border politics

BORDER POLITICS

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BORDER POLITICS

The Limits of Sovereign Power

Nick Vaughan-Williams

Edinburgh University Press

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For Ning

Nick Vaughan-Williams, 2009

Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburghwww.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Palatino Light by Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northampton,and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from theBritish Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 3732 4 (hardback)

The right of Nick Vaughan-Williams to be identifiedas author of this work has been asserted in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1The concept of the border of the state in contemporarypolitical life 2A blind spot in International Relations theory? 4The vacillation of borders 6The quest for alternative border imaginaries 8Map of the book 10

1 Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be:Security, Territory, Law 14

Borders and security: the United Kingdoms new borderdoctrine 16Borders and territory: the European Union and the riseof Frontex 24Borders and law: the United States naval base inGuantnamo Bay 29The need to rethink what and where borders are 32

2 The Study of Borders in Global Politics: From Geopoliticsto Biopolitics 38

Limology: a brief history and current state of the art 40Assuming the concept of the border of the state 44Acknowledging the concept of the border of the state 47Further problematising the concept of the border of thestate 51

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3 Violence, Territory and the Borders of JuridicalPoliticalOrder: Problematising the Limits of Sovereign Power 65

Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida: cartographiesof violence 66Carl Schmitt: sovereignty, territory, limits 72Michel Foucault: the how of power 77Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: the smooth space ofEmpire 83

4 The Generalised Biopolitical Border: Security as the NormalTechnique of Government 96

Politics, life, and sovereign power 97Reconceptualising the limits of sovereign power 108Generalised border politics: the case of the shooting ofJean Charles de Menezes 117

5 Alternative Border Imaginaries: The Politics of Framing 130Thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border 132Ethicalpolitical implications of the generalised biopoliticalborder 136The politics of framing 146

Conclusion 163

Bibliography 171Index 185

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to express my gratitude to the Higher EducationFunding Council for Wales (HEFCW) Centre for Border Studies at theUniversity of Glamorgan for the Research Studentship that funded thePhD thesis on which this book is based; the Department of Inter -national Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now AberystwythUniversity), and the Department of Political Science, University ofCopenhagen, for providing an intellectually challenging yet supportiveenvironment in which to work on the original thesis; and morerecently the Department of Politics, University of Exeter, for enablingme 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 adoctoral student and temporary Lecturer in International Theory andSecurity. I would like to thank: Jenny Edkins, for belief in me and thethesis, inimitable good humour and company, and outstandingqualities as a supervisor, mentor, and confidante; Hidemi Suganami,for taking me on as a supervisee somewhat late in the day, and neverceasing to challenge and provoke (and talk about causation); ColinMcInnes, for supervisory support in the formative stages of the thesisand professional advice and encouragement as Head of Department;Andrew Linklater, who acted as my internal examiner and providedhelpful feedback and advice; Tom Lundborg, for valued discussionsand friendship in Aber and for introducing me to the dark precursor;Cian ODriscoll for promenade-based pursuits and engaging, thoughusually just-war-based, conversation; and Columba Peoples for show -ing us all how it should be done. Outside Aberystwyth, I owe a hugedebt to: R. B. J. Walker, for his comments on my thesis as externalexaminer and intellectual and professional generosity since the viva;Maja Zehfuss, for introducing me to Jacques Derrida, inspiring me to

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pursue doctoral research, and persuading me that life in West Waleswouldnt be that bad; Noel Parker, for friendship and intellectualcomradeship in Copenhagen and beyond; and James Brassett, DanBulley, Angharad Closs Stephens, Debbie Lisle, Luis Lobo-Guerrero,Andrew Neal, Mustapha K. Pasha, Rens van Munster, and ChrisRumford for their ideas, collegiality, and friendship. Most recently, Ihave been exceptionally lucky to have found some excellent colleaguesat the University of Exeter, who offer an enviable intellectual contextand a lively social scene in equal measure. Particular thanks areextended to: Tim Cooper, Michael De-Lashmutt, Tim Dunne, RobinDurie, Jonathan Githens-Mazer, John Heathershaw, Bice Maiguashca,Alex Murray, Andy Schaap, Dan Stevens, and Colin Wight. Also, Imust express my appreciation to Rory Carson, Ollie Deakin, andOwen Rawlings for reminding me from time to time that life doesexist beyond academia.

The transition to academic life over the past ten years would nothave been possible without the unstinting support of my family.Thanks are due to my mother and father, and especially to mygrandmother to whom this book is dedicated, for their unconditionallove: they are my backbone and I suspect they do not know how muchI value them. I especially want to thank Madeleine for her patienceand understanding while I was working on the book, her com -passionate and intelligent companionship, and most importantly ourrelationship.

There are also a number of people who have made this bookpossible in a more practical sense. I wish to express my thanks to: JohnWilliams and Yosef Lapid for providing constructive feedback on draftchapters and their generous support of the book; two other anony -mous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of the manu -script; Nicola Ramsey, Senior Commissioning Editor at EdinburghUniversity Press, for her outstanding support and lightness of touch inseeing this project through to completion; Neil Curtis for his fastidiousattention to detail in the copy-editing process; and Henning Lindahlfor his characteristically excellent work on the jacket design.

Finally, parts of the book have appeared elsewhere at earlier stagesin the project and I would like to acknowledge these publicationsas follows. The discussion of Frontex in Chapter 1 was originallydeveloped in an article I published as Borderwork beyond inside/outside? Frontex, the Citizen-Detective, and the War on Terror, Space

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and Polity, 12 (1), (April 2008), pp. 6379. Elements of Chapter 3 werepublished as Borders, Territory, Law, International Political Sociology,4 (2) (December, 2008), pp. 32238. My treatment of the shooting ofJean Charles de Menezes in Chapter 4 is an abridged version of thearticle The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: New BorderPolitics?, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32 (2) (AprilJune 2007),pp. 17796, which also appears in A. Closs Stephens and N. Vaughan-Williams (eds), Terrorism and the Politics of Response (Abingdon andNew York: Routledge). Finally, parts of the exegesis of the work ofJacques Derrida at the end of Chapter 5 are based on a section in myarticle International Relations and the Problem of History,Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34 (1), (2005), pp. 11536.I am also grateful to Thales International and to the LondonMetropolitan Police for permission to reproduce Figures 1 and 3.

FalmouthSeptember 2008

Acknowledgements ix

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1

INTRODUCTION

Borders are ubiquitous in political life. Indeed, borders are perhapseven constitutive of political life. Borders are inherent to logics ofinside and outside, practices of inclusion and exclusion, and questionsabout identity and difference. Of course, there are many differenttypes of borders that can be identified: divisions along ethnic, nationalor racial lines; class-based forms of stratification; regional and geo -graphical 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 andis, above all, lived. In other words borders are not natural, neutralnor static but historically contingent, politically charged, dynamicphenomena that first and foremost involve people and their everydaylives.

Ostensibly, this book focuses upon one particular type of border:the concept of the border of the state. I say ostensibly because, as Ihope will become obvious, different types of borders inevitably foldinto one another: the notion of maintaining sharp, contiguous dis -tinctions between anything is impossible and inevitably breaks down.In a common understanding of the term, the concept of the border ofthe state refers to external, interstate or international borders thatdelimit and delineate states as independent entities in the statesystem.1 According to what John Agnew has referred to as the moderngeopolitical imaginary, state borders are taken to be territorialmarkers of the limits of sovereign political authority and jurisdiction,and located at the geographical outer edge of the polity.2 Accom -panying this imaginary is a well-known historical account of theemergence and supposed ossification of such borders associated withthe transition from overlapping jurisdictions in medieval Europe tothe emergence of the modern sovereign state characterised by strict

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2 BORDER POLITICS

territorial delimitations.3 Irrespective of conceptual or historicalaccuracy, there is little doubt that this imaginary, underpinned by theconcept of the border of the state, has had, and indeed continues tohave, significant political and ethical influence on the practice andtheory of global politics.

