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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Controlling national borders has once again become a key concern of contemporary states and a highly contentious issue in social and political life. But controlling borders is about much more than patrolling territorial boundaries at the edges of states: it now comprises a multitude of practices that take place at different levels, some at the edges of states and some in the local contexts of everyday life – in workplaces, in hospitals, in schools – which, taken together, construct, reproduce and contest borders and the rights and obligations associated with belonging to a nation-state.
This book is a systematic exploration of the practices and processes that now define state bordering and the role it plays in national and global governance. Based on original research, it goes well beyond traditional approaches to the study of migration and racism, showing how these processes affect all members of society, not just the marginalized others. The uncertainties arising from these processes mean that more and more people find themselves living in grey zones, excluded from any form of protection and often denied basic human rights.
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Seitenzahl: 456
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Framing Bordering
Introduction
Bordering: In-between the political and the sociocultural
Bordering and neoliberal globalisation
From borders to bordering: The processual turn
Everyday intersectional bordering
Outline of the book
2 Bordering, Governance, and Belonging: An Historical Overview
Introduction
Premodern borderings
Modernity and bordering: The long eighteenth century
Bordering in the aftermath of the First World War
Bordering in the aftermath of the Second World War
The collapse of state socialism and EU enlargement
Neoliberalism and its crises
The rise of absolutist movements
Bordering in the context of the violent conflicts, neoliberal developments, and ecological crises of the Global South
Journeys towards the ‘global migration crisis’
Rebordering
Brexit
Conclusion
3 Firewall Bordering at State-Managed Border Control Points
Introduction
Firewall bordering at state-managed border control points in the contemporary global context
Filtering citizenship
Filtering consumers
Filtering labour
Filtering families
Bordering scape 1: ‘External’ border control points: visas, airports, train stations, seaports
Fast-tracking to multiple citizenship and to belonging
Differential visa-free travel to and from the United Kingdom
Work-related visas: UK citizenship and belonging
Tourists: short-term consumers
Border guarding at the territorial borders
Bordering scape 2: Firewall bordering at the ‘internal’ border control point of registry offices
Enforcement performances and public reporting
Perspectives from secular and religious registrars
Perspectives from the targets of marriage-bordering regulations
Bordering scape 3: Firewall bordering, ‘external’ and ‘internal’ bordering encounters experienced by Eastern European Roma and Nepali Army families
The bordering discourse on loyalty and criminality
Nepali
Roma
Conclusion
4 Everyday Bordering, Citizenship, and Belonging
Introduction
Everyday bordering in the contemporary global context
Everyday bordering via public reporting
Everyday bordering via police and street-level bureaucrats
Everyday bordering via ID documents
Everyday bordering in Britain: Constructing the ‘hostile environment’
Bordering scape 4: Employment
Operation Skybreaker
Perspectives of border enforcement professionals
Perspectives from ethnic minority employers and employees
Perspectives from EU employees
Perspectives from metropolitan professionals
Bordering scape 5: Accommodation
Perspectives from landlords
Perspectives from tenants
Everyday bordering and homeless people
Bordering scape 6: Education
Perspectives from further and higher education
Perspectives from schools
Conclusion
5 Bordering and Grey Zones
Introduction
Grey zones in the contemporary global context
Grey zones: Gaps between different constructions of ‘migrants’ in national and international discourses
Grey zones: Offshoring processes
Grey zones: Historical trajectories of de and rebordering processes
Bordering scape 7: The Jungle in Calais
The 2015 Jungle camp
Campzenship
Everyday lives in the grey zone
Bordering scape 8: Grey zones in Britain
Irregular migrants’ legal status
Limboscapes of life in the United Kingdom
Bordering scape 9: Post-borderland Dover
Stuckness in unemployment
Stuckness in immobility
Stuckness in disconnection
Conclusion
6 Conclusion: Understanding Bordering
Bordering as central to and constitutive of social processes
Bordering as political discourse and practice of governance and belonging
Bordering as an outcome and a cause of social inequalities
Bordering as a situated endeavour
Bordering and transversal political epistemology
Resisting everyday bordering
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Introduction: Framing Bordering
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Bordering
Nira Yuval-Davis
Georgie Wemyss
Kathryn Cassidy
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy 2019
The right of Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0494-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0495-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Yuval-Davis, Nira, author. | Wemyss, Georgie, author. | Cassidy, Kathryn, author.
Title: Bordering / Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss, Kathryn Cassidy.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018050593 (print) | LCCN 2018061750 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509504985 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509504947 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509504954 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. | Border security--Social aspects. | Internal security--Social aspects. | Freedom of movement--Social aspects. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General.
Classification: LCC JV6225 (ebook) | LCC JV6225 .Y88 2019 (print) | DDC 363.28/5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050593
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by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
We dedicate this book to all those who are stuck in grey-zone bordering scapes anywhere across the globe.
Acknowledgements
We developed our theoretical and methodological framework on bordering and carried out the bulk of our fieldwork while taking part in the EUBORDERSCAPES project (http://www.euborderscapes.eu) funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme 2012–2016.
We would like to thank all our partners from twenty-two universities in nineteen different countries in and around Europe for participating the many stimulating conferences and discussions that took place during these years. Special thanks to James Scott and Jussi Lane from the University of Eastern Finland who capably and tirelessly administered this very large and complicated project.
