Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease:
01 Feb 2002-Alternatives: Global, Local, Political (Sage Publications, Inc.)-Vol. 27, Iss: 1, pp 63-92
TL;DR: Migration is increasingly interpreted as a security problem as mentioned in this paper, which is not an expression of traditional responses to a rise of insecurity, crime, terrorism, and the negative effects of globalization; it is the result of the creation of a continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society.
Abstract: Migration is increasingly interpreted as a security problem. The prism of security analysis is especially important for politicians, for national and local police organizations, the military police, customs officers, border patrols, secret services, armies, judges, some social services (health care, hospitals, schools), private corporations (bank analysts, providers of technology surveillance, private policing), many journalists (especially from television and the more sensationalist newspapers), and a significant fraction of general public opinion, especially but not only among those attracted to "law and order." The popularity of this security prism is not an expression of traditional responses to a rise of insecurity, crime, terrorism, and the negative effects of globalization; it is the result of the creation of a continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society. The professionals in charge of the management of risk and fear especially transfer the legitimacy they gain from struggles against terrorists, criminals, spies, and counterfeiters toward other targets, most notably transnational political activists, people crossing borders, or people born in the country but with foreign parents. This expansion of what security is taken to include effectively results in a convergence between the meaning of international and internal security. The convergence is particularly important in relation to the issue of migration, and specifically in relation to questions about who gets to be defined as an immigrant. The security professionals themselves, along with some academics, tend to claim that they are only responding to new threats requiring exceptional measures beyond the normal demands of everyday politics. In practice, however, the transformation of security and the consequent focus on immigrants is directly related to their own immediate interests (competition for budgets and missions) and to the transformation of technologies they use (computerized databanks, profiling and morphing, electronic phone tapping). The Europeanization and the Westernization of the logics of control and surveillance of people beyond national polices is driven by the creation of a transnational field of professionals in the management of unease. This field is larger than that of police organizations in that it includes, on one hand private corporations and organizations dealing with the control of access to the welfare state, and, on the other hand, intelligence services and some military people seeking a new role after the end of the Cold War. These professionals in the management of unease, however, are only a node connecting many competing networks responding to many groups of people who are identified as risk or just as a source of unease. (1) This process of securitization is now well known, but despite the many critical discourses that have drawn attention to the securitization of migration over the past ten years, the articulation of migration as a security problem continues. Why? What are the reasons of the persistent framing of migration in relation to terrorism, crime, unemployment and religious zealotry, on the one hand, and to integration, interest of the migrant for the national economy development, on the other, rather than in relation to new opportunities for European societies, for freedom of travel over the world, for cosmopolitanism, or for some new understanding of citizenship? (2) This is the question I want to address in this essay. Some "critical" discourses generated by NGOs and academics assume that if people, politicians, governments, bureaucracies, and journalists were more aware, they would change their minds about migration and begin to resist securitizing it. The primary problem, therefore, is ideological or discursive in that the securitization of migrants derives from the language itself and from the different capacities of various actors to engage in speech acts. …
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25 Mar 2010
TL;DR: Peutz and De Genova as discussed by the authors discuss the role of space, sovereignty, and freedom of movement in the enforcement of the deportation regime in the European Space of Circulation, and present a mapping of the European space of circulation.