THE CONCEPT OF THE BORDER OF THE STATE INCONTEMPORARY POLITICAL LIFE

Like all concepts in the practice/theory of global politics, the conceptof the border of the state is politically and ethically charged: its usagein all kinds of discourses must be seen as in part constituting themodern geopolitical imaginary it purports merely to describe.4 Oneobvious example of the work that the concept of the border of thestate does is to allow for a familiar spatial and temporal compart -mentalisation of global politics into two supposedly distinct spheres ofactivity: history and progress inside, and timeless anarchy outside.5 Inturn, such a compartmentalisation permits a problematic division oflabour between scholars of politics on the one hand and inter nationalrelations on the other.6 It is clear that the concept of the border of thestate does a lot of work, epistemologically and onto logically, inshaping thinking about diverse issues in global politics.

The concept of the border of the state underpins the arrangementof, and indeed the very condition of possibility for, both domestic andinternational legal and political systems. Domestically, it is integralto conventional notions of the limits of internal sovereignty andauthority, reflected in Max Webers paradigmatic definition of the stateas: a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly ofthe legitimate use of force within a given territory.7 In the internationalsphere it enables the principle of territorial integrity, enshrined inArticle 2, Paragraph 4 of the United Nations (UN) Charter which,since the end of World War II, has acted as the cornerstone forregulative ideals such as: the legal existence and equality of allstates before international law; protection against the promotion ofsecessionism by some states in other states territory; and territorialindependence and preservation.8 As such, and despite historical andcontemporary examples of derogations of these regulative ideals,without the notion of territorial integrity reliant upon the conceptof the border of the state there would simply be no domestic


Introduction 3

and international juridicalpolitical 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. Itorients the convergence of people with a given territory and notions ofa common history, nationality, identity, language and culture. In thisway, it is a pivotal concept that opens up but can also close down a multitude of political and ethical possibilities. Not only does thisparticular border delimit states but also different forms of subjectivityor personhood that are produced by the domestic/internationaljuridical-political order. Like the modern sovereign state, the modernpolitical subject is also conceived of as being fundamentally borderedin terms of autonomy before the law.9 Hence, discourses of rights andresponsibilities presume the subject of contemporary political life to bean individual whose status is clearly demarcated: a citizen. Seen inthese terms, the concept of the border of the state is central to theproduction of citizen-subjects whose identity derived from citizenshipprovides a series of convenient answers to difficult questions such asWho am I? Where do I belong? What should I do?

The concept of the border of the state has also framed the wayglobal security relations are commonly conceptualised. Although thestudy of security is a fundamentally contested terrain, the moderngeopolitical imaginary has had a bearing on the trajectory of the field.This influence has been especially, though not exclusively, due to therelative dominance of realist and neo-realist approaches in securitystudies. Such approaches, with their emphasis on states survival in ananarchical self-help system, rely on the concept of the border of thestate in order to frame their reading of the key elements of security:the referent object of the threat (national security); the source of thethreat (other states in the context of anarchy); and the likely means ofovercoming that threat (interstate warfare). Indeed, the concept of theborder of the state frames dominant notions of who and where theenemy of the state is. As has been pointed out elsewhere, realist andneo-realist perspectives understand security in terms of the history ofthe defence and/or transgression of states borders.10 Although theinsights of this approach have been questioned over recent years,particularly so since the end of the Cold War, aspects of such thinkingundoubtedly continue to permeate security practices. Indeed, therise of the notion of homeland security in the context of Westerngovernments attempts to counter the threat of international terrorism


has led to a reinvigoration of border protection initiatives: the newage of the wall has begun, writes Guardian columnist Julian Borger,ramparts and stone fortifications, regarded until recently as nationalrelics and tourist attractions, are back with a vengeance.11

A BLINDSPOT IN INTERNATIONALRELATIONS THEORY?

Despite the ubiquity of borders in political life, and the particularlyprivileged position of the concept of the border of the state, a numberof writers with very different perspectives have bemoaned what theyconsider to be the paucity of reflection on these matters in thetheoretical literature produced by the discipline of InternationalRelations (IR). For Chris Brown, neither modern political theory norIR theory has an impressive record when it comes to theorising theproblems caused by borders.12 Similarly, Robert Jackson has arguedthat: it is remarkable that state borders are usually taken for grantedby international relations. They are a point of departure but they arenot a subject of inquiry.13 Others in IR who have written in a similarvein include Mathias Albert,14 Yosef Lapid,15 Andrew Linklater andJohn MacMillan,16 R. B. J. Walker,17 and John Williams.18 Similar com -plaints have been made about the strange absence of theoreticalreflection on the role of borders in political life in a number ofother disciplinary contexts such as political anthropology,19 politicalsociology,20 and political geography.21 Williams neatly sums up thebasic point made by all these writers: that borders between states areall too often treated as if they were merely the fixtures and fittings ofthe international system.22

One of the purposes of this book is to contribute to efforts toaddress this deficiency within the extant literature. My motivation towrite, however, is not only framed by what has hitherto remainedunsaid about borders. It also stems from a dissatisfaction with what Iconsider to be the largely unreflective usage of the concept of theborder of the state in diverse claims about global politics. In thiscontext it is possible to identify two basic, prominent and competingdiscourses: the first is the claim that borders between states are athing of the past; the second is the assertion that borders betweenstates are here to stay.

According to the first discourse, the transformation of global

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production, involving the growth of multinational companies, atwenty-four hour market and post-Fordist industries, has renderedthe notion of a national economy obsolete.23 On this view, economicchange is said to have ushered in new patterns of governance, inwhich the role of the modern, sovereign, territorially bordered statehas also diminished.24 The emergence of the European Union, with itsself-portrayal as a borderless area of freedom, security and justice,could be cited as an example of this transformation. Consequently, itis sometimes argued that the erosion of state borders over recentdecades threatens the very idea of the Westphalian territorially definedinternational state system.25

By contrast, the second discourse maintains that nationaleconomies have been left intact if not actually strengthened byglobalisation.26 According to this perspective, the modern statecontinues to remain the primary political entity in world politics.27

Moreover, especially since the attacks on the twin towers of the WorldTrade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, there havebeen challenges to the concept of globalisation and discourses relatingto borderlessness.28 In the face of mounting American militaryaggression, and various reassertions of territorial sovereignty, somewriters, as we have already seen, argue that state borders are moreimportant than ever.29

Despite the fact that an array of evidence can be collected andmounted in defence of both positions, by now the above debatehas reached something of an impasse. This implies the need for analternative approach that does not reify the contours of the debate bysimply arguing in favour of one side over the other. How might this bedone? A preliminary and very straightforward observation concerningthe debate is that, despite the apparent irreconcilability of the twocompeting discourses, both rely upon a particular understanding ofthe concept of the border of the state. This understanding not onlyreflects, but works within and further entrenches, the moderngeopolitical imaginary. What the debate excludes is precisely thepossibility that the concept of the border of the state has undergonetransformation in contemporary political life. A focus on whetherborders between states are merely present or absent is blind todynamics in political practices that challenge the very imaginarywithin which those claims about presence or absence are able tomake any sense at all.

