Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World

Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee

This paper looks at aspects of the detention of irregular migrants in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand The principle intention of the paper is to study detention of irregular migrants as a means of understanding politics and how notions of political participation and of sovereignty are affected by the detention of certain sorts of individual What does the identification of certain “forms of life” to be detained say about the political norms of different societies? The conduit for this examination will be the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer Homo sacer is a term Agamben extrapolates from “ancient Roman law” It denotes a naked or bare life that is depoliticized Homo sacer is the excess of processes of political constitution that create a governable form of life Homo sacer is thus exempt or excluded from the normal limits of the state At the same time, however, homo sacer is not simply cast out but is held in particular relation to the norm: it is through the exclusion of the depoliticized form of life that the politicized norm exists This essay seeks to contextualize aspects of Agamben's argument by looking at detention as a form of exclusion in three different contexts

The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand

Introduction / Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr -- Knowledge, power, surveillance -- Detention of foreigners, states of exception, and the social practices of control of the banopticon / Didier Bigo -- Struggling with (il)legality: the indeterminate functioning of Malaysia's borders for asylum seekers, refugees, and stateless persons / Alice M. Nah -- The foreigner in the security continuum: judicial resistance in the United Kingdom / Elspeth Guild -- Ambivalent categories: hill tribes and illegal migrants in Thailand / Mika Toyota -- Borderpanic: representing migrants and borders -- Danger happens at the border / Emma Haddad -- Violence, subversion, and creativity in the Thai-Malaysian borderland / Alexander Horstmann -- Rethinking borderscapes: mapping hidden geographies -- The poetry of boundaries / James D. Sidaway -- The sites of the Sino-Burmese and Thai-Burmese boundaries: transpositions -- Between the conceptual and life worlds / Karin Dean -- A Pacific zone? (In)security, sovereignty, and stories of the Pacific borderscape / Suvendrini Perera -- Rethinking borderscapes: the new political -- "Temporary shelter areas" and the paradox of perceptibility: imperceptible naked-Karens in the Thai-Burmese border zones / Decha Tangseefa -- Locating political space through time: asylum and excision in Australia / Prem Kumar Rajaram -- Border's capture: insurrectional politics, border-crossing humans, and the new political / Nevzat Soguk -- Contributors -- Index.

Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge

In the summer of 2015, more than 350,000 migrants moved through Hungarian territory. Almost immediately there emerged in response a dialectic between, on the one hand, depoliticizing narratives of crisis that sought to immobilize the migrants and, on the other, concrete political mobilization that sought to facilitate their mobility. While state institutions and humanitarian volunteer groups framed mobility in terms that emphasized a vertical form of politics, a horizontal counterpolitics arose by the summer's end, one that challenged hegemonic territorial politics. The state's efforts to immobilize resulted only in more radical forms of mobility. Outlining an ethnography of mobility, immobilization, and cross-border activism, we follow the dramatic yet momentary presence, and subsequent absence, of migrants in an evanescent rebel city marked by novel political solidarities. [mobility, immobility, transit zones, border politics, refugees, migrants, Hungary]

Immobilizing mobility: Border ethnography, illiberal democracy, and the politics of the “refugee crisis” in Hungary

Refugees and migrants are often studied as though they have no relation to the racial and class structures of the societies in which they reside. They are strangers to be governed by ‘integration’ policy and border management. Refugees and migrants are, however, subjects of contemporary capitalism struggling to render themselves valuable capitalist modes of production. I study the government of refugees and migrants in order to examine capitalist value regimes. Societal values and hierarchies reflected in capitalist modes of production impact on struggles of racialised subaltern groups to translate body power into valued labour. Marx’s account of surplus populations points to the common marginalisations of people called ‘refugees’ and other subaltern groups struggling to translate their body power into valorised labour. The essay includes a study of the gentrification of a district in Budapest, and its transformation into a means for the reproduction of capital, leading to the marginalisation of g...

Prem Kumar Rajaram

Papers

Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee

The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand

Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge

Immobilizing mobility: Border ethnography, illiberal democracy, and the politics of the “refugee crisis” in Hungary

Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes