions glossed over by the principle of state sovereignty can be ‘read as points, lines, and planes, as monopolies of power and authority, borders and territories’.93 These points, lines and planes reflect the emergence in postRenaissance Europe of the link between the principle of state sovereignty and ‘a sense of inviolable and sharply delimited space’.94 Such points, lines and planes are often taken for granted as we have already seen, but Walker emphasises that ‘as historical constructs, conceptions of space and time cannot be treated as some uniform background noise, as abstract ontological conditions to be acknowledged and then ignored’.95 Indeed, the problematisation of these conceptions raises the stakes as far as the importance of the concept of the border of the state is concerned. The recognition that notions of inside and outside are merely ‘Cartesian coordinates that have allowed us to situate and naturalise a comfortable home for power and authority’ calls into question the politics of global space more generally.96

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 55

55

As William E. Connolly notes, once global space is reconsidered as ambiguous, contested and unstable, the function of artificially imposed borders becomes highly dubious.97 Against views that read borders between states act as ‘limits on violence’, it becomes easy to see how state borders are connected to violence in an altogether different sense (a matter to which the analysis will return in Chapter 3). Historically, the transition from a system of overlapping loyalties and allegiances in favour of sharp borders did not happen peacefully. Hence, Walker comments, ‘One has to ask how have we so easily forgotten the concrete struggles that have left their traces in the clean lines of political cartography and the codifications of international law.’ 98 Instead of reading borders between states and the principle of state sovereignty together as a form of ‘airbrushed achievement’ Walker thus challenges us to reappraise this relationship as a ‘site of struggle’.99 Overall, Walker provides a series of important insights that offer critical resources for an analysis of the concept of the border of the state. Significantly, he adds to this analysis by highlighting the importance of the connection between the concept of the border of the state and sovereignty, authority and violence. Moreover, his diagnosis of the inside/outside logic underpinning IR theory leads to a critical appreciation of the work that the concept of the border of the state does in texts that otherwise merely take it for granted. As we have already seen, authors of such texts rely on the concept of the border of the state to produce the inside/outside dichotomy that frames and also enables their theorisations. Further still, as well as diagnosing the logic underpinning these texts, Walker also shows what is common between discourses claiming the decline/continued importance of state borders as discussed in the Introduction to this book. Despite their outward dissimilarity, both discourses rely upon the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state: ‘The imaginary of the thin line that divides our political presences and absences in spatial terms is reproduced in a political imaginary that poses a sharp temporal choice between the lasting presence or immanent absence of thin lines.’ 100 Therefore, Walker’s diagnosis of the logic of inside/outside offers an important starting point in the task of opening up the terms of the hackneyed debate about the simple ‘presence’ or ‘absence’ of borders between states. One problem that has led to the impasse in this debate is that both

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

56

4/12/11

09:57

Page 56

BORDER POLITICS

sides work precisely within rather than question the terms of the parameters of the inside/outside model and the broader modern geopolitical imaginary. In addition to identifying and problematising this model and imaginary, Walker calls both into question throughout his work.101 Walker claims that ‘ours is an age of speed and temporal accelerations’,102 and often, echoing Balibar, Ó Tuathail, Agnew, Dalby, and Lapid, he implies that the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state is in some sense no longer ‘adequate’ to contemporary conditions: There is little doubt that the sharp distinction between the internal and the external spaces of modern politics […] is now extraordinarily difficult to sustain.103 Neither the spatial boundaries of the territorial state nor the geographic points of the compass […] provide much help in understanding how patterns of stratification, inclusion and exclusion are being transformed on a global basis.104 It is unlikely that the historical experience of sharp territorial borders at the edge of states […] would do much to help us understand the complexity, the constant mutation or the productive/destructive capacities of such boundaries.105 As already noted in the Introduction to this book, many other writers have implied the same basic point: namely that alternative border imaginaries are needed. Despite these observations, however, there remains considerable work to be done in terms of identifying critical resources apposite to the task of conceptualising such imaginaries, illustrating how they might elicit a more sophisticated understanding of what and where borders are, and evaluating what the implications for the practice/theory of global politics might be. Nevertheless, some clues about where it might be possible to find such resources and where they might lead in thinking differently about borders can be found in recent work that focuses on bordering practices in the context of the war on terror. Didier Bigo has expressed a similar dissatisfaction with current thinking about borders predicated on the inside/outside model. Bigo argues that new forms of transnational governmentality in global

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 57

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

57

politics have led to ‘the blurring [of the] distinction between the internal and the external’ which, in turn, has destabilised notions of ‘sovereignty, territory, [and] security’.106 Bigo explores the increasing intertwinement between internal and external security through an analysis of policing. Whereas formerly the realms of the police and the military had very little in common, Bigo points to the ways in which it is increasingly difficult to differentiate between the two. This does not lead to an erasure of the inside/outside distinction, however, but rather to its reworking: The core of this new securitization is related to trans-national flows and to the surveillance of boundaries (physical, social, and of identity), and can be seen as attempts to re-draw a border between an inside and an outside, a border different from state frontiers.107 On this view, which reads inside and outside as indistinguishable, internal security is projected beyond the borders of the state. Thus, reminiscent of the case of the United Kingdom’s new border security doctrine and the recent activities of Frontex in Africa discussed in Chapter 1, Bigo argues that: ‘Internal security […] implies collaboration with foreign countries and dissatisfaction with clear lines or borders between inside and outside, state and society, sovereignty and identity.’ 108 Bigo notes that traditionally security has been considered within the context of a given territory delimited by state borders but claims that the blurring of internal and external has given rise to new forms of securitisation that complicate this model: Security checks are no longer necessarily done at the border on a systematic and egalitarian basis, but can be carried out further downstream, within the territory, within the border zone or even upstream with police collaboration in the home country of immigrants, through visa-gathering systems and through readmission agreements.109 Moreover, these new forms of securitisation necessitate alternative topologies and ways of conceptualising borders. With this in mind, Bigo develops the notion of a ‘field of security’ that aims to transcend simplistic understandings of social and political space in terms of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

58

4/12/11

09:57

Page 58

BORDER POLITICS

internal/external, domestic/foreign, national/international, and so on.110 Borrowed from Pierre Boudieu, the concept of the field is used by Bigo to refer to an interconnected network of security relations that not only involves the material blurring of inside/outside but also concomitant changes in forms of knowledge.111 In the context of the war on terror, Bigo argues that this ‘semantic continuum’ is used to cultivate a globalised (in)security and field of ‘unease management’ characterised by practices of exceptionalism, acts of profiling and containing foreigners, and the normative imperative of mobility.112 On this basis, Bigo traces the way in which changing articulations of the relationship between inside and outside enable new forms of governance otherwise constrained by the modern geopolitical imaginary. Illustrating many of Bigo’s insights, and reflecting developments in integrated border security in the UK and EU cases referred to in the previous chapter, Louise Amoore has examined the re-articulation of the inside/outside relation in the context of emerging United States homeland security initiatives.113 Amoore traces the rise of new bordering practices designed to counter the threat of international terrorism in the United States since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001. She refers to the establishment of the so-called ‘Smart Border Alliance’ by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2004 as a departure in the way that the United States conceptualises its borders as a form of risk management. As in the UK case, Amoore shows how the United States has developed modes of pre-emptive bordering practices aimed at assessing risky subjects before they arrive at what has traditionally been considered its territorial borders, thus reflecting a new imagining of what and where the US border is: The management of the border cannot be understood simply as a matter of the geopolitical policing and disciplining of the movement of bodies across mapped space. Rather, it is more appropriately understood as a matter of biopolitics, as a mobile regulatory site through which people’s everyday lives can be made amenable to intervention and management.114 Amoore captures these developments, which involve a turn to digital technologies and the involvement of private enterprise, with the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

09:57

Page 59

59

concept of the ‘biometric border’.115 The biometric border refers to the encoding of the bodies of travellers before they move to enable the fixing of identities, classification according to perceived levels of risk, and filtration into legitimate/illegitimate flows of traffic.116 It is ‘biopolitical’ – a term coined by Michel Foucault discussed at greater length in Chapter 3 – precisely because of this focus on the body of the population which enables, as Amoore has shown, innovations in the way borders of political community are (re)produced and secured both spatially and temporally. Furthermore, reiterating Bigo’s assessment of the interweaving of internal and external realms of security, Amoore argues that the biometric border is not geographically fixed but as mobile as the subjectivities it attempts to govern: The biometric border is the portable border par excellence, carried by mobile bodies at the very same time as it is deployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway stations, or subways or city streets, in the office or the neighbourhood.117 The shift towards a biopolitical horizon in contemporary bordering practices and in academic border studies, though arguably far from complete in either context, raises a number of significant questions pertinent to the task of developing alternative border imaginaries. First, the relationship between the modern geopolitical imaginary and biopolitical modes of thinking requires further fleshing out: Has the latter displaced the former or are the two coexistent? Is the nature of the ‘shift’ conceptual, historical or both? Alternatively, how might it be possible to grasp the coexistence of the two? What kind of view of the philosophy of history even makes thinking in these terms possible? Second, if such a shift has taken place, then this surely has implications for fields of study such as IR predicated upon the modern geopolitical imaginary: How does a biopolitical framework lead to different insights about the practice/theory of global politics? In what ways does this challenge some of the dominant assumptions upon which contemporary political life is conceptualised? Third, the move towards biopolitical border studies raises numerous issues regarding the added value of such an approach: What happens to the concept of the border when it is reframed biopolitically? How does a biopolitical approach reconfigure the way we think about the connection between

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

60

4/12/11

09:57

Page 60

BORDER POLITICS

borders and bodies? Do bodies confront borders anymore or is it more accurate to see borders as in some sense constituted by and through bodies? How might this be conceived of and where does it take place? What critical theoretical/philosophical resources are available to think this through? More generally, as well as highlighting the necessity of further reflection on the relationship between geopolitical and biopolitical framings, in this chapter I have also suggested that there are a number of other dimensions to the current study of borders that require more theoretical work. First, the connection between the concept of the border of the state and violence has interested a number of diverse writers whose work has been surveyed. The nature of this connection, however, has ranged from a view of borders as limits on violence (Jackson, Williams) to claims about the violence of borders themselves (Walker, Connolly). This implies the need for a more detailed examination of the work that borders do on the one hand and the issue of violence in/of juridical–political order on the other. Second, the theme of borders and sovereignty has also emerged as an area of the field requiring deeper examination. Whereas earlier border studies scholars (Prescott, Anderson) working within the modern geopolitical imaginary viewed borders between states as markers of the limits of sovereign power located at the geographical outer edge of the state, more recent work, especially written in the context of the so-called war on terror (Bigo, Amoore), has emphasised that borders are more mobile than this model implies. This later scholarship challenges an assumption underpinning debates about the presence/absence of state borders that the relationship between sovereignty and those borders resembles a zero-sum game whereby, as levels of globalisation increase, so sovereignty and state borders decrease. As Walker has pointed out, however, the popularity of this assumption highlights a weakness in the literature that reads the principle of state sovereignty with sovereignty per se.118 Rather, if sovereignty, understood as a series of discourses and practices through which political authority is constituted and legitimised, is untied from statist principles, then how might it be possible to (re)conceptualise borders as limits of sovereign power? Third, closely related to this series of problems is the link between borders and the limits of authority and power. Traditionally the state has been considered as a container within which, for example, the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

The Study of Borders in Global Politics

Page 61

61

monopoly of the legitimate use of force has been theorised. Yet, as the critical geopolitics literature, together with Walker, Bigo and Amoore, have all pointed out, practices relating to the exercise of authority and power are increasingly shown to overflow the territorial borders of the state. A growing critical literature has begun to address the possibility that to understand the constitution, operation and legitimation of political authority it is necessary to disaggregate sovereignty from traditional statist paradigms favoured in IR and elsewhere in the social sciences. In Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (2004), for example, Jenny Edkins, Véronique Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (and other contributors including R. B. J. Walker), seek to demonstrate that sovereign power and authority are far from dead under conditions of globalising order. Rather, as Edkins and Pin-Fat argue in their introduction to the volume, ‘the interesting question is not whether a system or even a society of states has been replaced by an empire or by some other institutional configuration’, but rather, ‘what relations or grammars of power persist and how they operate’.119 On this basis, it seems that more is needed to explore what happens to our understanding, conceptualisation and theorisation of the limits of sovereign power and authority once these concepts are disaggregated from the concept of the modern bordered territorial state. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Kolossov, ‘Border Studies’, 2005, p. 606. Donnan and Wilson, Borders, 1999, p. 1. Newman, ‘Boundaries, Borders and Barriers’, 2001, pp. 137–8. Kolossov, ‘Border Studies’, 2005, p. 612. Agnew, ‘Book Review’, 1996, pp. 181–2. Paasi, ‘Changing Discourses’, 2005, p. 27. Kolossov, ‘Border Studies’, 2005. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Prescott, Political Frontiers, 1987, p. 80. Paasi, ‘Generations and the ‘development’ of border studies’, 2005, p. 663. 13. Prescott, Political Frontiers, 1987, p. 36. 14. Anderson, Frontiers, 1996, p. 10. 15. Kolossov, ‘Border Studies’, 2005.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

62 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

4/12/11

09:57

Page 62

BORDER POLITICS

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. van Houtum, ‘The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries’, 2005, p. 672. Ibid., p. 675. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics, 1996, p. 64. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 53. Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-Envisioning World Politics, 2003, p. 60. Ibid. Ó Tuathail and Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse’, 1992, pp. 190–204. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics, 1996, p. 61. Dalby, ‘Critical Geopolitics’, 1991, p. 274, (emphasis added). Ó Tuathail, ‘Borderless Worlds?’, 1999, p. 147. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid. Ibid. Linklater and MacMillan, Boundaries in Question, 1995, pp. 12–13. John Williams makes a similar point: ‘Certainly, dominant theories of international relations, whether neo-realism or liberal institutionalism, could not function without a reified notion of territorial borders,’ Williams, Ethics of Territorial Borders, 2006, p. 22. Biersteker, ‘State, sovereignty and territory’, 2002, p. 158. Ibid. Ruggie, ‘Continuity and transformation in the world polity’, 1983. Biersteker, ‘State, sovereignty and territory’, 2002, p. 158. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 2002 [1977], p. 8. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid. Ibid., p. 247. Ibid. Ibid., p. 275. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 1999, p. 211. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 327. Ibid., p. 338. Anderson, Frontiers, 1996, p. 5. Ibid., p. 1.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Study of Borders in Global Politics 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

09:57

Page 63

63

Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 178. Jackson, The Global Covenant, 2000, p. 316. Ibid. Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., p. 333. Ibid. Ibid., p. 319. Ibid., p. 322. Ibid. Ibid., p. 333. Williams, Ethics of Territorial Borders, 2006, p. 6. Williams, ‘Territorial Borders: International Ethics and Geography’, 2003, p. 39 (emphasis added). Ibid. Williams, Ethics of Territorial Borders, 2006, p. 114. Williams, ‘Territorial Borders, toleration and the English School’, 2002, pp. 739–40. Williams, Ethics of Territorial Borders, 2006, pp. 118–19. Williams, ‘Territorial Borders: International Ethics and Geography’, 2003, p. 27. Lapid, ‘Introduction’, 2001, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 17. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, p. 5. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 62. Walker, ‘After the Future’, 2002, p. 10. Ashley and Walker, ‘Reading dissidence/writing the discipline’, 1990, p. 375. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, p. 62. Ashley and Walker, ‘Reading dissidence/writing the discipline’, 1990, p. 382. Ibid. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, p. 62. Ibid.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

64 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

4/12/11

09:57

Page 64

BORDER POLITICS

Ibid., p. 63. Walker, ‘After the Future’, 2002, p. 10. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, p. 129. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 178. Connolly, ‘Tocqueville, territory and violence’, 1996, p. 12. Walker, ‘Sovereignty, identity, community’, 1990, p. 159. Walker, ‘After the Future’, 2002, p. 22. Walker, After the Globe/Before the World, p. 5. Walker frequently implies the inadequacy of the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state, see: Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, pp. 20, 159, 161; Walker, ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community’, 1990, p. 180; Walker, ‘Foreword’, 1999, p. xii; Walker, ‘On the Immanence/Imminence of Empire’, 2002, p. 343; and Walker, After the Globe/Before the World, p. 1. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, p. 2. Walker, After the Globe/Before the World, p. 7. Walker, ‘Sovereignty, identity, community’, 1990, p. 180. Walker, ‘Europe is not where it is supposed to be’, 2000, p. 28. Bigo, ‘When two become one’, 2000, p. 171. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 185. Bigo, ‘Globalised (in)security’, 2006, p. 30. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 6. Amoore, ‘Biometric borders’, 2006. Ibid., p. 337. Ibid., p. 338. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 338. Walker, ‘Conclusion’, 2004, p. 243. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction’, 2004, p. 3.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 65

Chapter 3 VIOLENCE, TERRITORY AND THE BORDERS OF JURIDICAL–POLITICAL ORDER: PROBLEMATISING THE LIMITS OF SOVEREIGN POWER

While some inroads have certainly been made into probing the connections between the concept of the border of the state and questions about violence, sovereignty and power, especially as border studies has shifted in its focus from geopolitics to biopolitics, the richness of bordering practices in contemporary political life stands in contrast to the relative poverty with which borders continue to be conceptualised and theorised. For this reason my analysis of the concept of the border of the state now turns away from the literature in IR and related disciplines to investigate the prospects for gathering critical resources from elsewhere. In many ways following the broader trajectory towards biopolitical border studies, I will suggest that there is a wealth of hitherto underexploited resources for problematising the concept of the border of the state, as well as the concept of the border itself more generally, within what is often referred to as ‘poststructuralist’ thought. Indeed, as this and subsequent chapters will show, despite the diverse and heterogeneous nature of poststructuralism, it is possible to identify a common interest concerning border problématiques in a general sense throughout a range of critical social, political and philosophical thinkers associated with that term. With this in mind, the analysis aims both to highlight the insights of post-structuralism for thinking about border politics as well as using this theme to encounter, push and illustrate the limitations of the thinkers under consideration. The discussion begins by further problematising the relationship between borders and violence. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, I examine the violent foundations of 65

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

66

4/12/11

09:57

Page 66

BORDER POLITICS

the juridical–political order and the work that borders do in upholding such violence. I suggest, however, that Benjamin and Derrida to some extent still take the modern sovereign territorially bordered state as the tacit ground upon which their analyses proceed. The earlier work of Carl Schmitt on sovereignty falls prey to the same criticism although an alternative frame is implied in one of his later texts. Some promise for pushing Schmitt’s insights further are to be found in the work of Michel Foucault whose influential account of power, and more specifically what he calls ‘bio-power’, challenges the idea of the bordered state as a container of sovereign power and authority. Moreover, Foucault’s work provides much of the inspiration for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire [2000] which attempts an alternative, if highly problematical, model of the spatiality of sovereign power. Ultimately, however, I argue that the prospects for thinking beyond the modern geopolitical imaginary, underpinned by the concept of the border of the state and a conventional inside/ outside logic, demand an even more radical problematisation of the limits of sovereign power than the above thinkers can offer on their own. WALTER BENJAMIN AND JACQUES DERRIDA: CARTOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE Complicating the view that borders between states are harmless ‘fences between neighbours’ that serve to delimit violence, William Connolly points to the rather more Janus-faced character of borders when he argues that ‘boundaries form indispensable protections against violation and violence; but the divisions they sustain also carry cruelty and violence’.1 On the latter, Connolly refers to the etymology of the concept of territory as deriving from the Latin root terrere, which means to frighten or to terrorise.2 Connolly suggests that territory can be thought of as ‘land occupied and bounded by violence’.3 On this view, to territorialise is ‘to establish boundaries around [territory] by warning other people off’.4 This etymological connection between territory and violence is also made by Barry Hindess: ‘While terror may sometimes pose a threat to the territorial order of state, the possibility that territory and terror derive from the same Latin root suggests that it might also be an integral part of this order’s functioning.’ 5 For Hindess, terror and territory are intrinsically linked not just because

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 67

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

67

territorial impulses imply violence to those who are deemed not to belong; the threat of violence is also imminent to those who do belong through the regulation of conduct using fear.6 Indeed, as Hindess reminds us, the territorial order of states often fails to domesticate terror: when states do not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; when terror is used as an instrument of policy by a state against its own or other states’ populations; when there are disputes over the government of a population that are under the jurisdiction of another state.7 Thus, Connolly and Hindess, echoing Walker in the previous chapter, emphasise a deep connection between borders and violence that is not only etymological but historical, structural and colonial. This connection is taken further and, in the work of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, is related to territory, authority and law. In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’ [1921], Benjamin considers the relationship between law and violence.8 More specifically, Benjamin analyses the foundations of justifications for the use of certain forms of violence and the designation of such violence as ‘legitimate’. Indeed, it is precisely the assumed distinction between what counts as legitimate and illegitimate violence that he seeks to interrogate overall. His hypothesis is that the interest of law in having a monopoly of violence over a population within a given territory is not simply to preserve legal ends but rather to preserve the very foundational structure of the juridical–political order of the state itself. Thus, in an extended passage, Benjamin argues: For if violence, violence crowned by fate, is the origin of the law, then it may be readily supposed that where the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, the origins of the law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence. […] For in the exercise of violence over life and death, more than in any other legal act, the law reaffirms itself. But in this very violence something rotten in the law is revealed, above all to a finer sensibility, because the latter knows itself to be infinitely remote from conditions in which fate might imperiously have shown itself in such a sentence.9 As this passage indicates, Benjamin’s analysis refers to a separation between law-making violence on the one hand (the origin of the law is

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

68

4/12/11

09:57

Page 68

BORDER POLITICS

violent) and law-preserving violence on the other (the law reaffirms itself through the exercise of violence). According to Benjamin, however, both types of violence merge in a ‘spectral mixture’ in the authority of the police: police violence is both law-making because ‘its characteristic function is not the promulgation of laws but the assertion of legal claims for any decree’ and law-preserving ‘because it is at the disposal of these ends’.10 The police, he argues, often intervene where there is no clear legal situation and as such their power can be thought of as ‘formless, […] [a] nowhere-tangible, all pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilised states’.11 Nevertheless, the key point Benjamin emphasises is that these interrelated forms of violence are inextricably implicated through the problematic of law. According to Connolly, this argument has provided an important point of departure for a number of critical twentieth-century thinkers who have sought to theorise the ways in which violence is bound up in the juridical–political order of the modern sovereign territorial state and state system.12 One of these engagements which, as I will go on to suggest, is instructive for any attempt to interrogate the relationship between borders and violence, is that given by Jacques Derrida. In ‘Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority’ [1992], Derrida engages with Benjamin’s text to offer a deconstructive critique of the interrelationships between the law and justice, authority, and violence and authorisations of authority and mystery.13 At first, Derrida invokes and elucidates the Benjaminian distinction between lawmaking and law-preserving violence to claim that the law rests on non-law through these two types of violence. Derrida explains the former type of violence (law-making or ‘originary’ violence) in terms of the attempt of the authority behind the law to establish itself by a ‘pure performative act that does not have to answer to or before anyone’.14 The latter type of violence (law-preserving or ‘secondary’ violence) works to secure originary violence in order to conserve, maintain and insure the ‘permanence and enforceability of law’.15 Because the origin of the authority behind the law cannot rest upon anything but itself, it is understood by Derrida to be a violence without a ground: a state of suspense beyond the conventional opposition between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’. Derrida calls the moments when the authority of a new law tries to establish itself the épokhè: a Greek word, meaning pause.16 These moments, supposing that they may be isolated, are said to be ‘terrifying moments’ because of the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 69

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

69

‘sufferings, the crimes, the tortures that rarely fail to accompany them’.17 On this basis, Derrida argues that no matter how distant it may feel, ‘the foundation of all states occurs in a situation that we can call revolutionary’.18 For each revolution to be successful in the founding of a new authority behind law it is necessary for that authority to create ‘après coup what it was destined in advance to produce, namely, proper interpretive models to give sense [and] legitimacy to the violence it has produced’.19 Elsewhere, Derrida claims: ‘successful unifications or foundations only ever succeed in making one forget that there never was a natural unity or a prior foundation’.20 These interpretive models and imperatives to forget are all bound up in what Derrida calls a ‘discourse of self-legitimation’.21 The justification for the violent origins of the foundation of authority behind the juridical–political order of every state can only ever be justified retrospectively.22 According to Derrida, one only has to look at revolutionary situations with their accompanying discourses throughout the twentieth century to get a sense for the way in which the recourse to violence is always justified ‘by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law’.23 While Derrida takes his lead from Benjamin, however, the argument presented in ‘Force of Law’ is that the oppositions set up in the ‘Critique of Violence’ between law-making and law-preserving violence do not hold in the final analysis. Derrida claims that this conclusion is reached implicitly within Benjamin’s own text in his discussion of the police referred to earlier: it is precisely because the police are everywhere that the separation between law-making and law-preserving violence becomes indiscernible. Thus, in an important section, Derrida writes: The very violence of the foundation or positing of the law must envelop the violence of the preservation of the law and cannot break with it. It belongs to the structure of fundamental violence in that it calls for the repetition itself and founds what ought to be preserved, preservable, promised to heritage and to tradition, to partaking. A foundation is a promise. […] Consequently, there is no more pure foundation or pure position of law, and so a pure founding violence, than there is a purely preserving violence. Positing is already an iterability, a call for self-serving repetition. Preservation in turn refounds, so that it can preserve what it

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

70

4/12/11

09:57

Page 70

BORDER POLITICS

claims to found. Thus there can be no rigorous opposition between positing and preserving, only what I call a differential contamination between the two, with all the paradoxes this may lead to.24 Illustrating the point that it is impossible to maintain a ‘rigorous opposition between positing and preserving violence’, Derrida cites the case of a Kurdish man. He had been granted asylum by a French tribunal in 1999 and was living legally in Paris but was deported to Turkey by the Gendarmerie when he failed to produce his papers on the street.25 For Derrida such cases indicate not only the irreducible gap between the law and justice but also the undesirable consequences of ‘police without borders […] without indeterminable limit, who become all pervasive and elusive’.26 The case of the Kurdish refugee highlights the way in which the police can be said to undertake to make the law instead of merely applying it, thereby blurring the very distinction Benjamin’s analysis upholds.27 Yet, Derrida’s usage of the concept of ‘the police’ not only refers to uniformed officers as such but also to something far more spectral: The police are present or represented everywhere there is force of law. They are present […] wherever there is preservation of the social order. […] The police become hallucinatory […] because they haunt everything; they are everywhere even where they are not.28 Derrida’s engagement with Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ opens up a series of insights into the connection between the borders, territory, law triad on the one hand, and violence on the other. ‘Force of Law’ permits a reading of borders between states as spatial instantiations of the épokhè or moments when the authority of a new law establishes itself. On this reading, borders between states can be said to represent traces of the violent foundations of the juridical– political order they supposedly delimit: scars in the territorial landscape that act as reminders of ‘the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures’ that rarely fail to accompany the founding of states as distinct entities. To do as Walker suggests and treat state borders as ‘sites of struggle’ is to politicise the way we think about them: not only as merely ‘socially constructed’ phenomena but the outcome of violent encounters. Moreover, to remember the épokhè, the ‘anxiety-ridden moment of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 71

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

71

suspense [or] interval of spacing in which […] revolutions take place’, is also to remember the ‘deconstructibility’ of the foundations upon which juridical–political orders rest.29 In short, it is to remember Walker’s axiom that ‘once upon a time things were not as they are now’.30 The memory of the épokhè is potentially revolutionary: state borders may serve to uphold the status quo but, paradoxically, they are equally a reminder of the ability to challenge authority, enact change, and act politically. After all, following the Benjamin–Derrida line of argument, the border of the state can be considered a product of the violent attempts to establish authority in the lack thereof. Hence, there is a locus of possibility at the heart of the concept of the border of the state. To recognise this locus of possibility is to remember the possibility of politics and therefore the potential for alternative forms of political arrangements. Crucially, the authority of the state relies upon practices of forgetting the memory of the épokhè which threatens to reveal the radical contingency of the juridical–political order. As Michael J. Shapiro has highlighted, revelations of such contingency are obviously not in the interests of the state.31 This is precisely because they provide grounds for challenging the status quo. Hence, Derrida writes: What the state fears (the state being law in its greatest force) is not so much crime or brigandage, even on the grand scale of the Mafia or heavy drug traffic […]. The state is afraid of fundamental, founding violence, that is violence able to justify, to legitimate, or to transform the relations of law.32 The mystique with which the state cloaks itself, readily displayed at royal or civic ceremonies, is part and parcel of the discourse of retrospective self-legitimisation referred to earlier. On this view, the state abdicates responsibility for the traumas of the structural violence underpinning its juridical–political authority by forgetting that they ever existed.33 Benjamin and Derrida, on the other hand, urge a teasing out of this structural violence so that it might be interrogated politically. While Benjamin and Derrida’s analyses of the violence of the foundation and reproduction of the juridical–political order deepen some of the insights of Connolly, Hindess and Walker earlier, however, there is a sense in which more critical work is necessary to untie an

