Limits at the Limes. Diffracted Sovereignty inside the Border Zones

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-235
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Border Control ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Control Approach ◽  
Control Selection ◽  
Border Zones ◽  
Border Surveillance ◽  
European Migration

Abstract This paper questions state sovereignty at borders, by referencing the contradictions that a border control approach based upon security concerns creates, and the distortions between societies of norms and situations of exception that the European migration and asylum policies generate. Meanwhile, whilst sovereignty should correspond in a legal theory perspective to authority, its expressions manifested in the European borders consists essentially in domination as bare violence is deployed. By investigating the hiatus between how sovereignty ought to be in theory and how it is observed in practice, it is possible to consider that the very sovereignty is diffracted in the thickness of the frontiers (i). This paper explores the methods states develop directly or indirectly in the borders, inside the border zones, basing the analysis on the notion of heterotopia Michel Foucault forged. Such a conceptual tool is deployed in order to underscore how states construct and exploit frontiers as useful margins and establish them as dissolution zones. Three methods – extraction, classification and obliteration – are highlighted that correspond to the main purposes of border surveillance – control, selection and removal – (ii).

Die Ökonomie des Zwischenlandes.

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (183) ◽  
pp. 289-305
Author(s):  
Angela Schweizer
Keyword(s):  
Financial Support ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Border Control ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Job Market ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Security Control ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Migration Politics ◽  
European Migration

The following article is based on my fieldwork in Morocco and represents anthropological data collected amongst undocumented sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco. They want to enter Europe in search for a better life for themselves and to provide financial support for their families. Due to heavy border security control and repression, they find themselves trapped at the gates of Europe, where they are trying to survive by engaging in various economic activities in the informal sector. The article begins with an overview of the European migration politics in Africa and the geopolitical and historical context of Morocco, in light of the externalization of European border control. I will then analyze the various economic sectors, in which sub-Saharan migrations are active, as well as smuggling networks, informal camps and remittances, on which they largely depend due to the exclusion from the national job market.

Automated Border Control: Criminalizing the “Hidden Intent” of Migrant Embodiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
Keyword(s):  
Homeland Security ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Great Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Border Control ◽  
Computer Engineering ◽  
Novel Technologies ◽  
Surveillance Technology ◽  
Border Zones

I argue that we are entering an automated era of border control that I label a border-biosecurity industrial complex. Funded in great part by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), scientific research and automated surveillance technologies promise the state innovative and supposedly unbiased solutions to the challenge of border control and security. This article spotlights a border surveillance technology called AVATAR (Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessment in Real-Time). Analyzing this technology, which was funded by the DHS and developed by faculty at the University of Arizona’s National Center for Border Security and Immigration (BORDERS), allows me to assess how the emphasis on novel technologies to detect terrorists unleashes the search for ubiquitous surveillance devices programmed to detect deviant behavioral and physiological movements. I offer a wider view of this technology-in-the-making by analyzing how university research in aerial defense, the psychology of deception, the life sciences, and computer engineering influences the development of surveillance devices and techniques. I explore how, during a posthuman era, automated technologies detect and racialize “suspect life” under the guise of scientific neutrality and supposedly free from human interference. Suspect life refers to the racial bias preprogrammed into algorithms that compute danger or risk into certain human movements and regions such as border zones. As these technologies turn the body into matter, they present biological life as a more scientifically verifiable truth than human verbal testimony, moving border control from the adjudication of law through the subjective interview to the automated body that speaks a truth more powerful than a complex story can tell.

The Invisible Center: Christian Liberalism in American Religious Freedom Jurisprudence

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211986467
Author(s):  
Hannah Dick
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Establishment Clause ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Free Exercise ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Antidiscrimination Law ◽  
The One

This article interrogates the notion of liberal state neutrality when it comes to adjudicating religious freedom claims. Drawing on work in political theory, legal theory, and religious studies, I argue that Christianity is a central and invisible feature of liberalism. I then examine how Christian liberalism has shaped American religious freedom jurisprudence, analyzing contradictory Supreme Court decisions involving free exercise and establishment claims. On the one hand, the language of secular purpose has safeguarded several Christian expressions from Establishment Clause scrutiny. On the other hand, since the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), some Christian conservative legal advocates have repositioned Christianity as a persecuted religion requiring free exercise exemptions from antidiscrimination law. That the Court has recently obliged this more narrow understanding of religious freedom demonstrates the resilience of the Christian liberal state. While the cases are drawn from the American context, I suggest that the language of Christian liberalism is a useful conceptual tool for analyzing religious freedom claims in a variety of liberal democratic contexts.