Abstract: Acknowledgments vii Introduction / Nathalie Peutz and Nicholas De Genova 1 Part One. Theoretical Overview The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement / Nicholas De Genova 33 Part Two. Sovereignty and Space 1. Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens / William Waltes 69 2. Immigration Detention and the Territoriality of Universal Rights / Galina Cornelisse 101 3. Mapping the European Space of Circulation / Serhat Karakayali and Enrica Rigo 123 Part Three. Spaces of Deportability 4. From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportations across the Mediterranean Space / Rutvica Andrijasevic 147 5. Deportation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Anticipation, Experience, and Memory / Victor Talavera, Guillermina Gina Nunez, and Josiah Heyman 166 6. Engulfed: Indian Guest Workers, Bahraini Citizens, and the Structural Violence of the Kafala System / Andrew M. Gardner 196 7. Deportation at the Limits of "Tolerance": The Juridical, Institutional, and Social Construction of "Illegality" in Switzerland / Hans-Rudolf Wicker 224 8. Deportation Deferred: "Illegality," Visibility, and Recognition in Contemporary Germany / Heide Castaneda 245 9. Citizens, "Real" Others, and "Other" Others: The Biopolitics of Otherness and the Deportation of Unauthorized Migrant Workers from Tel Aviv, Israel / Sarah S. Willen 262 10. Radical Deportation: Alien Tales from Lodi and San Francisco / Sunaina Maira 295 Part Four. Forced Movement 11. Fictions of Law: The Trial of Sulaiman Oladokun, or Reading Kafka in an Immigration Court / Aashti Bhartia 329 12. Exiled by Law: Deportation and the Inviability of Life / Susan Bibler Coutin 351 13. "Criminal Alien" Deportees in Somaliland: An Ethnography of Removal / Nathalie Peutz 371 Part Five. Freedom 14. Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement / Peter Nyers 413 References 443 Contributors 483 Index 497
661 citations
TL;DR: This article argues that while an important and innovative contribution, the securitization framework is problematically narrow in three senses, and points to possibilities for developing the framework further as well as for the need for those applying it to recognize both limits of their claims and the normative implications of their analysis.
Abstract: Those interested in the construction of security in contemporary international politics have increasingly turned to the conceptual framework of `securitization'. This article argues that while an important and innovative contribution, the securitization framework is problematically narrow in three senses. First, the form of act constructing security is defined narrowly, with the focus on the speech of dominant actors. Second, the context of the act is defined narrowly, with the focus only on the moment of intervention. Finally, the framework of securitization is narrow in the sense that the nature of the act is defined solely in terms of the designation of threats. In outlining this critique, the article points to possibilities for developing the framework further as well as for the need for those applying it to recognize both limits of their claims and the normative implications of their analysis. I conclude by pointing to how the framework might fit within a research agenda concerned with the broader construction of security.
636 citations
Cites background from "Security and Immigration: Toward a ..."
...As Didier Bigo (2002) has argued, issues can become institutionalized as security issues or threats without dramatic moments of intervention....
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...Practices of surveillance and border controls, for example, particularly as undertaken by bureaucrats or ‘professional managers of unease’ (Bigo, 2002: 65), are a central part of securitization, and are not simply those actions enabled by preceding speech acts....
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...An alternative argument concerning the ‘narrowness’ of the Copenhagen School’s exclusive focus on speech is advanced by Didier Bigo (2002) and the so-called ‘Paris School’.9 For these theorists, security is constructed and applied to different issues and areas through a range of often routinized practices rather than only through specific speech acts that enable emergency measures....
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...An alternative argument concerning the ‘narrowness’ of the Copenhagen School’s exclusive focus on speech is advanced by Didier Bigo (2002) and the so-called ‘Paris School’.9 For these theorists, security is constructed and applied to different issues and areas through a range of often routinized…...
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors interpret these developments as heralding a new figure of citizenship, and begin the important task of developing a new vocabulary by which it can be understood, which they call "acts of citizenship".
Abstract: Throughout the twentieth century the figure of citizenship that has been dominant since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has begun to change. We have witnessed the emergence of new rights including ecological, sexual and indigenous rights as well as blurring of the boundaries between human and civil, political and social rights and the articulation of rights by (and to) cities, regions and across states. We have witnessed the birth of new ‘acts of citizenship’: both organized and spontaneous protests to include situationist and carnivalesque forms. We have also witnessed the emergence of ‘activist’ international courts (and judges), as well as new media and social networking as sites of struggles. How subjects act to become citizens and claim citizenship has thus substantially changed. This article interprets these developments as heralding a new figure of citizenship, and begins the important task of developing a new vocabulary by which it can be understood.