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

72

4/12/11

09:57

Page 72

BORDER POLITICS

interrogation of the relation between borders, violence and authority from an assumed correlation between fixed territorial and juridical limits. Both Benjamin and Derrida take the juridical–political order of the modern sovereign territorially bordered state precisely as the ground for thinking about the borders, territory and law triad on the one hand, and violence on the other. Yet, as we have already seen in Chapter 1, for example, one of the interesting aspects of the legal arguments mobilised by the United Nations in response to the position of detainees in Guantánamo is precisely the problematisation of the dominant inside/outside framing of this relationship. In search of an alternative frame, the next section investigates the thought of Carl Schmitt and in particular his later work on spatial structures and order. CARL SCHMITT: SOVEREIGNTY, TERRITORY, LIMITS German legal theorist Carl Schmitt wrote his influential book Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [1922] against the backdrop of successive governments’ almost continuous use of emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. According to this text: If security and public order are seriously disturbed or threatened in the German Reich, the president of the Reich may take the measures necessary to re-establish security and public order, with the help of the armed forces if required. To this end he may wholly or partially suspend the fundamental rights established in Articles 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153.34 On Schmitt’s view, under emergency situations there are often no norms or principles on the basis of which a response may be formulated. A decision has to be made in order to close the gap between existing codes of practice and any given situation. Thus, for Schmitt, the essence of sovereignty is understood to be a monopoly on the ability to decide on the exception: ‘For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.’ 35 Indeed, such a decision involves two steps: first the decision that an emergency actually exists beyond the scope and provisions of the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 73

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

73

existing legal order; and second the decision about what can be done to remedy the situation. It is through this analysis of the figure of the sovereign that Schmitt’s formula recognises that the operation of the juridical order is actually grounded in the realm of the non-juridical. The sovereign, he who makes a double decision on the exception, has an unusual relationship to the juridical–political order: ‘Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety.’ 36 At once the sovereign both belongs to and stands above or outside that order in his capacity to decide when the constitution no longer applies. According to this formula, the law is outside itself, since the sovereign who is outside the law declares that there is nothing outside the law. Schmitt refers to the strange situation arising from the suspension of existing legal norms and practices in this way as the ‘state of exception’. The strangeness of this situation stems in part from a blurring of the normal lines between the legal and the political within the day-to-day operation of the juridical–political order of the sovereign state. Such a situation characterised most of the Weimar era, save one or two periods of relative ‘normality’ between 1925 and 1929, as well as the entire twelve-year duration of the Third Reich. What is perhaps more striking about Schmitt’s thesis, however, is the realisation that the state of exception seems to provide the condition of possibility for the ‘normal’ operation of the juridical–political order as such. Following Schmitt’s treatment of the logic of norm/exception, it can be said that to define the ‘normal’ territory of the juridical–political order some notion of ‘exceptional’ territory is required. One way of thinking about this exceptional territory is to interpret it as precisely the site of state borders, located, according to the inside/outside model, at the geographical outer edge of the sovereign state. Paradoxically, borders between states can be seen to be simultaneously exceptional territory, a zone of anomie devoid of law and excluded from the normal juridical–political territory of the state, but nevertheless an integral part of that juridical–political territory (in fact, the very condition of its possibility). The characterisation of state borders as exceptional territory perhaps clarifies why border sites between states are sometimes spoken about in quasi-mythical terms: a noman’s-land; a void; a place of nothingness neither strictly inside nor outside the state.37 This characterisation also resonates with images of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

74

4/12/11

09:57

Page 74

BORDER POLITICS

state borders as sites of exceptional measures, practices and rules (such as passport control, body searches and a sense of ‘lawlessness’). Understood as exceptional territorial sites, borders between states mark a threshold between the inside and the outside, the normal situation and an exceptional situation, where these distinctions become impossible to maintain. Indeed, this point has been recently illustrated by Mark Salter’s discussion of the global visa regime in which he comments on the paradoxical situation at borders between states where ‘one may claim no rights but is still subject to the law’.38 Salter sees state borders as the space where exceptional decisions are made: ‘the sovereign decides the political status of the individual as they cross the frontier: national, stateless, refugee, foreigner, alien. This decision is absolute. […] Thus, state actions at the border are a special case of law.’ 39 Following Salter, it can also be argued that exceptional activities associated with state border sites reveal the realm of the non-juridical as the ultimate ground of the normal juridical order of the state. As such there is a certain nakedness about the territory occupied by borders between states where the violent and extra-legal foundations of the state are revealed. Schmitt’s paradigmatic treatment of sovereignty as the decision on exception enables some interesting claims about the relationship between borders, territory and law. Like Benjamin and Derrida, however, Schmitt presupposes the modern territorially bordered sovereign state as the basic ground for analysing this relation, and also seems to read territorial and juridical limits as congruent. While, as Hidemi Suganami notes, Schmitt is unclear about whether sovereignty resides in the person of the head of state, the government, or in a particular regime as a whole, we are left in little doubt that his analysis privileges the state as the supreme sovereign political entity. Hence, Suganami writes: In short, the state, when it functions and qualifies as a sovereign political entity, is the supreme authority in the sense of the authoritative-entity-in-decisive-cases that makes decisions to resort to war against its enemy, internal or external, when it judges it necessary to do so.40 The result of this privileging is that Schmitt reads the notion of juridical–political order as something that is synonymous with the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 75

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

75

state. In this way, there is a sense in which an interrogation of the relation between borders, territory and law based on his understanding of sovereignty in Political Theology remains already caught within a conventional inside/outside rendering of that relation. On this reading, the limits of territory and the limits in law appear coextensive and yet, as the Guantánamo example in Chapter 1 illustrates, practices in contemporary political life call this framing into question. Nevertheless, despite the limitations of Schmitt’s analysis as developed in Political Theology, his later work on the spatial consciousness of law is suggestive of the possibility of developing an alternative frame without the state at its centre. The stated aim of Schmitt’s later book The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, written in Berlin during World War II and first published in 1950, is to ‘understand the normative order of the earth’.41 Schmitt’s argument develops around the central concept of nomos: a derivation of the Greek word nemein meaning ‘to take or appropriate’.42 In German, nemein translates as nehmen which is linked to the verbs teilen (to divide or distribute) and weiden (to pasture).43 Schmitt explores planetary division and order in the light of these three dimensions: the appropriation of land (nehmen); the division and distribution of the appropriated land (teilen); and the utilisation, management and usage of that taken land (weiden). On this basis, nomos can be understood as the visible form of a social and political order derived from the measure and division of pasture: Nomos is the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the form of political, social and religious order determined by this process. Here, measure, order, and form constitute a spatially concrete unity.44 For Mitchell Dean the emphasis Schmitt gave to nomos can be understood as a corrective to strands of thought within jurisprudence that fail to consider how land appropriation is constitutive of law and the spatial character of the socio-economic and legal order.45 Dean explains that, if Michel Foucault wanted to shift the focus from the ‘who’ to the ‘how’ of power, then Schmitt’s reformulation was from the ‘who’ to the ‘where’ of law.46 For this reason Schmitt uses the concept of nomos to grasp the geographically situated nature of law: ‘it creates

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

76

4/12/11

09:57

Page 76

BORDER POLITICS

territory, defines locality, marks places, separates backyards and defines households’.47 Schmitt argues that there has always been some kind of nomos or spatial consciousness of the earth: history consists of land appropriation, division and cultivation. Respublica Christiana constituted the first nomos, a spatial order characterised by divisions between the soils of the medieval West, the soil of heathens and the soil of Islamic empires. Later, in the sixteenth century, discoveries of vast new spaces and the appropriation of uncultivated land conditioned the possibility of the emergence of a second nomos: an international law based upon centralised, spatially self-contained states in Europe. According to Schmitt: The core of the nomos lay in the division of European soil into state territories with firm borders, which immediately initiated an important distinction, namely that this soil of recognized European states and their land had a special status in international law.48 European appropriation, division and utilisation of the earth extended through protectorates, leases, trade agreements and spheres of interests, and culminated in the division of Africa. The Eurocentric nomos, however, is said to have come to an end following World War II which ushered in a new planetary division between East and West. Although this nomos characterised the period in which Schmitt was writing, his conclusion to Nomos of the Earth points to three possible futures: the complete unity of the world resulting from the victory of either East or West; the attempt to retain a balanced structure between East and West; or the combination of several independent entities (Grossräume) constituting a new order and orientation of the earth. Schmitt’s account of the appropriation, division and management of the earth from the Middle Ages through the Jus Publicum Europaeum to the Cold War is a highly contestable grand narrative. Nevertheless, what is interesting about the argument of Nomos of the Earth is the way it ultimately seems to question an earlier assumption Schmitt makes in Political Theology: namely that limits in territory and law are necessarily coterminous. An approach predicated upon this assumption considers borders to be fixed and located at the outer edge of the state as markers of the limits of sovereign authority. Such an assumption, according to Schmitt’s historical narrative, made sense

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 77

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

77

in the context of the division of European soil into state territories during the sixteenth century. Schmitt challenges this inside/outside framing of the relationship between borders, territory and law, however, by arguing that the changing economic trends of the nineteenth century meant the demise of state borders as sharp delimitations of sovereignty and neat containers of order and orientation: ‘over, under, and beside the state-political borders of what appeared to be a purely political international law between states spread a free, i.e. non-state, sphere of economy permeating everything: a global economy’.49 Schmitt connects the declining importance of the concept of the border of the state with the development of modern technology and the advent of a new technical-industrial-economic order. As an illustration of this trend, Schmitt points out that, on the one hand, the United States is spatially delimited but, on the other hand, its political, legal and economic reach has far surpassed these spatial delimitations. On this basis, Schmitt seems to problematise the concept of the border of the state as a frame for understanding the relationship between sovereignty and territory in favour of thinking more in terms of ‘magnetic power fields of human energy and work’.50 Overall, Schmitt offers a tantalising glimpse of an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between borders, territory and law but this is ultimately left undeveloped in his work. MICHEL FOUCAULT: THE ‘HOW’ OF POWER In Power/knowledge Foucault argues that ‘we need to cut off the king’s head; in political theory that has still to be done’.51 By this he suggests, contra Schmitt, that power and authority cannot be profitably analysed as if it were a top-down phenomenon ‘dispensed’ by the sovereign: Rather than asking ourselves what the sovereign looks like from on high we should be trying to discover how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts, and so on are gradually and materially constituted as subjects, or the subject.52 Thus, for Foucault, power in global politics is not something that can be approached as if ‘it’ were a possession ‘divided between those who have it and hold it exclusively and those who do not have it and are

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

78

4/12/11

09:57

Page 78

BORDER POLITICS

subject to it’.53 Instead, following late seventeenth-/early eighteenthcentury French historian Henri de Boulainvilliers, Foucault argues that ‘power is never anything more than a relationship that can, and must, be studied only by looking at the interplay between the terms of the relationship’.54 In other words, an analysis of power should not begin with a central source such as the sovereign, but rather … its infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then look at how these mechanisms of power […] have been and are invested, colonized, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, extended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination.55 While Foucault has not devoted an entire text solely to the concept of power, he has studied what he calls the ‘how’ of power by looking at relations of power through an analysis of asylums, madness, prisons, sexuality and policing in their historical contexts.56 The histories Foucault wrote in, for example, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception [1963], Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason [1967] and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1970], are not works of history in the conventional sense, however, but transgressive analyses of ‘accidents, abrupt interruptions, and the play of surfaces’.57 In his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History’ Foucault describes his later work as that of the genealogist, who ‘does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things’.58 Rather, as he goes on to explain, ‘genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is […] situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to explore a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.’ 59 Because, on Foucault’s view, the forces at work in history are not ‘controlled by destiny’, such an analysis of the relationship between the body and history is a study of relations of power.60 Yet, for Foucault, the relationship between history, power and the body is dynamic in an important sense. That is to say, historically, different forms of power have affected the body differently. In the course of lectures published as Society Must Be Defended [1975–76], Foucault moves from a discussion of the emergence of what he calls

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 79

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

79

‘disciplinary power’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the analysis of power relations focusing on individual bodies and, for example, surveillance techniques) to an examination of the emergence of what he calls ‘bio-power’ in the latter half of the eighteenth century (the exploration of power relations in the more expansive context of populations, the concept of life and living beings).61 While the sovereign/subject relationship was perhaps an adequate means of analysing power relations in feudal societies, Foucault argues that this method becomes increasingly unable to capture emergent practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At this time, different forms of power relations emerged that entailed ‘very specific procedures, completely new instruments, and very different equipment’.62 This new type of power relation relied on a ‘closely meshed grid of material coercions’ involving almost constant surveillance.63 Such a power, according to Foucault, is therefore not a sovereign power as such but a form of ‘disciplinary power’ in the sense that it attempts to render visible the spatial distribution of bodies for control over them. Disciplinary power structures space by enclosing and hierarchically arranging elements within it: ‘the first action of discipline is in fact to circumscribe a space in which its power and the mechanisms of its power will function fully and without limit’.64 Towards the mid-eighteenth century, however, as Western societies came to accept the human being as a species, Foucault discerns the rise of a secondary technology of power, a form of power he refers to as ‘bio-power’.65 This type of power, which is ‘applied not to man-asbody but to the living man, to man-as-living-being […] to man-asspecies’, has a massifying, as opposed to an individualising, effect: After the anatomo-politics of the human body established in the course of the eighteenth century, we have at the end of that century, the emergence of something that is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body, but what I would call a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race.66 By the term ‘biopolitics’, Foucault refers to the way in which the biological features of the human species became the target for political strategy.67 With the emergence of the population as a political subject, new techniques of governance were enabled.68 Foucault sees the rise of this new technology of power alongside increases in birth and

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

80

4/12/11

09:57

Page 80

BORDER POLITICS

mortality rates and the use of statistics about longevity as objects of statistical measurement by the first demographers. Concomitantly, these developments gave rise to new biopolitical fields of public hygiene, insurance schemes and other mechanisms to ‘control relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings’.69 Whereas disciplinary power isolates, concentrates and is essentially protectionist, by contrast biopower is said to be centrifugally oriented in favour of expansion, circulation and movement: We see the emergence of a completely different problem that is no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are canceled out.70 Therefore, Foucault’s understanding of the mechanisms of biopolitical security is one that no longer focuses on the ‘safety (sûreté ) of the Prince and his territory’ but rather the ‘security (sécurité ) of the population and, consequently, those who govern it’.71 Nevertheless, Foucault presents disciplinary power and biopower as complimentary. The latter did not eclipse the former: ‘it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques’.72 Foucault reaches some interesting conclusions when these trends are considered against the backdrop of sovereignty. In classical theories of sovereignty, including Schmitt’s as advanced in Political Theology, the decision over the right of life and death is one of the basic attributes associated with the figure of the sovereign. Foucault notes a paradox relating to this right, however, because the sovereign cannot grant life in the same way that he can sentence a person to death.73 There is an imbalance: ‘sovereign power’s effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill’.74 On this basis, ‘the very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill: it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life. […] It is the right to take life or let live.’ 75 Yet, with the advent of the emergence of biopower as a secondary technology of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 81

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

81

power, Foucault argues that a new right emerged: ‘the power to “make” live and “let” die’.76 In other words, whereas sovereignty formerly involved the decision over life, Foucault sees in the emergence of scientific, continuous, biopolitical technology an optimisation of human life as a state of life, not for its disciplining as such but for its regularisation: a ‘technology which aims to achieve a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers’.77 Thus, as Foucault wryly remarks, we have become so good at keeping people alive that biologically they should have died years ago.78 As we have already seen, Foucault’s reconfigured treatment of power is not in terms of something that can be ‘possessed’, or kept in a container such as the modern sovereign territorially bordered state, but rather as something that circulates through networks, capillaries, bodies, actions, attitudes, discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.79 On the one hand, Foucault argues that power always requires space and this, reflecting Agnew and Connolly earlier, is what defines territory: ‘Not only can the exercise of power only be performed in a certain space, but it is the presence of power that defines a territory – territory is what is controlled by a certain type of power.’ 80 Thus, as the quotation suggests, Foucault does not disaggregate his analysis of power relations from concepts of space or territory as such. On the other hand, he also calls into question the idea that that space or territory can somehow be bordered or easily separated into distinct areas. Thus, in an interview about the implications of his work for the discipline of geography in 1976, Foucault points to the ways in which relations of power always ‘necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state’.81 In other words, while the territory of the juridical–political order of the state undoubtedly constitutes space within which power relations may be identified and analysed, such power relations always exceed the space/territory that state borders are said to delimit according to the conventional inside/outside model. In this way, the concept of the border of the state is challenged as a frame for thinking about the limits of power and authority from a Foucauldian perspective. Yet, the fact that power relations ‘necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state’ does not mean that Foucault seeks to ‘in any way minimize the importance and effectiveness of state power’.82 On the contrary, Foucault seeks to understand precisely

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

82

4/12/11

09:57

Page 82

BORDER POLITICS

how this works, but argues that approaching power as if it were somehow centred and delimited would not assist him in this task: In reality, power in its exercise goes much further, passes through much finer channels, and is much more ambiguous, since each individual has at his disposal a certain power, and for that very reason can also act as the vehicle for transmitting a wider power.83 Further still, this approach to power accompanies a broader shift in how we view the state, not as something essentially defined by its territory but rather as a series of practices: We cannot speak of the state-thing as if it was a being developing on the basis of itself and imposing itself on individuals as if by a spontaneous, automatic mechanism. The state is a practice. The state is inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually becomes a way of governing, a way of doing things, and a way too of relating to government.84 Therefore, Foucault has significant implications for any attempt at interrogating the link between the concept of the border of the state and power in world politics. From the point of view of the inside/ outside model, the concept of the border of the state frames power in the manner suggested by Agnew, Edkins and Pin-Fat, and Walker earlier. This framing itself relies, however, upon a prior (and particular) understanding of power as something that is somehow fixed, static, locatable and containable within the territorial demesne of the state. Once Foucault’s alternative view of power is adopted, then different border imaginaries are required to characterise the way in which the limits of power and authority in global politics do not coincide with the geographical outer edges of the modern sovereign state. One attempt at outlining what this could look like, and what a Foucauldian-inspired perspective could mean for thinking differently about borders in global politics, can be found in the recent work of Hardt and Negri.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:57

Page 83

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

83

MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI: THE SMOOTH SPACE OF EMPIRE In Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism [1916] Lenin attempted to unite the world’s proletariat against the imperialist forces of the West. According to Lenin, imperialism was not a policy or ideology pursued by Western forces as Nikolai Bukharin had argued in Imperialism and World Economy [1915]. Neither, in Lenin’s view, was imperialism simply the rule of financial capital, as Rudolf Hilferding had suggested in Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development [1910]. Rather, Lenin argued that imperialism could be understood only as a specific stage of capitalism: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired profound importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.85 The motivating hypothesis of Hardt and Negri’s Empire [2000] is that, while Lenin’s theory of imperialism as decaying capitalism was relevant to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has somewhat lost its purchase on global politics today. According to Hardt and Negri, the ‘contemporary global order can no longer be understood adequately in terms of imperialism as it was practiced by the modern powers’.86 Whereas the imperialist order was ‘primarily based on the sovereignty of the nation-state extended over foreign territory’ a new form of sovereignty is said to have emerged: a ‘network power’ that includes nation-states but also ‘supranational institutions, major capitalist co-operations, and other powers’.87 As a ‘single logic of rule’, Hardt and Negri argue that this nascent global order is best summed up by the concept of empire. This is not to be confused with imperialism. Rather, empire must be understood as a completely new concept within the lexicon of discussions of global politics. In the preface to Empire, Hardt and Negri summarise their understanding and usage of the concept. First and foremost, the concept of empire is ‘characterised fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits’.88 Second, empire attempts to fix the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

84

4/12/11

09:58

Page 84

BORDER POLITICS

current state of affairs by suspending history in order to extend the longevity of its reign: it is ‘a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history’.89 In other words, empire presents the status quo as the immutable end product of historical development: the pinnacle of progress outside or beyond time. Third, the object of the rule of empire is nothing short of social life in its entirety, the paradigmatic form of biopower as understood by Foucault. Empire does not merely adopt populations then to subjugate them but actively produces the world it inhabits through technologies of power.90 Fourth, empire is ‘bathed in blood’, but, nevertheless, committed to peace. Perpetual policing constitutes a deferment of the problems and contradictions inherent to empire’s rule: hence its borderlessness and timelessness. On this basis, the task of empire ‘is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganise them and redirect them toward new ends’.91 On the one hand, Hardt and Negri accept the hypothesis commonly associated with globalisation theory that the growth of economic and cultural exchanges has led to the partial decline of the nation-state: The primary factors of production and exchange – money, technology, people, and goods – move with increasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy.92 On the other hand, they deny that the decline in sovereignty of the nation-state has led to the decline of sovereignty per se. Rather, the central argument advanced in Empire is that: ‘Sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’ 93 At the heart of the old imperialist paradigm, according to Negri, was a ‘powerful specification of sovereignty’, whereby people, territory and authority were bound together through the figure of the sovereign.94 The characteristics of this order included the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, the ability to mint money, a singular structuring of the means of communication and an ‘absolute process of territorialisation’.95 Imperialism consisted of the exporting of these characteristics beyond

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 85

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

85

the confines of the nation-state through the occupation of zones of the world and the exploitation of those to whom sovereignty had been denied. Accordingly, the function of the concept of the border of the state was to ‘delimit the centre of power from which rule was exerted over external foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed flows of production and circulation’.96 As such, the concept of the border of the state was indispensable to the imperialist project: ‘Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other.’ 97 Moreover, fulfilling the ends of imperialism, the importance of the concept of the state was gradually codified in international law (the jus gentium), institutions (such as the United Nations), and norms (for example the ‘territorial integrity’ of states). Negri argues, however, that there is currently an ‘earthquake’ shaking this old paradigm of sovereign order ‘in its most intimate aspect: the relation to space’.98 Underpinning the new scenario are: the development of nuclear technologies (where the notion of the ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ no longer makes any sense); the construction of a world market (where national monies lose their own autonomy associated with sovereignty); and the dissolution of the substance of sovereign prerogatives into the airwaves.99 In Negri’s view, the key implication of these new characteristics (referred to in shorthand as ‘the bomb’, ‘money’ and ‘the ether’ respectively) is that the space of politics is said to have become ‘increasingly undefinable’.100 Indeed, it is said to have become undefinable to the extent that: We find ourselves looking at a space which is smooth, with occasionally a few variously striated zones, a space that is unified, and periodically identifiable by the hierarchies which run through it; a space that is invested by a continuous circulatory movement, within which one can occasionally perceive resistances.101 In this way, it is possible to detect a shift away from some of the key assumptions of the modern geopolitical imagination underpinned by Euclidean geometry and the concept of the border of the state.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

86

4/12/11

09:58

Page 86

BORDER POLITICS

Crucially, the ‘earthquake’ to which Negri refers does not imply a lessening or dilution of the sway of sovereign power, as some globalisation theorists suggest. Rather, what Hardt and Negri refer to as empire ‘is a decentred and de-territorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’.102 While the former imperialist system operated by and within spatial and temporal delimitations associated with the discourse of first, second and third worlds, ‘the distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have [now] merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow’.103 On this basis, the concept of empire is defined precisely by the increasing absence of territorial limits to sovereign power. In this way, Hardt and Negri’s use of the concept of empire can be read as a substitution for the concept of the border of the state and as a challenge to the inside/outside model it conditions. Theoretically, Hardt and Negri claim to achieve this reframing through their historical reading of the abandonment of the inside/ outside dialectic. According to Hardt and Negri, the decline of borders between states results from the continuous attempt of empire to overcome the former limits of imperial sovereign rule. In their view, the creation of an open space, a ‘universal suburb characterised by variations of speed’,104 derives from what they see as a particular historical transformation: ‘in the passage from modern to postmodern and from imperialism to Empire there is progressively less distinction between inside and outside’.105 Whereas modern sovereignty has typically been conceived of in terms of a real or imagined territory and the relation of this territory to its outside, the external order of nature, the new imperial order has rendered obsolete the distinction between civil order or interior space and the external spaces of nature: ‘We have no nature in the sense that these forces and phenomena are no longer understood as outside, that is, they are not seen as original and independent of the artifice of the civil order.’ 106 On this basis, Hardt and Negri claim that the inside/outside dialectic has been abandoned in favour of a ‘play of differences and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality’.107 In other words, ‘there is no more outside’ only an inside: ‘in this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power – it is both everywhere and nowhere’.108 Empire is not threatened by difference or hybridity. Rather, as Michael Hardt has explained, empire rules precisely through ‘a kind of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 87

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

87

politics of difference, managing hybrid identities in flexible hierarchies’.109 On this basis, Hardt and Negri argue that imperial sovereign rule has a triple imperative: ‘Incorporate! […] Differentiate! […] Manage!’ 110 First, empire does not seek to exclude in the same way that the inside/outside model of political community has historically presupposed: […] Empire does not fortify its boundaries to push others away, but rather pulls them within its pacific order, like a powerful vortex. With boundaries or differences suppressed or set aside, the Empire is a kind of smooth space across which subjectivities glide without substantial resistance or conflict.111 Second, cultural differences are celebrated under empire, not stifled. Although imperial rule does not seek to create differences, ‘it takes what it is given and works with it’.112 Third, antagonisms within the workforce along racial lines are not so much a hindrance for empire as a motor for better production, because divisions of this nature facilitate rather than hamper control: ‘the imperial “solution” will not be to negate or attenuate these differences, but rather to affirm them in an effective apparatus of control’.113 It is through social institutions such as the factory, the home, the school and the army that subjectivities are produced and managed by empire. Whereas these institutions were formerly separated from each other under the old imperialist order, however, Hardt and Negri argue that they now merge to form the fabric of social and political life: ‘the limited space of the institutions has broken down […]’ and consequently ‘[…] the logic that once functioned within the institutional walls now spreads across the entire social terrain’.114 It is in this sense that Hardt and Negri claim that the politics of space has changed dramatically under conditions of empire. The new form of sovereign rule is said to depend upon the blurring of inside and outside to create subjects that are amenable to its sway.115 For Hardt and Negri, the abandonment of the inside/outside dialectic resolves a crucial tension between the creation and maintenance of fixed borders among territories, populations and social functions under the old imperialist paradigm of sovereign order, on the one hand, and the operation of capital on a plane of immanence that has no respect for such borders, on the other.116 On this basis, they argue:

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

88

4/12/11

09:58

Page 88

BORDER POLITICS

‘What has changed is that, along with the collapse of the institutions, the disciplinary motifs (i.e. mechanisms, apparatuses, methods of deployment) have become less limited and bounded spatially in the social field.’ 117 As such, in Foucauldian terms, the passage to a society of control has not led to the end of disciplinary society but rather to the accentuation and generalisation of its immanent aspects. On this basis, the immanent production of subjectivity in a society of control now corresponds with the logic of capital so that the tension above is resolved to the benefit of imperial rule: we get ‘a new and more complete compatibility between sovereignty and capital’.118 As we have seen, Hardt and Negri claim that the changing logic of sovereignty, together with the abandonment of the inside/outside dialectic, produces a ‘smoothing over’ of the spatiality of empire: ‘The establishment of a global society of control that smooths over the striae of national boundaries goes hand in hand with the realisation of the world market and the real subsumption of global society under capital.’ 119 Whereas imperialism is said to have been a ‘machine of global striation, channeling, coding, blocking, and territorializing the flows of capital’, empire is defined by ‘uncoded and deterritorialised flows’.120 This smooth space does not entail the disappearance of social inequalities or other segmentations, however. On the contrary, Hardt and Negri argue that, in many ways, these have been exacerbated under empire, but in a different form. Thus, the old coordinates of north and south and centre and periphery no longer make much sense because empire is characterised by: [T]he close proximity of extremely unequal populations, which creates a situation of permanent social danger and requires the powerful apparatuses of the society of control to ensure separation and guarantee the new management of social space.121 As noted already, these powerful apparatuses of the society of control are no longer through the disciplinary modalities of the state but rather through the modalities of biopower. As such, they extend beyond, and thereby render increasingly meaningless, the notion of territorial borders at the geographical outer edge of the state within which it was formerly assumed that sovereignty was exercised. On the one hand, Empire arguably assists in the task of rethinking the character of power in contemporary global politics, not as some-

