global apartheid

There is a double-bind of the same kind inherent in the very notion of the circulation of persons. The problem lies not so much in the difference in treatment between the circulation of commodities or capital and the circulation of people, as the term circulation is not used here in the same sense. It is, rather, the fact that in spite of computer networks and telecommunications, capital never circulates without a plentiful circulation of human beings – some circulating ‘upwards’, others ‘downwards’. But the establishment of a world apartheid, or a dual regime for the circulation of individuals, raises massive political problems of acceptability and resistance.

Balibar, “What is a Border?” in Politics and the Other Scene, 82.

cfp – Migration without Boundaries at Michigan State

Call for papers

MSU Graduate Student Research Conference on Migration

“Migration Without Boundaries”

 October 5-6^th, 2012, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

Michigan State University will host a graduate student research conference on migration, welcoming papers on the theme, “Migration Without Boundaries.” This conference aims to facilitate and foster an interdisciplinary, trans-institutional cohort of scholars interested in issues of migration and mobility. The organizers of this conference invite papers from scholars at any stage in their graduate career, working on any thematic, conceptual, spatial, or temporal aspect of migration, from any disciplinary perspective. Advanced undergraduate students are also welcome to apply.

Submissions may include research proposals, research designs, dissertation or thesis chapters, methodological models, work in progress, outlines of dissertations, and preliminary research findings. Michigan State University has over 30 renowned faculty members that work on migration, many of whom will serve as discussants. The conference will feature keynote speaker Dr. Rhacel Parrenas of the Sociology department at the University of Southern California on the evening of Friday, October 5^th, and a plenary session and paper sessions on Saturday, October 6^th.

Applicants should submit abstracts including the author’s name, address, institutional affiliation, stage in program, email address, and phone number. Abstracts should be limited to 250 words. A $20 conference fee can be paid online through the conference website upon acceptance.

Students may also consider submitting a panel proposal, including an abstract for the panel and an abstract for each paper presenter. The panel abstract should include a statement about the panel topic and a brief summary of the arguments to be explored by contributing papers.

If you wish to be considered for a travel award, please provide a brief statement of need with application. Please submit abstracts by July 16^th, 2012, invitations will be sent by August 1^st, and we will require attendance confirmation by August 30^th. Papers should be sent to panel commentators by September 17^th, to allow faculty discussants ample time for consideration.

Abstract Due: Monday, July 16^th, 2012

Email submissions and questions to: migrationwithoutboundaries@gmail.com

To download a PDF version of this call for papers click here and for more information visit our Facebook page here.

This conference has been sponsored by the MSU History Department, the Sociology Department, the Asian Studies Center and The Center for Eastern European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CEERES).

Cultures, Migrations, Borders Summer School – Greece

Summer School (website)
Cultures, Migrations, Borders
Lesbos, Greece
June 28 – July 10, 2012

For Master and Ph.D. students in the social sciences

The University of the Aegean and the University of Amsterdam welcome applications for the Summer School ‘Cultures, Migrations, Borders’ that will take place on the island of Lesbos from June 28 to July 10, 2012.

The larger socioeconomic transformations in Africa and Asia have resulted in increased migration flows to Greece and to Europe in general. Greece and the Aegean Sea have served as one of the entry “gates” of Europe, as its geographical position is at the crossroads of populations and cultures. These border crossings have become hot debates especially under the current crisis as they are intertwined with issues of culture and identity formation, the European Union and state policy, and constructions of Otherness. By drawing on an increasing interest in the study of cultures, migrations and borders, our summer course examines how migrations shape and are shaped by processes of boundary formation in a variety of cultural encounters.

The programme of the course is structured around four thematic axes:
a. Theoretical and methodological issues in the study of migration and borders
b. Institutional and political aspects of the migratory condition
c. People on the move, immigrant groups, refugees and host communities
d. Cross cultural encounters across borders and interactions of host/immigrant on the border

In addition, fieldtrips will form the basis for project preparation and presentation. Students will be able to visit and study a reception centre for refugees, experience border life and the reality of border crossing from Greece to Turkey, and learn about the cultural heritage of Lesbos. They will gain practical experience, develop research skills, and learn how to place their findings within wider local and global processes, while they acquaint themselves with life on an Aegean island. Ph.D. students will have the opportunity to present their work at a seminar designed for their needs.

