Introduction

p r e m k u m a r r aja r a m
a n d c a r l g ru n dy -wa r r

We want to emphasize that the study of borders and migration cen-

ters on questions of justice and its limits. The border is not a neutral
line of separation; borders between nation-states demarcate belong-
ing and nonbelonging and authorize a distinction between norm
and exception. The authority accorded by the territorial border
vindicates a curtailed conception of justice, one that is particularly
telling in its circular claim to being an exhaustive representation of
human need. Justice operates to outline the limits of a spatial uto-
pia, an attempt at a purposive unity enveloped by the nation-state.
The territorial border thus functions to distinguish an arena within
which justice may operate to entrench a space of utopic unity. This
results in a grounded base for thinking and responding to chaotic
heterotopia in the world (Foucault 1989a; Decha, chapter 10 in this
volume).
We also want to emphasize that the clearing of utopic space and
the limiting of justice rest on a desire to conceal or not hear voices
and experiences of heterotopia and dystopianot out there, but
within. The border is not empty or readily pliable; it is a paradoxi-
cal zone of resistance, agency, and rogue embodiment. The enforced
order of the utopic space of territorial justice is premised on a series
of abstractions, including the citizen and the community. In these

ix
x introduction

abstractions, that which remains inchoate, which cannot be ab-

stracted, is placed outside, consigned to the border, at the edges
of the norm. This operative placing beyond the margins should not
be taken at its word. The placing beyond of that deemed not to fit
inaugurates a bicameral system of the political where the inside,
the norm, has a symbiotic relation with the outside, the exception.
The border is a zone in between states where the territorial resolu-
tions of being and the laws that prop them up collapse. It is a zone
where the multiplicity and chaos of the universal and the discomfits
and possibilities of the body intrude. We use the term borderscapes
to indicate the complexity and vitality of, and at, the border.
This book is a cross-disciplinary conversation between scholars
of Asian and European borders in light of a set of security discourses
and associated bureaucratic and punitive practices that have been
prevalent in different forms and at different scales over the last five
years. The focus of these discourses and practices has been the terri-
torial border; the border is conceived as a tool of exclusion, one that
can be strengthened and fostered to protect a community and a so-
ciety against a phantasmic threat of otherness that tends to become
flesh in the demonized and abject figure of a migrant or refugee.
The book studies legal, bureaucratic, and punitive discourses and
practices that center on creative practices of and at the border. Such
border practices invade and permeate everyday sites; the border be-
comes not the imaginary line of separation but something camou-
flaged in a language and performance of culture, class, gender, and
race (Soguk, chapter 12 in this volume).
Such camouflage reproduces the border in the multiple localities
and spatialities of state and society. Borders, as Nevzat Soguk men-
tions here, can fold inward, enveloping and containing individuals
and groups in societies within particular regiments of governmental-
ity. Or they can fold outward, restricting entry and expelling irregu-
lar migrants. The term borderscapes is an entry point, allowing for
a study of the border as mobile, perspectival, and relational. From
this entry point, we study practices, performances, and discourses
that seek to capture, contain, and instrumentally use the border to
affix a dominant spatiality, temporality, and political agency. We
also study those hidden geographies of association and digressions,
concealed by instrumental captures of the border that demarcate a
coherent inside from a chaotic outside, that question the anchoring
 introduction xi