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 89

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

89

thing contained within the state but rather more dispersed in global politics along the lines suggested by Foucault. On the other hand, however, as Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes have pointed out, there is a sense in which, despite seemingly offering an alternative conceptualisation of global politics to the modern geopolitical imaginary, ‘in other ways [Hardt and Negri] too remain stuck up a Westphalian blind alley’.122 On Laffey and Weldes’s view, the key characteristics of Empire – the changing logic of sovereignty, the abandonment of the inside/ outside dialectic and the production of a smooth space – have a dependence (albeit in a negative sense) on the very sovereignty narrative Hardt and Negri purport to overcome. On this basis, Laffey and Weldes conclude: ‘the Other against which Empire is defined is, in short, modern territorial sovereignty’.123 Laffey and Weldes’s argument, that Hardt and Negri rely upon the sovereignty narrative in order to define what empire is not, opens up a related line of critique concerning the work that the concept of the border of the state does in Empire as a whole. Hardt and Negri argue that, while the ‘presence’ of state borders once defined the old imperialist order, it is precisely the ‘absence’ of them that now characterises contemporary political life. Thus, in their preface, Hardt and Negri write: ‘the concept of Empire is characterised fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits’.124 The changing logic of sovereignty, so their argument goes, means that empire perpetually overcomes its own territorial limits which, in turn, progressively collapses the inside/outside dialectic resulting in a crisis of political space. Simply because Hardt and Negri argue that state borders are no longer relevant to the new logic of imperial rule does not mean that Empire is not dependent upon the concept of the border of the state, however. On the contrary, the concept of the border of the state remains pivotal to the claims they want to make about global politics. In a similar vein to Laffey and Weldes’s critique, it is possible to see how the concept of the border of the state creeps back into the text as the Other against which their fundamental argument about ‘smooth space’ is determined. Empire begins by excluding the importance of the concept of the border of the state, but it is this very exclusion that animates the argument of the book throughout. In this way, the extent to which Hardt and Negri offer a genuinely alternative border imaginary to the inside/outside model is called into question.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

90

4/12/11

09:58

Page 90

BORDER POLITICS

R. B. J. Walker opens up a second, albeit related, line of critique of the theoretical/philosophical assumptions underpinning Hardt and Negri’s Empire, focusing on two main theoretical concerns with their argument as a whole.125 First, for Walker, the central thesis of Empire is an old thesis.126 In Walker’s view, Hardt and Negri’s overall argument is reminiscent of the literature that identified potentialities for new forms of political arrangements in the context of a perceived decline in sovereignty at the height of the Cold War.127 Walker notes that the key difference between this literature and Hardt and Negri’s text is the way in which the latter do not argue for a decline in so much as a change in the logic of sovereignty. In Walker’s view, this signals that, for Hardt and Negri, sovereignty is considered to be an ongoing problem in contemporary political life.128 Having recognised sovereignty as a problem, however, Hardt and Negri then undermine this recognition by arguing for the existence of a new form of sovereign power conceptualised as empire. On this basis, Walker argues that ‘as with so many other texts, a version of history as modernisation is deployed to solve problems identified in a reading of modernity as history’.129 Thus, Walker reiterates the need to view sovereignty precisely as a continuing problem rather than as an achieved condition as implied by Hardt and Negri. Second, according to Walker, Hardt and Negri’s analysis relies upon ‘a double reading of the history of modernity as a specific revolution and counterrevolution’, in which ‘immanence’ is pitted as ‘a revolution against transcendence and sovereignty as a counterrevolution against immanence’.130 For Walker, the effect of this binary allows Hardt and Negri then to claim that ‘there is no more outside’ but, he argues, this actually conflates two claims: first, that there has been a shift from a specifically modern articulation of relations of identity and difference associated with a territorially bounded space to a different kind of order; and second, that this different kind of order is radically immanent with no outside or Others but merely techniques of control.131 As far as Walker is concerned, the former claim is ‘more or less plausible though difficult to articulate with much coherence’, while the latter can be considered as ‘an overdetermined interpretation’ of the former.132 Moreover, the latter is itself reliant upon a prior ‘claim about the radical immanence of modernity’ which reflects the ‘familiar story about capitalism eventually incorporating the entire world and thereby undermining the logic of a pluralistic states system’.133 Hardt

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 91

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order

91

and Negri argue that there is no more outside but this move does not displace the inside/outside model: this model is precisely the condition of possibility for bringing everything inside in an immanentist way. Hence, Walker argues: One can no more move inside an inside/outside problem than move outside of it. In any case, such a move would involve a reversion to a notion of an inside separate from an outside that much of Hardt and Negri’s historical commentary on sovereignty and imperialism effectively undermines.134 Thus, for Walker, Empire is ‘at once a creative and provocative intervention into debates about the character and possibility of contemporary political life as well as a source of considerable irritation and disappointment’.135 Walker’s discussion above highlights the way in which Hardt and Negri’s claim that the smooth space of empire has resulted from the abandonment of the inside/outside dichotomy is not strictly correct. It is not that the inside/outside model has been entirely abandoned but rather that borders between states have been overcome through the bringing in of everything to the inside. As Walker shows, however, the move inside inside/outside leads only to a reproduction of the inside/ outside model. Therefore, in this way, Hardt and Negri’s discourse shares another similarity with the discourse of globalisation theory: both discourses seem to privilege immanentism over transcendentalism so that the decline of borders between states is not so much an empirical observation but a teleological outcome of a particular version of philosophy of history. Thus, to offer an alternative theorisation of global politics to the conventional inside/outside model and the modern geopolitical imaginary it reflects, a different genealogical account of the problem of sovereignty is required without borderlessness between states as its telos. With this task in mind, Chapter 4 investigates the work of Giorgio Agamben who develops Foucault’s analysis of the biopolitical structures of the West in different directions from Hardt and Negri.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

92

Page 92

BORDER POLITICS

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 1995, p. 163. Ibid., p. xxii. Ibid. Ibid. Hindess, ‘Terrortory’, 2006, p. 244. Ibid. Ibid. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 2004 [1921]. Ibid., p. 242 (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 243. Ibid. Connolly, ‘The Complexity of Sovereignty’, 2004, p. 24. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 1992. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Derrida, Negotiations, 2002, p. 115. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 1992, p. 36. Derrida, Negotiations, 2002, p. 115. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 1992, p. 35. Ibid., p. 35 (emphasis added). Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 2002, pp. 13–14. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 2002 [1992], pp. 278–80 (emphasis added). Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 1992, p. 20. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993, p. 179. Shapiro, ‘Risky businesses’, 2005, p. 9. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 1992. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 2003. Quoted in Agamben, State of Exception, 2005, p. 14. Schmitt, Political Theology, 2005 [1922], p. 13. Ibid., p. 7. Bennington, ‘Frontiers: of literature and philosophy’, 1996. Salter, ‘The global visa regime’, 2006, p. 169. Ibid., pp. 171–2. Suganami, ‘Understanding Sovereignty’, 2007, p. 517.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 93

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

93

Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 2003 [1950], p. 39. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., pp. 344–5. Ibid., p. 70. Dean, ‘A Political Mythology of World Order’, 2006. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. Schmitt, Political Theology, 2005, p. 148. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 30. Foucault, Power/knowledge, 1980, p. 121. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 2003, p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 30. Fontana and Bertoni, ‘Situating the lectures’, 2003, p. 274. Banchard, ‘Introduction’, 1977, p. 17. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, 1977, p. 146. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 155. Fontana and Bertoni, ‘Situating the lectures’, 2003, p. 273. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 2003, p. 35. Foucault, Power/knowledge, 1980, p. 39. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 2004, p. 45. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, pp. 242–3. Ibid., p. 243. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 2004, p. 1. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 2003, p. 242. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 240–1. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 248. Foucault, Power/knowledge, 1980, p. 39. Foucault, ‘Questions to Michel Foucault on Geography’, 1980, p. 116; ‘Questions on Geography’, Power/knowledge, 1980, p. 68. 81. Foucault, Power/knowledge, 1980, p. 122.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

94 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

4/12/11

09:58

Page 94

BORDER POLITICS

Ibid., p. 72. Ibid. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 2004, p. 277. Lenin quoted in Abu-Manneh, ‘The illusions of Empire’, 2003, p. 162. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 2004, p. xi. Ibid., p. xi. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, xiv. Ibid. Ibid., p. xv. Ibid. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. xii. Negri, ‘The Crisis of Political Space’, 2003, p. 190. Ibid., p. 191. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, p. xii. Ibid. Negri, ‘The Crisis of Political Space’, 2003, p. 191. Ibid., pp. 192–5. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, p. xii. Ibid., p. xiii. Negri, ‘The Crisis of Political Space’, 2003, p. 195. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, p. 187. Ibid. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 190. Hardt and Dumm, ‘Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy’, 2004, p. 172. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, pp. 198–200. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 330. Ibid., p. 331. Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., p. 332–3. Ibid., pp. 336–7. Laffey and Weldes, ‘Representing the International’, 2004, p. 127.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 95

Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical–Political Order 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

Ibid., p. 129. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, p. xiv. Walker, ‘On the Immanence/imminence of Empire’, 2002, p. 341. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 342–3. Ibid., p. 343. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 343–4. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., p. 337.

95

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 96

Chapter 4 THE GENERALISED BIOPOLITICAL BORDER: SECURITY AS THE NORMAL TECHNIQUE OF GOVERNMENT

In this chapter I will argue that there are potentially useful critical resources for developing alternative border imaginaries to the conventional inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state to be found in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The discussion begins with a detailed exegesis of some of Agamben’s key arguments, building on the thought of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt discussed in Chapter 3, as articulated in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [1998], Means Without End: Notes on Politics [2000], State of Exception [2005] and several key essays and interviews. By now, Agamben’s work has been taken up by a range of writers in politics, IR, and related disciplines dealing with questions of: sovereign power, violence and resistance in the context of the ‘War on Terror’; 1 practices associated with security as the new paradigm of global governance; 2 trauma, time and practices of memorialisation; 3 migration and patterns of global movement; 4 the politics of humanitarianism and human rights; 5 and debates about the rule of law and sovereign exceptionalism.6 Agamben’s treatment of sovereignty and the generalisation of exceptional practices associated with it, together with secondary appropriations of such ideas, have not gone without criticism.7 Several departures will be made from current interpretations of Agamben’s work, however, in respect of his central concept of ‘bare life’, the importance of what he calls ‘a logic of the field’ and, perhaps most importantly, the implications of his oeuvre for an understanding of political space. Building upon this distinctive reading, I will argue that Agamben’s reconceptualisation of the way we think about the limits 96

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 97

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

97

of sovereign power leads to what I call the concept of the ‘generalised biopolitical border’, which challenges many assumptions of the modern geopolitical imaginary. POLITICS, LIFE, AND SOVEREIGN POWER Over the past two decades, Agamben has critiqued the dominant treatment of the relationship between politics and life in political philosophy.8 According to Agamben, this treatment has been shaped by the thought of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. At the heart of Aristotle’s conception of the state is the distinction between ‘natural life’ and the ‘good life’. Agamben claims that this distinction reflects the way in which the Greeks had no single word for ‘life’. Rather, he claims, two terms were used in its place: zoe¯ (the biological fact of life) and bios (political or qualified life).9 Agamben notes that Aristotle’s opposition between the biological fact of life and qualified life and his distinction between private and public spheres have had a lasting impact on the political tradition of the West. Nevertheless, Agamben argues that these insights concerning the relationship between politics and life have largely been assumed rather than interrogated within political thought. For Agamben, however, one important exception is the work of Michel Foucault. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Power [1976] Foucault refers to the process by which biological life (zoe¯ ) has become included within the modalities of state power (bios) as the transition from politics to biopolitics. As we saw in the previous chapter, the term biopolitics is used to describe the emergence during the seventeenth century of attempts to govern whole populations through the institutionalisation of medicine, the use of vaccinations and other methods of curing and preventing disease. Foucault argues that, whereas for Aristotle life and politics are treated as separate, biopolitics calls into question the idea of life itself: ‘modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question’.10 In other words the entry of zoe¯ into bios constitutes a fundamental shift in the relationship between politics and life where the simple fact of life is no longer excluded from political calculations and mechanisms but resides at the heart of modern politics. At certain points in Homo Sacer it seems as though Agamben agrees fully with Foucault’s historical schematisation. For example, in the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

98

4/12/11

09:58

Page 98

BORDER POLITICS

introduction, Agamben writes: ‘the entry of zoe¯ into the sphere of the polis […] constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought’.11 In a crucial sense, however, Agamben makes a different claim from Foucault’s about the historical-philosophical structure of the West. He argues that ‘the Foucauldian thesis will […] have to be corrected, or at least completed’ because a historical shift to biopolitics has not actually taken place.12 Rather, ‘the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’.13 In other words, whereas Foucault reads the movement from politics to biopolitics as a historical transformation involving the inclusion of zoe¯ in the polis, for Agamben the political realm is originally biopolitical. On Agamben’s view, the West’s conception of politics has always been biopolitical but this relation between politics and life has become even more visible in the context of the modern state and its sovereign practices.14 According to Agamben, the originally biopolitical element of politics can be detected in Aristotle’s definition of the polis in terms of the exclusion of zoe¯ from bios. The exclusion of zoe¯ in this context is not entirely ‘exclusive’. This is because zoe¯ remains in a fundamental relation with bios. Indeed, zoe¯ is included in bios through its very exclusion from it. As Jenny Edkins puts it, ‘natural life or zoe¯ is there as that which is excluded, the outlaw that haunts the sovereign order: it is thus included by the very process of exclusion’.15 In other words we are not dealing with a straightforward exclusion but rather an ‘inclusive exclusion’. To explain what he means by inclusive exclusion, Agamben introduces the notion of the ‘ban’ which is borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy.16 If someone is banned from a community, he or she continues to have a relationship with that group of people: it is precisely because of the ban that there continues to be a connection. The figure of the banned person complicates the notion of a clear separation between inclusion and exclusion: he or she who is excluded is included by virtue of their very exclusion. The idea of an inclusive exclusion is fundamental to Agamben’s thought because, as we shall see, it is central to his account of the Western paradigm of sovereignty. Agamben’s approach to sovereignty is influenced by Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’.17 According to Schmitt, as discussed in Chapter 3, such a decision declares that a state of emergency exists and suspends the rule of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 99

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

99

law to allow for whatever measures are deemed to be necessary. Agamben, however, also invokes Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty that: ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule’.18 Agamben draws on Benjamin’s insight, written in a period when emergency powers were repeatedly invoked during the Weimar Republic era in Germany, in an attempt to move the notion of the exception away from the issue of emergency provisions towards a more relational and original function within the Western political paradigm.19 The diagnosis of the relationship between politics, life and sovereign power put forward by Agamben brings together Nancy’s concept of the ban, Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty, and Benjamin’s notion of the permanence of the state of the exception. For Agamben, the activity of sovereign power relies on a decision about whether certain forms of life are worthy of living. Such a decision, which is a sovereign cut or dividing practice, produces an expendable form of life that Agamben calls ‘bare life’. The sovereign decision bans bare life from the legal and political institutions to which citizens normally have access. This ban renders bare life amenable to the sway of sovereign power and allows for exceptional practices such as torture, rendition or execution. Bare life is neither of what the Greeks referred to as zoe¯ nor bios. Rather, it is a form of life that is produced in a zone of indistinction between the two. On this basis, Agamben argues that it is necessary to isolate and analyse the way in which the classical distinction between zoe¯ and bios is blurred in contemporary political life: ‘Living in the state of exception that has now become the rule has […] meant this: our private body has now become indistinguishable from our body politic.’ 20 Thus, elaborating on his ‘correction’ of the Foucauldian thesis, Agamben claims that the key feature of modern politics is not the simple inclusion of zoe¯ in bios, but rather: The decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe¯, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.21 This ‘zone of irreducible indistinction’ is precisely that which sovereign

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

100

4/12/11

09:58

Page 100

BORDER POLITICS

power relies upon producing to sustain its own operation. What Agamben ultimately seeks to show is that the production of bare life is the originary (if concealed) activity of sovereign power. Before dealing with this central claim about the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity, however, it is first necessary to unpack and illustrate aspects of Agamben’s central thesis. His understanding and usage of key terms such as ‘zones of indistinction’ and ‘bare life’ are not always clear or even consistent: it must be stressed that there is a need to take them as areas for debate rather than as simple givens.

The politics of indistinction: towards an alternative topological register The recent work of Claudio Minca has pointed to the way in which, despite Agamben’s well-known ideas about sovereignty and the generalised state of exception (to which the analysis will return), relatively scant attention has been paid to the spatial dimensions of his thought.22 According to Minca’s formulation, there can be ‘no politics, and thus no political analysis, without a theory of space’ and it is precisely the spatial-ontological dimensions of Agamben’s work that deserve closer attention when thinking about the possibilities for developing alternative border imaginaries to the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state.23 Agamben contends that thinking in terms of borders, separations and distinctions can be unhelpful when trying to understand the relationship between politics and life, and this contention is crucial when considering his overarching perspective. In an interview published in the German Law Review, Agamben argues for an approach to political analysis that allows for the identification of indistinction: [W]e need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances. The polarity is present and acts at each point of the field. Then you may suddenly have zones of indecidability or indifference. The state of exception is one of those zones.24 Agamben’s reference to the need for a ‘logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances’, is highly significant. The development of the concept of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

09:58

Page 101

101

the field in physical theory is most commonly associated with the work of Albert Einstein. In his 1905 paper ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’, Einstein first articulated the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’. Classical approaches to mechanics had formerly relied upon a conception of space that derived from Euclidean mathematics. On this view, space was seen as the relationship between points, lines and planes which were idealisations of solid bodies. The premise of the ‘Special Theory’ is that the relationship between space and time is not absolute but relative and contingent. According to this model, space-time is mutually interdependent and forms an immanent field of forces within which substances and events consist of the ‘adventures of electrons and protons’.25 On this basis, there are no separate and autonomous realms of value and meaning outside the field: only the streams and distributions of energy that comprise it. As Stanford Kwinter puts it, Einstein’s immanent field of forces consists of ‘clusters of action, affectivity, and matter’: it is a regime that ‘organises, allies, and distributes bodies, materials, movements, and techniques in space, while simultaneously controlling and developing the temporal relations between them’.26 The key point about the notion of the field is that entities within it are not mutually exclusive phenomena but physically continuous within their milieu of interaction.27 Because entities collapse into and interpenetrate one another the concept of the border – or the notion of separate ‘bordered’ entities – makes little sense according to this paradigm. Thus, thinking through strict binary oppositions is unhelpful, and an alternative topology is called for: one that reads the terms of a binary ‘not as “dichotomies” but as “di-polarities”’.28 Agamben illustrates the different topological register implied by a logic of the field with reference to the Möbius strip (see figure 2).29 The Möbius strip is a surface with only one side so that what is inside and what is outside enters into a zone of irreducible indistinction: what is ‘presupposed as external […] now reappears […] in the inside’.30 This zone of indistinction between inside and outside remains otherwise obscured when relying on a straightforward inside/ outside topology. The alternative topological approach represented by a logic of the field brings this zone of indistinction into relief, however: it allows for the identification of fuzziness, ambiguity and lack of clarity. The importance of this alternative topology in Agamben’s work should not be underestimated for it provides a spatial theory that

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 102

102

BORDER POLITICS

Figure 2 Möbius strip

informs his analysis of the exercise and limits of sovereign power, subjectivity and the political space or nomos of the West: ‘It is precisely this topological zone of indistinction […] that we must try to fix under our gaze.’ 31 As I have already noted, Agamben applies a logic of the field to an analysis of the relationship between politics and life by focusing on the classical distinction between zoe¯ and bios: I find it much less interesting to insist on the distinction […] than to question the interweaving. I want to understand how the system operates. And the system is always double, it works by means of an operation. Not only as private/public, but also the house and the city, the exception and the rule, to reign and to govern, etc.32 The problem with continuing to think in terms of borders, separations and distinctions, in the ways that the modern geopolitical imaginary and a conventional logic of inside/outside do, is that it is a mode of thought ignorant of such blurring or fuzziness. Further still, one of the chilling implications of Agamben’s argument is that, because most accounts of global politics fail to recognise the link between sovereign power and the production of indistinction between zoe¯ and bios, there is an ‘uncanny affinity between the horrors of the camp and the political philosophy we may turn to’ when trying to comprehend – if not resist – instances of sovereign practice.33 According to Agamben, the ‘locus par excellence’ of the impossibility of upholding the classical

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 103

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

103

distinction between zoe¯ and bios, and the production of bare life, is the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay.34 On this basis, a return to the treatment of detainees held in Guantánamo offers a useful backdrop against which Agamben’s notion of bare life can be elucidated further.

Bare life in Guantánamo Bay Despite the centrality of the concept of bare life in Agamben’s work, it nevertheless remains elusive and contentious. The term ‘bare life’ is Daniel Heller-Roazen’s translation of ‘nuda vita’, contained in the subtitle of Agamben’s original Homo Sacer: Il Potere Sovrano e la Nuda Vita. Not all scholars agree with this translation, however. For example, Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino translate ‘nuda vita’ as ‘naked life’.35 As such, there is sufficient ambiguity for multiple readings of bare life to emerge. Many writers who draw on Agamben refer to bare life as if it were the same as zoe¯ (i.e. the sweet, natural, reproductive life of the private sphere).36 Yet, contrary to this view, it is possible to read bare life as the form of life produced immanently by sovereign power in a zone of indistinction between zoe¯ and bios. Such a reading seems to be more faithful to Agamben’s argument: The foundation (of the modern city from Hobbes to Rousseau) is not an event achieved once and for all but is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision. What is more the latter refers immediately to the life (and not the free will) of citizens, which thus appears as the originary political element. […] Yet this life is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe¯ of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer […], a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture.37 In other words, bare life does not exist before or outside sovereign power relations. It is not something we are born with and can be stripped down to: ‘life conceived as a biological minimum […] to which we are all reducible’.38 Bare life is not zoe¯: any attempt at qualifying life as ‘bare’ or ‘good’ is a move away from zoe¯. To suggest otherwise implies that bare life is something we are all born with whereas, for Agamben, bare life is something that is actively produced

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

104

4/12/11

09:58

Page 104

BORDER POLITICS

by sovereign power for sovereign power: ‘bare life is a product of the machine and not something that preexists it’.39 Once the concept of bare life is untied from zoe¯, then, far from a universalistic conception of subjectivity, it can be interpreted as a form of life whose identity is always in question. The United States government classifies detainees held in Guantánamo as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ but this is not a term recognised by the United Nations or any other international institution.40 Such a classification itself constitutes ‘arbitrary deprivation of the right to personal liberty’ since it creates a deliberate legal and political ambiguity surrounding detainees’ status.41 In contravention of Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, and despite repeated calls from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), none of the detainees has been declared a prisoner of war nor presented before a competent tribunal to establish who or what they are.42 It is precisely this production of a deliberate uncertainty surrounding the status of detainees that allows for the indefinite use of exceptional measures against them. By referring to detainees as unlawful enemy combatants they are taken outside of international legal and political frameworks: citizens who commit crimes are treated as ‘lawful criminals’; non-citizens scramble this conventional logic.43 These conventional logics and frameworks, reflecting dominant notions about what form of life is eligible for protection, constitute a juridical–political culture in which it is possible for some ‘humans’ not to be treated as such. As ‘pure killing machines’, the detainees in Guantánamo are not deemed to be ‘humans with cognitive function’ that are ‘entitled to trials, to due process, to knowing and understanding a charge against them’.44 Rather, as Butler argues, ‘they are something less than human, and yet – somehow – they assume a human form’.45 Indeed, the subject of sovereign power in Guantánamo is precisely ‘the subject who is no subject, neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death’.46 As such, guards who stand watch over the detainees in Guantánamo confront a peculiar form of ‘human life’. Stripped of political and legal status, it bears no resemblance to Aristotle’s conception of man as ‘politikon zo¯on’ in the public sphere or bios. Yet, importantly as far as the interpretation of Agamben advanced here is concerned, neither does this life in any simple way conform to what

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

Page 105

105

the Greeks would have called zoe¯, understood as natural reproductive life confined to the private sphere. Rather, the life confronted by the guards is a life that scrambles these Aristotelian co-ordinates: we no longer have any idea of the classical separation between zoe¯ and bios in this context.47 It is a bare life produced by the sovereign practices of the camp that is caught in a zone of indistinction between zoe¯ and bios: a life that is mute and undifferentiated. For Agamben, such a life belongs to homo sacer or sacred man: a figure in Roman law whose very existence is in a state of exception defined by the sovereign. The figure of homo sacer is sacred in the sense that it can be killed but not sacrificed and is both constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Moreover, as the state of exception is less anomalous and more a permanent characteristic, according to Agamben we all potentially run the risk of becoming bare life: we are all ‘(virtually) homines sacri’.48

Assessing Agamben Agamben’s claim that we are ‘all (virtually) homines sacri’ raises some interesting and important questions that are not dealt with explicitly in his oeuvre: What is meant by the idea that we are all ‘virtually’ bare life? Does the concept of bare life allow for any form of differentiation? What are the limitations of adopting Agamben’s logic? How might it be elaborated and/or improved upon? The word ‘virtually’ – though in brackets – seems to do a lot of work in Agamben’s claim that ‘we are all (virtually) homines sacri’.49 According to Deleuze, the virtual is not something that is somehow lacking in ‘reality’ but rather ‘something that is engaged in a process of actualisation’.50 This is useful when considering Agamben’s claim in greater depth. It points to the way in which the production of bare life is very much a dynamic process: a process of ‘becoming’ in Deleuzian terms.51 While political structures certainly condition the virtuality of bare life, this production happens immanently. In other words, like all forms of subjectivity, it is never fixed or static but ephemeral. Under biopolitical conditions we are not born as bare life but born with a capacity to be produced as bare life owing to the relationship between our lives and law. Although Butler is highly indebted to Agamben, she argues that this universality exposes an area of weakness in his understanding of subjectivity. Butler’s chief criticism of Agamben is that the claim ‘we

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

106

4/12/11

09:58

Page 106

BORDER POLITICS

are all (virtually) homines sacri’ does not tell us how ‘power functions differentially’ among populations.52 Focusing on issues of race and ethnicity, Butler argues that the generality of Agamben’s claim fails to appreciate the ways in which ‘the systematic management and derealization of populations function to support and extend the claims of a sovereignty accountable to no law’.53 For Butler, certain populations are more likely to be produced as bare life than others. Although security warnings issued to citizens do not involve racial profiling, Butler suggests that the creation of an ‘objectless panic’ all too often ‘translates […] into suspicion of all dark-skinned peoples, especially those who are Arab, or appear to look so to a population not always versed in making visual distinctions’.54 As such, Butler’s criticism presses Agamben’s Homo Sacer on its tendency to generalise and oversimplify the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity: a charge that other critics have also recently made. William Connolly advances similar critiques of Agamben’s account of the logic of sovereignty.55 Connolly’s main objections are twofold. Firstly, according to Connolly, Agamben assumes that there was once a separation between zoe¯ and bios: ‘what a joke […] [e]very way of life involves the infusion of norms, judgements, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private and public levels’.56 Hence, while Connolly accepts the way in which ‘new technologies of infusion’ have ‘intensified’ biopolitical life, he maintains that ‘the shift is not as radical as Agamben makes it out to be’.57 Secondly, Agamben’s answer to the problem of sovereignty is to transcend it altogether. For Connolly, Agamben’s approach to the problem of sovereignty is incommensurable with that problem: ‘biocultural life exceeds any textbook logic because of the non-logical character of its materiality […] [it] is more messy, layered, and complex than any logical analysis can capture’.58 On this basis, Connolly arrives at the damning conclusion that ‘Agamben displays the hubris of academic intellectualism when he encloses political culture within a tightly defined logic’.59 The joint concern of Butler and Connolly is that Agamben’s analysis of the concept of sovereignty does not take into account the complexity of the issues at stake. Such a concern might also arise in the light of Jacques Derrida’s multifarious warnings about the nature of the sovereign operation. For Derrida sovereignty is both ‘silent’ and ‘unavowable’.60 Any attempt at defining sovereignty invokes as part of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

09:58

Page 107

107

the definition the very concept we are attempting to define. To confer sense on sovereignty is to universalise it within language, subject it to rules, and bring it within a code of law which, according to Derrida, compromises the exceptionality that characterises it.61 On this basis, Derrida argues that ‘the identity of sovereignty is always in question’ because sovereignty ‘has no identity, is not self, for itself, toward itself, near itself’.62 In this way, sovereignty ‘keeps itself in the night of the secret’.63 A Derridean perspective highlights the frailty of any attempt to diagnose the actuality of sovereignty. After all this actuality is not somehow given but actively produced: ‘sorted, invested, and performatively interpreted by a range of hierarchising and selective procedures’.64 From this perspective, the concern would also be that Agamben treats the problematic of sovereignty as if it were something that could be tamed or even identified clearly in the first instance. Running throughout these criticisms of Agamben is a worry that his perspective ultimately closes off questions about subjectivity, sovereignty and politics more generally. At the heart of this critique is the complaint that the notion of bare life is too homogenising and thus too simple to appreciate the detail and complexity of the production of differentiated subjectivities. On the one hand, with its seemingly universalistic pretensions, the notion of bare life might appear too sweeping to allow for nuanced analyses of subjectivity. On the other hand, I want to suggest, the sting of this criticism is largely neutralised once the notion of bare life is untied from the concept of zoe¯. If bare life is treated as precisely an indistinct form of subjectivity that is produced immanently by sovereign power for sovereign power then the undecidability of the figure of homo sacer is brought into relief. This move allows for a differentiated approach to the production of subjectivities under biopolitical conditions because it does not fix bare life as some sort of given that pre-exists sovereign power. On this basis, bare life is a form of subjectivity whose borders are always rendered undecidable by sovereign power; it is a form of subjectivity whose identity is always in question; and, therefore, it is a form of subjectivity whose inhabitation of a zone of indistinction requires different modes of political analysis summed up by Agamben in his reference to a ‘logic of the field’. Such a logic, which privileges analysis of the production of zones of indistinction, not only has implications for the way we consider the production of subjectivities in world politics. It also has significant ramifications for the way we might

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 108

108

BORDER POLITICS

reconceptualise the limits of sovereign power and develop alternative border imaginaries.

