10: Borders, documents and mobility regimes Flashcards
Key ideas:
- Typical for states in the world to want clear limits
- Regulation of the cross boarder movement of people ‘bodies’ relies on force. Goal is to keep people out, and also to keep people in.
- Usually it involves a degree of enforcement. Army checkpoints, electric fences. Ultimate background tool
- He says the certainty of our categories are threatened. It is less clear who is ours and who is there’s.
- Violence is therefore a way to create certainty.
- The control of movement of bodies across boarders doesn’t just rely on force. Rarely just a case of brutal force.
three trends in cross-border mobility regimes
- increasingly stratified regulation (unequal ‘smoothing’ rather than total restriction)
- standardisation in a globalising mobility regime through documents
- focus on the individual body (biometrics)
- Aim to make cross-boarder moving ‘smooth’ on one hand. And on the other hand makes it difficult for the poor person to pass.
- In order to regulate the movement of bodies, is to collect information about the bodies. To know who is the desirable and who is the non-desirable.
- As Kelly said in his text, James Scott has called this ‘seeing like a state’. States see in a specific way, they collect information about people
seeing like a state
James C. Scott
- increasingly stratified regulation (unequal ‘smoothing’ rather than total restriction)
These documents are essential for us to live the lives with live in the contemporary world. It is very difficult to live without these documents. You have to have a name and a surname and a birth certificate in order to have a name in the world and in order to get the other licences etc etc.
- Many visa requirements only function in one direction. E.g. many of people at Manchester travel without visa travel to many states in the world, but people from that state can not travel to UK without visa.
- Some people need many more kind of via than others.
- There is a standardisation of the way in which you apply for a visa and the way these are being made in west
2) 2. standardisation in a globalising mobility regime through documents
- We can see this system coordination between different states
- This is linked to globalisation
- A emergence of a way to regulate bodies crossing boarders globally
- Seeing like a state in Scotts terms, is increasingly targeted. Not seeing everyone in the same way. This is in very un equal and hierarchical way.
3) focus on the individual body (biometrics) - Increasingly the seeing like the state, is reading about people, regulating their movement, this is increasingly done by the body itself
- Dna, fingerprint prints, eyes
- The ways in which we are being made legiable to the state, is increasingly down to the individual body.
- Boarder control becomes ‘matching two things’ Need a document, (which is a result of other documents), and that document identifies me as an individual body, and that should match at the boarder control, with the body itself.
Hayden 1996
casestudy
- war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was not ‘ethnic conflict’ (so-called ‘ancient hatreds’ between nations/ethnic groups) but a modern process: the discourse of the ethnically defined nation-state provided ‘the inducement for mass violence‘
- ‘In a political situation premised on the incompatibility of its components, these mixed territories were both anomalous and threatening since they served as living disproof of the nationalist ideologies. For this reason, the mixed regions could not be permitted to survive as such, and their populations, which were mixing voluntarily, had to be separated militarily.’ (Hayden 1996: 768)
(link to Mary douglas)
Douglas ‘Purity and Danger’ (1966)
- Boarder controls are ways to police classification. Ways to harden classification and make it stick. To perfect it. To make sure we know who exactly fits in which box. To know exactly where somebody is and where it fits in that classification, and to prevent both anomalies.
- Anomalies = cant decide what territory they should be in.
- Also want to avoid dirt. Dirt = body that should be in particular territory, but should be in another particular territory. ‘Matter out of place’
- Undocumented migrants – if we have to prove we are worthy of crossing boarders, we have to do this through documents. When document become central to classifying certain bodys to being worth something, it also means that certain people do not have these certain documents and cannot cross boarders.
Increasingly this job of ‘monitoring’ is not just done by people in the embac, and boarder control, but also by people like social workers, people in the NHS, like university teachers.
T. Kelly (KEY READING)
‘The indeterminacies of identity documents meant that the residents of Bayt Hajjar wore the uncertainties of their legal status on their bodies and their encounters with the Israeli military became marked by fear and anxiety’ (Kelly 2006: 102)
- ‘playing the game’
- Instead of palastianian documents (worst possible to have at these checkpoints) if they have any other documents at all they will use these.
- They try and get an Israeli number plate
- They try to pass as Israeli e.g. by speaking Hebrew
- They try to look as unsuspicious as possible, by wearing particular clothes, by driving nice cars.
- Confronted by a system, a state that is much more powerful than them, and play the system ‘play the game’. Go along with it. Motivation: to make a living. Main reasons for all of this is economic. To sustain livelihoods. Survival is to a large extent depended on the economy in Israel. An economic necessity.
• The importance the documents have in peoples lives. He says the rules may look very clear, but in practice the actual key experience of trying to cross, is that they don’t have certainty in what is going to happen, e.g. if they are going to cross to work. Even if they have the write documents, they still might not make it across. A lot of anger and frustration, and a lot of fear and anxiety which he documents.