Special thanks also to the nine international teams who constituted with us Work Package 9, Borders, Intersectionality, and the Everyday, led by Nira Yuval-Davis. We cooperated closely and produced two special issues of the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies (Racialized Bordering Discourses on European Roma, 2017) and Political Geography (Intersectional Borders, 2018) in which we were able to pursue some comparative studies of our subject. Earlier versions of sections of chapters 1 and 3 were published in the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, parts of chapter 4 were published in Sociology, and parts of chapters 3 and 5 were published in the special issue of Political Geography. The material has since been updated and restructured around our developing argument; hence this book has been worked on and written exclusively by us, working in Britain.
We would like to thank the School of Social Sciences at the University of East London, and especially the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB), which provided us with a home during the project. We would also like to thank the central research administration team at the university and especially Jamie Hakim, for being such a supportive research administrator and media researcher for our team. And we want to thank all the national and international scholars who took part in the research seminars series on Bordering, which we ran at CMRB during the project.
Nira Yuval-Davis would also like to thank the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Umea in Sweden. The Centre enabled her, as a part-time visiting professor, to apply for and be a formal partner in the research project.
Our work would not have been possible without the close relationships we have developed with various grassroots organisations working on different aspects of bordering. With three of them – Migrants Rights Network (MRN), Southall Black Sisters (SBS), and the Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London (RAMFEL) – we cooperated formally in producing the film Everyday Borders (2015), directed by Orson Nava and produced by Georgie Wemyss (see https://vimeo.com/126315982).
Our work would also not have been possible without the very many other individuals and organisations who helped us to get insights into different aspects of bordering, who put us in touch with the people we interviewed, and who facilitated the bordering encounters we observed. Among them are Doctors of the World, Sue Lukes, Migrant Voice, the Everyday Borders Consortium, Hackney Migrants’ Centre, Roy Millard, Emad Chowdhury, L’Auberge de Migrants, and Secours Catholique.
We owe a special debt to the many regular and irregular border crossers and workers who gave us the angle of their situated gazes on what bordering meant to them in and between Calais, Dover, Folkestone, and East and South London.
At Polity, we are grateful to John Thompson, who encouraged us to propose the project, and to the editorial team, which showed patience when the result of the EU referendum and the election of Trump in 2016 forced us to delay completion, as we sought to incorporate these events and embed the significance of bordering to governance and belonging in the context of contemporary political earthquakes.
Importantly, we want to thank our families and our close friends for their continuing practical and emotional support. As we are migrant families, bordering has been a subject close to all our hearts.
1IntroductionFraming Bordering
Introduction
The argument of this book is that borders and borderings have moved from the margins into the centre of political and social life. We aim to show how bordering has redefined contemporary notions of citizenship, identity, and belonging for all, affecting hegemonic majorities as well as racialised minorities in their everyday lives while creating growing exclusionary ‘grey zones’ locally and globally.
The borders … are dispersed a little everywhere. (Balibar, 2004: 1)
When Étienne Balibar made his famous comments on the change of bordering technologies in Europe at the beginning of the noughties, he was referring to the spread of border checking points from the territorial borders at the edge of states into a multiplicity of locations, especially in the metropolis – in train stations, sweatshops, restaurants – wherever border agencies feel that there is a chance to catch ‘irregular’ or ‘undocumented’ migrants. Similarly, borders have been moved away from the territory of their state into the territories of other countries: not only are US border checks taking place in Canadian airports and British ones in Eurostar terminals in continental Europe, but consulates in most countries have effectively turned into passport and visa checkpoints. In this way, the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of borders have been taking place globally.
As analysed in this book, these debordering and rebordering practices have marked a fundamental change. This change has been caused not just by the technologies that have been employed in bordering processes, but also by the political projects of governance and belonging that underlie them. As will be discussed here, these political projects themselves emerged as a result of, and in response to, neoliberal globalisation and its associated double crisis of governability and governmentality (Yuval-Davis, 2012). The growing centrality of borders and bordering in the contemporary political and social order has in its turn had a profound effect on global social inequalities, which are multiscalar (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).
Controlling national borders has acquired in the second decade of the twenty-first century a political and emotional poignancy that it has not had since the end of the Cold War, or even earlier. After decades in which the importance – or even existence – of borders was seen as waning in a world increasingly dominated by the rise of globalisation – economic, cultural, political (Hudson, 1998; Wonders, 2006) – rebordering the states has become a symbol of resistance to the pressures that emanate from neoliberal globalisation. Thus Donald Trump, whose promise to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico played an important role in his election victory in 2016, argued in his 2018 lecture to the UN General Assembly: ‘We reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism’ (Guardian, 25 September 2018).