RECONCEPTUALISING THE LIMITS OF SOVEREIGN POWER Homo Sacer ends with the provocative conclusion that: Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe¯ and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city.65 This section explores Agamben’s conclusion further before moving towards an outline of its implications for the way we might reconceptualise the limits of sovereign power. First, it is necessary to return to Agamben’s treatment of the concept of sovereignty in greater depth, especially in terms of his move to generalise the state of exception as a permanent feature of the Western paradigm of government. Second, from here I will argue that it is possible to analyse what might be called the space of the exception, not as something localised but as rather more generalised and diffused. Third, such a space can be characterised as something resembling a ‘generalised border’ where exceptional measures, practices and characteristics formerly associated with borders between states in the conventional sense become routinised and dispersed throughout global juridical–political space.

The generalised exception As we have already seen, Agamben’s approach to sovereignty is indebted to Schmitt’s theory of the decision on the exception. Embellishing this theory, however, Agamben invokes Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt in an attempt to move the notion of the exception away from the issue of emergency provisions towards a more relational and originary function within the Western political paradigm. In this way, for Agamben, Benjamin’s engagement with Schmitt ‘proves the necessary and, even today, indispensable premise of every inquiry into sovereignty’.66 It is instructive to recall that Schmitt’s theory of exception was in part attempting to neutralise

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

09:58

Page 109

109

Benjamin’s concept of divine violence outside the law outlined in his 1921 essay ‘Critique of Violence’.67 Through the concept of the exception, Schmitt was able to show how there is no pure violence outside the law: the exception is a mechanism by which operations outside the law can nevertheless remain part of the law. Yet, in his ‘Eighth Thesis on the Concept of History’, Benjamin responded to Schmitt’s theory of exception by arguing that: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that accords with this fact. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about the real […] state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.68 According to Agamben, the ‘Eighth Thesis’ is the ‘decisive document in the Benjamin–Schmitt dossier’ because it effectively ‘[puts] Schmitt’s thesis in check’.69 Benjamin’s counter-argument, while not dismissing Schmitt’s thesis entirely, points to the way in which the Third Reich thrived on confusing the difference between norm and exception, law and fact, and order and anomie.70 It is precisely Benjamin’s identification of the role of this confusion in the Nazi state that inspires Agamben to attempt then to reconfigure the activity of sovereign power in terms of the creation of zones of indistinction: ‘the essential point […] is that a threshold of undecidability is produced at which factum and ius fade into each other’.71 In his brief history of the state of exception, Agamben emplaces Benjamin’s ‘Eighth Thesis’ within a broader tradition of early twentiethcentury thought dealing with the transformation of democratic regimes during the two world wars: H. Tingsten’s Les Pleins Pouvoirs [1934], F. Watkin’s The Problem of Constitutional Dictatorship [1940], C. Friedrich’s Constitutional Government and Democracy [1941], and C. Rossiter’s Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies [1948] all trace the expansion of the powers of the executives of warring states throughout this period. One of the cases Agamben draws upon is the post-1914 British legal system which witnessed the generalising of formerly exceptional measures within the state apparatus. After Britain declared war on Germany, the government asked Parliament to approve laws without debate. On

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

110

4/12/11

09:58

Page 110

BORDER POLITICS

4 August 1914 the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was passed giving the government powers to regulate the economy and limit citizens’ rights. Later, parliamentary activity virtually ceased altogether and on 29 October 1920 the Emergency Powers Act was introduced in which Article One stated: If at any time it appears to His Majesty that any action has been taken or is immediately threatened by any persons or body of such persons of such a nature and on so extensive a scale as to be calculated, by interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel, or light, or with the means of locomotion, to deprive the community, or any substantial portion of the community, of the essentials of life, His Majesty may, by proclamation (hereinafter referred to as a proclamation of emergency), declare that a state of emergency exists.72 For Agamben, Article One of the Emergency Powers Act constitutes a decisive event in British legal history because it established the principle of the state of exception within the juridical–political order. Since then, Agamben claims, ‘the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones’ like Britain.73 In other words, the state of exception has increasingly appeared as what might be referred to as the ‘dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’.74 In support of this view, which resembles something like an ‘unstoppable global civil war’, Agamben refers to contemporary sovereign practices that blur the otherwise taken-for-granted threshold between democracy and absolutism.75 One example is President George W. Bush’s ‘Military Order’ authorising the ‘indefinite detention’ and ‘trial by military commissions’ of non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities. This Order, as we have already seen, works to secure sovereign power by blurring the legal and political status of a suspected individual thereby producing a ‘legally unnameable and unclassifiable being’.76 It is possible to identify something of a tension in Agamben’s account of the history of the state of exception, which can be summarised as a question of intensity or structure. On the one hand, Agamben sometimes talks about the becoming-general of the state of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

Page 111

111

exception in the West as if it were a gradual turning of the screw since World War I, through fascism, to our contemporary conjecture.77 If this reading is adopted, then there are grounds for drawing parallels between Agamben’s reading of modernity and the reading offered by Hardt and Negri in the previous chapter. In turn, this would open up Agamben’s perspective to the critique Walker makes of the troublesome privileging of immanentism that sees history as a long march to borderlessness. On the other hand, however, Agamben also emphasises on many more occasions that the transformation of the state of exception into a paradigm of government is not a modern innovation but a feature of Western politics: it is the constitutive paradigm of the juridical–political order.78 Agamben argues that the years since World War I have seen the ‘testing and honing’ of this paradigm of government that is in a fundamental sense an originary aspect of the juridical–political life of Western societies: What the ark of power contains at its centre is the state of exception – but this is essentially an empty space, in which human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life.79 In other words, as Didier Bigo usefully puts it: The state of emergency in which we live is not an exceptional moment, limited in object, space and time, but the norm, or more exactly it is the perpetuation of the emergency as a rule, as a form of prolonged state of exception.80 Some readers will no doubt be displeased with the apparent tension above, although the extent to which one must choose between intensity or structure as if they were mutually exclusive is debatable. If the production of bare life is not a new or particularly recent phenomenon, as Agamben maintains and illustrates with reference to the figure of homo sacer in Roman law, then the exception must be seen as a fundamental feature of Western politics. As I will go on to argue, however, what has changed within this overarching framework is the historically contingent character of both the method and the location of the production of bare life. In this way, reflecting Agamben’s commitment to a ‘logic of the field’, it is also possible to read intensity and structure not as dichotomous but as fundamentally interrelated.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

112

4/12/11

09:58

Page 112

BORDER POLITICS

The generalised space of the exception Agamben argues that what is at stake in the sovereign exception is the ‘creation and definition of the very space in which the juridical– political order can have validity’.81 He also claims, however, that such activity, which constitutes the sovereign nomos according to Schmitt, is not simply the taking of land but the taking of an outside or exception. As discussed in Chapter 3, interstate borders, typically understood in terms of the delimitation of sovereignty at the outer edge of sovereign territory according to the modern geopolitical imaginary, might be seen as exceptional spaces: an undecidable zone of anomie excluded from the ‘normal’ juridical–political space of the state but nevertheless an integral part of that space (in fact, the very condition of its possibility). Yet, for Agamben, the constitutive outside of sovereign territory is not a space that is to be found fixed at the edge in a geographical sense. Rather, Agamben sees the constitutive outside as something interior to the juridical–political order itself. According to Agamben, the constitutive outside of sovereign territory is the generalised state of exception that brings together law and life since there is no fundamental relationship between the two. In other words, the constitutive outside refers to the decision on life itself. As such, if we are to consider the spatiality of the constitutive outside, it makes more sense to think of this as occupying a far less localised terrain than that associated with traditional state borders. Instead, Agamben’s work challenges us to resituate the constitutive outside of sovereign territory in a far more generalised way. To reiterate Agamben’s central thesis, the sovereign move is not a simple exclusion. Rather, it consists of an inclusive exclusion through the decision on the status of different forms of life: one that blurs the categories of zoe¯ and bios thereby creating a zone of indistinction between the two. On this view, sovereignty is presented as an activity that perpetually distinguishes between politically qualified life on the one hand (that is, life with juridical–political status that deserves to be lived), and life that is a mere biological fact on the other hand (that is, life without juridical–political status). ‘Bare life’, which is neither zoe¯ nor bios, inhabits this zone of indistinction. Sovereign power relies upon the production and inclusive exclusion of bare life against which ‘the human’ as the politically qualified life of the polis is made possible. Through the inclusive exclusion of bare life, sovereign power thus

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

09:58

Page 113

113

establishes the constitutive outside of territory in which the juridical– political order can be said to have validity. Agamben seizes on the emergence of concentration camps in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historically associated with the state of exception and martial law, to illustrate how the simple dichotomies between inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, bios and zoe¯ fail to hold in the final analysis. For Agamben, the space of the camp is fundamentally paradoxical: ‘the camp is a piece of territory that is placed outside the normal juridical order’ and yet ‘it is not simply an external space’.82 The camp excludes what is captured inside which, as an inclusive exclusion, blurs conventional spatial distinctions between internal and external, inside and outside and so on. Because law is suspended in the camp and arbitrary or exceptional decisions on the status of life become the rule, Agamben argues that the camp represents: ‘the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realised – a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation’.83 As such, people in camps, as we have seen in the context of Guantánamo, ‘move about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit’.84 To some extent, the camp is another figure that is characterised somewhat ambiguously in Agamben’s work. The camp can be read as a historically contingent manifestation of the operations of sovereign power: ‘the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule’.85 For Agamben, however, the camp is not understood as an anomaly or a merely historical fact.86 Rather, he argues that the camp is ‘in some sense […] the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we live’.87 In other words, as a spatial arrangement of the state of exception in which bare life is produced in a zone of indistinction between zoe¯ and bios, the camp is itself a structure: ‘if sovereign power is founded in the ability to decide on the state of exception, the camp is the structure in which the state of exception is permanently realised’.88 On this basis, Agamben claims that the camp is symptomatic of the workings of the juridical–political system of Western sovereign biopolitics. The camp reveals something fundamental to the Western paradigm born of the exception: the attempt to materialise the state of exception and create a space in which bare life and juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction.89 Hence, while there may be few camps such as Guantánamo,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

114

4/12/11

09:58

Page 114

BORDER POLITICS

the logic upon which these places rest can be observed in territory or space conventionally defined as the ‘normal’ interior of the state. Elaborating upon Agamben’s work, the next section advances the concept of the ‘generalised biopolitical border’ to try to capture the production and existence of these zones of indistinction: a concept that offers promise for an alternative conceptualisation of the limits of sovereign power to that assumed by the modern geopolitical imaginary.

The concept of the generalised biopolitical border On the one hand, the production of bare life in zones of indistinction is most visible in contemporary camps specifically designated for that purpose (not only Guantánamo, but, for example: Bagram and Kandahar air bases in Afghanistan; Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in Iraq; the Baxter immigration facility in southern Australia; the new Sodhexo-run detention centre near Heathrow; and various so-called CIA ‘black sites’ in Eastern Europe). At these sites, as I have shown against the backdrop of Guantánamo, exceptional practices have become routinised and bare life is produced through the blurring of zoe¯ and bios. On the other hand, Agamben points to the way in which the production of zones of indistinction, where exceptional activities become the rule, is more and more widespread in global politics. Indeed, the notion of the generalised space of exception points to the way in which characteristics usually associated with the edges, margins, or outer-lying areas of sovereign space gradually blur with what is conventionally taken to be the ‘normality’ of that space. Whereas the space of the exception was once localised in spaces such as the camps, Agamben implies that in more recent times it has become increasingly generalised in contemporary political life: ‘the camp, which is now firmly settled inside [the nation-state], is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet’.90 In Homo Sacer Agamben refers to zones d’attentes in French airports (where foreigners seeking refugee status are detained) as an example of the way in which the structure of the camp permeates everyday life: In […] these cases, an apparently innocuous space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

09:58

Page 115

115

the atrocities are committed depends not on law but the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.91 Under biopolitical conditions in which ‘the paradigm of security has become the normal technique of government’, Agamben argues that the blurring of the citizen and the bare life of homo sacer is not encumbered by traditional limits: ‘Living in the state of exception that has now become the rule has […] meant this: our private body has now become indistinguishable from our body politic’.92 On the contrary, as Claudio Minca has put it, there has been a ‘normalisation of a series of geographies of exceptionalism in Western societies’ throughout everyday life.93 By now there is a growing literature that illustrates the generalised state of exception to which Agamben refers. Sociologists Carsten Laustsen and Bülent Dikken, for example, have attempted to show that the camp is the prototypical social unit by looking at, inter alia, rape camps, gated communities, sex tourism and theme parks.94 Laustsen and Dikken largely reiterate Agamben’s argument, but draw novel, if controversial, parallels between concentration camps and what they call ‘liberatory’ spaces such as Ibiza.95 A more substantive application and embellishment of Agamben, demonstrative of the scope of his work beyond the political structures of the West, is offered by Achille Mbembe. In ‘Necropolitics’, Mbembe reads colonial occupation as a matter of seizing and asserting control over a geographical area through the production of bare life in zones of indistinction.96 His core argument is that colonisation not only relies upon disciplinary and biopolitical modalities of power but also on a third dimension: the ‘necropolitical’. Under conditions of ‘necropower’ the status of the living dead is attributed to swathes of populations occupying/ constituting ‘death worlds’. Examples of such death worlds include colonies in Africa and the Middle East where ‘the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner’.97 According to Mbembe: ‘colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political stand side by side or alternate with each other’. On this basis, he continues: ‘the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of juridical order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilisation”’.98 Mbembe’s reading of colonial occupation as the production of bare life in zones of indistinction or ‘death worlds’

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

116

4/12/11

09:58

Page 116

BORDER POLITICS

points to the inadequacy of the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state. His account of the necropolitical in Africa emphasises how the establishment of death worlds, rather than borders between states, delimits sovereign power. Many African states cannot claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of force; there is little or no monopoly on territorial borders; and conflict entails urban militias and/or private armies more so than the mobilisation of sovereign subjects as citizens who respect each other as enemies. Consequently, Mbembe argues that ‘it makes little sense to insist on distinctions between “internal” and “external” political realms’.99 While Mbembe draws attention, however, to the way in which Agamben’s line of argument (or one that is indebted to it) challenges conventional thinking in terms of the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state, he does not take this point any further. By contrast, I want to focus on the implications of Agamben’s central thesis, that the structure of the camp is the ‘hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we live’, for the way we might think about that ‘political space’. Instead of viewing the limits of sovereign power as somehow spatially fixed at the outer edge of the state, Agamben reconceptualises these limits in terms of a decision or speech act about whether certain life is life worth living or life that is expendable. Such a decision performatively produces and secures the borders of political community as the politically qualified life of the citizen is defined against the bare life of homo sacer. On this view, the concept of the border of the state is substituted by the sovereign decision to produce some life as bare life: it is precisely this sovereign cut or dividing practice, one that can effectively happen anywhere, that constitutes the ‘original spatialisation of sovereign power’.100 Moreover, such a decision can be read as a security practice because the production of bare life works to shore up notions of who and what ‘we’ are: notions, for example, that are commonly mobilised as part of an array of responses to perceived threats of terrorism.101 Although Agamben does not refer to it in his work, one way of capturing this alternative border imaginary is what I call the concept of the generalised biopolitical border. The concept of the generalised biopolitical border refers to the global archipelago of zones of indistinction in which sovereign power produces the bare life it needs to sustain itself and notions of sovereign community. Here, following Eyal Weizman, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ is used to describe

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 117

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

117

… a multiplicity of discrete extraterritorial zones, the spatial expression of a series of ‘states of emergency’, or states of exception that are either created through the process of law [through which law is in fact severely undermined or annulled] or that appear de facto within them.102 Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border unties an analysis of the operation of sovereign power from the territorial confines of the state and relocates such an analysis in the context of a global terrain that spans ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ space. With its focus on the production of zones of indistinction the concept of the generalised biopolitical border can therefore be read as a response to those who call for alternative border imaginaries to the conventional inside/outside model underpinned by the concept of the border of the state. The concept of the generalised biopolitical border points to the way in which bordering practices are rather more diffused throughout society than the modern geopolitical imaginary implies. In this sense, it reflects Balibar’s observation that borders are being ‘multiplied and reduced in their localization, […] thinned out and doubled, […] no longer the shores of politics but […] the space of the political itself ’.103 The case of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes illustrates the dynamics captured by the concept of the generalised biopolitical border and the changing method and location of the production of bare life. GENERALISED BORDER POLITICS: THE CASE OF THE SHOOTING OF JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES At 10.05 on 22 July 2005 UK anti-terrorist officers killed Jean Charles de Menezes on board a stationary underground train at Stockwell Station in South London by firing eleven rounds at close range (seven bullets entered his head, one bullet entered his shoulder and three bullets missed).104 Five-and-a-half hours after the shooting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair issued a statement in which he claimed that the operation had been ‘directly linked’ to ongoing investigations into the attempted bombings in Central London the previous day.105 At that time, Ian Blair announced that the person shot dead at Stockwell had been acting suspiciously and was challenged by police but refused to obey instructions.106 In a statement the following day, however, the Commissioner announced that a

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

118

4/12/11

09:58

Page 118

BORDER POLITICS

‘mistake’ had been made and that there was no evidence to connect Menezes with the attempted bombings or any other ‘terrorist’ activity.107 Six months later, following the completion of the first part of the inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) into the shooting, Ian Blair commented: In a terrible way, the Met was transfixed on other things. It was transfixed on: where are these bombers? And therefore, in a dreadful way, we didn’t see the significance of that. That was our mistake. It was. It was a bad mistake.108 Discussion in the mainstream UK media of the killing has been typically framed by Sir Ian Blair’s explanation that it was simply a ‘mistake’: an error, an aberration or a lamentable one-off tragedy.109 According to one commentator this framing is entirely appropriate: ‘by recognising that de Menezes’ death was a freak mistake, we can deal with the reality of politics today – rather than worrying about whether we could be next, or wondering what the Met is hiding from us’.110 On the other hand, an uncritical acceptance of the discourse of the ‘mistake’ reifies rather than questions the very framework within which the killing of Menezes has been valorised. In other words, by merely accepting the discourse of the ‘mistake’ as a starting point in reflecting on Menezes’s death, we run the risk of colluding with rather than offering a critique of the activities of sovereign power. Despite the emergence and subsequent entrenchment of a particular narrative about what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005 (‘22/7’), there are many ambiguities and unanswered questions about the circumstances leading to and surrounding his death. One blind spot relates to the elementary issue of precisely who was involved in the planning, management and carrying out of the killing. According to Nafeez Ahmed, the initial report given by the police had not mentioned anything about the surveillance operation mounted outside a block of flats located on Scotia Road in the Tulse Hill area of London on the morning of 22 July.111 We now know that the aim of that stake-out was to find suspects linked to the attempted bombings on the London transport network the day before – in particular, Hussein Osman whose details, including a gym membership card leading to the Tulse Hill address, had been found at the site of the attempted blast in the Shepherd’s Bush area.112

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

09:58

Page 119

119

Information about the surveillance team remains sketchy, however, and there have been unconfirmed suggestions about the involvement of military personnel and/or members of the Special Forces.113 Nevertheless, many reports obscure questions surrounding this involvement by focusing on the anti-terrorist officer who was distracted from Menezes’s emergence from the flats at 09.33 because he was ‘relieving himself’ in nearby bushes.114 Even though Menezes’s racial profile did not match that of Hussein Osman or any of the other suspected bombers, anti-terrorist officers followed him on his thirty-threeminute bus journey from Tulse Hill to Stockwell Station. At no point was he stopped or challenged.115 A positive identification had been made before the bus arrived in Stockwell and it is thought that Cressida Dick, the police officer in charge of the ‘Gold Command’ centre at Scotland Yard, authorised the use of lethal force if necessary to stop Menezes boarding an underground train.116 Yet, the reasons why Menezes was simultaneously mistaken as an ‘IC1 male’ and Hussein Osman and not in any way challenged by surveillance team members seeking confirmation of his identity remain unclear. After alighting from the bus, Menezes crossed Clapham Road and walked 1,000 metres into Stockwell station where, contrary to initial reports about his suspicious behaviour, he picked up a free copy of The Metro newspaper, walked through the ticket barriers using his ‘Oyster Card’ as payment and then took the escalator to the northbound Northern Line platform.117 He began to run towards the platform only once he had noticed that a train was arriving in the station.118 Having boarded the stationary underground train, Menezes sat in a carriage facing the platform.119 Undercover surveillance team members flanked him and held the carriage doors open for armed anti-terrorist officers as they ran down the escalator and into the carriage in which Menezes sat.120 According to one eyewitness Menezes ‘looked like a cornered fox’ as the officers approached him.121 An officer, known as ‘Hotel 3’, grabbed Menezes, wrapped his arms around him and pinned his arms to his side while he was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.122 Despite being fired at point-blank range, three bullets missed his body.123 One eyewitness account had suggested that Menezes was wearing a heavy winter coat with wires protruding from it.124 Images of Menezes’s body lying dead on the floor of the carriage clearly show,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

120

Page 120

BORDER POLITICS

however, that he wore a lightweight denim jacket in keeping with the mid-morning temperature (18°C/64 °F).125 No explosives were found attached to his body and he was not carrying a rucksack or bag. Despite these infamous images, there is scant footage recording Menezes’s movements from Scotia Road to the carriage on the train at Stockwell. According to police sources, there had been ‘technical difficulties’ with CCTV equipment on the platform, and no cameras were operating in the carriage where the shooting took place because the hard drive had been taken away for examination following the failed attacks of the previous day.126 Yet, unofficial reports from the Tube Line Consortium, which is in charge of running the Northern Line service, maintain that at least 75 per cent of cameras at Stockwell station and all on the train should have been working.127 Against the reading of ‘22/7’ as a mistake, the shooting of Menezes can be viewed as a reflection of innovative ways in which, temporally and spatially, attempts are made by sovereign power to reproduce and secure the politically qualified-life of the polis.

‘22/7’ as a form of temporal bordering Reflecting on the killing of her son, Maria Otone de Menezes commented: An honest policeman who was doing his job properly would have spoken to my son first, stopped him and asked him where he was going, and not just have shot and killed him without knowing who he was.128 Similarly, Alex Pereira, his cousin, remarked: Jean had lived in São Paulo. It is a dangerous city and he knew the rules there: if you run away when the police tell you to stop, then you are dead. He knows you don’t run away and his English was perfect. There is no explanation for him ignoring a warning because there was no warning.129 Patricia de Menezes said: ‘They judged my cousin, and sentenced him, all in the space of a moment.’ 130 What is striking and interesting about these reactions is that the family members complain in a very basic

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

09:58

Page 121

121

sense about the lack of time given to Menezes: he was denied the time to explain or defend himself as would be expected in the normal juridical process; time was quite literally ‘taken away’ from him. Indeed, all in the ‘space of a moment’, temporary sovereigns decided that Menezes’s life was not life worth living but a life that could (and should) be dispensed with. Borrowing from Agamben, it can be argued that Menezes was produced as ‘bare life’: a form of life whose status is indistinct; banned from conventional law and politics and subject to exceptional practices. The decision that Menezes’s life was not life worth living can be directly linked to the Metropolitan Police’s ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy, also known as ‘Kratos’ referring to: ‘the power to decide, to be decisive, to prevail’.131 On this understanding, ‘Kratos’ is associated with notions of clear, confident and forceful decisioning. Paradoxically, however, for this very reason the ‘Kratos’ policy does not actually allow for decision-making or at least forms of decision-making that take time to deal with the dilemmas provoking the need for a decision in the first place. Brian Massumi likens this form of decisioning to a ‘lightning strike’ or ‘flash of sovereign power’.132 Moreover, he argues that this approach is the temporal equivalent of a tautology : ‘the time form of the decision that strikes like lightning is the foregone conclusion. When it arrives, it always seems to have preceded itself. Where there is a sign of it, it has always already hit.’ 133 The lightning-strike decision is a foregone conclusion because it sidesteps or effaces the blurriness of the present in favour of a perceived need to act on the future without delay.134 Illustrating his argument Massumi suggests that this approach characterises the Presidency of George W. Bush for whom there is no time for uncertainty: ‘I have made judgements in the past. I have made judgements in the future.’ 135 Citing Bush’s admission that it took just twelve minutes for him to ‘discuss’ the invasion of Iraq with cabinet colleagues, Massumi points to the way the United States administration tends to skip decision-making that takes time because: Deliberation […] in the current lexicon […] is perceived as a sign less of wisdom than of weakness. […] To admit to discussing, studying, consulting, analysing is to admit to having been in a state of indecision preceding the making of the decision. It is to admit to passages of doubt and unclarity in a blurry present.136

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

122

4/12/11

09:58

Page 122

BORDER POLITICS

For Massumi, the ‘lightning strike’ approach in general is one that seeks to act on the future or, in other words, one that responds to the threat of ‘an indefinite future: what may yet come’.137 Whereas traditionally, however, threats were responded to through ‘prevention’, Massumi argues that we are witnessing the birth of a new form of response in the context of the global ‘war on terror’: the politics of ‘pre-emption’.138 This change is marked by a shift in temporal registers from the indefinite future tense to the future perfect tense: the ‘always-will-have-been-already’.139 In other words, the politics of preemption does not respond to events by simply trying to ‘prevent’ them but actually effects or induces the event: Rather than acting in the present to avoid an occurrence in the future, pre-emption brings the future into the present. It makes present the future consequences of an eventuality that may or may not occur, indifferent to its actual occurrence. The event’s consequences precede it, as if it had already occurred.140 Massumi illustrates his point using the analogy of a fire. A politics of pre-emption does not simply predict but actually causes fires: ‘it is like watching footage of a fire in reverse: there will have been fire, in effect, because there is now smoke’.141 The discourse of the foregone conclusion is one that is identifiable with the killing of Menezes. On the one hand, as we have already seen, Sir Ian Blair has referred to the killing as a ‘mistake’. But, on the other hand, he has also warned that we should be prepared for more killings like it: ‘These are fantastically difficult times […] It’s still happening out there, there are still officers having to make those calls as we speak […] Somebody else could be shot.’ 142 What seems to be at stake here is precisely an attempt to securitise the future by bringing it into the present: ‘it’s still happening out there’. Ian Blair is effectively dealing with the consequences of future killings under the ‘Kratos’ banner before they actually happen irrespective of whether they actually do. In this way the ‘Kratos’ policy acts as a temporal bordering process: it pre-empts threats to sovereign political community that come from the future thereby securing time as something that belongs to the state and not to terrorists. Hence, in the United Kingdom, there are now distinct echoes of Pentagon policies post-9/11 which, as Didier Bigo has illustrated with reference to the film Minority Report

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 123

The Generalised Biopolitical Border

123

(2002), place emphasis on the capacity to pre-empt anywhere and at anytime.143

‘22/7’ as a form of spatial bordering In the context of the ‘War on Terror’, the securitisation of time and space are mutually implicated as Joseph Pugliese suggests: ‘the civic spaces of the city become spaces of uncivil danger, fraught with racialised taunts, repeated security checks and harassment, and the possibility of both symbolic and physical violence’.144 Attempts at firming up the temporal borders of sovereign political community have been played out spatially through changes to the built environment in London, which are often designed to manage rather than prevent flows among the population of the city. Sometimes these changes are visible, such as the installation of CCTV cameras across the city in tube stations, walkways, office blocks and so on. In other ways these changes can be subtler and integrated into patterns of daily life, such as the use of ‘Oyster Cards’ on the transport network. Yet, perhaps more subtly still, the introduction of new GPS satellite technology has also allowed for the development and emergence of new forms of electronic bordering. For example, from 12 noon to 16.45 on 7 July 2005 the mobile phone operator O2 was ordered by the City of London Police to close their network to the public for an area totalling 1 kilometre square around Aldgate.145 This emergency zoning, as discussed in the London Assembly Report, was designed to assist the service needs of the City of London police, but it also prevented other emergency services still reliant upon the O2 network from doing their job properly.146 As such, this form of electronic bordering is intimately connected to questions about sovereignty, territory and power which are all raised as problems for future discussion in the Assembly Report.147 William Walters has coined the term ‘firewalling’ for this type of electronic bordering process which reflects the need for ‘new metaphors and figures to capture the character of borders today’.148 Applying Agamben’s argument, the killing of Menezes can be read as symptomatic of innovations in forms of bordering that rely upon the blurring of public and private spaces. On the one hand, the production of ‘bare life’ is not a new means of securing forms of sovereign political community, as Agamben shows in relation to the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