Additional information on the programme, costs, accommodation and the application form can be found at http://migbord2012.pns.aegean.gr

Deadline for applications: May 31, 2012.

Lecturers:
Dr. Bakalaki Alexandra (Social Anthropology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Dr. Bampilis Tryfon (Cultural Anthropology, University of Leiden)
Dr. Bellas Christos (Economics, University of the Aegean)
Prof. Cowan Jane (Social Anthropology, University of Sussex)
Dr. Dimova Rozita (Social Anthropology, Humboldt University)
Prof. Green Sarah (Social Anthropology, University of Manchester)
Dr. Kalir Barak (Sociology/Social Anthropology, University of Amsterdam)
Dr. Lindo Flip (Sociology/Social Anthropology, University of Amsterdam)
Dr. Myrivili Lenio (Cultural Technology, University of the Aegean)
Dr. Moutafi Vassiliki (Social Anthropology, University of the Aegean)
Prof. Papataxiarchis Evthymios (Social Anthropology, University of the Aegean)
Dr. Petrakou Electra (Political Geography, University of the Aegean)
Dr. Petridou Elia (Social Anthropology, University of the Aegean)
Dr. Plexousaki Effie (Social Anthropology, University of the Aegean)
Dr. Rozakou Katerina (Social Anthropology, University of the Aegean)
Dr. Strating Alex (Sociology/Social Anthropology, University of Amsterdam)
Dr. Trubeta Sevasti (Sociology, University of the Aegean)

For enquiries pls send e-mail to: migbord2012@aegean.gr
We would appreciate it if you forwarded this information to interested colleagues and students.
Thank you!
The organizing committee

nonlinear territoriality and networked borders

“Borders can be disembedded from their local contexts, projected at a distance, and then implanted anywhere in the state territory (Balibar 2004). Such ‘portability’ of borders changes the way movement through space is organized and how people and places come into contact. The node-and-link territoriality of networked borders brings people and places together by connecting them directly across space, unlike modern state border territoriality that connects them via contiguous state territories. This situation opens up the entire space of the globe to bordering processes, thus accelerating the proliferation of borders and multiplying the actors involved in their establishment. The implications for society of such novel territoriality of borders are paramount…” (82)

“…networked borders appear to provide an optimal solution to the dilemma of open borders versus security that bedevils the current round of globalization. The main idea behind networked borders is to check people and goods before they reach the state border proper. Performing border functions away from the state border lines allows borders to travel with the flows. In other words, the border becomes embedded in the flow (Axford 2006; Sassen 2006). Hence flows can potentially be scrutinized along the entire journey from the point of origin to the point of arrival. Technically, these developments are rendering territorially linear borders redundant. At most, state border lines can be seen as supplemental checking stations along the way, much like notes (of linear morphology indeed) in a wider, global network of border networks. This realignment of the relationship between borders and territory – from territorial rigidity to mobility – makes it more effective for securing mobility in a global world, thus achieving a highly selective permeability of borders. In the end, networked borders indicate the adaptation of the ordering capacity of borders to a world of flows. It appears that, for the moment, it is only by disembedding, multiplying, and dispersing borders that globalization can be made sustainable while preserving the nation-state and its claims to territorial sovereignty. Thus a global world will not be one without borders, as many have hoped. Instead, it will be one that has globalized borders.” (82)

“The nonlinear territoriality of networked borders has often been mistakenly taken as nonterritoriality. Their scattered territorial nature makes them less visible and creates the illusion that they are disconnected from territory and much easier to cross. … In fact, what has changed are the terms of the spatial encounter with borders, as well as the nature of the border-crossing experience. Social and economic categories like race, class, ethnicity, religion, education, wealth, and others have become much more important bordering factors now. …such changes do not make borders nonterritorial. Rather, socioeconomic boundaries and territorial borders are folded into each other. Both socioeconomic categories and territoriality come together in networked borders.” (84)

Gabriel Popsecu, Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-First Century

Yale border barriers conference

How did I miss this??? “Walls and Fences: The Politics and Ethics of Border Barriers” at Yale University, April 13-14, 2012.

aag border matters panel

Here’s the text of my talk from the 2012 Association of American Geographers meeting. The session was called “Border Matters!”