Discourses regarding the control of national borders have been central to political projects in the West as well as in many other parts of the world (Geschiere, 2009). Such discourses relate to the control of immigration at a time when the ‘migration and refugee crisis’ is being described as the most serious one since the end of the Second World War (Geddes and Scholten, 2016). They also relate to trade agreements, tariff controls, and protection from competing cheap imports and from the ‘chipping away’ of state authorities by global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Sassen, 2015a). Some of the more ‘creative’ solutions suggested by the British government as to how to resurrect the United Kingdom’s borders, especially regarding the passage of goods to and from the Irish Republic to Northern Ireland, show how complex, contested, and torn between the demands of the polity and those of the market these bordering processes have become. They also show how bordering has become dependent to a considerable degree on digital and virtual technologies. This is also a central facet of the other, related political bordering discourse, namely the securitisation discourse: the demand that the government should ‘keep our nation safe’ (Andreas, 2003) from ‘global terrorism’. Therefore borderings, regarded as spatial and virtual processes – dynamic and shifting, multiscalar and multilevel – that construct, reproduce, and contest borders, make a considerable contribution to a variety of local, regional, and global political projects of governance and belonging. They determine individual and collective entitlements and duties as well as social cohesion and solidarity. As such, bordering can be considered a pivotal ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) as well as of hegemonic social imaginaries (Taylor, 2004).
Thus we argue that, in order to understand contemporary local and global political and social relations, the management of social solidarity and social difference, and the regulation of labour and of the economy at large, we need to analyse the bordering processes and technologies that are used as discourses and practices in different, multiscalar locations. The present book shows how, in this historical conjuncture, bordering processes weave together arenas of social, political, and economic configurations in complex and contested ways, which cannot be understood while remaining within the boundaries of more traditional subdisciplines such as social policy, international relations, migration studies, social identities, or race and ethnic studies. In recent years there has been a lot of discussion on the limitations of national methodologies (e.g. Beck and Sznaider, 2010; Büscher and Urry, 2009). We argue that bordering studies, which originally emerged in the very different fields of geography (Newman, 2006; Paasi, 2012) and cultural studies (Anzaldúa, 1987), play a crucial role in the understanding of contemporary global–local society – or ‘glocal’, to use Brenner’s (1998) term – and need to be studied in a holistic (if complex) interdisciplinary way. At the same time we argue that, to fully understand the role of bordering in contemporary society, we need to encompass in our analysis of macrosocial structures and processes the gazes of differentially situated individual and collective social actors.
In this introductory chapter we present and explain the theoretical and methodological framing of our approach to bordering as well as the overall context in which we see borderings as operating today.
We start by locating bordering in-between the political and the sociocultural or, more specifically, at the intersection of political projects of governance and belonging.
The section that comes after this examines the paradoxical roles that borders and borderings play in contemporary neoliberal globalisation, as they are both a constitutive part of this process and a response to its effects. It demonstrates how these roles affect contemporary hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, and thus glocal inequalities.
The following sections expand on our methodological and epistemological approach to the study of bordering. We first discuss the processual turn in border studies and then argue for the addition of an everyday, situated intersectionality approach that should contribute to a comprehensive and valid understanding of bordering.
Bordering: In-between the political and the sociocultural
Doreen Massey (1994: 149) used the term ‘power geometry’ to address new images of space, highlighting that such analysis includes ‘how different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to … flows and interconnections’. Henri Lefebvre (1991) has argued that space is the ultimate locus and medium of struggle, and therefore a critical political issue. Border work (Vaughan-Williams, 2008; Rumford, 2008, 2013) is thus about producing, controlling, and regulating (as well as resisting and contesting) such spatial power geometries, producing discourses and practices related to borders that continuously divide – and connect (Donnan and Wilson, 1999) – territorial, social, and economic spaces.
In consequence, borders need to be seen as constitutive parts of the world rather than as segmenting a pre-given ‘natural’ whole. Importantly, bordering is not only about who moves and who does not, but also about who controls whose movements. In other words, some of the crucial analytical as well as political questions related to bordering concern the understanding of the ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of the construction and control of specific borders in specific times and spaces.
Bordering, then, is continuously happening. Different kinds and levels of bordering connect apparently unrelated social, political, economic, and ecological phenomena – from the governance of international trade, climate change, and criminalisation of particular people to social and economic inequalities within and between states. Most importantly, as Nash and Reid (2010) claim, state bordering processes acquire a double meaning, as processes related on the one hand to state territorial boundaries and on the other to symbolic social and cultural lines of inclusion and difference, material and imagined, physical and cultural. As Popescu (2012) argues, borders can be regarded as dynamic and creative discontinuities that play a crucial role in encouraging the multiple, complex interplay between political and territorial and between cultural and identitarian processes. They are based both on collective historical narratives and on individual identity constructions of self in which difference is related to space but not reducible to it. Given these characteristics, borders and bordering need to be seen as material and virtual processes that existed even before digital technologies came to play such crucial roles in contemporary borderings. And, to understand them fully, we need to incorporate into our analysis both everyday vernacular (Jones and Johnson, 2014) and situated and intersectional (Yuval-Davis, 2015a) perspectives. On these we will expand towards the end of this chapter.
Barth (1998) and others following him have argued that what is crucial in processes of ethnicisation and racialisation is the existence of ethnic (and racial) boundaries rather than that of any specific ‘essence’ around which these boundaries are constructed. Any physical or social signifier can be used to construct the boundaries that differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’. State borders are but one of the technologies used to construct and maintain these boundaries. Henk van Houtum and his colleagues (van Houtum and van Naerssen, 2002; van Houtum et al., 2005) have argued that all bordering processes are a combination of ordering and othering. Indeed, as will be shown throughout the book, bordering has a double character, as a political project of governance and as a political project of belonging.
In the empirical chapters of the book, we show that political projects of governance and belonging tend to be entangled and to support and shape each other in concrete social and political situations. However, in this introductory chapter we consider it useful to separate these strands.
Bordering constitutes a principal organising mechanism in constructing, maintaining, and controlling social and political order. This mechanism includes determining not only who is and who is not entitled to enter the country, but also whether those who do would be allowed to stay, work, and acquire civil, political, and social rights. Different political projects of governance determine in different ways the differential criteria for these different entitlements and the individual and collective duties of those governed, be they formal citizens or not. While these bordering constructions might seem to affect only those who were not born in the country, they actually affect the society as a whole, both materially and normatively. They determine what everyone should expect as a citizenship entitlement or as a duty, especially when one compares oneself to people of different origins and formal citizenship status whom one encounters in everyday life. In this way bordering affects all members of society, although in different ways, according to their situated positionings as well as according to the racialised imaginary and the normative social order.
Bordering processes, which are related to different functions of governance, are multilayered. This is true not just in relation to different levels of state, or in relation to regional and global institutions of supra-state borderings, but also within the state borders. In different states there are different spatial and governance hierarchies of territorial borders – of neighbourhoods, cities, country regions, and federal states. For example, in the United States individual states are known to interpret differently the US constitution regarding the rights of undocumented migrants (Park, 2015) and in Britain there is much talk of ‘postcode lottery’ – a term that refers to the ways in which the spatial location of citizens’ places of residence determines at least a part of their rights and duties (Press Association, 2016).
Thus there are many situations in which the spatial governance of internal borders acquires an importance of its own. Of course, these spatial borderscapes intersect with ethnic and other social categorisations that hold among a country’s population, to establish a shifting and contested hierarchy of citizenship statuses and entitlements to different state resources.
Nevertheless, national borders have important roles in establishing territorial, national identities; they also constitute the bedrock of international social order. As Häkli (2015) has pointed out, ‘the border is in my pocket’: more and more frequently and in more and more places, people are asked to prove the legitimacy of their stay within particular state borders by showing their passports and visas.
The decisions, however, regarding the criteria for selecting such people are not intrinsic to the bordering technologies in operation but rather reflect the political, economic, social, cultural, and security interests linked in various ways to the states’ and supra-states’ governance. In other words, when we study contemporary borderings, we need to pay close attention not just to their mode of operation and their discursive imaginaries but also to the particular roles they play in particular political projects.
As mentioned above, van Houtum and van Naerssen (2002) correlated the terms ‘bordering’, ‘ordering’, and ‘othering’ – which Popescu (2012) calls ‘borderology’ – to refer to the interplay between contemporary social and political ordering and border-making. Physical borders are there not only by virtue of tradition, wars, agreements, and high politics; they are also made and maintained through other cultural, economic, political, and social activities, which are aimed at determining who belongs and who does not.
It is for this reason that particular constructions of bordering constitute not only particular political projects of governance but also particular forms of political projects of belonging. Processes of bordering always differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’, those who are in and those who are out, those who are allowed to cross the borders and those who are not.
Different political projects of belonging would construct the borders as more or less permeable, would view those who want to cross the border as more or less of a security or cultural threat, and would construct the borders around different criteria for participation and entitlement for those who do cross them. Thus bordering constructions are intimately linked to specific political projects of belonging, which are at the heart of contemporary political agendas and whose contestations are closely related to different constructions of identity, belonging, and citizenship.
It is important to differentiate between belonging and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Belonging relates to emotional (or even ontological) attachment, about feeling ‘at home’, comfortable, and (although feminists who have worked on domestic violence would dispute this) ‘safe’ (Ignatieff, 2001). It is a material and affective space that is shaped by everyday practices and social relations as well as by emotions, memories, and imaginaries (Blunt, 2005: 506). This construction of belonging as being at home is also linked to views on who has a right to share the home and who does not belong there, that is, views on bordering. As we shall see later on, technologies of everyday bordering and securitisation that are supposedly aimed at making people feel safe by keeping out those who do not belong can end up undermining these feelings of safety and raising instead a sense of precarity.
Belonging, especially in terms of self-identification, tends to be naturalised (Fenster, 2004). It becomes articulated, formally structured, and politicised only when it is perceived to be under threat in some way. The politics of belonging comprises specific political projects aimed at constructing a sense of belonging to particular collectivities, which are themselves being assembled through these projects and placed within specified boundaries. For example, in specific nationalist political projects of belonging, people of colour or foreign-born persons can or cannot be part of the nation. Other kinds of projects decide whether people who support, say, the right to abortion can be part of a particular religious community, and so on.
As Antonsich (2010) points out, however, these boundaries are often spatial and relate to a specific locality or territoriality and not just to constructions of social collectivities, which brings us back to issues of bordering. In addition, as Back and Sinha (2018) emphasise (and see also Andersson, 2014), when considering issues of belonging we need to allow for the importance of the temporal dimension. These authors argue that we cannot understand migration without an appreciation of the experience of time in an unfolding life. The debate about belonging is often coded so as to refer to those seen to ‘really belong’ because they and their kin have put ‘time into’ society. Migrants, by contrast, are viewed as itinerant, passing through.
Facing the challenge of global reflexivity (Beck, 2007) expressed by quickly shifting markets, social relations, and political conditions, many non-mobile residents find it rational to claim that they really belong – to a social community, to a network of friends (including social media; see Metykova 2010), or to a particular place. However, there is a considerable gap between such claims and actual projects of ‘making belonging come true’.
This is particularly true when we relate to the most common political project of belonging, which is that of state citizenship. As Sahlins (1989: 271) claims, borders are ‘privileged sites for the articulations of national distinctions’ and, hence, of national belonging. While regional, ethnic, racial, and religious differences might be crucial signifiers of belonging, when people travel to other countries they are usually identified, both formally and informally, through their nationality or state citizenship. Or at least this tended to be the situation until the global war on terrorism and the recent refugee crisis, when many, especially among those of Muslim background, started to be identified everywhere through their presumed religious affiliation, although at the moment of writing this identification is a subject of political campaigning but in most countries is not (yet?) embedded in law.
However, an ‘undesirable’ racial or religious belonging is not as important in everyday borderings as the construction of people as non-belonging.
Following Arendt (1943), Agamben (1998) has pointed out that refugees (or, more accurately, those who are seeking refuge but do not have the legal status of refugee) are constructed around a major paradox: ‘that precisely the figure that should have incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee[,] constitutes instead the radical crisis of the concept’ (Agamben, 1995: 116). Agamben claims that, ‘in the nation-state system, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterise them as rights of citizens of a state’ (1998: 2). He sees refugees as a modern embodiment of ‘bare life’ that in the ancien régime belonged to God and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as zoē) from political life (bios), which in the modern world relates to a person’s nationality. ‘By breaking up the identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality, the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty’ (Agamben, 1995: 177).
Given the recent refugee crisis and the fact that thousands of refuge seekers have been allowed to drown in the Mediterranean, let alone die in many other locations on the globe (such as in the Mexican desert) on their way to a secure haven, Agamben’s prophetic words are a powerful vindication of the ways in which political projects of governance affect political projects of belonging. However, as Bousfield (2005), Zembylas (2010), and Yuval-Davis (2011) point out in somewhat different ways, one should not equate being deprived of legal status and civil rights to lacking subjectivity as well as agency to resist. Nor should we assume that being an outsider with no rights of citizenship means that those who seek refuge do not have other attachments and forms of belonging, or other political projects of (self-)governance. American Latino/a researchers discuss empowering identities and cultural performances by (postcolonial) migrants as ‘border performantics’ (Aldama et al., 2012; see also Gonzales and Sigona, 2017). The bordering scape of the ‘Jungle’ near Calais discussed in chapter 5 will illustrate this claim.
Having discussed the relationship, in bordering processes, between the political and the sociocultural, between governance and belonging in general terms, we now contextualise contemporary borderings within the hegemonic social order of neoliberal globalisation.
Bordering and neoliberal globalisation
It seems perhaps paradoxical that we are writing a book on bordering at a time when, for many, it was expected that borders would have become an irrelevance; after all, many of us are living more transnational lives than ever before, and the volume of transnational flows is so great. Borderings – their supposed disappearance as well as their proliferation – are central to the global and local operations of neoliberal globalisation in several different ways.
Scholte (2005) claims that most of the characteristics that are usually considered to typify globalisation – internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation, westernisation – have existed previously under the rule of different empires and the spread of international capital and trade. Only the ‘re-spatialization with the spread of transplanetary social connections’ (Scholte, 2005: 3) is distinctive and a key to contemporary historical development.
Globalisation can therefore be understood as a widening and deepening of webs of interconnectedness and implies ‘a heightened entanglement of the global and local’ (Inda and Rosaldo, 2008: 11). This time–space compression (Harvey, 1999), the specific respatialisation of the present globalisation, has been possible as a result of the microchip revolution, which has brought about major changes in the speed and cost of global transport (Dicken, 2003; Rodrigue, 2006) and, even more, in global communication, especially the Internet (Block, 2004), creating what Castells calls ‘information societies’ (Castells, 2000 [1998]: 21) that build transnational political and cultural ties (Tsing, 2002: 457; Ong, 2006; Inda and Rosaldo 2008). Indeed, the intensity and immediacy of this connectivity and the potential for rapid change it releases not only enable greater mobility but can be linked to some of the imagery frequently encountered in popular and political discourses on contemporary migration to (and within) Europe and other western countries, such as ‘flood’, ‘swarm’, and the like – metaphors that in turn exacerbate fears among ‘autochthonous’ Europeans and the sense of threat that migrant mobilities present.
Contemporary globalisation has taken place under the hegemony of the neoliberal political and economic order. The economic processes inherent in neoliberalism’s globalisation have been part of an imperialist project that serves to reconcentrate wealth according to particular class interests, creating inequalities and uneven development (Harvey, 2007a, 2007b; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001; Saad-Filho and Johnston, 2005). In this new world order, integration is achieved through structural and policy reforms that have gained global dominance since the 1970s and are driven by a range of neoliberal policies, including market deregulation and expansion through privatisation (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001: 12–13). These neoliberal restructurings serve to distinguish the contemporary period of capitalist expansion from other periods in history when globalising tendencies were also in evidence.