124

Page 124

BORDER POLITICS

figure of homo sacer in Roman law. On the other hand, what arguably is new about current bordering practices, of which the shooting of Menezes is symptomatic, are the location and method of the production of ‘bare life’. Menezes’s death, and its valorisation by the authorities in their subsequent investigations, point to a new preparedness to make ‘lightning decisions’ about life worth living (the politically qualified life of the polis) and life not worth living (‘bare life’) potentially anywhere. With the advent of ‘Kratos’, such decisions are no longer localised or fixed at particular ‘border sites’ in the margins of sovereign territory but increasingly more widespread or diffused throughout society: a phenomenon that is captured by the concept of the generalised biopolitical border. After all, Menezes was not killed in a camp or space especially designated for such exceptional practices but in a tube station in Central London. In this way Agamben’s chilling conclusion that ‘we are all (virtually) bare life’ is perhaps regrettably less sensationalist than it might at first seem, and calls for alternative ways of identifying and interrogating the types of bordering processes upon which sovereign power relies: ‘these are fantastically difficult times […] It’s still happening out there […] Somebody else could be shot.’ 149 NOTES 1. Closs Stephens and Vaughan-Williams, Terrorism and the Politics of Response, 2008; Edkins, ‘Missing Persons’, 2007; Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004 and ‘Through the Wire’, 2005; Edkins, Pin-Fat and Shapiro, Sovereign Lives, 2004; Dauphinee and Masters, The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror, 2007; and van Munster, ‘The War on Terror’, 2004. 2. Bigo, ‘Detention of Foreigners’, 2007. 3. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 2003. 4. Doty, ‘States of Exception’, 2007; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, ‘The Irregular Migrant’, 2004. 5. Caldwell, ‘Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity’, 2004; Edkins, ‘Humanitarianism, Humanity, Human’, 2003. 6. Connolly, ‘The Complexity of Sovereignty’, 2004; Neal, ‘Foucault in Guantánamo’, 2006; Prozorov, ‘X/Xs’, 2005. 7. Ibid. 8. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998; Remnants of Auschwitz, 1999; State of Exception, 2005.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

09:58

Page 125

125

Agamben, ‘Form-of-Life’, 1996, p. 151. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 6. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 2003, p. 180. Nancy, ‘Abandoned Being’, 1993. Schmitt, Political Theology, 2005. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 2003, p. 392. Agamben, State of Exception, 2005. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 139. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, p. 9 (emphasis added). Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, 2006; ‘Agamben’s Geographies of Modernity’, 2007; ‘The Return of the Camp’, 2005. Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, 2006, p. 388. Agamben, ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, 2004, p. 612 (emphasis added). Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1985, p. 190. Kwinter, Architectures of Time, 2001, p. 14. Ibid., p. 14. Agamben, ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, 2004, p. 612. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, p. 37. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid. Agamben, ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, 2004, p. 612. Norris, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead’, 2005, p. 14. Agamben, ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, 2004, p. 612. Binetti and Casarino, ‘Translators’ Notes’, 2000, p. 143. See, for example, Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, 2005. Edkins and Pin-Fat note that the concept of bare life is contentious and open to different readings. However, they set-up and use the terms ‘bare or naked life’ and ‘zoe¯ ’ interchangeably (pp. 6–7). For other examples of this tendency see: Butler, Precarious Life, 2004, p. 67; Edkins, ‘Missing Persons’, 2006; Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, 2006, p. 6; Laustsen and Dikken, ‘Zones of Indistinction’, 2002, pp. 290–307; Norris, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead’, 2005; and Ojakangas, ‘Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power’, 2005, p. 7. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, p. 109.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

126 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

4/12/11

09:58

Page 126

BORDER POLITICS

Butler, Precarious Life, 2003, p. 67. Agamben, State of Exception, 2005, pp. 87–8. UN, E/CN4/2006/120, 2006, p. 12. Ibid. The UN report on the situation of detainees in Guantánamo points out that the United States government relies upon the deliberate cultivation of ambiguity in order to flout the Geneva Conventions. In a memorandum sent by the Department of Defense dated 16 April the government states: ‘US Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions’ (emphasis added). As the UN report notes, this formulation is ambiguous because it implies that military necessity may, under certain circumstances, overrule the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. UN, E/CN.4/2006/120, 2006, p. 23. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 2002, p. 91. Butler, Precarious Life, 2003, p. 98. Ibid., p.74. Ibid., p. 98. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 138. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, p. 111 Ibid. Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 2001, p. 31. See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Becoming-Intense’, 2004. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the way in which becoming is ‘[…] the in-between, the border, or line of flight’. As such, and resonating with Agamben’s treatment of bare life, becoming is said to constitute a ‘zone of indiscernibility’, pp. 323–4. Butler, Precarious Life, 2003, p. 68. Ibid. Ibid. Connolly, ‘The Complexity of Sovereignty’, 2004. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid. Ibid. Derrida, Rogues, 2005, p. 100. Ibid., p. 101. Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, 2002, p. 335. Ibid., p. 335. Derrida, ‘The deconstruction of actuality’, 1994, pp. 28–30. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, p. 187.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

The Generalised Biopolitical Border 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

09:58

Page 127

127

Ibid., p. 63. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 2004. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 2003. Agamben, State of Exception, 2005, p. 58. The Nazi state proclaimed a state of exception in 1933 but this was never repealed. Agamben, State of Exception, 2005, p. 29. Quoted in ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 2. As Didier Bigo has pointed out, government leaders such as Tony Blair, George Bush, and John Howard do not necessarily declare states of emergency formally. Rather, ‘they speak of specific administrative derogations or ask for more power for a short period (under a sunset clause)’, Bigo, ‘The Ban, the Pan, and the Exception’, 2006, p. 5. Agamben, State of Exception, 2005, p. 2. Ibid. Ibid., p. 3. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, pp. 4, 9; Means Without End, 2000, p. 39; State of Exception, 2005, pp. 2–3. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, pp. 6, 7, 8, 19, 28, 83; Means Without End, 2000, p. 37; Agamben, State of Exception, 2005, pp. 3, 6–7. Ibid., p. 87. Bigo, ‘The Ban, the Pan, and the Exception’, 2006, p. 5. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, pp. 18–19. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., pp. 40–1. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid. Ibid., p. 40. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, pp. 171–2. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 45. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, p. 174. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 39. Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, 2006, p. 388. Laustsen and Dikken, ‘Zones of Indistinction’, 2002; Culture of Exception, 2005. For a review of the limitations of Laustsen and Dikken, see McLoughlin, ‘The Nomos of the Modern’, 2005. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 2003. Ibid., p. 25.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

128

4/12/11

09:58

Page 128

BORDER POLITICS

98. Ibid., p. 24. 99. Ibid., p. 32. 100. Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, 2006, p. 388. 101. Closs Stephens, ‘7 Million Londoners, One London’, 2008. 102. Weizman, ‘On Extraterritoriality’, 2007, p. 13. 103. Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, 1998, p. 220. 104. The Daily Telegraph, ‘De Menezes “shot 11 times during 30 seconds”’, 26 August 2005. 105. Ibid. 106. BBC News Online, ‘Man Shot Dead by Police on Tube’, 2005. 107. NBC News, ‘UK police defend shoot-to-kill after mistake’, 2005. 108. Daily Telegraph, ‘Met chief admits serious mistake over Menezes’, 2006. 109. BBC News Online, ‘London Attacks in Depth’, 2007; NBC News Online, ‘UK Police defend shoot-to-kill mistake over Menezes’, 2006; Daily Telegraph, ‘Met chief admits serious mistake over Menezes’, 2006; Appleton, ‘Memorial to paranoia’, 2005; Black, 7–7 The London Bombs, 2005; Davenport, ‘Met Chief admits Menezes mistakes’, 2006; Taylor, ‘Special Report’, 2006. 110. Appleton, ‘Memorial to paranoia’, 2005. 111. Ahmed, The London Bombings, 2006, p. 97. 112. BBC News Online, ‘London Attacks in Depth’, 2007. 113. Ahmed, The London Bombings, 2006, p. 97. 114. Cusick, ‘A Cover up?’, 2005. 115. Taylor, ‘Special Report’, 2006. 116. Ibid. 117. Ahmed, The London Bombings, 2006, pp. 97–100; BBC News Online, ‘London Attacks in Depth’, 2007; Pugliese, ‘Asymmetries of Terror’, 2006. 118. BBC News Online, ‘London Attacks in Depth’, 2007. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Whitby, ‘I saw tube man shot’, 2005. 122. BBC News Online, ‘London Attacks in Depth’, 2007. 123. Ibid. 124. Whitby, ‘I saw tube man shot’, 2005. 125. ‘Weather in London, UK, on 22 July 2005’. 126. Pugliese, ‘Asymmetries of Terror’, 2006, p. 1. 127. Ibid., p. 1. 128. Quoted in Taylor, ‘Special Report’, 2006. 129. Daily Telegraph, ‘De Menezes “shot 11 times during 30 seconds”’, 2005. 130. Ibid.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 129

The Generalised Biopolitical Border 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

Derrida, Rogues, 2005, p. 13. Massumi, ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact’, 2005, pp. 5–7. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 4–5. Ibid., pp. 6–10. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Ibid., pp. 8–9. NBC News, ‘UK police defend shoot-to-kill after mistake’, 2005. Bigo, ‘Protection: Security, Territory, Population’, 2006. Pugliese, ‘Asymmetries of Terror’, 2006. The London Assembly, Report of the 7 July Review Committee, 2006. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid. Walters, ‘Rethinking Borders Beyond the State’, 2006. NBC News, ‘UK police defend shoot-to-kill after mistake’, 2005.

129

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 130

Chapter 5 ALTERNATIVE BORDER IMAGINARIES: THE POLITICS OF FRAMING

In their reflections on the role of radical theory, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt call for the ‘proposition of new concepts for political theorising today adequate to our conditions’.1 Virno and Hardt tie conceptual revision to political change, and this move reorientates the relationship between theory and practice so that the two are not conceived as separate but rather inextricably linked: ‘the relationship between theory and practice remains an open problematic, a kind of laboratory for testing the effects of new ideas, strategies and organisations’.2 The task of inventing new concepts apposite to the study of contemporary global politics not only assists in political analysis but constitutes a critical praxis, with significant ethical and political implications, in its own right.3 This is because the question of whether a given concept is ‘adequate’ or ‘apposite’ to our conditions will depend upon a prior judgement about who ‘we’ are and what ‘our’ conditions might be in the first place. On the one hand, the concept of the border of the state, underpinning the modern geopolitical imaginary and conventional inside/ outside model, has occupied and continues to occupy a prominent position in conceptualisations of global politics, both explicitly and implicitly. This is illustrated in the cases of United Kingdom and European Union border security arrangements considered in Chapter 1 which, alongside innovations in understanding what and where ‘the border’ is, retain a traditional understanding of it in their operations at ports, airports and the outer-geographical edge of the sovereign territories they seek to protect. The concept of the border of the state is also prominent in diverse theorisations of global politics from the mainstream works of Waltz, Bull and Wendt in IR through to treat130

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 131

131

ments of, for example, concepts of violence and sovereignty in Benjamin, Derrida and Schmitt. On the other hand, as we have also seen, multifarious practices in contemporary political life, such as the ‘offshoring’ of the European Union’s borders in West Africa or the United Nation’s legal argument mobilised in defence of detainees held in Guantánamo, imply that this conventional border imaginary has undergone radical transformation. For this reason, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, many critical analysts of global politics have pointed to what they consider to be the ‘inadequacy’ of the concept of the border of the state, the inside/outside model, and the modern geopolitical imaginary, as a framework for political understanding and practice. In the previous chapter, the concept of the generalised biopolitical border was introduced based upon Agamben’s reconceptualisation of the limits of sovereign power. As such, and in the manner of political theorising advocated by Virno and Hardt, this concept can be read as a response to those writers, such as Balibar, Walker and Weizman, who imply the need for alternative border imaginaries to the conventional inside/outside model. Having outlined this concept, the primary task now is to flesh out how the generalised biopolitical border might lead to different practice/theory in global politics. What difference does thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border make for IR and related disciplines? What does it mean for, and how does it relate to, a logic of inside/outside and the modern geopolitical imaginary? What forms of ethical–political thought and praxis might follow from it? To address these questions, I shall begin by returning to three examples considered in the Introduction to the book, namely conceptualisations of juridical–political order, the production of citizensubjects, and security practices, to illustrate how these aspects of political life could be rethought under conditions of the generalised biopolitical border. Second, departing from pessimistic readings of the implications of Agamben’s thought for ethical–political practice, I shall then spell out what I consider to be the affirmative mode of alternative thinking that the concept of the generalised biopolitical border gestures towards. Finally, the analysis turns to the work of Jacques Derrida in order to comment on potential problems with the generalised biopolitical border and what I shall go on to outline as the activity of framing in global politics.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

132

4/12/11

09:58

Page 132

BORDER POLITICS

THINKING IN TERMS OF THE GENERALISED BIOPOLITICAL BORDER The concept of the border of the state has enabled a dominant conception of juridical–political order that is central to the modern geopolitical imaginary: a view of that order as being divided between domestic and international realms and, notwithstanding aberrations from time to time, largely settled and stable. In this way the concept of the border of the state helps to domesticate the contingency of the juridical–political order by acting as a familiar reference point on the basis of which the repetition of diverse practices cumulates to create a sense of normality and permanence. Yet, as Agnew, Ó Tuathail and other critical geopolitics scholars have pointed out, the role of the concept of the border of the state in maintaining this semblance of stability and immutability contributes to a form of knowledge privileged by the modern geopolitical imaginary that is inherently linked to questions of power and authority. In other words, the work that the concept of the border of the state does in upholding the juridical–political order is not a natural nor neutral practice, but one that serves to benefit those whose interests are bound up in maintaining the status quo. Consequently, accounts of global politics that rely upon an unreflective usage of the concept of the border of the state are complicit in practices of forgetting the contingency of the juridical–political order and therefore also the reification of it. By contrast, thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border reveals the contingency and performative self (re)production of juridical–political order. Agamben’s account of the logic and operation of sovereign power demonstrates that this order, born of the exception, is predicated upon the performative act of suspending the law to produce a zone of indistinction in which bare life can be produced. Seen in this light, sovereign power does not pre-exist bare life and neither does bare life pre-exist sovereign power. Instead, sovereign power and bare life must be thought of as co-constitutive of each other. Sovereign power comes to exist only through the constant (re)production of bare life in zones of indistinction that are amenable to its sway: The essence of political power in the West […] is the power to suspend (not apply) law and thus to produce a sphere of beings

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 133

133

without quantities, homines sacri, whom every being, insofar as he or she is alive, may be.4 On this basis, it is through the production of homo sacer that the politically qualified life of the polis, necessary for juridical–political order, is ultimately defined and sustained. As Andrew Norris puts it: ‘politics must again and again enact its internal distinction from bare life […] it must repeatedly define itself through the negation of bare life – a negation that can always take the form of death’.5 In other words, the politically qualified life of the polis and the form of juridical–political order this subjectivity enables are contingent upon a sovereign decision about the status of some ‘human’ life as not worthy of being lived as such. As Judith Butler has explored in her discussion of Agamben against the backdrop of indefinite detention in Guantánamo, this decision relies upon nothing other than the ‘deeming’ of certain forms of life to be ineligible for certain basic, if not universal, human rights: ‘the decision to detain, to continue to detain someone indefinitely, is a unilateral judgement made by government officials who simply deem that a given individual, or indeed a group, poses a danger to the state’.6 Moreover, as Butler highlights, it is a decision that is increasingly taken by government officials (such as those who sanctioned and shot Jean Charles de Menezes) rather than by democratically elected politicians, thereby constituting an extension of sovereign power by stealth.7 Often, the decision leading to the production of bare life is underwritten by so-called national security imperatives defined by a state of emergency: in this way the invocation of the discourse of exceptionalism attempts to legitimise the suspension of national and international law. Therefore, echoing Derrida’s discussion of authority in Chapter 3, the legitimacy of sovereign power is legitimised by nothing other than its own legitimisation. One way of characterising how the generalised biopolitical border reconceptualises the (re)production of the juridical–political order is in terms of performance. Whereas the modern geopolitical imaginary supported by the concept of the border of the state implies a static, immutable juridical–political structure that is somehow given, Agamben’s thesis reveals this as a performed fiction. The sovereign decision that creates bare life is not necessarily a singular act but a reiterative performance: one that leads to the perpetuation of bare life detained indefinitely in camps or left to die in cargo containers at sea.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

134

4/12/11

09:58

Page 134

BORDER POLITICS

Moreover, as Agamben’s analysis implies, this border performance is also a body performance. Bodies do not simply encounter pre-existing borders as if they were timeless territorial artefacts. Rather, borders are continually (re)inscribed through mobile bodies that can be risk assessed, categorised, and then treated as either trusted citizen travellers or bare life. In this way border/body performances depend upon movement and are played out at sites across everyday life. A perspective that identifies the performative character of the juridical–political order reconfigures the way in which the relation between borders and subjectivity might be analysed. According to the modern geopolitical imaginary, the ‘proper’ political subject is the citizen: ‘bordered’ and autonomous before the law in the same way as the sovereign state of which it is a subject. Such a formulation attempts to domesticate the radical contingencies of subjects’ socioontological status and fix their identities to territory in order to secure the presence of sovereign political community. Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border prompts an alternative line of analysis that redirects emphasis away from the modern bordered citizen. For Agamben, the ‘real sovereign subject’ is not the citizen but rather homo sacer: the ‘mute carrier of sovereignty’ defined not by contract or rights but by exposure to the sovereign decision on whether it is deemed life worthy of living.8 The insistence on the significance of the marginal figure of homo sacer highlights the need for further analysis of the multifarious methods, contexts and locations in which bare life is produced in global politics. One example, which has already received some attention in the academic literature inspired by Agamben, is a critical engagement with the politics of humanitarianism.9 Conventional accounts of the relationship between human rights and sovereign power suggest that the former has a capacity to act as a check on the worst excesses of the latter. Agamben, however, shows a more insidious dimension to this relationship which, ultimately, challenges the basis for an optimistic reading of the potential of international human rights. According to an Agambenian perspective, human rights and sovereign power are not diametrically opposed because ultimately they both rely upon the same referent object: bare life. The subjects produced by the ideology of humanitarian intervention closely resemble the subjects of sovereign power: mute; undifferentiated; and depoliticised. In the same way that sovereign

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 135

135

power produces the bare life it needs to sustain itself, humanitarianism renders people into needy victims, lives to be saved taken outside of the workings of normal juridical–political order, in such a way that justifies flouting norms of territorial integrity and ‘intervening’ in the affairs of another sovereign state. In other words, the concept of humanity cannot be relied upon to check sovereign power: rather, as Anne Caldwell puts it, ‘humanity instead appears as the ground and object of sovereignty; it has become a political group, represented by a new political power’.10 Therefore, despite the stated aims of humanitarian organisations and ventures, there is a danger that they can end up in solidarity with the very powers they ostensibly seek to overcome or at least mitigate: the discourse of human rights fails to call into question the distinction between politically qualified life and bare life upon which the conception of rights rests. Thus, as Slavoj Žižek has provocatively argued, concentration camps and refugee camps can be seen as two sides of the same sociological matrix: ‘perhaps the ultimate image of the treatment of the “local population” as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan – one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food parcels’.11 Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border also has potentially challenging implications for the way in which analyses of global security relations might be framed. To a large extent the concept of the border of the state offers a stable and comfortingly coherent means of mapping who, where and what ‘the enemy’ is: it enables the juxtaposition of an immutable realm of warfare and barbarism outside the state on the one hand and the impression of safety, stability and possibility of progress inside the state on the other.12 Such a picture permits a double designation of ‘the enemy’ so that it is taken to be both (a) outside the state but (b) itself another state which, in turn, leads to the possibility of a resolution of conflict through classical forms of warfare between sovereign states. The concept of the generalised biopolitical border, however, scrambles this conventional logic and the assumed alignment between inside/amity and outside/enmity. Rather than essentialising the enemy as the other outside the state, an Agambenian approach is more attentive to the ways in which different threats are produced as ‘foreign’ or ‘exteriorised’, as, for example, Dan Bulley has shown in the case of the London bombings on 7 July 2005.13 Furthermore, Agamben argues that under biopolitical conditions in which security becomes the normal technique of government, classical

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

136

4/12/11

09:58

Page 136

BORDER POLITICS

interstate warfare is eclipsed. Rather, as security becomes the ‘basic principle of state activity’ politics is reduced to policing, and lines of amity and enmity are fundamentally blurred. Conflict is no longer between states but potentially between the terroristic state and its citizens who are ‘all virtually homines sacri’.14 ETHICAL–POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE GENERALISED BIOPOLITICAL BORDER Prima facie, Agamben seems to lead in somewhat pessimistic, even despairing, directions. Indeed, his diagnosis of the relationship between politics and life, analysis of the production of bare life in zones of indistinction, and prognosis that ‘we are all virtually homines sacri’ imply a bleak picture of the possibility for contestation, change and, in short, politics. For this reason, Andreas Kalyvas argues that Agamben’s portrayal of the ‘unstoppable march to the camp’ is ‘totalistic […], and though it is concerned with politics and its eclipse, it is itself quite un-political’.15 William Connolly arrives at a similar conclusion: ‘Agamben […] carries us through the conjunction of sovereignty, the sacred, and biopolitics to a historical impasse’.16 In an interview in 2004, however, Agamben replied to his critics: I’ve often been reproached for (or at least attributed with) this pessimism that I am perhaps unaware of. But I don’t see it like that. There is a phrase from Marx, cited by Debord as well, that I like a lot: ‘the desperate situation of society in which I live fills me with hope’. I don’t see myself as pessimistic.17 By now a growing number of scholars have identified a more ‘positive’ moment in Homo Sacer. On Jenny Edkins’s view, a bleak assessment of Agamben’s work, such as that reached by Kalyvas and Connolly, ‘overlooks a significant facet of Agamben’s work, where he seeks to propose an alternative to, and indeed a contestation of, sovereign biopolitics’.18

Agamben and ethical–political praxis Central to Agamben’s thinking about ethical–political praxis and resistance against sovereign biopolitics is his conception of the subject

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 137

137

as an interval or remainder between what he refers to as practices of subjectification and de-subjectification.19 According to Agamben, the biopolitical terrain of global politics can be understood as ‘a kind of de-subjectification machine: it’s a machine that both scrambles all the classical identities and […] a machine that […] recodes these very same dissolved identities’.20 For Agamben it is possible to think through the potential for resistance by rendering the machine inoperative on its own terms.21 Agamben’s thought does not lead to nihilism or passivity but calls for the radical invention of new practices: ‘a movement on the spot, in the situation itself’.22 In The Time That Remains [2005], Agamben gives the example of St Paul’s negotiation with the Jewish law that divides Jews and non-Jews. Agamben is interested in the way in which, instead of applying a universal principle to argue against this sovereign cut, Paul intervenes by taking the law on on its own terms. According to Agamben, Paul does this by dividing the division itself: by introducing a further division between the Jew according to the flesh and the Jew according to the spirit. This division of the division means that, instead of a simple separation between Jews/non-Jews, there are now ‘Jews who are not Jews, because there are Jews who are Jews according to the flesh, not the spirit, and [non-Jews] who are [non-Jews] according to the flesh, but not according to the spirit’.23 Consequently, a remainder is produced that renders the applicability and operativity of the law ineffective: a new form of subject that is neither a Jew nor a non-Jew but a ‘non-non-Jew’.24 Applying this logic to contemporary conditions, Agamben places his hope for a kind of minority politics in this form of unworking of the system or biopolitical machine from within: One should proceed in this way, from division to division, rather than by asking oneself: ‘What would be the universal communal principle that would allow us to be together?’ To the contrary. It is a matter, confronted with the divisions introduced by the law, of working with what disables them through resisting, through remaining – résister, rester, it’s the same root.25 Elsewhere, Agamben links the move to render the system inoperative with notions of ‘profanation’, meaning to violate or transgress, and play.26 He illustrates the logic of profanation through play with the

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

138

4/12/11

09:58

Page 138

BORDER POLITICS

example of the cat that plays with the ball of string as if it were a mouse. The game frees the mouse from being cast as prey and at the same time the predatory activity of the cat is shifted away from the chasing and killing of the mouse: ‘and yet, this play stages the very same behaviours that define hunting’.27 With this example Agamben seeks to demonstrate the profanatory potential in play as a means of creating a new use of something by deactivating an old one. The ultimate call is to subvert the given machine or apparatus according to its own logic: ‘to wrest from the apparatuses – from all apparatuses – the possibility of use that they have captured’.28 In Means Without End [2000], Agamben is clear that any move to render biopolitical apparatuses inoperative must do so on the basis of his diagnosis of the relationship between politics and life as outlined in the previous chapter: It is by starting from this uncertain terrain and from this opaque zone of indistinction that today we must once again find the path of another politics, of another body, of another world. I would not feel up to forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biological body and body politic, of zoe¯ and bios, for any reason whatsoever. It is here that I must find my space once again – here or nowhere else. Only a politics that starts from such an awareness can interest me.29 The figure that Agamben draws upon to think through the possibility of resistance is what he calls ‘whatever being’.30 The notion of ‘whatever being’ refers to being-as-such: ‘the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality’.31 ‘Whatever being’ has no essence that can be separated from its attributes.32 It constitutes a ‘pure singularity’ in the sense that it cannot be broken down into different parts.33 The task, then, is not to mobilise resistance on the basis of universal generalised principles such as human rights. Rather, it is to explore and invent the profanatory potential that resides within remnants of forms of subjectification and de-subjectification produced by sovereign power itself. Prospects for thinking and acting otherwise in global politics centre around the figure of the refugee in Agamben’s work. According to Agamben, this figure, which can be understood precisely as the ‘remnant’ of sovereign biopolitics, is perhaps the ‘only imaginable

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 139

139

figure of the people today’: a ‘whatever being’ that throws conventional juridical–political categories into disarray.34 Indeed, for Agamben, this unique figure acts as a site for the invention of alternative forms of political community not based on unity, sovereignty, citizenship or other conventional categories. Rather, the refugee […] should be considered for what he [sic] is, that is, nothing less than a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state and, at the same time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable [sic] renewal of categories.35 Taking the refugee as a starting point for the reconstruction of political categories and philosophy demands attention to how the topology wrought by this figure, reflecting the Möbius strip outlined in the previous chapter, might stimulate alternative conceptualisations of ethical–political relationality. Agamben illustrates the direction in which this thinking could lead against the backdrop of the politics of space in Jerusalem.36 The prospect of this city as the capital of two states, without territorial divisions, ‘could be generalized as a model of new international relations’. Agamben continues: Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, one could imagine two political communities dwelling in the same region and in exodus one into the other, divided from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities, in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual.37 This alternative topology, embodied by the figure of the refugee, disaggregates political space from the homogeneous and territorially bordered sovereign nation-state to create the possibility for new political arrangements: It is only in a land where the spaces of states will have been perforated and topologically deformed, and the citizens will have learned to acknowledge the refugee that he himself is, that man’s political survival today is imaginable.38

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

140

4/12/11

09:58

Page 140

BORDER POLITICS

Agamben and the possibility of resistance In her recent work, Jenny Edkins, independently and together with Véronique Pin-Fat, has explored what Agamben’s thought might mean in the context of resistance against biopolitical apparatuses in the current ‘War on Terror’. Significantly, nowhere in his work does Agamben claim that the biosovereign order he diagnoses and engages with is in fact necessary or somehow inevitable. This leads Edkins to deny that sovereign power constitutes the only possible form of political life and, indeed, that it constitutes a political life at all.39 The suggestion that the biopolitical sovereign order does not constitute ‘a political life at all’ ties into a broader argument Edkins and Pin-Fat seek to establish: that sovereign power is not a relation of power in the Foucauldian sense, as discussed in Chapter 3, but rather one of violence.40 Relations of violence do not produce subjectivities in the same way as power relations. Instead, the former is a type of relation that merely involves the technologised administration of sovereign biopolitics: in other words a form of slavery or servitude.41 With the emergence of a global zone of indistinction in which we can no longer distinguish between ‘our biological life as living beings and our political existence’, the possibilities for resistance arguably have been curtailed.42 Thus, according to Edkins and Pin-Fat, any attempt at contesting sovereign biopolitics must, however paradoxical it may seem, seek to reinstall power relations ‘with their accompanying freedoms and potentialities’.43 On this basis, the challenge for practical politics is to envisage how such a reinstallation might take place. Following Agamben’s claim referred to earlier, that ‘it is by starting from this uncertain terrain and from this opaque zone of indistinction that today we must once again find the path of another politics, of another body, of another world’, Edkins and Pin-Fat argue that strategies for contesting sovereign power ‘cannot consist of a call for a reinstatement of classical politics, a reinstatement of the distinction between zoe¯ and bios’.44 In other words, it will not do for any such contestation to find its basis in the very logic it is trying to overcome. Edkins emphasises that identity politics, associated with social movements, for instance, would reappropriate rather than displace that flawed logic.45 This is because, as she explains, identity-based claims ultimately work within the same horizon as sovereign power: ‘such a claim is a demand for inclusion in or recognition by the state,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 141

