Borders, Territory, Law¹

This article takes as its starting point legal arguments deployed by the United Nations on the situation of detainees held in Guantánamo Bay. This case raises a series of provocative questions about the contemporary relation between borders, territory, and law. First, it challenges dominant assumptions about the nature and location of authority in world politics based upon a conventional logic of inside/outside. Second, it raises the issue of what critical theoretical/philosophical resources might be available in order to rethink the above relation. Third, it summons the need to develop alternative border imaginaries. It is argued that some prospects for addressing these questions are found in the work of Benjamin, Derrida, Schmitt, and Agamben.