of society, community, and politics to the phantasmic figure of the

nation-state. Indeed, we point to the phantasm of the nation-state,
to the performance of coherence centered on representations of the
border as something static and stable, clearly outlining belonging
and nonbelonging, the very substance and vindication of the nation-
state (Sidaway, chapter 7 in this volume). Such phantasms are set
against experience and ways of being that cross over and intrude
into spaces unintended. The authors explore borders in Thailand
Burma, Australia, and PortugalSpain, among other places, point-
ing to the vibrancy at sites taken to be of zero width (OToole
1997): empty lines demarcating the end of one territory and the be-
ginning of another. We do not claim, though, that nation-states are
entirely discursive constructs, to be blown away by a deconstructive
wind. The phantasmic nature of their bordering strategies rests on
ongoing processes of appropriation, of accumulation by disposses-
sion (Harvey 2003). Such appropriation of means of production,
distribution, and financing, and of the meaning of spaces enacts a
form of foreclosure. Accumulation by dispossession involves, aside
from disenfranchisement, also the reinscription of spaces and their
material infrastructure. They become located within particular reg-
isters of meaning and action; they are understood in particular ways
and acted on in particular ways. This dual register, giving meaning
and outlining action, transforms accumulated spaces into known
and utilizable places that have particular meanings and functions
attributed to them in ways that preempt and foreclose the consider-
ation of other meanings and functions of spaces. Moreover, such re-
inscription ties material infrastructure to a wider global or regional
network of actions and processes; the inscription of the meaning of
capital and other material infrastructure connects these to wider
networks and processes of global capital movement and accumula-
tion. This anchoring of domestic infrastructure to global networks
and processes radically transforms their nature and strengthens the
ongoing processes of inscription, dispossession, and accumulation.
Finally, in this book we also explore the constitution of a new
political (Soguk, chapter 12 in this volume), centering on commu-
nity and agency that work within and against, and are given life
by, fluid border practices that fold inward and outward. We seek
to recover a politics of becoming (Connolly 1999) that sees poli-
tics as process, community as disconnected from the rigid territorial
xii introduction

spatialities of the nation-state and as making overtures to the global.

Such a politics is insurrectionary; it resounds onto the staticity of the
nation-state and the regulative practices that enforce stasis, pointing
to a politics as ongoing process, not definitively contained by a par-
ticular spatiality but forming new, irregular, and fluid spatialities
and communities as it operates.

J U S T IC E , B E L O N G I N G , T E R R I T O R Y
The territorial arrangement of the world, what Ana Mara Alonso
calls the spatialization of being, is based on ontological and episte-
mological resolutions (Alonso 1994). One leads from the other. The
ontological resolution is one where the meaning of being a human
being becomes tied up with the meaning of the nation-state. This
location of the meaning of what it is to be human vindicates an
understanding of political and moral belonging centering on and
giving form to a state that is more an aspiration to unity, co-
herence, structure, and intentionality than a reflection of these as
preexisting forms (Sayer 1994). The state-centered ontological reso-
lution is then the fundamental basis by which a claim that the state
represents and acts to guarantee order, security, and justice is made
and vindicated. Simultaneously, this ideological claim conceals rela-
tions of domination that cohere the state, as well as the fragmented
and tenuous nature of this domination. Identity and the nature of its
relation to the state are not given but are contested and rely on forms
of policing, often less than fully efficient, to appear coherent. The
resolution is thus processual and contested; it requires ideological
and political domination for its vindication.
The border here is a transformative and creative instrument; it
marks the transition from a state of anarchy to one of order, thus
enabling a narrative of justice and recognition centering on the clari-
fication of what form of life or living constitutes belonging and what
constitutes nonbelonging. Justice, in the territorial model, is cen-
tered on generalizable rules and laws. The administration of these
rules and laws is the same as the administration of justice. Norms of
justice are taken to have an independent standing; they do not de-
pend on the extent of actors commitments to specific values (Fraser
2001, 22).
In the normal model, norms of justice stem from the value ac-
corded to territory (not to nation). Here the question of the rela-
 introduction xiii