141

not a claim that contests or disrupts the notions of inclusion and exclusion upon which sovereign power depends’.46 Rather, what is required is a displacement of the logic that might tie resistance back to sovereign politics: If a logic of sovereign power is identified that relies for its very operation on the production and organisation of bare life as a form of life that is hospitable to its operation, then it is in a sense obvious that a challenge to sovereignty might be framed in terms of a refusal or destabilisation of that very form of life itself.47 One way of challenging sovereign power would be to remove the grounds upon which it is able to produce bare life in the first place thereby rendering the biopolitical machine inoperative on its own terms. This implies the need for a life that is inseparable from its form: one where the classical binary between zoe¯ and bios does not hold and cannot be blurred in a zone of indistinction. Crucially, as far as the potential for a politics of resistance is concerned, Agamben’s notion of ‘whatever being’ lacks the features permitting the sovereign capture: ‘what the state cannot tolerate in any way […] is that the singularities form a community, without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging’.48 Somewhat ironically, then, as Edkins has pointed out, the form of being produced by sovereign power, that is, bare life, ‘turns out to be that form of being sovereign power finds intolerable’.49 Put differently, the form of life sovereign power produces for its own survival is also potentially the source of its undoing. The type of politics that might follow from Agamben’s formulation – a ‘whatever politics’ as Edkins puts it – is one that capitalises on this potential ‘weakness’ in sovereign power. In practical terms, Edkins and Pin-Fat argue that such a politics consists of two interrelated moves: the refusal to draw abstract lines of the sort sovereign power itself relies upon; and/or what they call the assumption of bare life.50 These moves, and their implications for how thinking in terms of a generalised biopolitical border might prompt a reframing of ethical– political practice/thought, warrant closer attention. To produce a zone of indistinction between zoe¯ and bios that is hospitable to the cultivation of bare life, the logic of sovereign power must assume a distinction between the two to begin with. This

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

142

4/12/11

09:58

Page 142

BORDER POLITICS

involves drawing abstract lines or borders between different forms of life in order to distinguish the politically qualified life of the polis from life that is deemed not to be worthy as such. What counts as politically qualified life is not a static given but a historically contingent outcome. Different groups have been excluded from politics throughout history (for example slaves, women, and Jews) although the fear arising from Agamben’s work is that we are now all potentially excluded as homines sacri. To counter this, Edkins and Pin-Fat suggest that one form of resistance would be to reject or to prevent the inscription of borders between zoe¯ and bios, inside and outside, human and inhuman: It is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all (and, indeed, nothing else will do) that sovereign power (as a form of violence) can be contested and a properly political power relation can be reinstated.51 Importantly, Edkins and Pin-Fat emphasise that they are not arguing for a renegotiation of where these lines are drawn: to renegotiate in this fashion would be to remain inside the relation of violence. Rather, they argue that to move outside this relation of violence and reinstall a properly political power relation must involve the cessation of linedrawing in toto: ‘[…] we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands’.52 The second and interrelated strategy of resistance put forward by Edkins and Pin-Fat involves what they call an acceptance of bare life and it is this line of thought that perhaps reflects Agamben’s notion of inoperativity most closely. Such an acceptance occurs when the subject both acknowledges and also demands recognition of its status as nothing but bare life. In this way properly political power relations are reinstalled as the subject transforms bare life into what Agamben calls form-of-life.53 The transformation occurs as the subject literally lays bare the violent excesses upon which sovereign power rests by assuming them. To illustrate this point, Edkins and Pin-Fat draw on the provocative example of the phenomenon of lip sewing among refugees. Among others they cite the case of Abbas Amini, an Iranian national seeking asylum in Britain, who, in 2003, protested against the government’s immigration policies by sewing shut his eyes, ears and mouth:

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 143

143

Amini’s political act of resistance, using his own body, can be read as an act where, with all hope lost, the only site left for resistance is in complete embrace of bare life as a form-of-life that has its own bios.54 This example offers a useful illustration of what Agamben means by an act of transgression that un-works the biopolitical system from within. By assuming bare life Amini takes away the grounds upon which sovereign power would otherwise operate. His actions adopt the logic of the system in order to jam it. Another example of an attempt to render the sovereign biopolitical machine inoperative is Agamben’s own refusal to travel to the United States.55 Since March 2004, Agamben has protested against what he considers to be the ‘biopolitical tattooing’ of the US Department of Homeland Security by publically resigning from his position as Visiting Professor at New York University and banning himself from air travel to the United States.56 In an article published in Le Monde in 2004, Agamben claims that: ‘History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.’ 57 Citing the capture and filing of finger print and retina data as reflecting a new ‘normal’ biopolitical relationship between the citizen and the state, he argues: By applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it’s humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.58 Agamben’s decision to ban himself from travel to the United States, thereby effectively rendering himself immobile, jams the generalised biopolitical border because, as we have seen in previous chapters, it relies precisely on circulation of people, goods and services. Indeed, this example highlights that, for border security to work effectively, subjects need to be constantly on the move: without movement biopolitical bordering practices cannot operate. The profanatory potential of this insight has yet to be mobilised as far as resistance against some of the most insidious practices legitimised by the ‘War on Terror’ is concerned.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

144

4/12/11

09:58

Page 144

BORDER POLITICS

The limits of a ‘logic of the field’ Sergei Prozorov has expressed dissatisfaction with the ‘discomforting contours’ of the critique of sovereign power and the possibilities for a practical politics of resistance proposed by Edkins and Pin-Fat. As Prozorov sees it: [T]he proper avenues of critique appear self-defeatingly extreme, if not outright inconceivable: the total refusal to draw dividing lines and installing limits is ultimately a call to dispense with the very principle of order.59 On this basis, Prozorov dismisses the forms of resistance advocated by Edkins and Pin-Fat as ‘quaintly paradoxical’.60 In their counterresponse, however, Edkins and Pin-Fat argue that Prozorov’s criticisms make sense only ‘when viewed from the framework of sovereign power’.61 It is precisely their intention to ‘dispense with the very principle of order’ as far as it is founded upon the sovereign ban and a division between forms of life.62 Furthermore, Edkins and PinFat stipulate that they are not advocating the refusal of all dividing lines and installing limits as Prozorov claims: ‘we are specifically referring to the drawing of lines between what amounts to forms of life as “politically qualified” or as “bare life”’.63 With this proviso in mind, they argue that the form of praxis emanating from their reading of Agamben is one that ‘insists […] on the politics of decisioning and particular distinctions and demands that specifics of time, place and circumstance be attended to in each instance’.64 This exchange is interesting because it highlights an area of ambiguity in Agamben’s work that is carried through to Edkins and Pin-Fat’s discussion of the possibilities of a practical politics that follow on from it. On the one hand, at the heart of Edkins and PinFat’s argument is a normative commitment to the displacement of line drawing or practices of bordering associated with sovereign politics: ‘nothing less will do’.65 In this way the ethical and political codes they call for resonate with the spirit of Agamben’s logic of the field as outlined in Chapter 4. On the other hand, Edkins and Pin-Fat make it clear in their response to Prozorov above, that it is not all but only certain distinctions they are refusing: only the ‘drawing of lines upon which sovereignty depends’.66 In this way there seems to be a depar-

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 145

145

ture from a logic of the field and a return to thinking in terms of borders, distinctions and separations. Therefore, the ambiguity lies in the issue of whether Agamben’s call for a logic of the field implies the need for the abandonment of all forms of borders, distinctions and separations, or just some. If it is the former case then the ‘metadistinction’ Edkins and Pin-Fat rely upon in their argument – between certain types of distinctions that are to be refused and other types of distinctions that are to be embraced – surely falls prey to the very logic they are ostensibly seeking to displace. If it is the latter then the question arises, how do we know which borders, distinctions and separations should be refused? We are then back to familiar questions located within the framework of sovereign politics: Who draws the line? Where? On what grounds? Furthermore, an additional problem arises when the relationship between a logic of the field and the concept of the generalised biopolitical border is considered against the backdrop of the inside/ outside problematic. Despite Agamben’s commitment to a logic of the field, the generalised biopolitical border, understood as a form of dividing practice, does not escape or ‘go beyond’ the inside/outside dichotomy in any straightforward sense. If one of the purposes of the production of bare life is to define the politically qualified life of the polis, then the former acts as the constitutive outside of the latter. In other words, while the border between inside/outside is shown not to be fixed at the geographical outer edge of the sovereign state as the modern geopolitical imaginary implies, Agamben’s diagnosis of the activity of sovereign power as the decision to produce some life as bare life (and thus other forms of life as non-bare life) is still reliant upon and reiterative of an inside/outside way of thinking. Effectively, the substitution of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border for the concept of the border of the state means that the dividing practice upon which sovereign power relies is recast: not something pre-given, static and localised at a territorial extremity but reinscribed as a performance throughout society in a more generalised sense. Agamben’s call for an adoption of a logic of the field in political analysis raises these thorny questions without putting forward any easy solutions. To abandon a mode of thought that is reliant upon borders, distinctions and separations is difficult – perhaps impossible – to envisage as Prozorov’s comments reflect. In her essay ‘Whatever Politics’, Edkins suggests that the move to acknowledge the inevitable

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

146

4/12/11

09:58

Page 146

BORDER POLITICS

chaos of a world without lines is not hopelessly utopian.67 Drawing on Jacques Derrida, she claims that, while borders attempt to produce clarity and offer stability, they are always already doomed to failure and break down on an everyday basis: ‘Attempts are continually made, in the here and now, in philosophy and in politics, to make distinctions, but these only ever partially or temporarily succeed.’ 68 Pursuing this line of enquiry, the following section investigates Derrida’s treatment of borders further in order to elucidate what is at stake with the identification of these problems arising from Agamben’s adoption of a logic of the field: first, by examining Derrida’s problematisation of the concept of the border in a general sense; second, by outlining what I call his account of the politics of framing; and, third, by applying this account to the question of the relation between the concept of the border of the state and the concept of the generalised biopolitical border as rival border imaginaries in global politics. THE POLITICS OF FRAMING According to Jacques Derrida, the history of the structure of Western thought since Plato is effectively a history of binary oppositions, of which presence and absence, cause and effect, speech and writing, and inside and outside are prominent examples.69 Oppositions of this nature constitute a powerful conceptual order: especially because we are often unaware we are using or relying upon them. In a very broad sense, deconstructive thought engages critically with these binaries by unpacking the logic that they ultimately rest upon. Through this questioning, the structure of Western thought is shown not to be natural but rather laden with assumptions and priorities that often have significant ethical and political implications.

The basic moves of deconstructive thought Derrida is notoriously hesitant to define deconstruction because any attempt at such a definition would be ironic. In his ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, Derrida writes: ‘What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of course!’ 70 More accessible accounts of the basic moves of deconstructive thought can be found in Positions [1981] and Limited Inc. [1988]. Derrida insists that

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 147

147

a deconstructive strategy or way of reading always involves a double and simultaneous movement: Deconstruction cannot be restricted or immediately pass to a neutralization: it must, through a double gesture, double science, a double writing – put into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes and that is also a field of non-discursive forces.71 The first move of deconstruction is to recognise that the terms within any given binary opposition are not strictly opposites after all but hierarchically arranged because one of the two terms is usually privileged over the other: presence over absence; cause over effect; speech over writing; inside over outside.72 In this way the first or superior term tends to assume a degree of naturalness and, as such, is referred to as a kind of centre, origin or source. Derrida argues that it is necessary to overturn this hierarchy.73 A deconstructive strategy, however, ‘is to avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it’.74 In other words, deconstruction does not simply reverse the privileging of terms because this would reappropriate, rather than displace, the logic at play. Instead, Derrida argues that a different strategy is required. This second move is precisely the displacement of the logic of the system. It involves identifying what is called the ‘undecidable’: something that can no longer be contained within the binary opposition ‘but which, however, inhabit[s] [it] without ever constituting a third term’.75 As the extract at the beginning of this section emphasises, it is strictly on the condition of such a double gesture alone that deconstruction might intervene in the field of oppositions it criticises.76 ‘Deconstruction’, writes Derrida, ‘does not consist in moving from one concept to another, but in reversing and displacing a conceptual order within which it is articulated.’ 77 Jonathan Culler offers a useful illustration of the basic moves of deconstruction, focusing on causation and the binary opposition between cause/effect.78 Typically, Culler argues, cause is privileged and given logical and temporal primacy over effect.79 A deconstructive line

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

148

4/12/11

09:58

Page 148

BORDER POLITICS

of enquiry, however, shows that this structure is not a given, but rather the effect of a rhetorical operation. Culler asks us to imagine that we feel a pain.80 This feeling causes us to look for a cause for the pain. Perhaps we see a pin. A link is therefore made between the pain and the pin. In producing a causal sequence the perceptual order is then reversed from (a) pain to pin to (b) pin to pain. Using this example, Culler argues that ‘the causal scheme is produced by a metonymy or metalepsis (substitution of cause over effect); it is not an indubitable foundation but the product of a tropological operation’.81 On this basis, we are unable to speak of ‘the cause’ in any simple sense. What is at stake in this example is that cause is more complicated than the cause-leading-to-effect structure implies, because the feeling of pain causes us to find the pin which, in turn, causes the production of a cause. Culler goes on to make three key points about the way deconstruction works in this example. These are worth going through here because they raise some key features about what deconstruction does and does not entail. First, Culler’s deconstructive analysis does not lead to the conclusion that causality is something we should abandon in our thinking.82 Causality is not abandoned in the example above because it is the feeling of pain that causes the process of identifying a cause. Rather, the deconstructive move is to apply the concept of causality to causality itself. In this way, the appeal is not to some sort of external benchmark to engage with causality but the principle of the concept of causality itself: ‘the deconstruction appeals to no higher logical principle or superior reason but uses the very principle it deconstructs’.83 Second, in employing the concept of causality in its deconstruction of that concept, deconstruction involves the critic rather than putting him/her outside that which is critiqued.84 In other words, in his deconstruction of causality, Culler asserts the indispensability of causation while, at the same time, refusing it as an unquestionable foundation. Third, the deconstruction of causality shows that cause cannot be easily seen as being logically and temporally prior to effect as conventional wisdom would have it.85 Deconstruction upsets this conventional wisdom: if the effect is what causes the cause to become a cause, then the effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin.86 According to Culler: ‘by showing that the argument which elevates cause can be used to favour effect, one uncovers and undoes the rhetorical operation responsible for the hierarchisation and one

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 149

Alternative Border Imaginaries

149

produces a significant displacement’.87 If neither cause nor effect can act as an origin then the notion of the origin is no longer originary: ‘a nonoriginary origin is a “concept” that cannot be comprehended by the former system and thus disrupts it’.88 Culler’s illustration demonstrates the way in which a rigorous border cannot be maintained between cause and effect. The logic of cause/effect is haunted by the undecidable which Culler seizes upon to enact the displacement of the notion of origin. Undecidability does not refer to ‘indeterminacy’ or confusion. Rather, as Derrida emphasises in Limited Inc., undecidability ‘is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts)’.89 Such possibilities are also determined in different situations, whether discursive, political or ethical. These determinations are determined pragmatically but, according to Derrida, they are then ‘stabilised through a decision of writing (in the broad sense I give to this word, which also includes political action and experience in general)’.90 In Culler’s example above the rhetorical production of the pin as the cause of the pain is an instance of such stabilisation. This form of writing referred to in the quotation above is known as ‘archewriting’ in Derridean terms. Despite efforts of stabilisation through practices of arche-writing, however, there are always traces of instability. The resisting and disorganising quality of undecidability denies the possibility that any term within an alleged binary opposition can be ‘pure’. Again, this is shown in Culler’s example through the way in which cause and effect, initially separated, are shown to be mutually implicated. Thus, deconstruction unpacks binary logic to demonstrate that the terms within a supposed opposition are not mutually exclusive, but mutually interdependent, and mutually contaminated: the concept of the border invoked in any given binary is shown to be ‘undecidable’ and as such it displaces the dichotomous logic.

Deconstructing the concept of the border In Positions, Derrida further illustrates what he means by the ‘undecidable’ with a series of analogies.91 One of these is the hymen which, as a form of border, is both part of the logic of inside/outside (in a general sense) and yet also neither itself strictly inside nor outside. As such, the hymen is not simply outside inside/outside, but, then again, neither can it be contained within that system of logic.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

150

4/12/11

09:58

Page 150

BORDER POLITICS

Instead, the hymen disrupts the logic of inside/outside while, in a strange way, remaining part of it. In this way Derrida uses the figure of the hymen to demonstrate that, albeit in a very particular and obscure context, the border between inside and outside is impossible to maintain. Another analogy Derrida uses to illustrate what he means by the undecidable is the concept of the supplement, which also serves to problematise the concept of the border in a general sense. On the one hand, the concept of the supplement implies a fullness of presence: ‘the supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence’.92 On the other hand, the supplement also supplements: It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. […] The supplement is an adjunct […]. As a substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness.93 In this passage Derrida refers to the way in which the concept of the supplement acts as an illusion in the attempt to produce full presence. By supplementing something with something else, that which is supplemented is produced as an effect of the supplementation: it appears to be present as a result of the thing that supplements it. Derrida’s point, however, is that the act of supplementation also reveals a lack in that which is supplemented: the supplement indicates what is lacking in that which is supplemented. Derrida gives the example of two dictionaries.94 The second is published as a supplement to the first. In light of the above argument the second dictionary can be said to produce the first as a whole (‘bordered’) text in its supplementarity. The second dictionary also points out what words are lacking in the first dictionary, however. In this way, ‘the supplement is added to make up for a deficiency, but as such it reveals a lack, for since it is in excess, the supplement can never be adequate to the lack’.95 Derrida’s discussion shows that the supplement is therefore undecidable: it disrupts and displaces the binary opposition between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. Again, this problematises the notion of the border that is presupposed to separate the two terms of the binary presence/absence.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 151

151

The concept of the border is also problematised by Derrida in his use of the term différance. Binary oppositions presuppose a fixed notion of difference between the terms that comprise them (cause/ effect, inside/outside, presence/absence). Thus, ‘inside’ can be said to rely upon ‘outside’ to be identified and so on. Derrida argues, however, that language is not as stable as this structure implies: meaning is always already on the move; constantly referring; and differentiating and deferring. It follows that there is no fixed point according to which meaning is produced. Derrida captures this restless and relentless movement with the neologism différance.96 This strange term, which is a play on the French verb différer (to differ and to defer), demands closer attention. In Positions Derrida refers to différance as ‘a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence […] the systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing [espacement] by which elements relate to one another’.97 The difference between différance and difference is not audible in French: whenever we say différance it is unclear or ‘undecidable’ whether or not we are referring to différance or merely saying the French word for ‘difference’.98 Hence, the difference between différance and difference is clear only in the written form.99 This point serves an important function in Derrida’s engagement with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to Derrida, Saussure treats speech as if it were in some sense originary or authentic in terms of meaning and therefore a more immediate form of expression than writing.100 On Derrida’s view, however, writing is not somehow opposite and/or external to speech as the binary opposition between speech/writing suggests.101 On the contrary, writing not only relates to but also affects and even changes speech. In this way, again, Derrida highlights how the supposed border between speech and writing is impossible to maintain and ultimately breaks down. The key point arising from Derrida’s notion of différance is that it shows how meaning may derive from difference but this difference is not one between static, coherent or ‘bordered’, self-present elements. David Roberts captures what is at stake when he writes: Meaning is an endless web, each part of which depends on and refers to others, so that we never get a full, final grasp of what is

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

152

4/12/11

09:58

Page 152

BORDER POLITICS

being referred to. Meaning is always deferred; there is always further différance.102 In this way, Derrida problematises the concept of the border by highlighting how signs blur into one another rather than standing alone as self-present, coherent, and positive terms in language. Because meaning is always already caught in a movement of difference and deferral, context can never be considered somehow simple or secure: it is only ever secured through the production of hierarchies of signification within the entire field of meaning.103 Consequently, Derrida writes, ‘one of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of re-contextualisation’.104 In other words, deconstruction is partly about never entirely accepting the ‘givenness’ of a context but problematising the borders that produce that context as supposedly separate from another context. According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a ‘theory’ as such.105 Neither is it a philosophy nor a method that can be ‘applied’ to a particular empirical situation.106 It is not even ‘a discourse, an act, or a practice’.107 Rather, Derrida insists, ‘deconstruction, if there be such a thing, happens; it is what happens’.108 Elsewhere he comments: ‘deconstruction is the case’.109 No matter how much something appears naturally sewn up, settled or given, it is always produced in a limitless context of interpretation and reinterpretation which, necessarily, denies the possibility of any sort of closure, finitude or totalisation. Therefore, a deconstructive ethos leads to ‘extreme complication’ of precise borders, distinctions or separations upon which coherent, logical and explanatory accounts of fundamentally imprecise phenomena are predicated.110 Deconstruction consists of ‘dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting “out of joint”, the authority of the “is”’.111 In this way, it intervenes in ‘relations of force, in differences of force, in everything that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized’.112

Borders as frames of intelligibility So far, the exploration of Derrida’s thought, focusing on his treatment of the hymen, the supplement, and différance has emphasised that

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 153

153

borders are not simple, straightforward givens. Rather, there is a general problematic of the border which deconstruction seeks to engage with rather than efface. As well as highlighting this problematic, however, Derrida also encourages a reading of borders as frames of intelligibility that are inscribed in order to attempt to give meaning to something. As we have already seen, the inscription of a border represents a move to delineate and attempt to secure an inside from an outside. This conditions the possibility of attempting to give meaning to the inside as a self-present entity defined against the outside. In his essay ‘The Parergon’ [1979], Derrida explores the way in which borders act as frames but, in doing so, he demonstrates how the activity of framing is always contingent and never quite succeeds in its attempt to delineate inside from outside.113 For Derrida, the attempt to delimit context by drawing a border or frame always follows the logic of what he calls the parergon.114 His use of the word parergon relates to Immanuel Kant’s writings in which, according to Derrida, parerga act as limiting devices at the edge of the ergon as a work/object to be judged. The relationship between parerga and the ergon is exemplified by colonnades in front of magnificent buildings and drapery around statues. In each case parerga (that is, colonnades and drapery) centre or ground the ergon (that is, magnificent buildings and statues) by means of a frame. This framing is necessary for all aesthetic judgement. It allows for the internal or proper meaning of an object or work of art to be isolated from circumstances external to it. Derrida gives the example of the question: ‘Do you find this palace beautiful?’115 Any response has to discern the ‘intrinsic value’ of the palace on the one hand from the palace as a ‘function of extrinsic motives’, such as relations of economic production, on the other. In this case, the framed is included for judgement whereas the frame itself – and what lies beyond the frame – is excluded. Yet, it is not always clear what is proper and what is secondary to a work.116 In other words, there is a degree of ambiguity concerning the separation of parerga from the ergon. This relates to what we might call the undecidability of the frame: What is the place of the frame? Does it have a place? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What is its inner limit? What is its outer limit?117 If, according to Kant, parerga do not belong to the ergon but are merely extrinsic to it, then for Derrida, parerga do belong to the ergon,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

154

4/12/11

09:58

Page 154

BORDER POLITICS

albeit in an extrinsic way.118 The difference here is subtle but of vital importance. On Derrida’s view, parerga cover over what would otherwise appear as a lack inherent within the ergon to which they are added.119 While parerga are in some sense extrinsic to the ergon ‘it is not simply their exteriority that constitutes them as parerga, but the internal structural link by which they are inseparable from a lack within the ergon’.120 Thus, because of the ‘internal structural link’ binding the parerga to the ergon, Derrida refers to the conjugated term parergon. In so doing, Kant’s separation between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ or ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is challenged. Derrida shows that what is ostensibly outside (parerga) actually plays an important role inside (ergon) the object of Kant’s analysis. In effect this is a reiteration of the same argument Derrida makes with respect to supplementarity. Derrida highlights that the incomprehensibility of the border of the object to be judged does not only appear at the inner limit between the parerga and the ergon, in other words between the magnificent building and its colonnades or the statute and its drapery. Crucially, it also arises at the outer limit: […] from the outside, from […] the space in which the statue or column stands, as well as from the entire historic, economic and political field of inscription in which the drive of the signature arises […] the parergonal frame is distinguished from two grounds, but in relation to these, it disappears into the other.121 Such a disappearance blurs the ergon into the milieu in which it is located: in other words limitless context.122 In The Truth in Painting [1987], Derrida further illustrates the undecidablility of the parergonal frame with reference to the lace of a shoe: In its rewinding passing and re-passing though the eyelet of the thing, from outside to inside, from inside to outside, on the exterior surface and under the interior surface […] it remains the ‘same right through’, between right and left, shows itself and disappears […] in its regular traversing of the eyelet, it makes the thing sure of its gathering, the underneath tied up on top, the inside bound on the outside, by a law of structure.123 In this example the lace both constitutes and undermines the oppo-

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 155

Alternative Border Imaginaries

155

sition between inside and outside. The frame of a painting works in the same way: It cuts out but also sews back together. By an invisible lace which pierces the canvas […], passes into it then out of it in order to sew it back on to its milieu, onto its internal and external worlds.124 In each of these examples the parergonal frame is not geometrically fixed at the outer edge of the work but endlessly traversing inside and outside. On this basis, a more dynamic approach to framing is implied: one that ends up slicing through the inside/outside dichotomy. Such an approach ultimately leaves us wondering where the border ‘is’: ‘parerga have thickness’.125 Derrida’s treatment of the parergon has implications far beyond a critique of Kant. Every philosophical discussion on meaning in some way presupposes a discourse on the limit between an inside and an outside: a discourse on the border between inside and outside as a frame. Through an engagement with the figure of the parergon, however, Derrida demonstrates that borders as frames are not fixed but rather a site of intrinsic instability, change and invention. Consequently, it is difficult to speak of their ‘presence’, as such, because they are not necessarily given in advance but rather drawn according to circumstance. In this way, borders as frames might be described as ‘spectral’. The frame they impose attempts to domesticate contingency in order to give meaning. The attempted separation of the inside from the outside is hard to maintain, however. What is ostensibly extrinsic always penetrates and thus determines that which is considered to be intrinsic.126

Framing global politics/global politics reframed One way of thinking about the concept of the border of the state is to consider it precisely as a framing device. As we have seen in previous chapters, it frames particular understandings of the interrelationships between sovereignty, territory, violence, authority and power which, in turn, enables, constrains and conceals particular practices in diverse spheres of contemporary political life including law, citizenship and security relations. In this way, the concept of the border of the state,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

156

4/12/11

09:58

Page 156

BORDER POLITICS

ascribed a particular set of meanings by the modern geopolitical imaginary, delimits context to attempt to provide a sense of stability and permanence: a foothold on the basis of which diverse understandings of, and practices in, global politics may proceed. Viewed in these terms, the concept of the border of the state is parergonal to global politics: it operates as a discourse of the limit between inside and outside to tame contingency, offer some sense of fixity in the context of otherwise limitless fluidity, and thereby attempt to give meaning to the flow and flux of social and political life. Yet, as a parergonal frame, the concept of the border of the state cannot be separated from global politics: the former is intrinsically a part of the latter in the same way that colonnades are inseparable from the building they stand in front of. Furthermore, following Derrida, the parergonal nature of the concept of the border means that it has never somehow only been located at the outer edge of the state. Rather, it must be seen as being fundamentally ‘thick’, constantly weaving inside and outside the inside/outside dichotomy it frames. On this basis, the concept of the generalised biopolitical border can also be read as a framing device. On the one hand, this concept offers an alternative frame to the concept of the border of the state which many writers in IR and related disciplines now regard as a problematic starting point for conceptualising practices in global politics that do not conform to the coordinates of the modern geopolitical imaginary (such as those outlined in Chapter 1). Reflecting what might be referred to as a shift in thinking from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon, the generalised biopolitical border derived from Agamben’s work illustrates one way in which it might be possible to diversify, pluralise and radicalise the study of borders. Agamben’s theorisation of sovereign power leads to a dispersal of the border that separates inside from outside so that it can be seen as generalised across a globalised biopolitical terrain. On the other hand, while the concept of the generalised biopolitical border offers an alternative frame that problematises the modern geopolitical imaginary, it fails to escape either a logic of inside/outside or the particular (and political) activity of framing. In other words, this concept may challenge the imperiousness of the concept of the border of the state as a frame in the practice/theory of global politics but, in the final analysis, one frame (the concept of the border of the state) is merely substituted by another (the concept of the generalised biopolitical border). As such,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries

09:58

Page 157

157

the worry is that the concept of the generalised biopolitical border can also be accused of trying to foist a sense of coherence, shapeliness and form on global politics in the same way that the concept of the border of the state has done (and as the discipline of IR continues to reinscribe). In short, the concept of the generalised biopolitical border, while prompting a critique of the concept of the border of the state, amounts to a different type of framework. Recognising that the concept of the border of the state and the concept of the generalised biopolitical border are two different types of frame calls into question whether one can be considered ‘better’ than another. Immediately the problem here is that the terms of the question presuppose the existence of a ground of some kind – a set of criteria or metrics – according to which a given frame might be judged. In conventional social scientific inquiry an appeal to some notion of reality or empirical referent can be identified as acting as such a ground. As Derrida has shown, however, appeals of this nature are sorted, invested and interpreted: there is always a politics of reality.127 In other words, there are always frames, and each one is contestable and politically charged: paraphrasing Derrida, there is always a politics of framing. It is precisely because of the fundamental absence of an absolute frame, a meta-frame according to which all other frames might be judged better or worse than others, that there is a need for the activity of framing in the first place. Further still, the absence of a meta-frame means that no frame is impervious to deconstructive analysis: ‘deconstruction is the case’.128 According to Derrida, a deconstructive perspective must ‘neither re-frame nor fantasise the absence of the frame’.129 In other words, the work of deconstruction is to negotiate between two competing imperatives. On the one hand, because the activity of framing is always contingent, unstable and violent, deconstructive analysis should not aspire to, or be satisfied with, merely switching one problematic frame (for example, the concept of the border of the state) for another (for example, the concept of the generalised biopolitical border). On the other hand, deconstructive analysis requires sensitivity to the way in which frames are used everyday through language and, while the activity of framing never works because of infinite context, it will not do simply to wish this activity away: some form of closure is necessary for anything to happen and so we need frames. This means that any form of practice/theory ultimately relies