According to Bob Jessop (2013a), neoliberalism took over from ordoliberalism, which was the hegemonic political economic system in the West after the Second World War; others, such as Esping-Andersen (1990), called it welfare capitalism. In ordoliberalism, the capitalist economic system was controlled by a strong state, which could limit and regulate the forces of the market.
According to Wendy Brown (2015), neoliberalism is essentially a form of governing that sees democracy at best as an obstacle and at worst as an illegitimate intervention into the rule of the market. In neoliberalism, the rule of the market is understood as a form of governance that should be applied everywhere, not just to marketised goods but to education, prisons, the organisation of the state, and so on. So neoliberalism treats popular sovereignty, or decisions based on human agreement and deliberation, as inappropriate interference with the efficient market and the price mechanism. ‘Business’ is viewed as a means to displace the messiness of politics and democracy. Globalisation, which was facilitated by the microchip revolution, is not, then, identical to neoliberalism but has become one of its main tools, facilitating mass movements of goods, finances, and people and destabilising local, regional, and global political and social relations.
In this context of neoliberal globalisation, particular places, territories, and scales have an advantage over others for capitalist accumulation, and certain cities and city regions have a privileged position in this spatially differentiated global order; positioning is therefore relational (Massey 1994; Sheppard 2002). The rise of what is called the economy of flows (Lash and Urry, 1994) has been highly uneven in terms of benefits. While global elites have been rapidly incorporated into a world community, others have found themselves included under much less favourable, even exploitative conditions; some places and people have been excluded from these developments or completely marginalised. As we explore further in the book, economic changes resulting from neoliberal reforms cannot be simply summarised as ‘decline’ or ‘advantage’; the situation is far more complicated. While some places are devolving into economically marginal areas or ‘grey zones’ (Yiftachel, 2009; 2011), possibilities for the development of new connective social and economic activity may still exist. We assume – as does Gough (2002) with respect to the contemporary city – that neoliberal globalisation creates not only fragmentation but also opportunities for new forms of socialisation.
Increasing evidence indicates that globalisation processes are not homogeneous in their effects, but diverse and context specific, as well as often ambiguous, contradictory, unstable, and limited in their impact (Kingfisher and Maskovsky, 2008; Ward and England, 2007). As a result, scholars have shown a growing concern to explore ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Places and regions are constantly vying for ways to engage in economic activities and to connect with, even manipulate or subvert, centres of power. In almost all cases, inhabitants are not just passive receivers, as the seemingly marginalised both act on and transform this global complex (Nagar et al., 2002: 265; Lindner, 2007; Woods, 2007).
These developments – and the different degrees of access gained around them by different populations and segments of populations – have been crucial in shaping and structuring some of the central characteristics of contemporary neoliberal globalisation. Bordering processes have been affected by these developments in several ways, all major and all different, and have themselves caused, in turn, some significant social, economic, and political effects.
First, the time–space compression associated with globalisation has made physical and virtual mobility and connectivity much easier (Urry, 2007). This has resulted in a dramatic rise in the volume of global border crossers. Overall, the rise in cross-border mobilities of not just people but goods, services, and capital is often framed as unprecedented (O’Byrne, 2001). At the same time, these developments have also facilitated the installation of sophisticated systems of surveillance both at physical border zones and everywhere else, in and outside state territories, via satellites and other virtual and digital means (Broeders, 2007).
Secondly, neoliberal globalisation, like previous imperial globalisations but probably even more so because of the mobility and communication technological developments, has made the global economy much more interdependent and at the same time diversified. The expansion of global capitalism can be characterised by the flexibility of labour (e.g. part-time or contracted work, which is much less protected in terms of labour conditions and workers’ rights) and of labour markets, as well as by the creation of new markets, and new ways of organising production and of arranging and coordinating the international financial system (Harvey, 1989: 147–72). In this neoliberal restructuring of capitalism, the role of the state is no longer that of a basic unit for the accumulation of capital, trade, and investment—which now take place transnationally.
As Mezzadra and Neilson (2012) point out, this required a proliferation of bordering to operate as labour regulators. As these and other scholars argue (see e.g. Brambilla et al., 2015), global neoliberalism relies on complex and shifting flows of heterogeneous labour force and differential rates of pay for different kinds of labour in different parts of the world, where various bordering processes are vital as regulatory mechanisms. Moreover, while neoliberal companies depend on global mobility, there is a huge disparity, although also degrees of mutual dependency, between different kinds of labour that are filled in by people of usually different genders, education, and origin and who are subject to differential regimes of bordering permeability.
This creates a system of transnational stratifications constructed through people’s accessibility to different kinds of passports and visas (to be discussed in chapter 2); and these different kinds dictate cross-border mobility, transforming borders into a virtual computer firewall (Rumford, 2006). Mezzadra and Neilson use the examples of mutual dependence among careworkers and global finance workers to illustrate this point; but, as will be seen in the bordering scapes presented in chapters 3–5, a variety of participants depend on different bordering encounters, and this dependence often cuts across not only the national–transnational, the skilled–unskilled, or the public–private, but also the legal and the nefarious.