tion among territory, state, and nation is important. In the normal

model, nation is understood in a way that allows it to be used by the
state as a means of legitimating itself. That is, ethnic or nation-based
claims (for example, of indigenous populations) are worded in ways
that reassert the priority of the sovereign law of the territorial state.
The imposition of the state over nations (such as indigenous nations)
has its historical origins both in violent conquest and in epistemo-
logical displacement. The modern bureaucracy of the state collects
and collates facts about its given population. This bureaucratization
of knowledge about population distances that population from its
cultural or historical bases and defines it in terms of categories and
concepts allowed by the territorial state. This creates a veneer of ob-
jectivity; it allows for the articulation of knowledge about and poli-
cies for an objectively distinct population. The creation of knowl-
edge about population allows for a mode of governing that separates
the act of ruling from individual actors, making organizations in-
dependent of particular settings or individuals. The states dominant
imposition over territorial space is vindicated through the exercise
of the law and through the bureaucratic creation of subjectivities
that allow for a self-justifying mode of governing (Foucault 1977;
Foucault 1990; Andersen and Denis 2003; Escobar 1995; Hyndman
1999; Appadurai 1993).
The law, however, should not be taken as the final or sole arbiter
of belonging or nonbelonging. Homi Bhabha writes of the ambiva-
lence underpinning the rational edifice of modern politics (Bhabha
1994). The narratives of justice emanating from this edifice are not
solely rooted in abstract law. Bhabha suggests that the narratives of
justice rest on a violent suppression of (often racialized or gendered)
otherness. This otherness shadows the norm and results in the radical
relation of the norm with what it would exclude. It also results in a
demand that belonging be determined not solely in terms of legal
recognition, such as through the bestowal of citizenship, but also
through forms of social performance. Belonging must be performed;
groups must prove their cultural or social belonging through effec-
tive identity performance. The way people dress, speak, and socialize
all have effects on recognition at particular points in society.
Recognition is thus not something exclusively undertaken by an
abstract managerial state. Neither is it something restricted to the be-
stowal of citizenship. Recognition involves also social performance;
xiv introduction

it indicates that the mark of belonging does not begin and end with
the bestowal of citizenship, and that groups make appeals for rec-
ognition before different societal actors or institutions (Carruthers
2003). This differentiation and the nuance inherent in the generic
terms belonging and recognition are also reflected in the concept of
citizenship, which is often graduated and is to be distinguished in
terms of the limits on its use and in terms of the rights it confers (Ong
2001). The mark of citizenship may not allow effective or equal
opportunity for all; racial distinctions remain important in restrict-
ing access to housing, government loans, education, and government
jobs in Israel and Malaysia, for example. Other less official forms
of discrimination exist toward migrants (citizens or otherwise) in a
number of countries; the assumption of apocrypha in discrimination
claims is perhaps an indication of the force of the public discourse of
recognition and the law.
Conferring belonging involves both state and society. If the
analysis of recognition cannot be said to begin and end with the
bestowal of rights, then the role of society in leavening and influ-
encing the territorial narrative of justice emanating from a territo-
rial resolution of ontology is important. What is the relation, in
this ontological resolution, between the state and society? We sug-
gest that a particular representation of society is used to legitimize
the state and makes it knowable. Society here becomes a zone or
realm within which the state operates; society is constructed as a
zone more or less independent of the state but amenable to interven-
tion by the state. The state intervenes in society to solve societys
problems: in this conception, the state envelops society. Society
is a discursive construct, understood as a zone of intervention
where power is ordered and where that ordering is made apparent
(Feldman 2003, 62). The construction of society thus is a means
of making known, and legitimating, territorialized power and its
embodiment in the state.
Society should not in itself be taken as a final or autonomous
unit of analysis. The discursive and instrumental construction of
society as a zone amenable to intervention is probably a secondary
level of analysis. The construction of society in this way rests on a
more fundamental construction of bodies and agencies and their
location within society. The capacity to act on bodies, to distin-
guish legitimate embodiments and agencies from illegitimate ones,
 introduction xv