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

158

4/12/11

09:58

Page 158

BORDER POLITICS

upon line drawing: even a mode of thinking that advocates the refusal of drawing lines. Interestingly, this is reflected in the counter-response to Prozorov given by Edkins and Pin-Fat: that their reading of Agamben leads to ‘a politics of decisioning and particular distinctions’.130 In this way, despite Agamben’s insistence on the necessity of adopting a logic of the field, his accounts of the activity of sovereign power and the prospects for resistance against it do not overcome a reliance on borders, distinctions and separations. It must be reiterated, however, that, for Derrida, this is not necessarily something to lament. Although borders continually break down, they are nevertheless necessary. What this means is that the politics of framing must be marked and negotiated as such. The implications of Derrida’s account of what I have called the politics of framing can be summarised as follows. First, as we have seen in relation to the use of the concept of the border of the state, different frames in global politics do not simply produce different representations of global politics. The activity of framing, of invoking borders, distinctions and separations to try to make sense of contemporary political life, is not divorced from global politics but fundamentally part of it. Therefore, any form of framing constitutes praxis in its own right, with important ethical and political ramifications. Second, in the absence of a meta-frame or absolute standard, the use of a particular frame to try to make sense of contemporary political life must be seen as a political move. In other words, the adoption of one frame or another is always something that cannot be fully justified and is therefore open to the possibility of unending scrutiny, debate and/or contestation. On this basis, for example, my own elaboration of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border can be read as a political act using the work of a variety of theorists to articulate an alternative imaginary to that dominated by the concept of the border of the state. Third, part of the work of deconstruction is to expose practices of framing in order that particular frames might be interrogated and/or resisted as contingent outcomes: as borders drawn to provide comfort and security in the otherwise meaninglessness of the flux. A deconstructive ethos is to show how, no matter how established or settled a given frame appears to be, it is always produced in a limitless context of interpretation and reinterpretation which, necessarily,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Alternative Border Imaginaries

Page 159

159

denies the possibility of any sort of closure, finitude or totalisation. Fourth, as well as vigilance towards diverse practices of framing, deconstruction implies the need for a constant questioning of frames. On this basis, it is necessary continually to reflect on the frames used to try to make sense of global politics and project these reflections into our analyses. Following this ethos, it is necessary perpetually to return to, question and realise the limitations of framings in global politics which any further uptake of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border must necessarily embrace. NOTES 1. Virno and Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, 1997, p. 7 (emphasis added). 2. Ibid., p. 2. 3. For parallels with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s view of the task of philosophy see Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 1994. 4. Wall, ‘Au Hasard’, 2005, p. 40. 5. Norris, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead’, 2005, p. 5. 6. Butler, Precarious Life, 2003, pp. 58–9. 7. Ibid., pp. 61–2. 8. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 113. 9. See Caldwell, ‘Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity’, 2004; Edkins, ‘Humanitarianism, humanity, human’, 2003; Kumar Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, ‘The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer’, 2004. 10. Caldwell, ‘Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity’, 2004, p. 116. 11. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 2002, p. 94. 12. Walker, Inside/outside, 1993; Ashley, ‘The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space’, 1987. 13. Bulley, ‘Foreign Terror’, 2008. 14. Agamben, ‘On Security and Terror’, 2008. 15. Kalyvas, ‘The Sovereign Weaver’, 2005, p. 112. 16. Connolly, ‘The Complexity of Sovereignty’, 2004, p. 27. 17. Agamben, ‘I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am’, 2004, p. 123. 18. Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, 2007, p. 70. 19. Agamben, ‘I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am’, 2004, p. 123. 20. Ibid., p. 116. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 121.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

160

4/12/11

09:58

Page 160

BORDER POLITICS

23. Ibid., p. 122. 24. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 2005, p. 51. 25. Agamben, ‘I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am’, 2004, p. 123. 26. Agamben, Profanations, 2007, pp. 73–92. 27. Ibid., p. 86. 28. Ibid., p. 92. 29. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 139 (emphasis added). 30. Agamben, The Coming Community, 1993; ‘Form-of-Life’, 1996; Means Without End, 2000. 31. Agamben, The Coming Community, 1993, p. 143. 32. Agamben, ‘Form-of-Life’, 1996, p. 151. 33. Agamben, The Coming Community, 1993, p. 67. 34. Agamben, ‘We Refugees’. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, 2007 40. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, 2005; ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004. 41. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004, p. 12. 42. Agamben, Means Without End, p. 138. 43. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, 2005, p. 1. 44. Ibid., p. 12. 45. Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, 2007, pp. 75–6. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 86. 49. Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, 2007, p. 78. 50. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, 2005; ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004. 51. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004, p. 13. 52. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, 2005, p. 15. 53. Agamben, ‘Form-of-Life’, 1996. 54. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004, p. 17. 55. Agamben, ‘Say No to Bio-Political Tattooing’, 2004. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Prozorov, ‘X/Xs’, 2005, p. 104. 60. Ibid., p. 104.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Alternative Border Imaginaries 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

09:58

Page 161

161

Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, 2005, p. 13. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004, p. 18 (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 18. Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, 2007, pp. 88–90. Ibid., p. 90. Derrida, Positions, 1981. Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, 1985. Derrida, Limited Inc., 1988, p. 21. Derrida, Positions, 1981, pp. 40–1. Ibid. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid. Derrida, Limited Inc., 1988, p. 21. Ibid (emphasis added). Culler, On Deconstruction, 1987. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 86–7. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Derrida, Limited Inc., 1988, p. 148. Ibid. Derrida, Positions, 1981, pp. 40–5. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1997, p. 144. Ibid., p. 145. Derrida, ‘The Supplement of Copula’, 1979, p. 34. Ibid., p. 34. Derrida, ‘Différance’, 1982. Derrida, Positions, 1981, pp. 38–9. McQuillan, Deconstruction: A Reader, 2000, p. 16. This point also calls into question the assumed tendency to privilege ‘speech’ over ‘writing’ in Western thought as if it were more direct, unmediated, pure or self-present.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 162

162

BORDER POLITICS

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1968. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1997, pp. 27–65. Roberts, Nothing But History, 1995, p. 196. Derrida, ‘Force and Signification’, 2002. Derrida, Limited Inc., 1998, p. 136. Derrida, ‘Some Statements and Truisms’, 1990, p. 85. Derrida, ‘As if I were dead’, 1996, p. 217. Derrida, ‘Some Statements and Truisms’, 1990, p. 85. Derrida, ‘Deconstruction: the Im-Possible’, 2001, p. 20. Derrida, ‘Some Statements and Truisms’, 1990, p. 85. Derrida, Limited Inc., 1988, p. 128. Derrida, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’, 1995, p. 25. Derrida, Limited Inc., 1988, p. 148. Derrida, ‘The Parergon’, 1979. Ibid. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid. Dronsfield, ‘After Parerga’, 2003, p. 35. Derrida, ‘The Parergon’, 1979, p. 24. Ibid. Ibid., p. 22. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 2002, p. 61. Ibid., p. 299. Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., p. 61. Derrida, Limited Inc., 1988, pp. 152–3. Derrida, ‘Politics and Friendship’, 2002, p. 223. Derrida, ‘Some Statements and Truisms’, 1990, p. 85. Derrida, ‘The Parergon’, 1979, p. 28. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, 2004, p. 15.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 163

CONCLUSION

On the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the world’s attention was drawn towards the escalation of conflict in Georgia, where President Mikhail Saakashvili launched an aerial bombardment and ground attack on the breakaway region of South Ossetia. The following day, Friday 8 August, images of the spectacular opening ceremony of the Games were overshadowed by live footage of Georgian troops taking control of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, together with the mobilisation of Russian armed forces into the region. Seeking to justify bombing raids over South Ossetia and throughout greater Georgia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spoke of the need to protect the interests of the 70,000 or so people who had accepted the offer of Russian citizenship. In response, Georgia sought to regain control of its disputed territory and called for international support against the presence of the Russian military within its borders. Arguments about the sanctity of Georgia’s borders and the principle of territorial integrity were quickly deployed by President Saakashvili: ‘Russia is fighting a war with us in our own territory. This is a clear intrusion on another country’s territory. We have Russian tanks on our territory, jets on our territory in broad daylight.’ 1 The intrusion of Russian forces into Georgian territory was denounced on similar grounds by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and United States President George W. Bush respectively: The territorial integrity and belonging of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to Georgia can never be put under doubt.2 The United States and her allies stand with the people of Georgia, and their democratically elected government. We insist 163

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

164

4/12/11

09:58

Page 164

BORDER POLITICS

that Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity be respected, and Moscow must honour its pledge to withdraw all its invading forces from Georgian territory.3 Nevertheless, while Russian President Dimitry Medvedev claimed to respect the cornerstone of the United Nations Charter, he argued that his country’s foreign policy must first and foremost protect its citizens in South Ossetia for whom the current border settlement was not adequate: Russia does not reject the principle of territorial integrity but its foreign policy will take into account the will of the peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, who are unlikely to want to remain in the same state with Georgia. If someone continues to attack our citizens, our peacekeepers, then of course we will answer just as we did.4 As the various leaders issued statements on a daily basis, large numbers of South Ossetians fled their homes, the Georgian towns of Gori and Senaki were left ravaged, and a significant but ultimately unknown number of civilians are reported to have died.5 The argument of this book has not been that borders between states are obsolescent or that the modern geopolitical imaginary no longer matters in global politics. Clearly, as the summer of violence in Georgia illustrates all too brutally, what we might call traditional geopolitical conflict over territorial borders is still very much a part of contemporary political life. Indeed, the location of the international border between Georgia and Russia is at the heart of the South Ossetian crisis, with bitter historically embedded disagreements concerning the alignment between people, nation and territory. Furthermore, as the above quotations serve to illustrate, responses to the conflict by the international community have been framed by notions of the sanctity of territorial possession and inviolability of state borders. On this basis, it would be churlish to suggest that the concept of the border of the state, together with more conventional inside/outside ways of thinking, has somehow lost its pertinence in today’s world. On the contrary, as demonstrated in Chapters 1, 2 and 3, this concept has acted, and continues to act, as a dominant framing in

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Conclusion

4/12/11

09:58

Page 165

165

both the theory and practice of global politics. As many scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds have also argued, however, the work that the concept of the border of the state does has been somewhat under-theorised. Such neglect has been particularly conspicuous in the discipline of IR which, as we have seen, has had a tendency to produce theoretical analyses of global politics that are dependent upon, but nevertheless take for granted, a particular understanding and use of the concept of the border of the state. By contrast, theorising and understanding this concept as a particular frame in global politics allow for an interrogation of the array of practices it enables, constrains and legitimises. Moreover, as shown in Chapter 3, this framing and the modern geopolitical imaginary it supports rely upon and reproduce specific notions about the intrarelationship between violence, territory and power. Yet, while the continued significance of the concept of the border of the state is not in dispute, it is possible to identify a proliferation of bordering practices in contemporary political life that complicates the modern geopolitical imaginary. As the examples in Chapter 1 demonstrate, the fine lines depicted on Mercator’s map belie the increasing complexity and thickness of bordering practices. Moves towards integrated border security in the UK, European and American contexts suggest departures from conventional thinking about the nature and location of borders, so that they are now evermore offshored, electronic and peripatetic. The danger is that an approach to the study of borders that reads the concept of the border of the state only in the context of the modern geopolitical imaginary is one that is ultimately unable to identify, interrogate and/or resist such practices which remain obscured by the dominant frame. While there is certainly a continued need for detailed case studies of traditional border sites understood to be located at the geographical outer edge of the state, it is also imperative that border studies adopts a more sophisticated conceptualisation of what and where borders are. Otherwise, border studies runs the risk of (re)producing an outdated paradigm of analysis that is unable to keep pace with the diversification of bordering practices in global politics. On this basis, I have argued that it is necessary to attempt to think outside the modern geopolitical imaginary, in order to diversify, pluralise and radicalise our understanding of what studying borders today might mean. This is no easy task because many of the theories, categories and

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

166

4/12/11

09:58

Page 166

BORDER POLITICS

concepts we might use to critique the modern geopolitical imaginary are themselves part of that very horizon of thought. Seeking to contribute to nascent moves away from a geopolitical towards a biopolitical paradigm of analysis, however, this book has argued that critical resources for developing alternative border imaginaries can be found in the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s diagnosis of the operation of sovereign power offers an array of spatio-ontological devices, such as the ban, the camp and a ‘logic of the field’, with which it is possible to articulate how borders are intimately linked to the bodies of those in transit, as mobile as the subjects they seek to control, and not merely confined to the outer edges of sovereign territory but more and more generalised throughout a global biopolitical terrain. These features of bordering practices in contemporary political life are not otherwise locatable on the radar of conventional border studies reliant upon – and reproductive of – the modern geopolitical imaginary. This way of thinking is blind to these dynamics whereas, responding to interdisciplinary calls for alternative border imaginaries from writers such as Balibar, Walker and Weizman, the concept of the generalised biopolitical border offers both a means of identifying and of engaging critically with them. Thinking in terms of the biopolitical generalised border highlights and confronts the contingency of the juridical–political order. This order, born of the exception, is predicated upon the performative act of suspending law to create a zone of indistinction in which sovereign power produces a form of life amenable to its sway: bare life. The ‘proper’ subject of sovereign power is recast: not the modern bordered sovereign citizen but the ‘mute carrier of sovereignty’ defined not by rights but by exposure to the decision on whether it is human life deemed worthy of living as such.6 Once this reconfigured view of the relation between sovereignty and subjectivity is adopted, then alternative possibilities for thinking about ethical–political praxis are opened up. New ways of conceptualising resistance emerge based around the notion of inoperativity and the attempt to jam the sovereign biopolitical machine by turning its own logic against it. Agamben’s diagnosis of the activity of sovereign power calls for analyses of the changing methods and locations of the production of bare life which, as we have seen, are not only confined to traditional border crossings but detention camps, railway stations and spaces of exception throughout everyday life. Furthermore, the production of

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Conclusion

4/12/11

09:58

Page 167

167

bare life is a bordering practice that can involve citizens as well as government officials and this has particular significance in the context of the ‘War on Terror’.7 Writing in 1938, Walter Benjamin claimed that: ‘In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in the position of having to play detective.’ 8 Reflecting Benjamin’s insight of seventy years ago, in 2007 the New York Metropolitan Transport Agency (MTA) ran a poster and radio advertisement campaign called ‘The Eyes of New York’. Under the banner ‘If you see something, say something’, ‘good’ citizens were enjoined to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the London Metropolitan Police (the ‘Met’) has led a series of similar campaigns in the United Kingdom. The most recent, from January 2006 to March 2007, led with the banner: ‘If you suspect it, report it’. Six posters call for vigilance, targeting: financial activity (‘Terrorists need funding. Have any cheque or credit card transactions made you suspicious?’); the use of vehicles (‘Terrorists need transport. Has a vehicle sale or a rental made you suspicious?’); the Thames (‘Terrorists could use the river. If you live or work on the river, has anything made you suspicious?’); domestic storage (‘Terrorists need storage. Are you suspicious of anyone using garages, lock-ups or storage space?’); and apartment blocks (‘Terrorists need places to live. Are you suspicious of your tenants or neighbours?’) (See figure 3.) What the campaign does not tell us is what it is about getting a refund, owning a white van, being near a river, using a garage or living in a block of flats that is particular to terrorist activity. Rather, the suspicion, as with the MTA example, is generalised and objectless. While the stated aim of both campaigns in New York and London is to achieve greater ‘security’, it is not at all clear that this sort of approach is successful in accomplishing its expressed goals. On the contrary, it can lead to many more problems, including the very dynamics it presumably seeks to overcome. For example, Judith Butler has highlighted how the imperative for ‘good’ citizens to be on the lookout for ‘risky subjects’ constitutes a ‘potential licence for prejudicial perception’.9 Butler argues that the cultivation of an objectless suspicion translates into a ‘virtual mandate to heighten racialised ways of looking and judging in the name of national security’ which, in turn, fosters mutual resentment and reinstates divisions along racial

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

168

4/12/11

09:58

Page 168

BORDER POLITICS

Figure 3 ‘If you suspect it, report it’ campaign, January 2006

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Conclusion

4/12/11

09:58

Page 169

169

lines.10In this way, she claims, a certain form of ‘indefinite containment’ permeates public culture ‘outside the prison walls, on the subway, in the airports, on the street, in the workplace’.11 Furthermore, the racialisation of suspicion translates into acts of violence in these otherwise ‘normal’ everyday settings – as demonstrated by the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell Station. Irrespective of the numbers of people who actually call anti-terror hotline numbers, the campaigns of the MTA and London Met illustrate how a politics of affect is employed in the ongoing ‘War on Terror’. Indeed, following Benjamin, it is through the attempt to cultivate ‘citizen-detectives’ that the central dynamics of the war on terror are (re)produced: dynamics that are not localised in the conflict zones of Afghanistan and Iraq but identifiable throughout everyday life in Europe and the West more generally. The cultivation of citizendetectives corresponds with attempts to produce others, usually of non-white appearance, as depoliticised subjects whose normal recourse to conventional provisions in politics and law are suspended in favour of national security objectives. Of course, it might be rightly pointed out that many of these dynamics are not ‘new’: Benjamin’s writings point to the historical legacies within which current practices must be located. Developments in technology, however, as well as in news media coverage enable innovations in the ways in which sovereign power attempts to secure itself both temporally and spatially. Agamben’s reference to the figure of homo sacer in Roman law reveals the ancient roots of biopolitical bordering practices but it is necessary to detect how borders get (re)produced differently from one historical and geographical context to another. On the one hand, the added value of the concept of the biopolitical generalised border is that it offers an alternative account of the limits of sovereign power to one reliant upon the modern geopolitical imaginary. On the other hand, as we have seen, this concept should not be considered as a straightforward replacement for the concept of the border of the state. Rather, what we are dealing with here are different framings of global politics, each with particular ethical– political implications, as discussed in Chapter 5. Applying the thought of Derrida, the task for the future of border studies, as I see it, is not to attempt to develop new ways of thinking that try to ‘escape’, ‘go beyond’ or ‘move outside’ the inside/outside problematic. On the contrary, such attempts are always already destined to failure as they

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

170

Page 170

BORDER POLITICS

only ever serve to reproduce an inside/outside logic. Instead, a Derridean-inspired approach is one that urges the incessant identification and perpetual deconstruction of the multiple practices of inside/outside in order to interrogate what is enabled by, and who benefits from, diverse border politics. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

BBC News Online, ‘Georgia Conflict’, 2008. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Agamben, Means Without End, 2000, p. 13. For a recent collection of essays that explore the role of citizens in what Chris Rumford has called ‘borderwork’, see Rumford, Citizens and Borderwork in Contemporary Europe, 2008. Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire’, 2003 [1938], p. 31. Butler, Precarious Life, 2004, p. 77. Ibid. Ibid.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 171

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-Manneh, B., ‘The Illusions of Empire’, in B. Abu-Manneh (ed.), ‘Empire and U.S. Imperialism’, Special Issue of Interventions: International Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, 5(2), 2003, pp. 159–76. Agamben, G., ‘We refugees’, trans. M. Rocke, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/ agamben/agamben-we-refugees.html Agamben, G., State of Exception (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Agamben, G., The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Agamben, G., ‘‘‘I am sure you are more pessimistic than I am …” An Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, Rethinking Marxism, 16(2), 2004, pp. 115–24. Agamben, G., ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben – A Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life’, German Law Review, 5(5), May 2004, pp. 609–14. Agamben, G., ‘Say No to Bio-Political Tattooing’, Le Monde, 10 January 2004. Agamben, G., Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Agamben, G., Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Agamben, G., ‘Form-of-Life’, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 150–6. Agamben, G., The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Agnew, J., Geopolitics: Revisioning World Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Agnew, J., ‘Book Review of A. Paasi: Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness’, Geografiska Annaler, B78, 1996, pp. 181–2.

171

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

172

4/12/11

09:58

Page 172

BORDER POLITICS

Agnew, J., ‘The Territorial Trap: the Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory’, Review of International Political Economy, 1(1), 1994, pp. 53–80. Ahmed, N., The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (London: Duckworth, 2006). Albert, M., ‘On Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity: An International Relations Perspective’, in D. Newman (ed.), Boundaries, Territory, and Postmodernity (London and Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 53–68. Albert, M., D. Jacobson and Y. Lapid (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: ReThinking International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Amoore, L., ‘Vigilent Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror’, Security Dialogue, 38(2), 2007, pp. 215–32. Amoore, L., ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography, 25, 2006, pp. 336–51. Anderson, M., Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Appleton, J., ‘Memorial to paranoia: conspiracy theorists and opportunists gather at the shrine to Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell’, Spiked Online, 24 August 2005, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/ printable/836/ Aristotle, Politics, trans. B. Jowett (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2000). Ashley, R., ‘The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 12, October 1987, pp. 403–34. Ashley, R. K. and R. B. J. Walker, ‘Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 34, 1990, pp. 367–416. Bailey. D., ‘Stemming the immigration wave’, BBC News Online, 10 September 2006, http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5331896.stm (accessed 26 May 2007). Balibar, E., ‘The Borders of Europe’, trans. J. Swenson, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 216–33. Banchard, D., ‘Introduction’, in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. D. Bouchard, trans. D. Bouchard and S. Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977). Bartelson, J., The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). BBC News Online, ‘Georgia Conflict: Key Statements’, 2008, http://news.bbc.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Bibliography

4/12/11

09:58

Page 173

173

co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7556857.stm (accessed 27 August 2008). BBC News Online, ‘London attacks in depth: the Menezes killing’, 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2005/london_explosions/default.stm (accessed 18 March 2008). BBC News Online, ‘Man shot dead by police on tube’, 22 July 2005, http:// www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4706787.stm (accessed 18 March 2008). Benjamin, W., ‘Critique of Violence’, in M. Bullock and M. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume One 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004) [1921], pp. 236–52. Benjamin, W., ‘On the Concept of History’, in H. Eiland and M. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) [1940], pp. 389–400. Benjamin, W., ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in H. Eiland and M. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938– 1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) [1938], pp. 3–94. Bennington, G., ‘Frontiers: Of literature and philosophy’, Professorial Lecture, 4 June 1996, University of Sussex. Biersteker, T., ‘State, Sovereignty and Territory’, in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B. Simmons (eds), Handbook of International Relations (London and New Delhi: Sage, 2002). Bigo, D., ‘Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the Social Practices of Control of the Banopticon’, in P. Kumar Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 3–34. Bigo, D., ‘Globalized (In)Security: the Field and the Pan-Opticon’, in D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala (eds), Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: the (In)Security Games (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), pp. 5–54. Bigo, D., ‘The Ban, the Pan, and the Exception: Reading Schmitt, Agamben, Nancy, and Foucault’, paper presented at the Annual ISA Conference, San Diego, March 2006. Bigo, D., ‘Protection: Security, Territory and Population’, in J. Huysmans, A. Dobson and R. Prokhovnik (eds), The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 84–100. Bigo, D., ‘The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies), in M. Albert, D. Jacobson, and Y. Lapid (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 91–116. Bigo, D., ‘When two become one’, in M. Kelstrup and M. Williams (eds),

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

174

4/12/11

09:58

Page 174

BORDER POLITICS

International Relation Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, Security and Community (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 171–205. Binetti, V. and C. Casarino, ‘Translators’ Notes’, in G. Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 143–6. Black, C., 7–7 The London Bombs – What Went Wrong? (London: Gibson Square Books, 2005). Boer, M. den, ‘Moving between bogus and bona fide: the policing of inclusion and exclusion in Europe’, in R. Miles and D. Thränhardt (eds), Migration and European Integration: the Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion (London: Pinter Publishers, 1995), pp. 92–112. Borger, J., ‘Security Fences or Barriers to Peace?’, The Guardian, 24 April 2007. Bouchard, D. ‘Introduction’, in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. D. Bouchard, trans. D. Bouchard and S. Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 15–29. Brown, C., ‘Globalisation’, in C. Brown with K. Ainley, Understanding International Relations, 3rd edn (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Brown, C., ‘Borders and Identity in International Political Theory’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson and Y. Lapid (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 117–37. Brown, G., ‘Statement on security’, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/ Page12675.asp, 2007 (accessed 29 June 2008). Bukharin, N., Imperialism and World Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1929) [1915]. Bull, H., The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd edn (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). Bull, H., The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1977). Bulley, D., ‘Foreign Terror? London bombings, Resistance and the Failing State’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10(3), August 2008, pp. 379–94. Butler, J., Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). Cabinet Office, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom: Security in an interdependent world’ (London: HMSO, March 2008). Cabinet Office, ‘Security in a Global Hub: Establishing the UK’s New Border Arrangements’ (London: HMSO, November 2007). Caldwell, A., ‘Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity’, Theory and Event, 7(2), 2004.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Bibliography

4/12/11

09:58

Page 175

175

Camilleri, J., A. Jarvis and A. Paolini (eds), The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995). Campbell, D., Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Campbell, D., National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Campbell, D. and M. J. Shapiro, Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Carlson, B., J. Warner and K. Wang, ‘Foreword’, The SAIS Review of International Affairs, Special Issue on ‘Borders’, 26(1), Winter–Spring 2006, pp. 1–2. Carrera, S., The EU Border Management Strategy: FRONTEX and the Challenges of Irregular Immigration in the Canary Islands (Brussels: Centre for European Studies, 2007). Closs Stephens, A., ‘Seven million Londoners, one London: national and urban ideas of community’, in A. Closs Stephens and N. Vaughan-Williams (eds), Terrorism and the Politics of Response (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 60–78. Closs Stephens, A. and N. Vaughan-Williams (eds), Terrorism and the Politics of Response (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008). Connolly, W., ‘The Complexity of Sovereignty’, in J. Edkins, V. Pin-Fat and M. J. Shapiro (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in World Politics (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 23–41. Connolly, W., ‘Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence’, in M. Shapiro and H. Alker (eds), Challenging Boundaries (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 141–65. Connolly, W., The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Connolly, W., The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd edn (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). Connolly, W., ‘The Irony of Interpretation’, in D. Conway and J. Seery (eds), The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 119–50. Coward, M., ‘The Globalisation of Enclosure: Interrogating the Geopolitics of Empire’, Third World Quarterly, 26(6), 2005, pp. 855–72. Culler, J., On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1987). Cusick, J., ‘A cover up? And if so, why?’, Sunday Herald, 21 August 2005. Daily Telegraph, ‘Met chief admits serious mistake over Menezes’, 31 January 2006. Daily Telegraph, ‘De Menezes “shot 11 times during 30 seconds”’, 26 August 2005.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

176

4/12/11

09:58

Page 176

BORDER POLITICS

Dauphinee, E. and C. Masters (eds), Living, Dying, Surviving: The logics of biopower and the war on terror (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Davenport, J., ‘Met Chief admits serious mistake over Menezes’, Evening Standard, 30 January 2006. Dean, M., ‘A Political Mythology of World Order: Carl Schmitt’s Nomos’, Theory, Culture and Society, 23(5), 2006, pp. 1–22. Deleuze, G., Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. A. Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2005). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming Imperceptible’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 256–342. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994). Derrida, J., Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Derrida, J., ‘Force and Signification’ in J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–35. Derrida, J., Negotiations: Interviews and Interventions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Derrida, J., ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’, in J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 317–51. Derrida, J., ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 85–117. Derrida, J., On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Padstow: Routledge, 2002). Derrida, J., ‘Deconstruction: The Im-Possible’, in S. Lotringer and S. Cohen (eds), French Theory in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) [1976]. Derrida, J., ‘As if I were dead: an interview with Jacques Derrida’, in J. Brannigan, R. Robbins and J. Wolfreys (eds), Applying: To Derrida (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 212–16. Derrida, J., ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, in D. Carroll (ed.), States of ‘Theory’: History, Art and Critical Discourse (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 63–94. Derrida, J., ‘Deconstruction and the Other’, in R. Kearney (ed.), States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 105–26.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Bibliography

4/12/11

09:58

Page 177

177

Derrida, J., ‘Force of Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority’, in D. Gray, D. Cornell and M. Rosenfeld (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67. Derrida, J., Limited Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Derrida, J., The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Derrida, J., ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (eds), Derrida and Difference (Coventry: Parousia Press, 1985), pp. 1–5. Derrida, J., ‘Différance’, in J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3–27. Derrida, J., Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Derrida, J., ‘The Parergon’, October, 9(3), 1979, pp. 3–40. Derrida, J., ‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics’, in J. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies in Post-Structural Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 175–205. Donnan, H. and T. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation, and State (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999). Doty, R., ‘States of Exception in the Mexico–US Border: Security, “Decisions”, and Civilian Border Patrols’, International Political Sociology, 1, 2007, pp. 113–37. Dronsfield, J., ‘After parerga: Kant, Derrida, and the temporality of aesthetic judgement’, in P. Rothfield (ed.), Kant After Derrida (London: Clinamen Press, 2003), pp. 80–104. Edkins, J., ‘Missing Persons: Manhattan 2001’, in E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (eds), Living, Dying, Surviving: The logics of biopower and the war on terror (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Edkins, J. ‘Whatever politics’, in M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli (eds), Sovereignty and Life: Essays on Giorgio Agamben (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 70–91. Edkins, J., ‘Humanitarianism, humanity, human’, Journal of Human Rights, 2(2), 2003, pp. 253–8. Edkins, J., Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Edkins, J. and V. Pin-Fat, ‘Through the wire: Relations of power and relations of violence’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(1), 2005, pp. 1–25. Edkins, J. and V. Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, in J. Edkins, V. Pin-Fat and M. J. Shapiro (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1–23. Elden, S., ‘Blair, Neo-Conservatism and the War on Territorial Integrity’,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

178

4/12/11

09:58

Page 178

BORDER POLITICS

International Politics, Special Issue on ‘Ethics in World Politics: Cosmopolitanism and Beyond?’, (eds) J. Brassett and D. Bulley, 44(1), 2007, pp. 37–57. Elden, S., ‘Contingent Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity and the Sanctity of Borders’, The SAIS Review of International Affairs, Special Issue on ‘Borders’, (eds) B. Carlson, J. Warner and K. Wang, 26(1), Winter–Spring, 2006, pp. 11–24. Fontana, A. and M. Bertani, ‘Situating the Lectures’, in M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 273–95. Foucault, M., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,1977–78, ed. M. Senellart (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Foucault, M., Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (London: Penguin, 2003). Foucault, M., Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) [1959]. Foucault, M., The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2001) [1970]. Foucault, M., ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematizations’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 381–90. Foucault, M., The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Routledge, 1989) [1963]. Foucault, M., ‘Questions on Geography’, in M. Foucault, Power/knowledge, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham and K. Soper (Padstow: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 63–78. Foucault, M., ‘Questions to Michel Foucault on Geography’, Microfascisms of Power (Madrid: Mattock Press, 1980). Foucault, M., Power/knowledge, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham and K. Soper (Padstow: Harvester Press, 1980). Foucault, M., ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History’, in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. D. Bouchard, trans. D. Bouchard and S. Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139–65. Frontex, Annual General Report, http://www.frontex.europa.eu/annual_report, 2005 (accessed 27 May 2005). Frontex Regulation, Council Regulation (EC) No. 2007/2004 of 26 October 2004 establishing a European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (Brussels: EU, 2005). Geddes, A., Immigration and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe?

