future challenges: archipelagos of circulation

Future Challenges: Archipelagos of Circulation

Stephen Graham

Newcastle University

•  “National borders have ceased being continuous lines on the earth’s surface and [have] become non-related sets of lines and points situated within each country” Paul Andreu

•  “A merging, a de-differentiation of the realm of the internal and the realm of the external. The difference between the liberal and the illiberal, the norm and the exception, is not longer fixed by state borders. The limits between the internal and the external are moving.” Didier Bigo

•  Urbanisation of security marked by passage-point urbanism: Proliferation of hard, militarised, urban, national and supranational borders, camps and enclaves, staffed by public and private security personnel, and linked by transnational infrastructures overlaid with systems of pre-emptive surveillance systems

Virtual Borders Within

‘Securocratic War’

•  Blurring of policing, military and intelligence through ideas of ‘assymetric’ or ‘irregular war’

•  Deploy both inside and outside of nation and mobilise permanently and preemptively against civilians within ‘securocratic war’.

•  Try to identify malign bodies, circulations and mobilities hidden within legitimate ones, within the spaces of cities and circulations, in advance of these reaching strategic spaces and ‘targets’

•  Topological spaces and times -- ‘the virtual border’: “whether it faces outward or inward to foreignness, is no longer a barrier structure but a shifting net, a flexible spatial pathogenesis that shifts round the globe and can move from the exteriority of the transnational frontier into the core of the securocratic state.” Allen Feldman

Anchored by System of ‘Global Cities’

1. Globalising ‘Homelands’? Extra-Territorial Borderings

•  ‘Homeland security’ is now “an away game. We don’t want [threats] to get in our airspace, on our land or close to our shoreline in the maritime domain. So we are working very hard with the other regional combatant commanders so as to roll up the bad guys, capture or kill them and interrupt their attacks.” US Navy Admiral Tim King

E.g. Global Airport System: US Visit, Visa Waiver and Anticipatory Data Mining and Profiling

Container Security Initiative

NSA’s Internet Surveillance

Anticipatory ‘Counter-Terror’ Financial Tracking

‘Garrison Tourism’

Extra-Territorial Secession of ‘Kinetic Elites’?

Extra-Territorial Migrant and Refugee Camps for ‘Kinetic Underclasses’ e.g. Nauru

“The globe shrinks for those who own it ; for the displaced or the

dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the

few feet across borders or frontiers” Homi Bhabha

Urban ‘Camps’ on Colonial

Frontiers:

‘Gated Communities’

in Post-’Surge’ Baghdad

Global Rendition Archipelago

Transnational Urban Growth Regions

2. Intra-territorial Enclaves of Exception ‘Pop-up armies’ at Political summits

Branded and Securitised Sports Events

‘Splintering urbanism’: Security zones and gated communities

Road Closures in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg

Export Processing/ ‘Free Trade’ Zones

‘Smart’ Highways

Computerised CCTV: Algorithmic Anticipation

Data ‘Mining’ and Data ‘Fusion’

Marked by Complex Foucauldian ‘Boomerang’

Effects •  . “It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its

techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had

a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West

could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself”

Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-6, 2003.

e.g. Security Zones/Green Zones; traveller and war-zone biometrics;

Historic Boomerangs

A ‘Medieval Modernity’?

The modalities of “modern nationalism, medieval enclaves and imperial

brutality” all “co exist in non-linear fashion.”

Alsayyad and Roy