shapes the contours of society. Bodies are fundamental sites of dis-

cipline and punishment. The extent and force of such discipline and
punishment vary across different bodies. Some bodies, as Perera,
Haddad, and Toyota all show in this volume, are more exemplary
sites than others for the coming together of the forces of domination
(and creation) that reveal the structure of territorial power. What
are particularly apparent are the processes of inclusion and exclu-
sion upon which this power rests. These more exemplary bodies are
often racialized or gendered (recognized or misrecognized primarily
in terms of race or gender) or are migrants from particular areas. At
the core of the territorial ordering of humanity are thus not only the
abstract operation of law but also a hierarchy of bodies. This is the
ambivalence that Bhabha speaks of, the emotive and violent concep-
tions of impurity and relations of fear and desire underpinning the
rational edifice of the modern state.
The conferral of belonging and the mechanism of recognition
arising from territorial conceptions of justice are thus not to be ana-
lyzed solely in terms of the abstract law. Such analysis repeats the
ruse of sovereign control and rationality integral to the maintenance
of sovereign power. The structure of order given by the territorial
border is complex, precisely because that border is not a zone or
space given to ready instrumentalization. The border is a landscape
of competing meanings with a range of actors: the order, justice, and
knowledge that emanate from it can only be viewed in abstract judi-
cial terms if the element of semantic competition is removed. If it is
not, then that order and that justice may be seen to be underpinned
by ambivalent engagements with dispossessed and disenfranchised
otherness. And the resultant knowledge may be understood as the
bureaucratic or legalistic co-option and cajoling of identities, insti-
tutions, and forces into concepts readily digestible.
Territorial knowledge is centered thus on an explication of mean-
ing that, in a circular manner, justifies its taxonomic role in society.
Knowledge operates by making perceptible that which has reason to
be seen (and seen in a particular light), while making imperceptible
that which has no reason to be seen (Rancire 1999). Society be-
comes subject to a taxonomic knowledge where the land, its mean-
ing, and people within its political borders are affixed to a particular
trajectory. Knowledge is thus performed in ways that repeat and vin-
dicate the ontological resolution upon which it is based.
xvi introduction

The question of ontology is fundamental to our investigation.

The efficacy and persuasiveness of statist conceptions of society and
societys narratives of order, justice, community, belonging, tempo-
ral continuity, and an aspiration to a rigorous methodological ac-
cess to truth and totality (Dillon 1999, 159) rest on the deferral of
the question of human beings and their location. The rigor of the
conceptions rests on a postponement of the question of what and
where it is to be effectively and properly human. This rigor frames
recognition (and misrecognition) in a formal public discourse (of
the law) and orients us to a solution framed in public discourse.
This occludes the thinking of a fundamental intertwining of self and
Otherness, citizen and noncitizen, existing either prior to or as a re-
sult of the conferring of political subjectivity that distinguishes and
separates. Indeed, stating the question of belonging and recognition
tends to reinforce distinct and separate identities; it reinforces the
sense that there is a group who already belongs and another seek-
ing belonging from an external frame; it reinforces the territorial
restrictions of community.
The framing of questions about belonging and recognition (and
so about justice) becomes thus a second-order relation between two
(or more) already distinct groups. The argument is not that there is
no distinction in the level of inclusion or exclusion among groups at
any given moment or space; the problem is rather that the tying of
groups to a particular landscape is enabled through a fundamental
relation with groups excluded. The identity of the included can only
be thought with reference to the excluded; the framing of questions
of belonging and of appeals for recognition thus acts as though there
were no fundamental relation between those included and those ex-
cluded. We presume that it is important to do work at the border
between citizen and noncitizen, those who belong and those who do
not belong, rather than taking the distinct categories as given. The
landscape of justice is vastly changed if we presume a fundamen-
tal relation. Not least, the purposive spatial utopia of the territorial
state loses its trajectory; its goal of self-perpetuation in the same
form can no longer be vindicated, and the maintenance of state sov-
ereignty for its own sake becomes a problematic issue.
In the purposive and narcissistic sovereign state, the question
of belonging is thought in terms of the extent to which an indi-
vidual may be reasonably expected to adhere to the states norms.
 introduction xvii