*****

The title of the paper is now “(Dis)locating Control: Transmigration and Precarity.” What I’d like to do here is condense the paper to its essential arguments; I will do this by outlining the points first, then elaborating upon them later.

• First, borders have lost their previously privileged position as sites of enforcement, especially as symbolic, pedagogical spaces of producing the interior/exterior relationship.
• Second, borders remain key sites in a network of policing and control technologies. However, states employ methods of interiorization, exteriorization, and excision to fundamentally alter the topology of state control.
• Third, the network of control is not solely the purview of the state, but includes supranational bodies (such as the EU, Frontex), non-governmental organizations (such as the IOM), states, and sub-state actors (the Minute Men in the US), and so on.
• Fourth, this network must be studied globally.
• Fifth, viewed globally, migration policing does not aim at inclusion/exclusion, but rather at the modulation of migration as part of what Deleuze called a “society of control.”
• Sixth, control societies are predicated upon open systems and deterritorialization, rather than the systems of enclosure necessary for disciplinary and biopower societies.
• Finally, control is a form of power largely ignored in the migration literature, but better explains the various “exceptional” arrangements of “inclusive exclusions” and “exclusive inclusions” that characterize migration today. In other words, biopower and disciplinary power do not adequately describe how and why the proliferation of migrant securitizations also result in the abandonment of life in favor of control.

My argument hinges upon understanding that the shift to control societies does not mean that there are no disciplinary or biopolitical technologies at work: there are indeed inclusions and exclusions, processes and technologies of enclosure, and so on. But I argue that the tendency, or the gravitational center around which these technologies orbit, is a deterritorialized network of technologies of modulating migrant populations.

            So, now I have to support these arguments, which of course I won’t be able to do in a satisfactory manner in the time allotted, but I’ll try.

Part I: Modulation Away From Borders

            There has been an increase in research documenting technologies of migration control that no longer take either the border as their ‘proper’ site or territorial exclusion as their primary goal. This wave can be conceptualized as a shift from a logic of border enforcement (discourses of sovereign power) to, broadly speaking, a logic of population management (discourses of biopower). Yet I take Foucault’s work on biopolitics to be delimited by its historicity and specificity: essentially, biopolitics is not merely taking life to be the central concern of politics, but it is the establishment of a regime of security over a territory for the purpose of making the population more productive. [I take Foucault’s definition of biopolitics because a) it takes into account both individuals and masses, b) it is oriented towards production, c) it is clearly territorial, and d) it is historicized as a governmentality. Crucially, then, it is not simply taking any life as the object and end of a politics, but a specific form of life, in a particular time and place, for specific ends.] What we see today is different in both operation and effect, in that contemporary governance is no longer territorial (although it retains territorial elements), nor is it directed at a bounded population (although it does not supersede population-level projects entirely), nor is it about the preservation and promotion of life (although it sometimes does this). To be more precise, there is a new diagram of power at work that is primarily indifferent towards life… except only when it is strategically useful to be otherwise. This helps to explain why both Foucault’s lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) and Deleuze’s essay on control (1995)  largely ignore the term “biopolitics” and instead, respectively, focus on neoliberalism and the transition from discipline to control. In effect, both recognize that biopower is a constitutive component of a different set of technologies with different ends. Indeed, Protevi notes that after 1980, biopolitics and control are contemporaneous, and work through distinct modes, actors, targets, practices, forms, outcomes, and so on. Following Nealon’s (2008) notion of the intensifications of power, Protevi points out that biopolitics and control are in fact complementary, but that in a control society what matters more than life itself are the mechanisms by which life is put in relation to and modulated with the political, the economic, and the social.