Introduction 5


THE VACILLATION OF BORDERS

tienne Balibar has written about the way in which borders in con -tem porary political life are not necessarily where they are supposed tobe according to the modern geopolitical imaginary: We are living ina conjecture of the vacillation of borders both of their layout andfunction that is at the same time a vacillation of the very notionof the border, which has become particularly equivocal.30 Thesignificance of Balibars argument, especially when related back to theimpasse of the debate above, is that the vacillation of borders is notconflated with their disappearance. On the contrary, for Balibarborders 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 provocativestarting 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 perhapseven outside the modern geopolitical imaginary, to begin to graspwhat is going on in global politics: borders [] are no longer at theborder, an institutionalised site that could be materialised on theground and inscribed on the map, where one sovereignty ends andanother begins.32

In this context, it is difficult to overstate the enormity of what is atstake, conceptually, historically and politically, in Balibars seeminglyparadoxical formulation that borders are no longer at the border. Thenotion that both the nature and location of borders have undergonesome sort of transformation requires a quantum leap in the way wethink about bordering practices and their effects. It also radicallychallenges the kinds of orientation hitherto provided by the moderngeopolitical imaginary underpinned by the concept of the border ofthe state. In turn, this raises particularly difficult questions about howissues relating to juridicalpolitical order, citizenship, subjectivity,identity, security and so on might be framed otherwise. Thus, Balibarspithy formulation highlights an urgent need for the development ofalternative border imaginaries apposite to the study of the changes hediagnoses.

In his call for generating different ways of conceptualising borders,Balibar is certainly not alone. Rather, it is possible to identify similarconcerns expressed by a number of writers working with various

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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 underpinnedby the concept of the border of the state rests, issues a similarinjunction to Balibar throughout many of his texts.33 Walker arguesthat: We have shifted rather quickly from the monstrous edifice of theBerlin Wall, perhaps the paradigm of a securitized territoriality, to awar on terrorism, and to forms of securitization, enacted anywhere.34

Likewise, Achille Mbembe has insisted: [I]n [the] heteronymousorganisation of territorial rights and claims, it makes little sense toinsist on distinctions between internal and external political realms,separated by clearly demarcated boundaries.35 In the same vein, EyalWeizman writes: New and suggestive cartographic representations oftodays world [are required] [] a departure from the traditional viewof 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 writershave made equivalent claims about the need for alternative borderimaginaries in the study of global politics, including Didier Bigo,37

David Campbell,38 Zaki Ladi,39 Yosef Lapid,40 Noel Parker,41 ChrisRumford,42 Gearid Tuathail and Simon Dalby,43 Michael J. Shapiro,44

and William Walters.45

Yet, despite these repeated calls, there has been a noticeablereticence when it comes to the task of conceptualising such alternativeborder imaginaries and then putting them to work against differentbackdrops. As Walker has argued, this reticence is perhaps unsur -prising given the stakes involved:

Better explanations of contemporary political life are no doubtcalled for, but they are unlikely to emerge without a moresustained reconsideration of fundamental theoretical and philo -sophical assumptions than can be found in most of the literatureon international relations theory.46

Nevertheless, there is a real danger of a growing disjuncture betweenthe increasing complexity and differentiation of borders in globalpolitics on the one hand, and yet the apparent simplicity and lack ofimagination with which borders and bordering practices continue tobe treated on the other. This raises the fundamental question: How

Introduction 7


might it be possible to develop alternative conceptualisations ofborders 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 borderimaginaries. To address the central question above the analysis stepsoutside the literature in IR and related disciplines and draws uponhitherto largely untapped resources for extended thinking about theproblem of borders found in post-structuralist thought. The termpost-structuralism is highly problematical and it is with hesitationthat I use it throughout as a heuristic device to refer to a hetero -geneous body of social, political, and philosophical work. Indeed, oneof the many problems with the term is that some of the authors whosework is often labelled as post-structural simply do not subscribe to oreven recognise it as an approach.47

Nevertheless, with these necessary caveats in mind, I will argue thatthe thinkers under consideration, primarily Giorgio Agamben, JacquesDerrida and Michel Foucault, are particularly apposite to the taskin hand because they all share a common interest in criticallyquestioning both the logic and practice of borders in a general sense.By this I mean that an area of overlap between them is an insistenceon detailed analyses of how different entities, such as concepts,subjects, communities and, indeed, states, become produced asseparate phenomena to begin with. In other words, rather than takingsuch entities as somehow distinct from the outset and then merelyanalysing the relationships between them, attention is drawn to theirproduction as supposedly singular entities in the first place.48

Moreover, as subsequent discussions will seek to illuminate, this priormove to produce entities as distinct relates intimately to questionsabout force, violence, power, authority and legitimacy, thus neces -sitating interrogation in its own right. On this basis, it is precisely howborders work and how they might be identified, interrogated andsometimes resisted that is of central concern to the thinkers I havechosen to focus upon.

From this general theoretical starting point, the insights of theauthors above are used initially to problematise the concept of theborder of the state. Here the use of the term problematisation relates

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to the method Foucault developed in his various studies of madness,sexuality, discipline, and surveillance and other aspects of social andpolitical life.49 Instead of asking questions like What is madness?Foucault was more interested in exploring how different under -standings of madness change over time through an analysis of thefield of relations around the concept.50 As a method, problematisationinterrogates the way that a concept is used in discourse, how thatusage is connected to questions to do with power relations, and theway in which it is also productive of particular forms of subjectivity.Therefore, rather than ask What is the concept of the border of thestate?, my analysis draws upon the insights of Agamben, Foucaultand Derrida together with other thinkers, such as Walter Benjaminand Carl Schmitt, to think about the work that this concept does:that is to say what is enabled, constrained or even concealed by themodern geopolitical imaginary it underpins and sustains. In particular,the analysis seeks to consider the relationship between the conceptof the border of the state and our understanding of practices ofsovereignty, 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 ofcritical resources for developing alternative border imaginaries. In thisregard, the move from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon ofthinking, initially inspired by Foucault and then taken in new andprovocative directions by Agamben, opens up crucial lines of enquiry.I argue that much promise is to be found in Agambens oeuvre for areconceptualisation of the limits of sovereign power: not as fixedterritorial borders located at the outer edge of the state but ratherinfused through bodies and diffused throughout everyday life. On thebasis of Agambens analysis, I develop the concept of the generalisedbiopolitical border which, as a critique of the modern geopoliticalimaginary, can be read as a response to those who call for a morepluralised and radicalised view of what and where borders are incontemporary political life.

Finally, in addition to drawing upon the insights of post-structuralist thought to problematise the concept of the border of thestate and develop alternative border imaginaries, the book also usesthe problem of borders to explore some of the limitations of the post-structuralist work under consideration. While the concept of thegeneralised biopolitical border is shown to be one suggestive response

Introduction 9


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

MAP OF THE BOOK

The book is organised into five chapters. The first chapter seeks toillustrate tienne Balibars point that borders are vacillating and notnecessarily where they are supposed to be in contemporary politicallife. To do this I look at three examples of bordering practices thatchallenge the modern geopolitical imaginary underpinned by theconcept of the border of the state: the emergence and implementationof the United Kingdoms new global border security doctrine; therecent activities of Frontex, the new European Union (EU) bordermanagement agency, in Africa; and the indefinite detention ofsuspected terrorists at the United States Naval Base in GuantnamoBay, Cuba. These illustrations provide a crucial empirical backdropthat demonstrates the overall importance of developing new waysof identifying and interrogating borders in the light of contemporarypractices.

Chapter 2 then provides a tour dhorizon of the study of borders inIR, critical geopolitics, and the interdisciplinary subfield of borderstudies. The aim is to offer an impression of the current state of theart of existing literature that deals in various ways with the concept ofthe border of the state. To this end, the primary purpose of the surveyis to accumulate, in a positive fashion, different insights and perspec -tives from a range of writings that can be mobilised to assist in con -ceptualising emerging practices of the kind outlined in Chapter 1.I argue that it is possible to detect the beginnings of a shift in borderstudies from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon of analysis butthat, while this has opened up new and exciting avenues of enquiry,these have yet to be fully exploited for: 1. interrogating the concept ofthe border of the state; and 2. developing different ways of con -ceptualising what and where borders are. As such, there is still muchwork to be done. On this basis, I situate the book as a contribution to

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ongoing interdisciplinary efforts to employ a biopolitical approach tothe study of borders.