The community of the nation-state emphasizes, as its bottom line,

a commonality that cannot be put under direct questioning. This
community is teleological or narcissistically self-referential; commu-
nity as commonality is both a point of departure and an end point
(Ahmed and Fortier 2003, 253). The conception of justice that sets
for itself a border or limit that is reenacted and strengthened by each
enactment of its laws refuses or makes unrecognizable the presump-
tion of another justice. The operation and performance of belonging
that is set in motion by territorially secured justice reinforces its
basis or rationales. Mirroring the self-referential teleology of com-
munity, territorially secured justice both inaugurates and reinforces
a state-centric notion of what it is to be human. In this reinforce-
ment, it asserts that the structure of justice and authority given by
the territorial state is a creative rendering of the human being as
an accountable and politicized subjectivity: a useful, necessary, and
productive transformation from states of nature and bare lives.
Territorially secured justice is thus not merely one possible struc-
ture of justice, but makes a claim to being the authoritative and ex-
haustive form; it sets the basis and becomes the ground that renders
the human being thinkable and accountable. Yet this proclamation
of an authoritative and incontestable justice relies, ultimately, on
shaky and contingent foundations. This is so in at least two senses.
First, the proclamation relies on unruly lines that demarcate se-
curity from anarchy, norm from exception (Walker 2003). In the
territorial reading, the border is a transformative line, distinguish-
ing politicized subjectivity from chaos outside (and maintaining this
distinction). This instrumental use of the border rests on the ca-
pacity of the territorial imagination to fill the space of the border
(Donnan and Wilson 2003, 13). The border, however, is not a zone
that is readily given to such space filling. The border, or border-
scape, is replete with actors and agents responding to, resisting, and
relaying the set of discourses and practices that envision the border
as an empty and pliable instrument of separation. That is, those ele-
ments who are rendered unaccountable, who have no reason to be
visible, do not simply disappear; it takes an act of some will, as well
as a certain amount of institutional force, to effect their invisibility
and erase their relation to the norm.
Second, the claim to an exhaustive rendition of justice relies on a
varying capacity to contain difference. Territorial claims to authority
xviii introduction

present themselves as coherent means of thinking and responding to

plurality in the world (Walker 2003). The priority accorded to the
particular over the universal allows for the co-option of difference
into nation-building strategies. This co-option of difference relies on
the efficacy of the naming and incarcerating strategies that lead to
both a semantic and a physical exclusion of difference. This efficacy
again rests on a capacity to disregard the ambivalence and paradox
at borders; it relies on a disregard or containment of the fluid inter-
play of global and local, and of the fundamental relation between
excluded and included.
In the preceding section, we have tried to show that the thinking
of the question of belonging, recognition, and community within
state and society rests on a number of abstractions; three are par-
ticularly important. The first is that of the autonomous and public
individual. This abstraction enables and encourages the thinking of
belonging in a public, or legal, sense; it corresponds to an ontologi-
cal resolution where the problematic question of what (and where) it
is to be human is deferred indefinitely. The way of thinking involved
in this deferral encourages the second abstraction, that of a self-
referential and narcissistic community. The deferral of the question
of humanity at the threshold of the state leads to the thinking of
belonging in terms of the extent to which the commonality of the
community, which is both a starting point and a goal, may be main-
tained: the end (and beginning) of justice is its maintenance within
the borders of a given community. The third abstraction is thus the
system of justice itself. Justice is wedded to the state, through the
abstractions of humanity and community; justice becomes a con-
stricted set of rules or norms designed to preserve these.
These abstractions are complex and fearsome. In an attempt to
rethink the politics of belonging, many of us focus in this book
on a rethinking of the notion of community through the figure of
the migrant and the border. This involves also a questioning of the
restriction of justice to the state; does justice have also an emanci-
patory and even cosmopolitan calling? What is fundamentally at
stake is the possibility of thinking community, humanity, and jus-
tice in ways that are not preemptively curtailed by the exigencies
of territoriality. As a starting point, authors in this book find the
political philosophies of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancire
important.
 introduction xix