Thirdly (and this point is closely associated with the second), global economic interdependence under neoliberalism has increased and polarised social and economic inequalities both globally, between the North and the South, and within each society. The capabilities required for globalisation have developed within the context of (western) nation-states and reached tipping points in which they were transformed by and became part of the new assemblage of the global economic and political order (Sassen, 2006). Globalisation reshaped and expanded capitalism, which is centred on surplus accumulation. The growth of transworld spaces has encouraged major extensions of capitalist production, including in areas of information, communications, and finance biotechnology. Notable shifts occurred in the ways in which processes of surplus accumulation operate – for example offshore arrangements and transworld corporate alliances – towards what Sassen calls ‘hypercapitalism’. Hypercapitalism – or neoliberalism – is, however, driven by the same impulses that drove nineteenth-century imperial capitalism and found new fields for the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ through the appropriation of capital and goods from the public sector – spectacularly so in the postcommunist countries, but also in the ‘developing’ (or industrialising) world and in the West, thanks to the spreading control of neoliberal market norms in more and more sectors of the state (Massey, 1995).
This state of affairs has created at least three different social processes with profound effects on contemporary bordering scapes. It created a global economic elite, executives and directors of multinational companies in which, significantly, there is also a growing minority of women and of people from the Global South, especially from what is known as the ‘tiger economies’ (Poon, 1996). This economic elite is constantly on the move, establishing its operations in different countries according to the suitability of the different locations in terms of infrastructure, labour force, and tax regimes.
Neoliberal globalisation has also created larger and larger territories – mostly, but not exclusively in the South – where the local economies were destroyed and no alternative systems have been created. As a result, there is a growing number of people, especially young men, who are desperate to migrate to areas of economic growth and are prepared to face any hardships for it, but on arrival have no skills to offer, except casual labour under the living wage (Triandafyllidou, 2016). These are the people whom Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general, has branded ‘people on the move’. Although the UN has recently established an interagency committee on migration, there is no international legislation that compels nation-states to allow them entrance to their territories, as in the case of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing from zones of armed conflict and from governments’ oppression; and the more pressure is created by these people as they try to migrate in growing waves, the more punitive the bordering regimes developed by different states become (Fekete, 2009). To a large extent, the growing number of people in ‘limbo-scapes’ and ‘grey zones’ (which will be discussed in chapter 5) is an outcome of this process. The humanitarian discourse that is often used when camps are formally established by the UN, international aid organisations, and NGOs, is often contradicted by draconian measures taken by different states and regions to block migrants from entry. Such measures range from razor wire through detention camps in deserts and islands to mass expulsions to a third country.
Another way in which neoliberal globalisation has affected bordering is via its effects on states’ governability. As discussed in chapter 2, neoliberal globalisation emerged during a period of global optimism, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the supposed victory of democracy and freedom (the ‘end of history’ to quote Fukuyama, 1992), in a cosmopolitan world in which social, national, and state borders were on the wane and the state as ‘container of power’ (Giddens, 1985; Taylor, 2004) was going to be over. States were seen as withering away, becoming weaker and less able to impose their will on other social, economic, and political carriers of power.
With the growing hegemony of neoliberal ideologies and policies and the strengthening of neoliberal global market forces, more and more agencies and the state apparatus in increasing numbers of countries have been privatised or restructured, either fully or in part (Jessop 2013a, 2002; McBride, 2005). In this way labour protections were loosened at a time when contemporary societies were becoming increasingly diverse, layered, and interconnected (Gonzales and Sigona, 2017). This does not mean that states stopped being important to neoliberal globalisation – all over the globe, the entire infrastructure in which corporations operate is after all, at least nominally, under the control of individual states. For the purpose of taxation all corporations are registered in particular states (which is often not where their main operations take place). The United States has had a special role in the development and running of neoliberal globalisation (Panitch and Gindin, 2012).
Saskia Sassen (2006) has concluded that, rather than weakening states overall, neoliberal globalisation has exerted on them a kind of pressure that caused some important internal changes. One such change is that the executive powers of governance have been strengthened at the expense of the legislative powers. With the privatisation of the state, a lot of the regulative tasks of the legislative branch have been lost; at the same time the executive branch negotiates virtually on its own with other national and supranational governance executives (the EU, the UN, the World Bank, the WTO) as well as with private, national, and especially transnational corporations. The struggle of the British parliament to be included significantly in the Brexit negotiations is a clear illustration of such a shift. Some would say that the inclusion of so many corporate executives in Donald Trump’s postelection cabinet represents an even further stage in this transformation, in which corporations give up on the ‘middlemen’ and enter state politics directly.
Yuval-Davis (2012), however, argues that Sassen’s position is somewhat overoptimistic and that liberal democratic states have not only shifted the internal balance of powers, but also suffered overall from a certain depletion of their powers. As the banking crisis has shown, with the growing entanglement and dependency of local and global markets and of local private and public institutions, various states have been forced to bail out banks and large corporations for fear of total economic collapse, while at the same time the governability of state agencies, their ability to reinforce regulations on that same private sector, is severely limited.