Chapter 3 moves away from the IR and related literature to explorepotential resources in post-structuralist thought for an interrogation ofthe concept of the border of the state. Developing some of the insightsof the literature outlined in the previous chapter, I seek to highlightand examine the relation between state borders and practices ofviolence, sovereignty, and (bio)power. First, the work of Benjamin andDerrida is drawn upon to analyse the violent foundations of thejuridicalpolitical order and the work that borders do in upholdingsuch violence. Second, I use Schmitts paradigmatic account ofsovereignty and later treatment of the relationship between spatialordering and law to offer an interpretation of borders as exceptionalspaces. Third, Foucaults treatment of (bio)power and notion ofbiopolitics are explored more fully, which offers further scope for acritical interrogation of the concept of the border of the state awayfrom the confines of the modern geopolitical imaginary.

Chapter 4 traces Agambens engagement with and development ofFoucaults understanding of the biopolitical structures of the Westin order to explore the possibilities of his approach for developingalternative border imaginaries. It begins with an exegesis ofAgambens work although departures are made from extantinterpretations in respect of his concept of bare life, the importance ofwhat he calls a logic of the field, and the spatial dimensions of histhought more generally. Building upon Agamben, I develop theconcept of the generalised biopolitical border as an alternative to thegeopolitical concept of the border of the state. Thinking in terms ofthe generalised biopolitical border unties an analysis of the limits ofsovereign power from the territorial confines of the modern state andrelocates such an analysis in the context of a global terrain that spansand decentres notions of domestic and international space.

Chapter 5 begins by assessing what the implications of the conceptof the generalised biopolitical border might be and how this differsfrom the concept of the border of the state. It does so by returning tothe examples of the work that the latter does in contemporary politicallife in respect of framing our understanding of juridicalpolitical order,the production of identities of citizen-subjects, and global securityrelations. By rereading these examples in the light of the concept ofthe generalised biopolitical border, I then explore how this alternative

Introduction 11


frame might entail new modes of practice/theory. Drawing onDerridas account of the politics of framing, however, I end on a noteof caution about the way in which thinking in terms of the concept ofthe generalised biopolitical border runs the risk of foisting the sameproblematic sense of form, shape, and coherence on global politics asa totality in the same way that the concept of the border of the statehas done.

NOTES

1. See Anderson, Frontiers, 1996; and Prescott, Political Frontiers andBoundaries, 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 WorldPolity, 1998; 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, TheTerms 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. 14.7. 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. 1211. 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.

67.16. Linklater and MacMillan, Boundaries in Question, 1995.17. Walker, Editorial Note, 2000, p. 2.18. Williams, Territorial borders, 2003, pp. 2546.19. 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.

12 BORDER POLITICS


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. 1356.26. Hirst and Thompson, Globalisation in Question, 1996 and The Future of

Globalisation, 2002.27. Carlson et al., Foreword, 2006, pp. 12. 28. Coward, The Globalisation of Enclosure, 2005, pp. 10534; Newman,

Borders and Bordering, 2006, p. 181.29. Starr, International Borders, 2006, pp. 310.30. Balibar, The Borders of Europe, 1998, p. 217.31. Ibid., p. 220.32. Ibid., pp. 21718.33. 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 ofEmpire, 2002, p. 343.

34. Walker, International/inequality, 2002, p. 17.35. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2005, pp. 1140.36. Weizman, On Extraterritoriality, 2007, p. 13.37. Bigo, The Mbius Ribbon, 2001.38. Campbell, Writing Security, 1998; National Deconstruction, 1998; Moral

Spaces, 1999.39. Z. Ladi, A World Without Meaning, 1998, p. 97.40. Lapid, Introduction, 2001, p. 2.41. Parker, A Theoretical Introduction, 2008.42. Rumford, Introduction, 2006.43. 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 post-

structuralism] 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 solidityof entities themselves, see Parker, A Theoretical Introduction, 2008,p. 11.

49. Foucault, Problematization, 1991.50. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, 2001 [1959].

Introduction 13


Chapter 1

BORDERS ARE NOT WHAT OR WHERE THEY ARESUPPOSED TO BE: SECURITY, TERRITORY, LAW

Borders between states have affected, and continue to affect, peopleslives in different ways according to their citizenship, economic status,ethnic background and so on. Moreover, the affects of such borderson different people do not remain static but may change according toindividual and broader historical and political circumstances. Today,especially in the West, many people seem to experience what might beconsidered a globalised borderless world whereby entering and exitinga 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 ofborderlessness do not make much sense at all as their movement issubject to intense scrutiny and methods of control. In other words,different people experience border politics differently depending onwho they are, where they are coming from and going to, and whattheir motivation for travelling might be.

When we think about borders in contemporary political life, anumber of iconic images perhaps come to mind: the Berlin Wall; theUnited StatesMexico border; the straight lines dividing the Africancontinent. According to this picture, paradigmatically represented byMercators map, global politics is characterised by territorial bordersthat separate states into sovereign political entities. On this view,the border is a marker of the limits of the sovereign power of thestate located at a fixed site at its geographical outer edge. Such a viewcorresponds with what John Agnew has famously referred to asthe modern geopolitical imaginary which, he argues, constitutes aterritorial trap underpinned by three problematical assumptions: thatstates have exclusive power within their territories as represented bythe concept of sovereignty; that domestic and international spheres

14


are distinct; and that the borders of the state define the borders ofsociety so that the latter is constrained by the former.1

The question of whether borders between states are here to stay orabout to disappear forever has preoccupied many theorists of globalpolitics over the last fifty years or so. Irrespective of which side of thedebate one might consider most convincing, however, a simple focuson the presence or absence of such borders is a rather unhelpfulstarting point for thinking about border politics to begin with. Fora start, it distracts attention from the politics of different borderexperiences according to peoples varying subject positions. Perhapsmore fundamentally still, it is a framing that is blinkered to thepossibility that the concept of the border of the state might bechanging in terms of both its nature and its location in contemporarypolitical life. Indeed, there are many current bordering practices thatchallenge the commonsensical image of what and where borders inglobal politics are supposed to be according to the modern geo -political imaginary, and in many respects the concept of the border ofthe state appears to be undergoing spatial and temporal shifts ofseismic proportions.

This Chapter takes as its starting point tienne Balibars pithyobservation that borders [] are no longer at the border.2 My aimis to illustrate this seemingly paradoxical and otherwise abstractformulation by investigating emerging reconfigurations of the conceptof the border of the state in current political practices. Such anempirical focus is significant for the study as a whole because itestablishes from the outset a need for more sophisticated con -ceptualisations of both the nature and location of borders andbordering practices. With this in mind I offer three illustrations ofhow the concept of the border of the state is being played out inunexpected directions with significant consequences for thinkingabout what studying borders might mean. The first considers howdevelopments in global border security, with specific reference to theemergence of the United Kingdoms new border doctrine, decentreour understanding of borders. The second analyses this decentring inrelation to the territorial location of borders by looking at the recentactivities of the new European Union border management agencyFrontex. The third points to the increasing disjuncture betweenterritorial limits on the one hand and the limits of law on the other inthe context of the detention of suspect terrorists held at the United

Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be 15


States naval base at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba. Taken together, theillustrations raise fundamental questions about the interplay betweenborders, identity, subjectivity, security, sovereignty, power andauthority, which frame the context of the rest of the book.