            What I mean by governance is no longer territorial is supported, I think, in the various ways in which migrant policing is no longer strictly territorial. To be clear, I focus here on technologies of migrant population modulation undertaken by the state – for reasons of space – but there are complementary technologies that are non-state oriented. These primary technologies of state-oriented migrant modulation are interiorization, exteriorization, and excision. I point to trends of internalization in the United States, then trends of externalization in the European Union. This is not because such trends are limited to those contexts; I am merely providing a heuristic based on the primary trends in each area. Specific local histories and practices would complicate this heuristic, although I am confident that they would be in line with the global tendency toward control outlined here. Rather than a full explication of each technology, I will simply provide an example for each:

Internalization

            I focus here on the use of license checkpoints, but I acknowledge that there are in fact many technologies at work in the interiorization of policing, including the use of migrant detention, the devolution of enforcement from federal to local officials, and others. The license checkpoint is a nexus of these changes:

These checkpoints are mobilized ostensibly to screen every vehicle and driver passing through the checkpoint for a valid license; routinely, however, this is used as an excuse in order to facilitate the policing of immigration status. Since these stops are often limited to roads that lead from large workplaces to domestic areas with high immigrant populations, they qualify as a selective technology that has the effect of disciplining large numbers of immigrants without actually physically encountering each of them. This discipline results in incapacitation (Coleman and Kocher 2011) but is no longer part of the closed system of enclosures, an integral part of how Foucault characterized biopolitics in Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population. Instead, traffic stops are relatively open systems, part of a network of policing techniques designed to incapacitate and make precarious.

            When the traffic stop is combined with the growth in the number of local law enforcement officers charged with immigration policing responsibilities, the result is non-immigration related offenses leading to immediate or delayed, but inevitable, contact with federal databases, which result in an increase in deportations. Federal programs, such as the 287(g) program, effectively deputizes local law enforcement officials, allowing them to access federal databases otherwise closed to them, and at other times obligating police to detain immigrants indefinitely until status can be verified. Coleman and Kocher (2011) argue that this assemblage of technologies results in a form of discipline that results in the “production of a docile population of ‘territorially present’ residents” who are not “legally present.” In other words, they can be deported but they cannot take an employer to court to claim lost wages. They further propose that “in the abstract immigration enforcement works through the production of an exemplary migrant precarity, i.e. an amplification of socio-economic and legal insecurities for certain immigrant bodies” (235). This uneven and selective enforcement helps explain why, for example, there is such a contradictory presence of “illegal” immigrants even after a meteoric rise in spending on, ostensibly, keeping them out.

Externalization

            Again, a very brief example, of “remote control:” An integral aspect of “remote control” is the prevalence of bilateral agreements between EU member states and its immediate neighbors, especially those in North Africa (Adepoju/van Noorloos/Zoomers 2009). [Note: Bilateral agreements are slowly giving way to Frontex/EU led agreements. This shift deserves recognition, but does not detract from the historical argument being made here. It remains to be seen how Frontex will alter the externalization of policing, but my suspicion is that it will extend the process rather than curtail it.] These agreements can be formalized, but EU member states tend to prefer informal agreements for a number of reasons. Informal agreements are less transparent, more flexible in the interpretation of human rights claims, especially the obligation of nonrefoulement, and subject to quick alteration based on a perceived crisis. Hamood (2008) points to the proposal to create “transit processing centers” in countries bordering the EU (20). These centers would serve as administrative and detention sites to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from reaching EU territory, where human rights obligations would set in. These bilateral agreements extend well beyond the establishment of camps, however, and include development aid, preferential immigration quotas, and circular migration schemes (Adepoju et al. 2009).

            These bilateral agreements reached their zenith in a series of arrangements between Italy and Gaddafi’s Libya. [After the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya it is difficult to know for sure whether such an agreement will be reestablished – as of the time of writing this was not clear – although it would be a safe assumption to imagine that Italy and the EU will base almost any aid to a fledgling Libyan government on the reduction of migrants and asylum seekers setting forth from the Maghreb.] The agreements generally stressed the use of Libya’s military to intercept clandestine immigrants in the Mediterranean (Hamood 2008; Adepoju et al. 2009; Andrijasevic 2009). A 2008 deal between the countries includes a provision that allows Italy to return intercepted migrants to Libya. A 2003 agreement placed Italian police officers in Tripoli full-time to provide Libya with “training and equipment, in particular to assist border surveillance and management” (Hamood 2008, 32). As previously noted, these technologies of remote control result, in part, in a protracted or fragmented journey (Collyer 2007; 2010) and effectively deny political, religious, and ideological refugees the human rights protections many of the EU member states themselves were instrumental in securing.