This is ultimately the result of a basic legal relationship between corporations and states in which companies have the status of fictional citizens. This status, carried by the famous ‘Ltd’ affix, enables the people who run these companies to escape responsibility for the results of the actions of their corporations. Moreover, while states were forced to bail out banks in order to avoid major economic collapses, states themselves – such as Ireland, Greece, and others – were forced to cut their budgets severely, against the interests of their citizens, because (among other reasons) they have become dependent on their credit assessment, which is carried out by the global financial market. These practices started, however, not in the Global North but in the Global South, through the enforcement of ‘structural adjustments’ programmes by the IMF and the World Bank. They began more than a decade earlier and had similar results (Bello et al., 1994).
A global crisis of governmentality has followed this crisis of governability (Yuval-Davis, 2012); this is because, when people feel that their interests are not pursued by their governments – even by the most radical ones, such as the Syriza party, which came to power in Greece – they are disempowered and deprived. After a while they also stop buying the neoliberal ideology, which tells them that it is their responsibility if they fail to be healthy and wealthy, to provide for their families, and to become incredibly rich and famous. This disenchantment has triggered forms of resistance that have employed everyday bordering both as a rhetoric and as a practice to ‘regain control’ – to use a popular Brexit slogan – and have articulated autochthonous claims of belonging (Geschiere, 2009; Yuval-Davis, 2011) as social and political triggers to ‘reborder’ the state and to keep its resources exclusively for those who ‘really belong’.
The combined crisis of governability and governmentality at a time of growing global mobility and of deeper heterogenisation of the local population as a result of migration brought with it also the major crisis of multiculturalism as the technology of control over diversity and discourses of diversity, which became hegemonic in the North after World War II and during the period when the welfare state flourished. Carl Ulrik Schierup et al. (2006) claimed that multiculturalism was an ideological base for transatlantic alignment whose project was the transformation of the welfare state, in late modernity or postmodernity, into a pluralist state in which cultural diversity rights would be incorporated into the more traditional welfare social rights (see also Rex, 1995). However, as Brown (2009) stated, multiculturalism can also be described as a technology of controlling and regulating aversion via tolerance. With the double crisis of governability and governmentality in the new millennium, this technology is gradually giving way to policies that encourage a ‘hostile environment’ (to use the British government discourse in the run-up to the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts). We call such policies ‘everyday bordering’.
Thus everyday bordering has come to replace multiculturalism as the hegemonic governance technology for controlling diversity and discourses of diversity, using often both securitisation and racialised discourses of belonging. In everyday life, bordering has developed as a technology of control of diversity by governments, which allegedly have been seeking to reassert control over the composition and security of the population. Instead of being found at the edge, separating and connecting one state to another, borders have now spread so as to be everywhere. Airports, train stations, even places of work, worship, and living can be borders. Borders can be situated in embassies as well as at the heart of metropolitan cities. Any place has become a borderland; and borderlands can no longer be determined exclusively in relation to specific territories and states.
In different and new contexts, citizens are required to become untrained and unpaid border guards, and more of us are falling under suspicion as illegitimate border crossers. Therefore the relationship between bordering as a top-down political project and everyday processes of ‘othering’ or constructing ‘us’ and ‘them’ – which is in any case linked to political boundary-making – is also intensifying. This tendency, which has been developing since before 9/11, is now institutionalised and legalised in many states. This happened in recent years, especially after the refugee crisis of 2015. More material and legal walls have been erected between and within states to prevent ‘undesirable’ migrants from entering or staying in this or that country. Promises to this effect, which have been central to the electoral success of Trump in the United States, Orbán in Hungary, and others elsewhere, signal the transition, in political discourse, from what Nancy Fraser (2017) calls ‘progressive neoliberalism’ – which has used the discourse of human rights, at least rhetorically – to outright exclusionary nationalist discourse.
In the United Kingdom, through the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts (as we detail in chapter 4), landlords, employers, teachers, and doctors are responsible for verifying that their tenants, employees, students, and patients are legally in the country and, if they fail, they may be fined or even go to prison, unlike those who are trained and paid to do this job. In this way, far from supporting a multicultural society of convivial diversity, this technology of control breeds suspicion, fear, and boundaries sensitisation both among those who belong and among those who do not. Brexit only enhances this sense of differentiation and hierarchisation among people and has become a model for right-wing autochthonic movements throughout Europe. Similar trends are evident in the Global North (e.g. the United States) and in the Global South (e.g. India).
Thus neoliberal globalisation, which seemed to many to facilitate a cosmopolitan ‘borderless’ world, has used bordering in its global regulatory work, by cooperating with and exploiting, in differential and hierarchical ways, different population groupings, states, and spaces across the globe. However, as Alpa Parmar (2018) has observed, contemporary borderings should not be seen as introducing new divisive imaginaries. Rather she views borders across western liberal democracies as mirrors that reflect, deflect, and obscure the image of western democracies, their attitudes to race, and their emotions about racial others. One needs at the same time to analyse the transformative function of borders in conjunction with their aim to preserve, all across the world, those local and global hierarchies, both racial and colonial, that govern mobility for some but not for others.
In the next chapter we present an overview of the main historical developments that have brought bordering to the centre of contemporary global political discourse as it is today. However, before turning to this task (and to the more detailed ethnographic border-scaping cases of the following chapters, which will illustrate the main features of contemporary bordering), we need to say a word about the methodological and epistemological framework of our analysis.