BORDERS AND SECURITY: THE UNITED KINGDOMSNEW BORDER DOCTRINE

Within one month of his accession to the UK premiership on27 June 2007, and in the aftermath of the attack on Glasgow airport,Gordon Brown announced a new series of measures designed toincrease national security and combat the threat of internationalterrorism.3 At the heart of Browns first Statement on Security was areliance on the notion of three lines of defence: the first locatedoverseas so that terrorist suspects can be identified and stoppedbefore they board planes, trains and boats to the United Kingdom;the second to be found at the main points of entry where biometricsare already in place and a new unified border force will be inoperation; and third within our borders [] to help prevent peoplealready in the country using multiple identities for terrorist, criminal orother purposes.4 This emphasis on borders as a central tenet ofemerging UK homeland security policy was further enshrined in theBorders Act, which came into force in October 2007, and morerecently in the National Security Strategy (NSS) unveiled in March2008. Furthermore, the establishment of the new United KingdomBorder Agency (UKBA) in April 2008, with a budget of 2 billion andeight thousand officers, represents a key milestone in the imple -mentation of nascent border policy.

While Browns first year as Prime Minister has witnessed a feverishpush towards heightened border security, however, this marks acontinuation of, rather than a departure from, Labours policy ingovernment. Indeed, the primacy of the development of UK bordersecurity can be traced to the days following the attacks on the WorldTrade Center and Pentagon in 2001. This trajectory was, of course,given added impetus in the wake of the London bombings on 7 July2005 and subsequent thwarted bombings across Britain. In December2006 the first in a series of documents outlining radical changes to theUK border was released: the Borders, Immigration and Identity ActionPlan. This was followed with the publication of Securing the UK

16 BORDER POLITICS


Border: Our Vision and Strategy for the Future in March 2007 andthe lengthier Security in a Global Hub: Establishing the UKs NewBorder Arrangements in November 2007. Emerging from this growingcorpus of literature, which has so far received little academic attentionespecially when compared with the study of American homeland andborder security,5 are several key themes that imply a shift in how theHome Office (HO), the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)and 10 Downing Street conceptualise what and where the UK borderactually is.

Reflecting something of a departure from the modern geopoliticalimaginary, the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Officeinvoke what is presented as an outdated model of the border againstwhich new plans for improved border security are outlined:

The border has been traditionally understood as a single, staffedphysical frontier, where travellers show paper-based identitydocuments to pass through.6

This philosophy will not deal effectively with the step change inmobility that globalisation has brought to our country. We believethat a new doctrine is demanded.7

As the second of these quotations demonstrates, the need for thedevelopment of a new UK border doctrine is partly framed in terms ofthe acceleration of mobility arising from conditions of globalisation.The exponential growth in global movement is presented as botha potentially good and bad phenomenon for the UK. On the onehand, it brings great opportunity, such as the con tribution to grossdomestic product of those working legally. On the other hand, itcreates new challenges including identity fraud, illegal immigration,organised crime and international terrorism.8 Therefore, this dualityis said to necessitate an approach that balances economic prosperitywith security imperatives: The goal is to find the optimal relationbetween an appropriate degree of security, and the free flow of peopleand goods.9 In this way, security and prosperity are taken to beseparate from the outset and the new UK border doctrine is taskedto keep out risky subjects (potential fraudsters, illegal immi grants,criminals or terrorists) while simultaneously welcoming in profitableand trusted subjects (business people, tourists, bona fide asylum



seekers, legal economic migrants): The aim of border control is to sorttraffic into legitimate and non-legitimate and maximise the effortdirected against movements that would, without action by the state,be detrimental to the UK, while minimising the burden on those thatwould not.10 Hence, rather than a barrier or obstacle in the physicalsense, the concept of the border at work here is one that privilegespermeability: a portal that depends upon rather than prevents thecirculation of people, services, and goods.

Yet, as well as increased mobility resulting from globalisation, theneed for a new border doctrine for the UK is also framed and justifiedin terms of broader changes to the security environment. Althoughit is recognised that threats from immigration, crime and terrorismare not new, the government argues that what has changed is theintensity of those threats: the UK faces threats [] of an un -precedented level of virulence, sophistication and variety.11 Againstthis backdrop, the attacks on the World Trade Center, Bali, Istanbul,Madrid, London, and Glasgow are cited as factors both leading to andreflective of that intensification.12 Crucially, enhanced border securitymeasures are presented as the most adequate and appropriateresponse to international terrorism.13 How has the UK border beentransformed from a static physical frontier and in what ways does itrespond specifically to the threat of terrorism? To address thesequestions, it is instructive to identify three key interlinked innovationsreflected in the new UK border doctrine: offshoring; identity capture;and pre-emption.

Offshoring the border

Throughout the various documents outlining the UKs new borderdoctrine are numerous references to the need to offshore borderingpractices:

Border control can no longer be a fixed line on a map. Using newtechnologies [] we must create a new offshore line of defence.14

The aim is to create a new offshore line of defence to checkindividuals as far from the UK as possible and through each partof their journey.15

18 BORDER POLITICS


We want to extend the concept of exporting our borders aroundthe world.16

The concept of offshore bordering, through not unique to the UKcontext, has come to underpin the Brown governments approach tosecurity in a global hub.17 Central to this concept is the notion that itis simply too late to wait for risky subjects to arrive at traditionalborder crossings, such as ports and airports, on UK territory. Rather,the stated innovation of the UKs new border doctrine is to take theborder to the perceived locus of threat before it departs in the firstplace.

In one sense, there is quite literally an exporting of the borderso that it is physically transported to territory overseas throughjuxtaposed controls whereby the UK monitors mobility in other statesand vice versa. For example, since 2001 the UK has taken its borderto sites in Boulogne, Brussels, Calais, Coquelles, Dunkerque, Frethun,Lille, and Paris to detect and deter potential clandestine illegalimmigrants before they are able to set foot on UK soil, fundamentallyaltering the way the UK operates at its border.18 In this context,as well as traditional forms of border control reliant on paperdocumentation, new technologies such as carbon dioxide probes,X-ray scanners, heart-beat sensors, and heat detectors have beenrolled out in order to detect the illegal entry of people concealed infreight.19

In another sense, offshore bordering relates to other forms ofcontrol on movement that are increasingly not related to territoryin any straightforward way but rather more ephemeral, electronicand invisible. These practices enable the expansion of UK borderoperations beyond reciprocal ventures with fellow European Unionmember states. Indeed, one of the main objectives of the new UKBAis to reach beyond Europe in an attempt to globalise the UK border.20

One recent innovation in this area is the development of a globalnetwork of overseas border security advisers including Airline LiaisonOfficers (ALOs). The role of ALOs, of whom there are fifty-fiveworking across thirty-two states worldwide, is to work with localintelligence and law-enforcement agencies to detect and deterinadequately documented passengers.21 Another dimension of off -shore bordering practices is the implementation of the new e-Bordersprogramme. This initiative, which involves data capture prior to travel



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

Identity capture and management at the border

At the heart of the range of measures designed to transform UKborder security is risk-based identity capture and management: Wewant [] to fix peoples identities at the earliest point practicable,checking them through each stage of their journey, identifying thosepresenting a risk and stopping them coming to the UK.23

The principle of the integrity of identity underpins new tech -nologies put in place for risk assessment. Whereas paper-basedpassports and visas allowed for identity fraud and the use of falsealiases, it is argued that new forms of biometrics lock applicants intoan identity at the earliest possible point in their journey, allowingauthorities to track more easily their previous and future dealingswith the UK.24 By checking biometric data against Immigration andAsylum databases, it is then possible both to cross-reference back toany previous application that might have been made and to discoverany history of criminality to allow or refuse travel.25 Such data aredefined as information about external characteristics and can includefingerprinting and features of the iris or any part of the eye.26 Whilethese systems are designed primarily to deter some travellers deemedto be illegitimate, they can also be used to ease the journeys of others.Thus, Project Iris, for example, is a biometrically controlled auto -mated border entry system that enables preregistered passengers toproceed through automated gates at the border rather than queuingto present their passport to an officer at the control.27 Again, in thisway we see the double functioning of the technologies put in placeintended both to hinder and to facilitate movement according todecisions about the legitimacy of the subject in transit.