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Bibliography

4/12/11

09:58

Page 179

179

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Gregory, D., ‘The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception’, Geografiska Annaler 88B(4), 2006, pp. 405–27. Guild, E., Danger: Borders Under Construction: Assessing the first five years of border policy in an area of freedom, security and justice (Brussels: Centre for European Studies, 2005). Hardt, M. and T. Dumm, ‘Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between M. Hardt and T. Dumm about Hardt and Negri’s Empire’, in P. Passavant and J. Dean (eds), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 163–75. Hardt, M. and A. Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2004). Hardt, M. and A. Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2000). Held, D. and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalisation Debate, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). Hilferding, R., Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) [1910]. Hindess, B. ‘Terrortory’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31, 2006, pp. 243–57. Hirst, P. and G. Thompson, ‘The Future of Globalisation’, Cooperation and Conflict, 37, 2002, pp. 255–66. Hirst, P. and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). HMSO, UK Borders Act 2007, London. Home Office, ‘Securing the UK Border: Our vision and strategy for the future’, March, (London: HMSO, March 2007). Home Office, ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan: Using the national identity scheme to strengthen our borders and enforce compliance within the UK’, (London: HMSO, December 2006). Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 31, CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/ Add.13, para.10, 2004. Huysmans, J., ‘Migrants as a security problem: dangers of securitising social issues’, in R. Miles and D. Thränhardt (eds), Migration and European Integration: the Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion (London: Pinter Publishers, 1995), pp. 53–72. International Court of Justice, ‘Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports, 9 July 2004. Jackson, R., The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Jorry, H., ‘Construction of a European Institutional Model for Managing Operational Cooperation at the EU’s External Borders: is the Frontex

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

180

4/12/11

09:58

Page 180

BORDER POLITICS

agency a step forward?’ (Brussels: Centre for European Studies, 2007). Kalyvas, A., ‘The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp’, in A. Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 107–35. Kolossov, V., ‘Border Studies: Changing Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches’, Geopolitics, 10(4), Winter 2005, pp. 155–79. Kumar Rajaram, P. and Grundy-Warr, C. ‘The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand’, International Migration, 42(1), (2004), pp. 33–64 Kwinter, S., Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Laffey, M. and J. Weldes, ‘Representing the International’, in P. Passavant and J. Dean (eds), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 121–43. Laïdi, Z., A World Without Meaning: the Crisis of Meaning in International Politics (London: Routledge, 1998). Lapid, Y., ‘Introduction: Identities, Borders, Orders: Nudging International Relations Theory in a New Direction’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson and Y. Lapid (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 1–21. Laustsen, C. and B. Dikken, Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005). Laustsen, C. and B. Dikken, ‘Zones of Indistinction: Security, Terror and Bare Life’, Space and Culture, 5(3), 2002, pp. 290–307. Lenin, V. I., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939) [1916]. Linklater, A. and J. MacMillan (eds), Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations Theory (London: Pinter Publishers, 1995). London Assembly, Report of the 7 July Review Committee, (London: Greater London Authority, 2006). McLoughlin, D., ‘The Nomos of the Modern: Sociology and the Culture of Exception’, borderlands e-journal, 4(3), 2005. Massumi, B., ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact’, proceedings of the ‘Genealogies of Biopolitics’ conference, 2005, http://www.radical empiricism.org (accessed 10 September 2006). Mbembe, A., ‘Necropolitics’, trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture, 15(1), 2005, pp. 11–40. Minca, C., ‘Agamben’s Geographies of Modernity’, Political Geography, 26(1), 2007, pp. 78–97. Minca, C., ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, Geografiska Annaler, 88B(4), 2006, pp. 387–403.

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Bibliography

4/12/11

09:58

Page 181

181

Minca, C., ‘The Return of the Camp’, Progress in Human Geography, 29, 2005, pp. 405–12. Nancy, J.-L., ‘Abandoned Being’, trans. B. Holmes, in J.-L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 36–47. NBC News, ‘UK police defend shoot-to-kill after mistake’, 24 July 2005. Neal, A. ‘Foucault in Guantánamo: Towards an Archaeology of the Exception’, Security Dialogue, 39(1), 2006, pp. 31–46. Neal, A., ‘Securitization and Risk at the EU Border’, unpublished paper. Negri, A., ‘The Crisis of Political Space’, trans. E. Emery, in W. Bonefeld (ed.), Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), pp. 189–200. Newman, D., ‘Borders and Bordering: Towards an Inter-Disciplinary Dialogue’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 2006, pp. 171–2. Newman, D., ‘Boundaries, Borders and Barriers: Changing Geographic Perspectives on Territorial Lines’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson and Y. Lapid (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 137–53. Norris, A., ‘Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead’, in A. Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–31. Ojakangas, M., ‘Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault’, Foucault Studies, 2, May 2005, pp. 5–28. Ó Tuathail, G., ‘Borderless Worlds? Problematising Discourses of Deterritorialisation’, Geopolitics, 4(2), Autumn 1999, pp. 139–54. Ó Tuathail, G., Critical Geopolitics, (London: Routledge, 1996). Ó Tuathail, G. and J. Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’, Political Geography, 11, 1992, pp. 190–204. Ó Tuathail, G. and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Paasi, A., ‘The Changing Discourses on Political Boundaries: Mapping the Backgrounds, Contexts, and Contents’, in H. van Houtum, O. Kramsch and W. Zierhofer (eds), B/ordering Space (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 17–33 Paasi, A., ‘Generations and the “development” of border studies’, Geopolitics, 10(4), 2005, pp. 663–71. Parker, N., ‘A Theoretical Introduction: Space, Centers, and Margins’, in N. Parker (ed.), The Geopolitics of Europe’s Identity: Centers, Boundaries, and Margins (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 3–24. Prescott, J. R. V., Political Frontiers and Boundaries (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987).

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

182

4/12/11

09:58

Page 182

BORDER POLITICS

Prescott, J. R. V., The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965). Prozorov, S., ‘X/Xs: Towards a general theory of the exception’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 30(1), 2005, pp. 81–112. Pugliese, J., ‘Asymmetries of terror: visual regimes of racial profiling and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the context of the war in Iraq’, borderlands e-journal, 5(1), 2006. Roberts, D., Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Ruggie, J. G., Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalisation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Ruggie, J. G., ‘Review: Continuity and transformation in the world polity: Toward a neorealist synthesis’, World Politics, 35(2), January 1983, pp. 261–85. Rumford, C. (ed.), Citizens and Borderwork in Contemporary Europe (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008). Rumford, C. ‘Introduction: Theorising Borders’, Special Issue, ‘Borders’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 2006, pp. 155–69. Salter, M., ‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31(2), 2006, pp. 167–89. Saussure, F. de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). Schmitt, C., Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab, 3rd edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005) [1922]. Schmitt, C., The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003) [1950]. Scholte, J. A., Globalisation: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Shapiro, M. J., ‘Risky Businesses’, paper presented at the ‘Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy Conference’, University of Wales, Gregynog, 6–8 January, 2005. Shapiro, M. J., Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Shapiro, M. J. and H. Alker, Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Starr, H., ‘International Borders: What They Are, What They Mean, and Why We Should Care’, The SAIS Review of International Affairs, Special Issue on ‘Borders’, 26(1), Winter–Spring 2006, pp. 3–10. Strange, S., ‘The Westfailure System’, Review of International Studies, 25(3), 1999, pp. 345–54. Suganami, H., ‘Understanding Sovereignty through Kelsen and Schmitt’,

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

Bibliography

4/12/11

09:58

Page 183

183

Review of International Studies, 33, 2007, pp. 511–30. Taylor, P., ‘Special Report: the death of Jean Charles de Menezes’, Guardian, 8 March 2006. Teschke, B., The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (New York: Verso, 2003). United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights, ‘Situation of Detainees in Guantanamo Bay’, 15 February 2006, E/CN.4/ 2006/120. van Houtum, H., ‘The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries’, Geopolitics, 10(4), 2005, pp. 672–9. van Houtum, H., O. Kramsch and W. Zierhofer, B/ordering Space (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). van Munster, R., ‘The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule’, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 17, 2004, pp. 141–53. Virno, P. and M. Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Walker, R. B. J., ‘Conclusion: Sovereignties, Exceptions, Worlds’, in J. Edkins, V. Pin-Fat and M. J. Shaprio (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 239–51. Walker, R. B. J., ‘After the Future: Enclosures, Connections, Politics’, in R. Falk, L. Ruiz and R. B. J. Walker (eds), Reframing the International: Law, Culture, Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 427–49. Walker, R. B. J., ‘On the Immanence/Imminence of Empire’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31(1), 2002, pp. 337–45. Walker, R. B. J., ‘Editorial Note: Re-Engaging with the Political’, in J. Edkins and R. B. J. Walker (eds), ‘Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics’, Special Issue, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 25(1), January– March, 2000, pp. 1–2. Walker, R. B. J., ‘Europe is not where it is supposed to be’, in M. Kelstrup and M. Williams (eds), International Relations and the Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 14–32. Walker, R. B. J., ‘Foreword’, in J. Edkins, N. Persram and V. Pin-Fat (eds), Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999). Walker, R. B. J., Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Walker, R. B. J., ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice’, in R. B. J. Walker and S. Mendlowitz (eds), Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990), pp. 159–85. Walker, R. B. J., After the Globe/Before the World, unpublished typescript. Wall, T., ‘Au Hasard’, in A. Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

184

4/12/11

09:58

Page 184

BORDER POLITICS

on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 31–49. Walters, W., ‘Border/Control’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 2006, pp. 187–203. Walters, W., ‘Rethinking borders beyond the state’, Contemporary European Politics, 4, 2006, pp. 141–59. Walters, W., ‘Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalising the Border’, Environment and Planning, 20(5), 2002, pp. 564–80. Waltz, K., Theory of International Politics (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979). ‘Weather in London, UK, on 22 July, 2005’, www.weatherunderground.com. Weber, M., ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 77–128. Weizman, E., ‘On Extraterritoriality’, in G. Agamben et al. (eds), Arxipèlag D’Excepcions (Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporania, 2007). Wendt, A., Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Whitby, M., ‘I saw man shot – eyewitness’, BBC News Online, 22 July 2005, http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4706913.stm (accessed 18 March 2008). Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modern World: the Lowell Lectures 1925 (London: Free Association Books, 1985). Williams, J., The Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Williams, J., ‘Territorial borders, international ethics, and geography: do good fences still make good neighbours?’, Geopolitics, 8(2), Summer 2003, pp. 25–46. Williams, J., ‘Territorial Borders, Toleration and the English School’, Review of International Studies, 28(4), 2002, pp. 737–58. Žižek, S., Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London and New York: Verso, 2002).

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 185

INDEX

Note: page numbers in italics refer to pages with illustrations. 9/11 see September 11 attacks 22/7 see Menezes, Jean Charles de Africa, 14, 26–8, 38, 76 Agamben, Giorgio, 8–9, 96–124, 132–46, 156, 158, 166–9 Agnew, John, 1, 14–15, 39, 42–4, 132 Ahmed, Nafeez, 118 Airline Liaison Officers, 19 Albert, Mathias, 50–1 America see United States Amini, Abbas, 142–3 Amnesty International, 29 Amoore, Louise, 58–9 Amsterdam Treaty, 25 Anarchical Society, The (Bull), 45–6 Anderson, Malcolm, 47–8 anti-terrorism, 3–4, 16–24, 26, 29–32, 58–9, 117–24, 167–9; see also security; war on terror archipelago, concept of, 116–17 Aristotle, 97, 98 Ashley, Richard K., 53 asylum seekers, 18, 142–3 authority see power; sovereignty Balibar, Étienne, 6–7, 15, 34, 117 ban, Agamben’s concept of, 98, 99 bare life, 99–100, 103–7, 112–17, 123–4, 132–6, 141–3, 166–7 Benjamin, Walter, 67–8, 71–2, 99, 108–9, 167, 169 Berlin Wall, 7, 14, 38 Biersteker, Thomas, 44–5 Bigo, Didier, 56–8, 111, 122–3 binary oppositions (deconstruction), 146–52

biometric borders, 58–9 biometrics, 16, 20–1, 23, 33, 58–9 biopolitical approach, 58–60 Agamben, 97–101, 105, 107, 113–17 Foucault, 79–81, 88 generalised biopolitical border, 9–10, 114–17, 123–4, 131–46, 156–9, 166–9 bios, 97–100, 102–6, 112–14, 138, 140–2 Blair, Sir Ian, 117–18, 122 border controls, 17–28; see also bordering practices; security border imaginaries, 4–10, 44–61, 130–59, 166; see also border of the state, concepts of border of the state, concepts of deconstructed, 151–2 as empire, 85–6, 89 as épokhè, 68–9, 70–1 as exceptional territory, 73–4, 112, 114 as frames, 152–9 generalised biopolitical borders, 9–10, 114–17, 123–4, 131–46, 156–9, 166–9 imperialist 84–5 inside/outside model, 7, 26, 54–9 logic of the field, 100–2, 107, 111, 144–6, 158 modern geopolitical imaginary, 1–3, 14–15, 41–4, 59, 132–4, 164–6 zones of indistinction, 101–2, 107–9, 112–17, 132–3, 136–8, 140–2 see also border imaginaries border studies, 38–44, 165 bordering practices, 16–28, 33–4, 56–9, 123–4, 143, 165 borders biometric, 58–9 electronic, 123

185

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

186 location of, 6–7, 18–20, 28, 33, 165 offshoring of, 18–20, 28, 33 presence/absence of, 4–5, 15, 55–6, 85–6, 89 thickness of, 32, 155, 156, 165 vacillation of, 6–7, 15–34, 59–60 see also border of the state, concepts of Borders Act (UK), 16 ‘Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan’, 16 Borger, Julian, 4 Boudieu, Pierre, 58 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 78 Britain see United Kingdom Brown, Chris, 4 Brown, Gordon, 16 Bukharin, Nikolai, 83 Bull, Hedley, 45–6 Bulley, Dan, 135 Bush, George W., 121, 163–4 Butler, Judith, 104, 105–6, 133, 167, 169 Cabinet Office (UK), 23 Caldwell, Anne, 135 camp, the, 113–15, 135 Canary Islands, 26–8 capitalism, 83 Carrera, Sergio, 27, 28 cause/effect (deconstruction), 148–9 citizenship, 3, 134 civil liberties, 21 colonial occupation, 115–16 concentration camps, 113, 115, 135 Connolly, William, 55, 66, 68, 106, 136 Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Rossiter), 109 Constitutional Government and Democracy (Friedrich), 109 Convention against Torture, 30 ‘Council Declaration on the EU Response to the London Bombings’, 26 critical geopolitics, 41–4, 132 ‘Critical Geopolitics: Discourse, Difference and Dissent’ (Dalby), 43 ‘Critique of Violence’ (Benjamin) 67–8, 109 Culler, Jonathan, 147–9 Dalby, Simon, 43 data capture, identity, 19–22, 23, 33

09:58

Page 186

BORDER POLITICS de Boulainvilliers, Henri, 78 de Menezes, Jean Charles, 117–24, 169 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 151 Dean, Mitchell, 75 decision-making, 72–4, 98–9, 121–2, 124 ‘Declaration on Combating Terrorism’, 26 deconstruction, 146–52, 157 Defence of the Realm Act (UK), 110 Deleuze, Gilles, 105 Department of Homeland Security (US), 58 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 10, 68–72, 106–7, 146–59, 169–70 de-subjectification, 137, 138 detention, indefinite, 29–32, 133 Dick, Cressida, 119 différance (Derrida), 151–2 Dikken, Bülent, 115 disciplinary power (Foucault), 79–80 Donnan, Hastings, 38 e-Borders Programme, 19–20, 23 economic migration see migration economy, global, 77; see also globalisation Edkins, Jenny, 61, 98, 136, 140–6, 158 ‘Eighth Thesis on the Concept of History’ (Benjamin), 109 Einstein, Albert, 101 ‘Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ (Einstein), 101 electronic bordering, 123; see also e-Borders Programme emergency, states of, 72–4, 133; see also states of exception Emergency Powers Act (UK), 110 empire, concept of, 83–8 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 83–91 épokhè, 68–9, 70–1 Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand, The (Williams), 49–50 EU see European Union European Union, 5, 24–8, 38 exception, states of, 72–4, 98–9, 108–17 exceptional territory, 73–4, 112, 114 field, logic of the, 100–2, 107, 111, 144–6, 158 field of security, 57–8 Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (Hilferding), 83 force see violence

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

09:58

Page 187

Index ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority’ (Derrida), 68–72 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK), 17, 23 Foucault, Michel, 8–9, 59, 75, 77–82, 88–9, 97 framing devices, 152–9 Friedrich, C., 109 Frontex, 24–8 Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Anderson), 47–8 generalised biopolitical borders, 9–10, 114–17, 123–4, 131–46, 156–9, 166–9 Geneva Convention, 30, 104 geography, political, 41 Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries, The (Prescott), 40 geopolitics, critical, 41–4 ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’ (Ó Tuathail and Agnew), 42–3 Georgia, 163–4 German Law Review, 100 Germany, 72–3, 109 Glasgow airport attack, 16 Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States, The (Jackson), 48–9 global economy, 77; see also globalisation global security relations, 3, 135–6 globalisation, 4–5, 17–18 Guantánamo Bay, 29–32, 103–5, 113–14, 133 Hardt, Michael, 83–91, 130 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 103 HERA I (Frontex operation), 27 HERA II (Frontex operation), 28 Hilferding, Rudolf, 83 Hindess, Barry, 66–7 History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Power, The (Foucault), 97 Home Office (UK), 17, 23 homo sacer, concept of, 105–6, 111, 124, 133–6, 169; see also bare life Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben), 96, 97–8, 103, 108, 114–15, 136 human rights, 30–2, 134–5

187 ICCPR see International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICERD see International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination ICJ see International Court of Justice ICRC see International Committee of the Red Cross Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (Albert, Jacobson, Lapid), 50–1 identity, 3, 20–2 identity data capture, 19–22, 23, 33 identity documents, 17, 19, 20–1 identity life cycle, 21, 21–2 immigration, 17–19, 26–8; see also asylum seekers; mobility immigration control see border controls imperialism, 83, 84–5 Imperialism and World Economy (Bukharin), 83 Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin), 83 inclusion and exclusion, 33, 98, 112–13, 142 inclusive exclusion, 98, 112–13 indefinite detention, 29–32, 133 Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), 118 inside/outside (deconstruction), 149–52 Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Walker), 52 inside/outside model, 7, 26, 54–9 integrated border security, 25–6 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 104 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), 30 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 31 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 30–1 international law, 30–2 International Relations theory, 4–5, 38–9, 44–61, 165 interrogation, 29 IPCC see Independent Police Complaints Commission IR see International Relations Jackson, Robert, 4, 48–9

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

188 Jacobson, David, 50–1 Joint e-Borders Operations Centre, 20 Kalyvas, Andreas, 136 Kant, Immanuel, 153–5 Kolossov, Vladimir, 39, 40 ‘Kratos’ policy, 121–2, 124 Kwinter, Stanford, 101 Laffey, Mark, 89 Lapid, Yosef, 50–1 Laustsen, Carsten, 115 law, 29–32, 67–77, 109, 110; see also sovereignty Le Monde, 143 Lenin, Vladimir, 83 Les Pleins Pouvoirs (Tingsten), 109 ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ (Derrida), 146 life, and politics, 97–105, 136, 138–9; see also bare life; bios; zoe¯ life cycle see identity life cycle lightning strike decisions, 121–2, 124 Limited Inc. (Derrida), 146, 149 limology, 38–44, 165 location of borders, 6–7, 18–20, 28, 33, 59–60, 165 logic of the field, 100–2, 107, 111, 144–6, 158 London bombings, 16, 26, 135 Madrid bombings, 26 Massumi, Brian, 121–2 Mbembe, Achille, 7, 115–16 Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Agamben), 96, 138–9 Medvedev, Dimitry, 164 Menezes, Jean Charles de, 117–24, 169 migration, 18; see also immigration; mobility ‘Military Order’ (US), 29–30, 110 Minca, Claudio, 100, 115 mobility, 14, 17–28, 143 Möbius strip, 101–2, 102, 139 modern geopolitical imaginary, 1–3, 14–15, 41–4, 59, 132–4, 164–6 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 98 National Security Strategy (UK), 16 ‘Necropolitics’ (Mbembe), 115–16 Negri, Antonio, 83–91 neo-realist approaches, 3, 45 Newman, David, 39

09:58

Page 188

BORDER POLITICS ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History’ (Foucault), 78 nomos, 75–7, 112, 113, 114 Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, The (Schmitt), 75–7 Norris, Andrew, 133 nuda vita see bare life offshoring of borders, 18–20, 28, 33 ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ (Einstein), 101 Ó Tuathail, Gearóid, 41–4, 132 Paasi, Anssi, 39 paper documentation (identity), 17, 19 parerga (deconstruction), 153–5, 156 ‘Parergon, The’ (Derrida), 153–4 philosophy, influence on border studies, 41 Pin-Fat, Véronique, 61, 140–6, 158 policing, 57, 68, 69–70, 84, 117–24 polis, 98, 112, 133, 142, 145 Political Frontiers and Boundaries (Prescott), 40 political geography, 41 political science, influence on border studies, 41 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Schmitt), 72–5 Positions (Derrida), 146, 149–52 post-structuralist thought, 8–10, 65–91 power, 60–1, 77–82; see also sovereignty Power/Knowledge (Foucault), 77–8 power relations, 140, 142 pre-emption, politics of, 122 pre-emptive bordering practices, 22–4, 28, 58 Prescott, J. R. V., 40 presence/absence (deconstruction), 150 presence/absence of borders, 4–5, 15, 55–6, 85–6, 89 Problem of Constitutional Dictatorship, The (Watkin), 109 problematisation, as method of analysis, 8–9 profanation, as means of resistance, 137–8 Project Iris, 20 Prozorov, Sergei, 144 Pugliese, Joseph, 123 Putin, Vladimir, 163

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

Index refugee, figure of, 138–9 refugees see asylum seekers resistance, 136–46 Respublica Christiana, 76 ‘Revised EU Terrorism Action Plan’, 26 revolution, 69, 71, 90 risk profiling, 20, 22–3, 58 Rossiter, C., 109 Ruggie, John Gerard, 45 Russia, 163–4 Saakashvili, Mikhail, 163 Salter, Mark, 74 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 163 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 151 Schengen Agreement, 25 Schengen Information System, 25 Schmitt, Carl, 72–7, 98–9, 108–9, 112 ‘Securing the UK border: Our Vision and Strategy for the Future’, 16–17 security, 3–4, 16–28, 56–9, 80, 116, 133–6; see also anti-terrorism; war on terror ‘Security in a Global Hub: Establishing the UK’s New Border Arrangements’, 17 security relations, 3, 135–6 September 11 attacks, 5, 16, 26, 58, 167 Shapiro, Michael, 61, 71 Single European Act, 25 ‘Smart Border Alliance’, 58 social psychology, influence on border studies, 41 Social Theory of International Politics (Wendt), 46–7 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), 78–80 sociology, influence on border studies, 41 South Ossetia, 163–4 Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (Edkins, Pin-Fat, Shapiro), 61 sovereignty and bare life, 98–100, 106–8, 132–5, 166 and borders of the state, 52–5, 60–1 empire as alternative form of, 83–90 limits of sovereign power, 60–1, 76, 80–1, 108–17 and resistance, 137–46 and states of exception, 72–5, 98–100, 108–17 and subjectivity, 98–100, 106–8, 132–3, 166 and territory, 75–7

09:58

Page 189

189 spatial concepts empire as smooth space, 85–6 Möbius strip, 101–2, 102, 139 Special Theory of Relativity, 101 state borders, concepts of see border of the state, concepts of State of Exception (Agamben), 96 states of exception, 72–4, 98–9, 108–17 subjectification, 137, 138 subjectivity, 3, 77–8, 105–6, 107–8, 134, 136–9 Suganami, Hidemi, 74 surveillance, 28, 79, 118–19 technology biometrics, 16, 20–1, 23, 33, 58–9 border controls, 18–19 electronic bordering, 123 identity data capture, 19–22, 23, 33 territorial trap, 14–15, 42 territory, 163–4 and borders, 2, 14, 18–20, 28, 33–4 exceptional territory, 73–4, 112, 114 and law, 29–32, 73–7 and sovereignty, 75–7, 81 and violence, 66–7 terrorism, 5, 16, 26, 58, 135, 167; see also anti-terrorism; war on terror Theory of International Politics (Waltz), 45 Theory of Relativity, 101 thickness of borders, 32, 155, 156, 165 Time That Remains, The (Agamben), 137–8 Tingsten, H., 109 transformation of borders see vacillation of borders travel see mobility Treaty of Rome, 25 Truth in Painting, The (Derrida), 154–5 UK see United Kingdom UKBA see United Kingdom Border Agency UN see United Nations UNITED, 26 United Kingdom, 16–24, 109–10 United Kingdom Border Agency, 16, 19 United Nations, 2, 29–31, 32, 104 United States, 58, 77, 143 US see United States vacillation of borders, 6–7, 15–34, 59–60

02 pages 001-190 text:Border Politics

4/12/11

190 van Houtum, Henk, 41 violence, 50, 55, 60, 66–72, 109, 140, 142 Virno, Paolo, 130 Walker, R. B. J., 7, 51–6, 61, 70–1, 90–1 Waltz, Kenneth, 45 war, 109–10, 135–6 war on terror, 29–30, 58, 122–3, 140–3, 167–9; see also anti-terrorism; security Watkin, F., 109 Weber, Max, 2 Weimar constitution, 72–3 Weizman, Eyal, 7, 116–17 Weldes, Jutta, 89 Wendt, Alexander, 46–7

09:58

Page 190

BORDER POLITICS Westphalian system, 5, 45, 50–1 ‘whatever being’, 138–9, 141 ‘Whatever Politics’, (Edkins), 145–6 width of borders see thickness of borders Williams, John, 4, 49–50 Wilson, Thomas, 38 World Trade Center attack see September 11 attacks Yugoslavia, dissolution of, 38 Žižek, Slavoj, 135 zoe¯, 97–100, 102–6, 107, 112–14, 138, 140–2 zones of indistinction, 101–2, 107–9, 112–17, 132–3, 136–8, 140–2