T H E M IG R A N T, T E R R I T O R Y, A N D R E CO G N I T IO N
We, this volumes contributors, examine systems of recognition and
the structures of intelligibility they underpin. We examine the differ-
ential operation of sovereign power toward different migrants in dif-
ferent social and political contexts. We examine specifically the frag-
mented nature of this sovereign power, how structures of recognition
do not center on and emanate unproblematically and coherently from
a managerial state. We suggest that such structures are broken up
and fragmented at different points as they are relayed to different mi-
grants. A common purpose of the diverse studies is the uncovering of
modes of recognition and the hidden geographies that are concealed
by these. Some authors analyze the operation of these structures and
systems; others focus more on the uncovering of hidden geographies.
Thus, while some of us concentrate on the construction of the border
(that is, on territorial spatialization and its systems of recognition),
others pay greater attention to the interstitial and in-between space
of the border demarcating sovereign space. This conceptual division
of labor mirrors a theoretical division. Many of us focusing on the
critique of territoriality find Agamben important. Many of us paying
greater attention to recovering hidden geographies find Rancires
study of perceptibility significant.
Agambens critique of sovereignty derives from Carl Schmitts
critique of the state, the political, and liberalism, as well as from
Foucaults biopolitics. Agamben understands the border as a con-
cept distinguishing norm from exception. This exception is cast out
from the norm, but in the act of casting out, the exception is brought
into the system of the nation-state. The exception exists in a relation
to the norm. In this relation, the exception is rendered recogniz-
able and brought into a system of sovereignty. Sovereign power is
not localized within a given territory; it extends outward to those
it excludes. The extension outward of sovereign power, Agamben
says, is not alien to sovereign law but is part of a system of law that
legislates for its own removal.
Agamben theorizes the excluded as the surplus or by-effect of
the production of governable identities (and here is his Foucauldian
biopolitics). The production of the political subject has the by-effect
of bringing into being also a remainder, a by-effect of the pro-
duction that cannot be incorporated into the structure of sovereign
power. These by-effects, no -longer human (Schtz 2000, 121),
xx introduction

are consigned to zones of exception where the sovereign law no lon-

ger applies.
The distinction between natural and politicized lives cannot be
thought; birth marks an entry into a world where the nation, the
state, territory, and citizenship preemptively set the basis by which
one is recognized as human. The by-effects or remainders, that which
cannot be rendered sufficiently human (as territorial sovereign power
recognizes the concept), are consigned to zones of exception, where
the sovereign law does not apply, and are bare lives.
The possibility of bare life is, Agamben says, the fundamental
condition of modern political existence. Following Hannah Arendt,
Agamben notes that the refugee, bereft of citizenship and thus thrust
into the barest of lives, ostensibly has the greatest possible claim on
human rights (Agamben 1998). Yet the denial or restriction of a full
complement of these rights to the refugee, and the provision of this
full complement for the citizen, emphasizes the conjoining of what it
is to be human with the marker of citizenship. The human qua human
has no particular claim on rights; they are not vested in his or her
body. The human qua citizen, on the other hand, has a clear claim to
a full range of human rights. The common aspect of existence is its
contingency: that which makes us human may be withdrawn.
Agamben suggests that the camp (by which he means both
refugee camps and concentration camps) is the archetypal zone of
exception. The juridico-political structure of the camp is important
for Agamben. The camp is a zone where the normal law does not
apply. Precisely because the structure of intelligibility given by sov-
ereign law is not evident, it becomes difficult in the camp to dis-
tinguish fact from law, right from wrong. This is not the end of
Agambens analysis of the camp, but the beginning. Agamben notes
that the sovereign law legislates for the camp. That is, the sover-
eign law legislates for its own removal. This understanding leads
Agamben to suggest that the zone of exception is not external to
the norm but is bound up with it. The trajectory of sovereign power
cannot be thought without also thinking the nature of this relation.
Sovereignty is not to be taken at its word: it extrudes from its de-
clared territorial location to encompass that which it has ostensibly
cast out. What is singular about this inclusion is that it is an extreme
(and fundamental) form of relation, where bare life is included solely
through its exclusion.
 introduction xxi