The rolling out of identity capture and management systems hasrelied heavily upon private enterprise and investment. With a stepchange in both the intensity and scope of border security measures,new business opportunities have coalesced around homeland defencethereby creating a multimillion pound industry. Contracts fordesigning and delivering the technological infrastructure central tothe governments border transformation programme were put out for

20 BORDER POLITICS


tender in 2007 and have been won by global multinational cor -porations such as Trusted Borders, British Telecom and Thales.28 Forexample, the international defence firm Thales has developed secondgeneration digital identity technologies which are designed to super -sede current paper-based documentation.29 Whereas the latter is basedon a static capture of physical identity valid for ten years and reliantupon trust, the former provides constantly updated forms of identitycapture using biometry and cryptography. The life cycle of the citizenis reflected in the life cycle of the identity smartcards which auto -matically register changes in physical appearance, status (for example,if someone has got married, divorced or had children), and cantherefore be read as continually evolving live histories of the subject(see figure 1).

Anticipating criticism from civil liberties campaigners such as ShamiChakrabarti, Director of the group Liberty, Thales makes an analogybetween its second generation digital identity solutions and mobiletelephones. The latter is a technology that can be traced and involves apotential loss of privacy but is deemed by the majority of populationsto be acceptable because of the benefits it affords. Similarly, Thalesargues, the former will be based on the same principle whereby newdigital identity data can be used by customers to assert their identityand gain access to an array of services (such as health and socialsecurity benefits). On the one hand, this view of identity presupposesthat identity is something that people possess, can be captured, andthen used in particular forms of governance, and clearly this under -


Figure 1 The Thales Identity Life Cycle of a Citizen30


standing permeates recent UK government literature on bordersecurity. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the second waveof identity technologies, such as those developed by Thales, reflects anawareness of the challenges faced by the task of capturing somethingthat does not exist straightforwardly. Moves towards a constantlyupdated method of identity capture, in tandem with subjects lifecycles as depicted in figure 1, point towards a recognition of the needfor a less static and more dynamic and contingent understanding ofidentity.

Pre-emptive bordering practices

The emphasis given to fixing identities at the earliest point practicablethrough offshore bordering practices points to the emergence of abroader principle of pre-emption that also underpins the UKs newborder doctrine. Whereas the traditional border philosophy referredto by the government perceived threats at a single, staffed, physicalfrontier at ports, airports, and other border crossings, an alternativevision has been outlined that tackles these threats before they reachUK territory.31 According to this vision, the traditional border did notact early enough in preventing the wrong sort of travellers to the UK:it can be too late they have achieved their goal in reaching ourshores.32 What does the principle and practice of pre-emption entailin this context?

The five foundations for the UKs new border doctrine, as outlinedin 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 bypreventing them from embarking on their journey to the UK mostobviously relates to the first of these foundations: the most effective[] way of addressing risks to the UK is to identify those movementswhich present a threat and to stop or control them before they reachthe UK.33 Indeed, referring back to Browns statement on security,pre-emptive bordering constitutes the first ring of defence envisagedby the UK government.34

On this basis, pre-emption involves gathering information andidentifying risk before travel begins: The earlier that risk is identifiedand can be acted upon, the greater the chance of it being successfullyresolved, and the less it usually costs to do so.35 Moreover, inno -

22 BORDER POLITICS


vations in biometric forms of data capture, together with the rollingout of the new e-Borders Programme, are also designed to usedeterrence as a form of pre-emption: In addition to the opportunitiesto collect data and intervene, border controls represent an importantopportunity to deter criminality.36 While it is noted that such deter -rence is difficult to measure, it is nevertheless a form of pre-emptionconsidered to be just as, if not more, important than more formalisedmethods: Border controls should therefore strike a balance betweenactions to improve the effectiveness behind the scenes such asinformation and intelligence sharing leading to targeted activity andactions that provide a visible presence at certain key locations.37

Pre-emption also connects with the second of the five foundationsabove, because the targeting of activity involves the prior constructionof risk profiles out of a single pool of information about suspectidentities and risky individuals.38 While recent documentation fromthe Cabinet Office, Home Office and Foreign and CommonwealthOffice makes frequent reference to the importance of intelligence-ledrisk management, however, it remains unclear precisely on whatgrounds an individual or group will be deemed risky under the UKsnew border doctrine. Indeed, the criteria upon which decisions aboutthe legitimacy of travellers are made have not been made public andvery few clues are given in the relevant policy literature. On the onehand, assurances have been made that the level of harm posed byindividuals will be determined by reliable forms of intelligence: Ourultimate vision is to use intelligence, risk assessment and analysis toapply scrutiny based on individual risk rather than nationality.39 On theother hand, there is an obvious presumption that those from insidethe European Economic Area (EEA) are low-risk trusted travellerswhereas non-European Union nationals are automatically treated ashigh-risk targeted travellers.40 Such a privileging inscribes a borderthat ultimately creates two zones of travel to the UK which, despitestatements to the contrary, necessarily builds nationality inextricablyinto the logic of inclusion and exclusion in this context.

As we have seen, new technologies have facilitated innovationsin the ways in which the UK government attempts to secure itsborders both spatially and temporally. Thus, while traditional formsof border control are still evident at conventional border sites, suchas ports and airports, technology has enabled the rise of differentthinking in government and policy-making arenas about what/where



the border of the UK should be in an interdependent world.41 Recentliterature outlining the new UK border doctrine emphasises thatborders 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 UKare somehow coterminous with the location of the UKs borders and,more significantly still, the governments attempts to control them.Similar dynamics, which raise significant conceptual issues to beexplored in later chapters, are also evident in the efforts of Frontex tosecure the European Unions borders.

BORDERS AND TERRITORY: THE EUROPEAN UNIONAND THE RISE OF FRONTEX

The main role of Frontex, which was established in Warsaw in 2004 asa decentralised EU regulatory agency with financial, administrativeand legal autonomy, is to promote a pan-European model ofintegrated border security.42 This pan-European model comprisesthree basic tiers: tier one involves the exchange of information and co-operation between member states on issues relating to immigrationand repatriation; tier two incorporates border and customs controlfocusing on surveillance, border checks and risk analysis; and tierthree encompasses co-operation between border guards, customsand police in non-EU states. Article Two of the founding Regulationoutlines the principle tasks of Frontex as follows:

(a) To co-ordinate operational co-operation between member statesin 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 thecontrol and surveillance of external borders;(e) To assist member states in circumstances requiring increasedtechnical and operational assistance at external borders;(f ) To provide member states with the necessary support inorganising joint return operations.43

The intention here is not to provide a detailed account of the

24 BORDER POLITICS


establishment of Frontex or its areas of legal competence but rather tooutline and illustrate: 1. how the notion of integrated border securityhas emerged as one of the European Unions responses to the threatof international terrorism since 11 September 2001; and 2. how therecent activities of Frontex in this context challenge what and wherethe borders of the European Union are.44 In this way parallels will bedrawn between the United Kingdom and European Union cases asillustrations of the increasing complexity of borders in contemporarypolitical life.