Derrida’s Legal Times

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-167
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

The aim of this essay is to suggest what Jacques Derrida’s late forays into law and politics might contribute to thinking in legal theory beyond what can be derived from Michel Foucault and his inheritors. The key differences pertain to time and timing. In particular, Derrida’s writings lead us to reconsider the timing of the relation between the subject and the law, whether that subject is declaring independence or awaiting death. Through the vector of time, the trace of the subject—not self-present or autonomous but a subject nonetheless—is recovered within the juridico-political sphere.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Luis Martinez
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Border Control ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
General Outline ◽  
Arab Uprisings

This chapter is the general introduction to The State in North Africa. After the Arab Uprisings. Until the Arab revolts, the process of state consolidation in North Africa was believed to be completed, and territory and border control came under state sovereignty. The governments of North Africa discovered with dismay that they were facing challenges that undermined this long task of territorial unification as well as the cultural and administrative harmonization undertaken in the wake of their independence. The introduction ends by presenting the general outline of the book.

Foucault and the Incompletion of Law

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-763 ◽  
Author(s):  
BEN GOLDER
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

In a late interview given to the French newspaper Le Monde, Michel Foucault discussed his dreams for a different style of criticism. ‘I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism’, remarked Foucault, in which one would ‘not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it.’ This somewhat wistful, poetic thought resonates with more familiar Foucauldian notions regarding the use of theory as a ‘toolkit’ or ‘toolbox’. Common to both these tropes – critique as affirmation and theory as functional – is the desire for thought to be put to work rather than put on trial, for sentences to be brought to life rather than delivered. And yet this presents the would-be Foucauldian book reviewer – and more so where the venue is the impeccably juridical one of the law journal – with a series of alluring problems. How might one elaborate such a Foucauldian critique in a context where one is expressly called upon to judge? What would such a non-judgmental Foucauldian critique look like? Are juridical practices of critique readily susceptible to Foucauldian appropriation or subversion? This set of related questions is emblematic of a wider concern of mine which forms the subject matter of this review essay, namely the place of Foucault (if indeed he has one) in legal theory. How does Foucault, that fabled figure of postmodern antinomianism who supposedly announced the demise and ‘expulsion’ of modern law, relate to legal theory? What might it mean to bring Foucault's unruly poststructuralism ‘into law’? And with what possible effects?

scholarly journals The Future of State Sovereignty

Legitimacy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 69-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Raz
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Turn On ◽  
The Future

This chapter is the first of four to focus on the legitimacy of the state. It starts with a question: Do increasing challenges to state sovereignty require legal theory to be re-thought? The chapter observes that, despite these increasing challenges, state sovereignty persists, since no alternative is available. It then argues that the success of the assortment of international organizations that challenge state sovereignty depends on their ability to attract loyalty, which depends, in turn, on their ability to recognize the truth of pluralism and respond to diverse interests, preferences, and traditions. It also suggests that perhaps such value-pluralism is best protected by sovereign states.

scholarly journals Surveillance at sea: The transactional politics of border control in the Aegean

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 224-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huub Dijstelbloem ◽  
Rogier van Reekum ◽  
Willem Schinkel
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Border Control ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Mobile Objects ◽  
Visual Politics ◽  
Control Apparatus ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Border Surveillance

The relationship between vision and action is a key element of both practices and conceptualizations of border surveillance in Europe. This article engages with what we call the ‘operative vision’ of surveillance at sea, specifically as performed by the border control apparatus in the Aegean. We analyse the political consequences of this operative vision by elaborating on three examples of fieldwork conducted in the Aegean and on the islands of Chios and Lesbos. One of the main aims is to bring the figure of the migrant back into the study of border technologies. By combining insights from science and technology studies with border, mobility and security studies, the article distinguishes between processes of intervention, mobilization and realization and emphasizes the role of migrants in their encounter with surveillance operations. Two claims are brought forward. First, engaging with recent scholarly work on the visual politics of border surveillance, we circumscribe an ongoing ‘transactional politics’. Second, the dynamic interplay between vision and action brings about a situation of ‘recalcitrance’, in which mobile objects and subjects of various kinds are drawn into securitized relations, for instance in encounters between coast guard boats and migrant boats at sea. Without reducing migrants to epiphenomena of those relations, this recalcitrance typifies the objects of surveillance as both relatable as well as resistant, particularly in the tensions between border control and search and rescue.

The Family of Nations as an Element of the Ideology of Colonialism

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 278-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Kleinschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
International System ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Technical Term ◽  
The Family

The article links the use of the concept of ‘civilisation’ with the nineteenth-century perception of the international system, for which the ‘family of nations’ was current as a technical term in international legal theory for the international legal community. Following the distinction between state sovereignty and subjecthood under international law, international legal theorists denied the latter to most states outside Europe and classed them as ‘uncivilised’, even though their governments had concluded treaties under international law with European and the us governments and had thereby been formally recognised as sovereigns. In many cases, these treaties were agreements concerning the establishment of ‘Protectorates’ as the paramount type of dependency under the control of a European or the us government. In this context, international law became the house law of the ‘Family of Nations’, which extended across the globe while denying access to it to many states.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document