Border formations: security and subjectivity at the border

This paper offers a normative argument for reconfiguring borders that rests on a critique of intersecting logics bearing on security, incorporation, agency, subjectivity, encounter, and citizenship. Especially important to my critique is the mutually reinforcing relationship between border security and prevalent assimilationist and integrationist forms of incorporation associated with the dominant single-citizenship model. I offer instead an alternative framing of incorporation I call enfoldment, which is anchored in the contingent and negotiated agency and subjectivity of mobile persons and a multiversal understanding of societies. As I argue, one avenue for opening the possibilities of migrant agency and subjectivity is via what I term 'mediated passage'. It entails shielding migrants and travellers from the direct control of movement by states at borders, allowing for passage across borders mediated by civil society organizations possessing independent power and authority. Keywords: bordersmobilitysecuritysocial agencysubjectivityclaims making Acknowledgements Karine Côté-Boucher was essential in bringing this article to the final form presented above. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous reviewers, the editors of Citizenship Studies, and Dalia Kandiyoti for very helpful comments. Along the way I benefited from the opportunity to present earlier versions of this essay at the 2008 Security and Exclusion workshop at the University of Windsor, led by Tanya Basok and Willem de Lint and at the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University led by Greg Elmer. Notes 1. We of course are still not done understanding the nature and implications of border transformations and their consequences upon regimes of citizenship (Amoore Citation2006, Sparke Citation2006, Walters Citation2006, Bhandar Citation2008, Muller Citation2008, Zureik and Salter Citation2005). The need to continue research and analysis should not stop us from also exploring alternative normative framings of the zones of passage across territories, states and social spaces, even if these framings require abstracting away the important specifics of practices, policies, and histories in order make theoretical links across conceptual terrains. 2. For the purposes of theorizations in this essay I am abstracting away from the great and very important diversity of practices and formations at borders across the global North and South. However, even in that abstraction, it should be clear to readers that when I invoke the term, the border, I mostly have the borders of my own experience in North American and Europe in mind. 3. Such a critique articulates the effects of borders and opens the possibility of refusing to be governed a particular way. And such refusal opens the way toward reframing and altering practices. The motivations for such refusal can be contingent and variable: a sense of injustice, an ethical concern for others, or even a revulsion regarding forms of violence and exclusion. This follows from Foucault's 'What is critique?' (1997) and Butler's (Citation2002) excellent exploration of that essay. Along with Butler and Foucault I am comfortable with the emphasis on acts, practices, and possibilities of refusal rather than on privileged moral systems and orders required to legitimate refusal and alternatives. 4. For CitationFoucault that concept was the alternative forms of subjectivity he was exploring in his late works, such as in the second volume of his History of sexuality (1992). For those who leave it lurking in the background, the inclusive concept might default to some form of rights-bearing liberal subjectivity, even if the theorist is troubled by liberal subjectivity. 5. Cf. Prins and Salisbury (Citation2008). 6. I have argued exactly for this sort of framing in Latham (Citation2008). 7. For a historical perspective, see Aristide Zolberg (Citation1978) and Saskia Sassen (Citation1999). 8. The works of Aihwa Ong (Citation1999, Citation2006) examine the practice of 'flexible citizenship' as a cultural logic. Yet it remains to be seen whether this logic can give birth to a post-Westphalian institutional framework especially in light of contemporary suspicion and restrictions towards dual forms of citizenship in Australia, Europe and North America (Stasiulis and Ross Citation2006). Nevertheless, see efforts to think the post-Westphalian moment in Europe (Walters Citation2002), and from a normative perspective by Andrew Linklater (Citation1998) and Nancy Fraser (Citation2007). 9. They might, for example, enjoy the bundle of rights available to everyone in a society. See the arguments around denizenship as one line of thought in this vein (Benhabib Citation2004, Soysal Citation1994). 10. See the articles in the special 2005 edition of Refuge, 'Betwixt and between: refugee and stateless persons in limbo', 22 (2). 11. See also Côté-Boucher (Citation2008). 12. Bommes and Geddes (Citation2000). 13. Amoore and De Goede discuss the larger effects of the operations of computerized data mining such as the transferring the deemed il/legitimacy of behaviours, identities and bodies into risk categorizations, thus fostering a sense of normalized self and suspicious otherness in securitized societies. 14. But see Soll (Citation2007) Pred (Citation1973), Beniger (Citation1986) and Edwards (Citation1988). 15. Recognizing that information systems are but one more form of social and material life. 16. See Elmer (Citation2004) for an exploration of the politics of many of the especially commercial rendering sites. 17. I owe this observation to Greg Elmer. 18. One question is whether extraordinary rendition is the beginning of reflexive state theory of this crucial and tragic dimension of the rendering regime. 19. I am thus using regime in a far weaker sense then Deleuze and Guattari's (Citation1988, pp. 100–120) 'signifying regime', where there are master signifiers and chains of signification. 20. The relevance of the Schmittian concept of decisionism should be obvious here. Of course, pointing to the power of officials via decisionism is one thing; making general claims about the state and sovereignty another. On the limits of Schmitt see Huysmans (Citation2006). 21. The need to negotiate can vary based on how new someone is and what access they have to capital, financial, intellectual (training), and social (family). 22. Bommes (Citation2005) argues for the importance of looking at incorporation as a variegated set of processes across social space understood as composed of multiple fields. 23. See for example Berger and Neuhaus (Citation1977), Fukuyama (Citation1995) and Putnam (Citation2000).