Integrated border security in Europe

According to the Frontex website, the origins of the agency lie inthe broad context of a series of moves designed to implement theprinciple of the free movement of people as originally provided forunder Article Three of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. In 1985, France,Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed theSchengen Agreement, pledging to apply the free movement principleby abolishing controls within their common borders. Two years laterthe Single European Act (SEA) came into effect stipulating that:the internal market should consist of an area without internalfrontiers in which the free movement of goods, persons, services andcapital is ensured in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty.A Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement was draftedand signed in June 1990, and in the following six years Italy, Spain,Portugal, Greece, Austria, Denmark, Finland and Sweden joined theoriginal five member states. It was not until the realisation of theAmsterdam Treaty in May 1999, however, that the Schengen acquiswas incorporated into the first pillar of the European Union. Thisincorporation went hand in hand with the expressed aim of estab -lishing 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 ofcompensatory measures, including closer co-operation between thepolice, customs and judiciary across member states via the SchengenInformation System (SIS), the implications of which for immigrationand asylum have been covered extensively.45 Thus, freedom andsecurity have been established as antithetical values requiring abalanced approach, and it is in precisely these terms that the



operation of Frontex has been framed: Frontex complements andprovides particular added value to the national border managementsystems of the member states and to the freedom and security of theircitizens.46 In this way, the security imperatives of Frontex aresupposedly tempered by the Unions commitment to freedom.

On the one hand, the development of Frontex can be located withinthis broad historical trajectory of the Europeanisation of memberstates borders: a further institutionalisation in the ongoing process ofa technocratically-driven integration project.47 On the other hand, therole of Frontex and integrated border security has also been presentedas a specific solution to the problem of the need to respond to thethreat of terrorism in the European Union since 11 September 2001. Inthe Declaration on Combating Terrorism, published on 25 March2004 in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, Article Six stresses thatthe solidarity of the Union must go hand in hand with the need tostrengthen border controls. Similarly, the Council Declaration on theEU Response to the London Bombings declared that its immediatepriority is to build on the existing strong EU framework for pursuingand investigating terrorists across borders. Moreover the Revised EUTerrorism Action Plan of 9 March 2007 refers to the role of Frontex inconducting effective risk analysis of Europes borders (Article 2.5) andimpeding terrorists movement by maximising the capacity of existingborder systems to monitor, and, where relevant, counter the move -ment of suspected terrorists across our internal and external borders(Article 3.2). Moves towards integrated border security have neverthe -less complicated how the traditional separation between internal andexternal 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 ofillegal immigrants arriving from Africa into Spanish territory betweenJanuary and September 2006.48 On average during this period betweena hundred and four hundred Africans were attempting to enter theEuropean Union via the Canary Islands every day. Many travelled (andcontinue to travel) on overcrowded cayucos Senegalese fishingboats each carrying seventy to a hundred and fifty people. Listscompiled by UNITED of some of those who did not make it alive intothe Union are accessible by typing dead refugees in fortress Europe

26 BORDER POLITICS


into Google. The headline style makes for particularly uncomfortablereading and offers a stark illustration of the way in which borderpolitics is not an abstract phenomenon but one that involves peoplesexperiences, their bodies and often ultimately deaths:

Found dead: 16/12/06Number: 126Name: Not knownCountry of origin: West AfricaCause of death: Reportedly drowned, missing, boat capsized on wayfrom Djiffer (Senegal) to Spain.

Found dead: 5/10/06Number: 24Name: Not knownCountry of origin: MaghrebCause of death: Drowned after their rubber boat broke up trying toreach Canary Islands.

Found dead: 17/9/06Number: 1Name: Not known (man)Country of origin: Sub-Saharan AfricaCause of death: Died of lack of medical care in police custody afterhis boat landed in Los Cristianos.49

As Sergio Carrera has pointed out, the situation in the Canarieswas presented by the European Union and Spanish officials as anunprecedented humanitarian crisis in the whole of Europe.50 Theinstitutional response to this crisis was the deployment of Frontexpersonnel 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 theircountries of origin.52 In this way, the first phase of Frontex activityin the Canary Islands reflects what might be considered to beconventional borderwork at traditional border sites associated withthe implementation of a control on movement of subjects at airports,ports and the geographical outer edges of sovereign territory.



The second phase of the Frontex operation from 11 August to15 December departed from this orthodoxy, however. HERA IIbrought together technical border surveillance equipment from severalmember states with the expressed aim of preventing migrants fromleaving the shores on the long sea journey.53 To achieve this, Frontexmobilised patrol boats supplied by Italy and Portugal off the WestAfrican coast near Mauritania, Senegal, and Cape Verde.54 Moreover,surveillance planes from Finland and Italy were flown along the coastand deeper into African territory in an attempt to deter would-bemigrants from making the journey to the European Union in the firstplace.55 In his analysis of Frontex operations in Africa, Carrera refers tothis deterrence of movement as a form of pre-border surveillance.56

Nevertheless, as a control on the movement of subjects into or withinthe Union, it is perhaps more accurate to see these missions asEuropean border performances, albeit hundreds of miles away frommember states territory and the geographical outer edge of theUnion.

What is interesting about the HERA II operation is that it highlightsthe way in which borderwork undertaken by Frontex not only occursat what might usually be understood to be typical border sites. Rather,as the pre-emptive measures in African territory illustrate, Frontexincreasingly polices the EUs borders by taking its bordering practicesdirectly to the populations it deems to pose the greatest threat.This offshoring of the border, reminiscent of the UKs new borderdoctrine, complicates the straightforward notion of an alignmentbetween the territorial limits of the Union on the one hand and thelimits of its ability to attempt to control movement on the other. Thisdis aggregation illustrates that the relationship between borders andterritory is not static but increasingly dynamic. That is to say, theterritories that borders supposedly delimit are not necessarily the onlyterritories within which borders can control movement. The case ofAmericas detention of suspected terrorists in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba,offers another illustration of the increasing complexity of the relationbetween borders and territory as well as a provocative case forthinking about the implications of this for law.

28 BORDER POLITICS


BORDERS AND LAW: THE UNITED STATES NAVAL BASEIN GUANTNAMO BAY

The United States government established the detention centre atGuantnamo Bay in January 2002 to hold suspected terrorists capturedin Afghanistan. Since its establishment, approximately 520 detaineesfrom forty different countries have been held there, including cabdrivers, farmers, and thirteen-year-old children.57 A recent UnitedNations report on the Situation of detainees at Guantnamo Bayhighlights the conditions under which they are detained. Detaineesare housed in 8-foot by 8-foot cells with wire walls, metal roofs andpermanent electric lighting. Interrogation methods, approved by theSecretary of Defense, consist mainly of: the use of stress positions (likestanding) for up to four hours; isolation for up to thirty days; sensorydeprivation; removal of comfort items; forced grooming; use of indi -vidual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.58 Other policiesinclude: degrading treatment (such as the removal of clothing sometimes in the presence of women); cultural and religious harass -ment (such as using female interrogators to perform lap dances anddeliberately mishandling the Holy Koran by kicking it); and beatingdetainees who resist.59 Moreover, the uncertainty generated by theindeterminate nature of confinement has, according to the UnitedNations, led to serious mental health problems: as of 13 June 2006there have been three suicides and many more attempted suicides.