Excision

            A final problem posed to understanding the contemporary governance of transmigration is the strategic manipulation of territory, or excision, that deeply troubles the “security, territory, population” triplet posed by Foucault (2007). The US, EU, and Australia all engage in the strategic manipulation of territory to create exclusion zones that are formally part of the national territory, but legally outside of the spaces in which migrants can claim workers’ rights or refugees can potentially claim asylum (Mountz 2010). For example, Australia has responded to an influx of asylum seekers by exercising the “power of excision,” or the declaration of “hundreds of islands off the coast of Australia [as] no longer part of Australian territory for the purposes of migration” (xviii). Especially in the case of Australia – but also relevant to Italy and the island of Lampedusa – Mountz notes that,

[b]orders are thus pushed farther away and nearly erased… [and] asylum processing is contracted out to poorer countries. This combines with remote detention (inside sovereign territory) to create a powerful geography of exclusion. (127)

These geographies of exclusion are an intriguing aspect of the paradigm of population modulation, in that they effectively curtail the sovereignty states are ostensibly protecting from “extreme” population flows.

A Caution

            There is a danger of overstating the prevalence of these new technologies of population modulation and reducing the border to a merely (and weakly) performative status. It is true that borders are performative (Brown 2010), as iterations of both the extent of sovereign power and the ‘container’ of rights claims. However, any study of borders/bordering and adjacent policing practices will show just how powerful these spaces remain. But as a tendency, borders are now responding to the paradigm of population modulation, or what Deleuze termed “control” (Deleuze 1995). It is not an overstatement, then, to note that the combination of internalization, externalization, and excision are drastically changing the way migration is governed. It is relatively easy to point to instances of each having occurred prior to the 1980s and the global rise of neoliberalism, but what is new is the specific assemblage of such technologies and how they operate together with particular effects and outcomes: precarization and control.

Control

Briefly, I want to differentiate my approach from the more common biopolitical understanding of migration policing. I base my argument on the contemporary crisis of enclosure institutions, which is partly a crisis in their territoriality. Various forms of power take different territorialities:

• Sovereign power: the king’s court, the pillory, the imperium bello where territorial expansion was displayed in the king’s medals rather than through the setting of ‘secure’ borders.
• Discipline: enclosures – i.e. hospitals, prisons, factories, the family unit; institutions with overlapping territorialities working on the body – i.e. the co-presence of church and state exacting allegiance and discipline.
• Biopower: nations as enclosures; presumes and intensifies disciplinary enclosures; utilizes the givenness of an already existing set of forces to increase productivity/health/lifespan.

Biopower, then, works primarily through closed systems, or at best through partially open ones. However, as Ong (2006) has noted, we are in a moment where sovereignty exists as yet another tool in the toolbox, where it is manipulated at will in order to suit particular ends. This form of graduated sovereignty does not work primarily through enclosures; it presumes open systems which must be modulated between, retaining only the final say over the extent of sovereignty. What moves to the fore here is not enclosure or life, but a mechanism or network of mechanisms, including, in this instance, the manipulation of sovereignty in ways that seemingly weaken the state itself. This is a natural byproduct of a society that takes a global political/economic space as its presumption and abandons the concern for life, even as life’s utterance, its discursive presence, proliferates.

            In sum, biopower is predicated upon a system of enclosures that presume impermeable borders – even if they do not exist in practice. The organization of social life and political organization centers on and resonates with these enclosures. However, after the generalized crisis of enclosures in the latter half of the 20^th Century into the present, there has arisen a new paradigm of power centered upon open systems. Control, as we will see, organizes social life and political organization away from borders, presumes a dissolution of enclosures, and reterritorializes governance around control mechanisms that are modular, adaptable, and highly selective.