630 citations
Cites background from "Security and Immigration: Toward a ..."
...New actors articulate claims for justice through new sites that involve multiple and overlapping scales of rights and obligations (Bigo, 2002; Huysmans, 2006; Huysmans et al, 2006) The manifold acts through which new actors as claimants emerge in new sites and scales are becoming the new objects of…...
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Book•
01 Jan 2009TL;DR: A survey of the literature and institutions of International Security Studies (ISS) can be found in this paper, along with a detailed institutional account of ISS in terms of its journals, departments, think tanks and funding sources.
Abstract: International Security Studies (ISS) has changed and diversified in many ways since 1945. This book provides the first intellectual history of the development of the subject in that period. It explains how ISS evolved from an initial concern with the strategic consequences of superpower rivalry and nuclear weapons, to its current diversity in which environmental, economic, human and other securities sit alongside military security, and in which approaches ranging from traditional Realist analysis to Feminism and Post-colonialism are in play. It sets out the driving forces that shaped debates in ISS, shows what makes ISS a single conversation across its diversity, and gives an authoritative account of debates on all the main topics within ISS. This is an unparalleled survey of the literature and institutions of ISS that will be an invaluable guide for all students and scholars of ISS, whether traditionalist, ‘new agenda’ or critical. • The first book to tell the post-1945 story of International Security Studies and offer an integrated historical sociology of the whole field • Opens the door to a long-overdue conversation about what ISS is and where it should be going • Provides a detailed institutional account of ISS in terms of its journals, departments, think tanks and funding sources
579 citations
TL;DR: For example, the authors argue that the more these spectacles fuel anti-immigrant controversy, the more the veritable inclusion of the migrants targeted for exclusion proceeds apace, which is the obscene of inclusion.
Abstract: Border policing and immigration law enforcement produce a spectacle that enacts a scene of ‘exclusion’. Such spectacles render migrant ‘illegality’ visible. Thus, these material practices help to generate a constellation of images and discursive formations, which repetitively supply migrant ‘illegality’ with the semblance of an objective fact. Yet, the more these spectacles fuel anti-immigrant controversy, the more the veritable inclusion of the migrants targeted for exclusion proceeds apace. Their ‘inclusion’ is finally devoted to the subordination of their labour, which is best accomplished only insofar as their incorporation is persistently beleaguered with exclusionary campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself a form of subjugation. At stake, then, is a larger sociopolitical (and legal) process of inclusion through exclusion. This we may comprehend as the obscene of inclusion. The castigation of ‘illegals’ thereby supplies the rationale for essentializing citizenship inequalities as...
564 citations
References
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TL;DR: The debate between realists and liberals has reemerged as an axis of contention in international relations theory as mentioned in this paper, and the debate is more concerned today with the extent to which state action is influenced by "structure" versus "process" and institutions.
Abstract: The debate between realists and liberals has reemerged as an axis of contention in international relations theory.’ Revolving in the past around competing theories of human nature, the debate is more concerned today with the extent to which state action is influenced by ‘structure’ (anarchy and the distribution of power) versus ‘process’ (interaction and learning) and institutions. Does the absence of centralized political authority force states to play competitive power politics? Can international regimes overcome this logic, and under what conditions? What in anarchy is given and immutable, and what is amenable to change?
3,964 citations
TL;DR: Our work Is our words, but our words do not work any more as mentioned in this paper, and the very temptation of these little scratches indicates that words at the heart of the subject are i n trouble.
Abstract: Our work Is our words, but our words do not work any more. They have not worked for some time. We can obviously start with the misleading label—‘International Politics’—which is given to our subject. As a result of this problem, I have wanted to use increasing numbers of inverted commas; but most have never seen the light of day because copy-editors have regarded them as an over-indulgence. Even so, the very temptation of these little scratches indicates that words at the heart of the subject are i n trouble:
641 citations
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