Legal challenges to indefinite detention

Detainees in Guantnamo are held in what Amnesty Internationalcalls a legal blackhole.60 Under the Military Order on the Detention,Treatment and Trial of Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism of13 November 2001 (the Military Order), the United States govern -ment has denied most detainees the right to challenge the lawfulnessof 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 DefenseDepartment, the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists inGuantnamo is a military and security necessity in the context of theglobal War on Terror:

The law of war allows the United States and any other countryengaged in combat to hold enemy combatants without charge or



access to counsel for the duration of the hostilities. Detention isnot an act of punishment but of security and military necessity. Itserves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing totake up arms against the United States.62

As the UN report points out, however, detention without charges oraccess to counsel for the duration of hostilities amounts to a radicaldeparture from established principles on human rights law.63 Furtherstill, as far as the United Nations is concerned, the global struggleagainst international terrorism does not, as such, constitute an armedconflict for the purposes of the applicability of international humani -tarian law.64 Yet, despite these findings, human rights lawyers actingon behalf of detainees and their families continue to find it difficult tomount effective defences.

Seeking grounds on which the camp might be closed down, thereport of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention sets outthe international legal framework that its assessment of the UnitedStates treatment of detainees is based upon. According to thisdocument, the relevant provisions under international law to whichthe United States is party fall under two main categories: first, a seriesof human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civiland Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention against Torture andOther Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Con -vention against Torture) and the International Convention on theElimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD); second,international humanitarian law treaties, such as the Geneva Con -vention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Third Con -vention) and the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection ofCivilian Persons in Time of War (Fourth Convention).65

On the issue of the scope of the United States obligation tointernational law, the report invokes Article Two of the ICCPR, whichdeclares: each State Party [] undertakes to respect and to ensure allindividuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rightsrecognized in the ICCPR without distinction of any kind.66 Prima faciethe applicability of the provisions of this Article could be called intoquestion owing to the seemingly anomalous territorial and juridicalstatus of the United States naval base at Guantnamo Bay. After all,this land, which has been the site of colonial struggle for almost acentury, is not strictly part of US territory but has been leased from

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Cuba since February 1903 for any and all things necessary to fit thepurposes of coaling and naval stations only, and for no other purpose.67

Therefore, it might be suggested that, while the provisions of ArticleTwo of the ICCPR apply in the rather more conventional context ofsovereign practices within bounded territorial states, they make littlesense in the case of Guantnamo Bay.

Seeking to clarify the phrase all individuals within its territory andsubject to its jurisdiction, however, the report refers to two recentinternational legal opinions that challenge this commonsensical view.First, the authors note the view of the Human Rights Committee thatmonitors the implementation of the Covenant that: a State Party mustrespect and ensure the rights laid down in the Covenant to anyonewith the power or effective control of that State Party, even if notsituated within the territory of the state party.68 Second, the UnitedNations report highlights the position of the International Court ofJustice (ICJ) on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wallin the Occupied Palestinian Territories.69 On the one hand, the ICJrecognised that the jurisdiction of states is primarily territorial. On theother hand, the ICJ also acknowledged that the ICCPR extends to actsdone by a State in the exercise of its jurisdiction outside of its ownterritory.70 On this basis, the UN report concludes that the UnitedStates government has the same obligations under Human Rights lawin Guantnamo 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 theUnited States on Cuban territory, and the legal arguments deployedfor and against their release, are fascinating for thinking about thecontemporary relationship between state borders, territory and law.One dimension of this relationship in the context of Guantnamo isobviously the way in which the United States government has reliedupon, and attempts to maintain, the principle that limits in law andterritory are coterminous (in other words, the idea that a state cannotbe held legally responsible for actions that take place on anotherstates territory). Such a view, reinforced by military capability, hasallowed for the treatment of detainees in Cuba in ways that wouldotherwise be considered unlawful within the traditional territorialborders of the United States. Indeed, it is because of the seemingly



anomalous nature of the naval base, with its own complicated colonialhistory, that detainees held indefinitely there do not have the samerecourse to domestic and international law that either Cuban orAmerican citizens enjoy.

Another interesting dimension of the Guantnamo case, however,is precisely the way in which the UN Working Group on ArbitraryDetention has sought to erode the grounds of the United Statesposition by mobilising international legal opinion that the relationshipbetween law and territory makes no difference to states obligationsunder human rights treaties and humanitarian law. The notion that astate is obliged to uphold international standards of human well-being only in relation to those within its own territory is challenged bythe United Nations ruling. Rather, the argument put forward by theUnited Nations is that if states exert control over subjects beyond theirterritorial borders then, irrespective of the location of those subjects, agiven state is still responsible for them under international law.

The situation of detainees in Guantnamo Bay is thereforeinteresting because it indicates that the limits of territory are notnecessarily coextensive with limits in law in contemporary politicallife. Indeed, the case points to a disaggregation between juridicalspace on the one hand and the space of the sovereign territoriallydelimited state on the other. Such a disjuncture, which may also applyto the United Kingdom and European Union cases as offshorebordering becomes an integral part of homeland security, challengesdominant assumptions about the nature and location of authorityin global politics as reflected in the norm of territorial integrityenshrined in the United Nations Charter.

THE NEED TO RETHINK WHAT AND WHEREBORDERS ARE

The three examples considered demonstrate that a commonsensicalpicture of the concept of the border of the state as something fixedterritorially at the geographical outer edge of the sovereign state issomewhat chimerical. In each case, this concept has been shown toshape, enable and constrain practices across domestic and inter -national terrains in ways that imply a thickness to borders thatthin lines on maps do not otherwise represent. Furthermore, eachillustration points to interesting divergences between the limits of

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security, law, and authority on the one hand, and the territorial limitsof the sovereign state on the other hand.

To some extent it might be objected that borders between stateshave never conformed to the commonsensical image of themassociated with the modern geopolitical imaginary. Nevertheless,irrespective of its historical accuracy, as an idealised picture of globalpolitics this imaginary has had, and continues to have, significantsymbolic value with important ethical and political implications as Iwill go on to consider in greater detail in Chapter 2. Another objectionmight be that the bordering practices looked at here are not actuallynew but rather continuations of broader historical modes of inclusionand exclusion. Prima facie, the UK governments designation of itsnew border doctrine as something new is perhaps dubious whenconsidered against the backdrop of colonial and imperial legacies.Indeed, given the historic work of British Embassies and Consulatesoverseas in upholding the global visa regime, together with traveladvisories and foreign policy more generally, it could be argued thatrecent notions of offshore bordering in the UK and EU contextsreflect much older bordering practices. Similarly, the extent to whichGuantnamo Bay is an innovation is equally questionable in light ofthe history of the projection of American influence abroad, forexample, in the context of the regulation of transnational economicactivities and extension of rights to citizens overseas.71 Taking a broadhistorical view, the attempt to striate space, create territory andproduce b/ordered subjects is arguably something rather familiar tothe modern geopolitical imaginary and marks more a continuationthan a departure from it.

Nevertheless, while it would be churlish to overstate the noveltyof the logic in the examples under consideration, technologicaldevelopments have enabled the proliferation of new kinds of border -ing practices. Moreover, these practices are increasingly electronic,invisible and ephemeral and, while not completely de-territorialised,complicate straightforward understandings of the relationshipbetween borders and territory. This is illustrated most vividly with thedevelopment of second generation biometric ID cards that activelytrack the life cycle of the subject. When these new forms of identitycapture and management are allied with moves to offshore borders asin the UK case, then it is possible to see how the concept of the borderof the state is in some sense being reconfigured. Such recon figuration,



which reflects Balibars comments about the vacillation of borders multiplied and reduced in their localisation, [] thinned out anddoubled, [] no longer the shores of politics but [] the space of thepolitical itself raises two sets of questions that frame subsequentchapters of this book.72

First, the concept of the border of the state has acted and continuesto act as a lodestar for diverse aspects of the practice/theory of globalpolitics, as outlined in the Introduction. The reconfiguration of thisconcept radically calls into question some of the most settled andcomforting assumptions, narratives and logics in contemporarypolitica

border politics

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