            Control abandons the ideal subject, and only attempts to minimize the most obvious outliers (i.e. terrorists). Control is indifferent to life: life, territory, sovereignty, and discipline are simply utilized strategically under a process without a subject, a process without goals. Security for whom, or for what? Security today is achieved only by negating meaningful life. Movement curtailed, why, and to what end? Movement is fundamentally liberal, and in the triumph of liberal democracy and liberal economics, why do we insist on rigidly controlling it? Control, ultimately, becomes hegemonic without benefitting anyone; to paraphrase Arendt, how do we contend with the banality of control?

            This abandonment brings into clarity the distinguishing feature of control, as opposed to the border enforcement or population management paradigms. Deportation is thus not about shaping the ‘correct’ populace, as much as it is about producing striations in space otherwise tending toward smoothness. License checkpoints and visa systems determine appropriateness to travel, but do not oppose ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (or the dialectic of inclusion versus exclusion). Indeed, by acting as turbulence that redirects a flow, rather than a barrier that excludes, the internalization or externalization of transmigrant policing has fundamentally altered the relation among people, politics, and place. The spatiality of control does not revolve around the resonant centers of state, nation, borders, yet it is not an unmediated deterritorialization. Control reterritorializes along new striations, new power configurations, and new social subjectivities. Precisely by abandoning the ideal subject, control, and its other – precarity, differentiates itself from disciplinary and biopolitical regimes, which work to secure populations, not radically precarize them.

Conclusion

            Ultimately, I argue that the topological border, the border’s proliferation across space, has the specific effect of producing mass precarity, which is precisely the point. This precarity is not only advantageous to capital, but is politically and socially advantageous to the global north, as it replicates the colonial relation without a responsibility to support and protect actual colonial subjects. This is the capital and state wet-dream. It is the culmination of a relationship set in motion with the original colonial conquests in the 16^th Century; only now capitalism and the state are well-developed enough to maximize, at least for a time, the instability that comes with such a mobilization of mass precarization.

            Understanding control and the modulation technologies it employs not only provides a description of the tendency of global governance, but it opens a space for weaponizing precarity, to use it against capital and the state, rather than to lament the loss of stable identities and rights. This is where I hope to take the next paper.

migration in control societies: governmentality without territory

I submitted an abstract for the 2012 International Geographical Congress (August 2012 in Cologne, Germany). It’s a huge conference, from what I gather, and they seem very concerned about the submissions being “cutting edge science.” So I have no idea if I’ll get in, but I figured I’d apply and see what happens.

*****

My abstract:

This paper responds to the call for research on the practices motivating and promoting changes in the management of international mobility, the social consequences for migrants and societies resulting from mobility-related practices, with a view toward elaborating normative ideas of a “no borders” politics.

Contemporary practices of policing migration flows no longer follow a logic of inclusion/exclusion because the border is no longer the primary site of enforcement and the goal of such practices is no longer to keep mobile populations out of a territory. Western (“receiving”) states rely instead on myriad techniques that implement three broad strategies: the internalization and externalization of policing, and the excision of territory. By shifting migration enforcement away from borders, the governance of human mobility has become dislocated from territory, contributing to the rapid rise in the securitization of migration precisely because of this dislocation. This paper explores various technologies of migrant policing and their relation to, production of, and ambivalence toward various territorialities. Using Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of “control societies,” the author orients these technologies as mechanisms that modulate population flows in ways that produce “inclusive exclusions” and “exclusive inclusions,” where migrant presence or absence is approached as a process of filtration rather than exclusion. The author argues that these control mechanisms, or modulating technologies, help to produce a generalized condition of precarity, which facilitates state and economic interventions that would not otherwise be possible. The paper concludes with a consideration of potential political subjectivities produced by and through governmentality without territory. Rather than a project of “open borders,” the author explicitly locates these subjectivities as operating in a politics of “no borders,” paralleling the territorially dislocated technologies of population modulation. New spaces, literally and figuratively, for politics and resistance are opened as an incitement toward articulating a stronger “no borders politics.”

*****

Session Information:

Title: Free Flow or Better Stay at Home? Changing Practices in the Management of International Mobility

Abstract: This session discusses new developments in the field of mobility and migration politics. The international governance or ‘management’ of human mobility is based on the (re‐)construction of migrants as ‘risks’ and of cross‐border mobility as a ‘risky project’ for individuals and receiving societies. The trend to distinguish between the ‘openness’ to skilled migration (‘free flows’ across ‘smart borders’) and the ‘closure’ to unskilled workers obscures the convergence of apparently different state and non‐state policies and practices in creating categories that order human mobility. Contemporary state and non‐state practices of cross‐border mobility and migration are characterized by a high degree of complexity; they are based on a mix of traditional coercive and direct interventions (‘border management’) and less repressive and indirect practices. Mobility and migration ‘management’ takes place at mostly all political levels and scales: transnational, international, and national scales; the individual migrant ‘level’; social behavior and body politics (as illustrated e.g. by the use of large‐scale ‘information campaigns’ that promote ‘better stay at home policies’ or the increasing popularity of ‘medical pre‐departure screenings’). Against these material practices of control and regulation, migrants and the advocates for ‘free movement’ and ‘no borders’ are challenged to find their own creative spaces and answers to the question if and how migration should be regulated and how autonomous mobility projects can still be realized.

We invite contributions that analyze the (1) narratives and worldviews of recent mobility and migration politics; (2) key actors and practices motivating and promoting changes in the management of international mobility; (3) social consequences for migrants and societies resulting from mobility‐related discourses and practices; (4) spatial and multi‐level modes of mobility politics; and/or (5) normative ideas of the free and open cross‐border flow of people.

territory without borders

Stuart Elden has an excellent summary of his (monumental) project of the last few years, The Birth of Territory, up at the Harvard International Review.

Stuart’s work in translating some seminal thinkers (including Lefevbre) alone would be impressive; his edited collections on others (including Kant, Foucault, others) are even better; his own theoretical work stemming from these other projects is becoming increasingly important. Definitely worth checking out.

borders and boundaries: fetishizing the material

In a post on 8/15/11, I tried to gesture toward thinking borders through Agamben’s Stanzas, and in an even earlier post (4/18/11; a panel talk delivered at AAG 2011) I made the claim that borders do not exist.

The problem I am trying to work through is a phenomenon addressed in different ways by Wendy Brown (in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty) and Reece Jones (in the forthcoming Border Walls). Essentially, the phenomenon of bordering implies something that in practice is both impossible and impractical: the physical, actual exclusion of bodies from a territory. We already know from the work of Mat Coleman, Didier Bigo, Alison Mountz, and others that immigration and refugee policing no longer happens at the border. Instead, borders as exclusionary sites marking an interior and exterior have transformed into borders that exist on/within the body of the immigrant or refugee, and require specific technologies, techniques, and practices to actualize the border in a policing event. As Coleman, citing Heyman and others, notes, the majority of immigration policing happens on the interior (in non-border states) through traffic stops and other domestic spheres – rather than at the border or in the workplace. So what relevance is a border if the border is, in a sense, everywhere?

“Edges matter,” as Edward Casey notes in a recent article in Environment and Planning D, “Border versus Boundary at La Frontera.” But he asks an important question: “Edges are not parts of matter or space (if anything, they mark the moment when matter gives way to empty space); they have mainly to do with the differences between things. But what are they, positively put” (384)? He differentiates between a border and a boundary thusly:

• border – “a clearly and crisply delineated entity…established by conventional agreements, such as treaties or laws; thus…a product of human history and its vicissitudes.” (385)
• boundary – can have “cultural and historical parameters” but is often “natural in status”…”rarely demarcated with any precision, varying in contour and extent… porous in character… lacks exact positioning.” (385)

I think, at this moment, this is a good distinction that can be adopted somewhat unproblematically (or as much as anything can be unproblematic…). Where Casey’s work is especially interesting is how he locates borders as “an expression of state power” (386), and details a fundamental ambiguity between border and boundary. He posits a spectrum rather than a strict dichotomy:

boundary/borderland/BORDER/walls & fences/border-line

He clarifies:

“At the left end of this spectrum we have terms that approximate to edges that are porous and malleable…On the right end, closure and exactitude are prized…” (389)

Essentially, a border, then, is a construction, an impulse, a fetish, that has a materiality but is ultimately contingent. A will to border, rather than a phenomenological border.

Casey retains an emphasis on a distinction between border and boundary – the terms mean something, and the materiality of the phenomenon does differ. His analysis is best read as, perhaps, an argument for the understanding of bordering practices (including walls and fences) along with borderlands (as an ambiguous space with unique geographies and cultural phenomena – i.e. Anzaldua). However, what remains ambiguous in his essay, and is indeed taken up in the responses by Michael Dear, Mat Coleman, and Roxanne Doty in the same issue, is the fact that contemporary policing practices that do not adhere to borders (lines, fences, walls, checkpoints) are part of the borderlands. But what happens when the borderlands is everywhere?

Some questions, in no particular order:

How do we conceptualize borders as a materiality without substance? Can we?

How do we reconcile the utter failure of bordering in preventing mass migration/movement, the effectiveness of certain bordering practices at keeping some (and I stress some) people out of a defined space/territory, and the reality of interior policing practices being the primary site for population management?

What is the relation between the State and borders? What is the relation between the State and interior enforcement? If there is, as I suspect, a different set of relations for each practice, do we have to change our understanding of the State?

I especially appreciated the following quote, given my discussion of Agamben’s Stanzas and the fetishization of the border:

“All the personnel employed at or near the wall are expected to pursue certain goals in common… These goals include accuracy in the demarcation of the border and the policing and surveillance of the entire border region with regard to national security, illegal drug importation, and immigration control. All of these fiercely held goals converge in making the border itself ever more definite and known as something that is objectively and unquestionably there – and presented as such. In all this concerted activity, it is as if La Frontera [the US/Mexico border] has been fetishized as an object in itself – but, finally, more an ideal object, an asymptote or regulative ideal, a sheer limit, than a material entity. The wall bears the brunt of the materiality, but the border itself, insofar as it is distinguishable from the wall, is regarded as untouchable and invisible – as is true of any pure border. In the case of La Frontera, the border as an ideal object acts to protect and sanction…vested interests…as if to legitimate these interests by this very act of idealization. So as not to keep the border entirely in the ideal realm, such concrete entities as walls and border markers are created and continually invoked, anchoring what would otherwise be abstractly projected as ideal.” (387)

thinking borders through Agamben’s Stanzas

I was rereading my post from over a year ago on Agamben’s book, Stanzas, that I wrote during my independent study on his work. I’ve been a bit surprised that my posts on Agamben’s books have been as popular as they have (pretty consistently some of my most visited posts), and the Stanzas has been hot for a few days (20 views just today). Anyway, a thought struck me.

Leland de la Durantaye notes that Stanzas

“is about a space – and a space like no other. This is not a localizable “real” space but, as Agamben calls it, a “phantasmic space,” a “potential space” – which is, in fact, the space of thought. It is thus located neither in the subject nor in the object, and as a result can never be fully grasped by a subject in the form of an object.”

I have been thinking a lot about borders lately (really for almost a year, off and on), and it struck me that what Agamben is applying to language, we can apply to borders.

Borders are, to paraphrase my post from last April, a vanishing horizon, whose object is constantly reaffirming its unattainability as object even as it continually reasserts its presence. Borders have never been the impermeable demarcations that States imagine them to be, but neither are they completely immaterial – Wendy Brown discusses this in her book Walled States. They are a horizon point, vanishing toward multiple horizons at once. The material border (fences, walls, ditches, etc.), the psychoborder (the internalization of the nation-form), the police border (those specific practices on the interior of the State that produce borders at home, on the roads to and from work, in the workplace, and elsewhere), the cultural border (the diasporic subject, the immigrant, and even a xenophobia directed at the interior – a good example from NJ here), are all vanishing horizons in which the border is fetishized, both material and psychic.

We desire borders, produce them, elevate boundaries into borders (and here), because they function in particular ways, but also because they do things, they are productive. But they are also limiting. Indeed, they may be more limiting than productive. What do they do? How do they do it? Who borders? Why? Where are borders more material than phantasm – if this is the case anywhere? Is the concept “border” even relevant anymore?