This declaration of a zone of exception, this legislation by the law

for its own removal, is thus a means of clarifying the ostensible bor-
ders of the norm. It is a declaration of the restricted scope of sover-
eignty and is in part due to the limited conception of humanity upon
which sovereign power rests. Agamben says that the sovereign interi-
orizes that which it can and exteriorizes that which it cannot. Politics
thus is an ongoing power struggle, an ongoing exercise in clarifying
that form of life which is interiorizable and that which is not. But this
relation between interiorized and exteriorized means precisely that
what is ostensibly cast out in a zone of exception is actually incor-
porated into the norm. Casting out is not a careless expulsion, but a
careful placing outside of the declared boundaries of the norm; it is a
holding in semantic and physical stasis of that which can clarify, and
continue to clarify, the boundaries of the norm. The rule or norm,
Agamben argues, lives off the exception alone (1998, 27). This
is the extreme form of relation where something is included solely
through its exclusion that vivifies and makes coherent the norm. This
extreme form of relation operates, first, to create a zone of exception
to which bare life may be consigned, and then to collapse this zone
and the distinction between norm and exception.
Agambens Schmittian conception of sovereignty has led to a
critique that he overly concretizes the place of sovereign power.
The critique is that Agambens notion of biopower (in contrast to
Foucaults) is equated with sovereign power (Rancire 2001, 4).
Sovereign power, in Rancires critique of Agamben, is that which
has the power of decision over life, creating and distinguishing bare
lives from politicized lives, consigning the former to states of ex-
ception. There is a polarity here that Didier Bigo identifies in his
chapter, where bare life is, in extremis, that condition of abjection
from which no thought of resistance is possible. Power and resis-
tance are separated by the decisionist sovereign who identifies the
space of the law and its limits. There is thus no difference between
sovereign power and biopower: sovereign power is the decisive exer-
cise of control over subjects, including the confinement of subjects
to a position of bare abjection. It is because of this decisionism that
Agamben has been accused of a certain pessimism about the possi-
bility of resistance (Vacarme 2004).
Agambens notion of power, however, does not necessarily pre-
clude resistance. His intention is not to demonstrate that there are
xxii introduction

clear zones of power and zones of abjection but rather to clarify

the focus of resistance. At its most clear, this involves the identi-
fication of the nature of the relation between rule and exception.
Such identification allows for the questioning of the bordering prac-
tices of the norm. For Agamben, the refugee is the limit concept
that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the
nation-state . . . and that thereby makes it possible to clear the way
for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics
in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the
state order or in the figure of human rights (1998, 134). His is
probably a messianic project: the aim is not to continue to remain
within the conditions of subjectivity and resistance given by territo-
rial power but rather to investigate the limits of these and thereby
think a notion of the political that strives to go beyond territoriality
and toward the global.
Rancire focuses on a study of the border between, in his terms,
man and citizen (between, that is, bare and politicized life).
Rancire reads these categories as ambiguous, noting that the main-
tenance of the border depends on a particular reading of human
rights. Rancire emphasizes what might be called the play of rights.
Rights are not vested in a clearly predefined group. For Rancire,
rights have two existences, one as written rights, the other as rights
that are used. As written or inscribed rights, declarations of human
rights are a part of the community. They are not abstract ideals; the
identification of conditions of rightlessness might demonstrate the
impotency of the claim that rights are a part of the community, but
the fact is that some political communities are informed not only by
conditions of inequality but by a fundamental statement about in-
trinsic equality. The second existence of human rights is in its usage.
Perhaps for Agamben (and almost certainly for Arendt) the exercise
or use of human rights is undertaken within a predetermined sphere
(that of citizenship); in opposition, Rancire suggests that the taking
up and exercising of human rights is done by political subjects who
are not definitively defined, individually or collectively. The taking
up of rights calls into question and brings into dispute the meaning
of predicates such as freedom or equality: political predicates are
open predicates: they open up a dispute about what they exactly en-
tail and whom they concern in which cases (Rancire 2004, 303).
In other words, political predicates, such as human rights, are taken
 introduction xxiii

up by subjects who are not prerestricted to the exercise of these

rights within a particular predetermined and limited sphere (such as
citizenship). The taking up of these rights thus involves putting the
limits or restrictions of the rights under question.
Rancires understanding of rights stems from his understanding of
politics. For Rancire, oppressive politics takes up a form of counting
where the community is understood as a sum of its parts, where each
part has a predetermined function. This is politics as police. Politics
as process involves the counting of a part who have no part, those
who are imperceptible (Rancire 2004, 305). This form of count-
ing separates the community from itself; it separates the community
from its parts, places, and functions. This form of counting is based
on the idea that political subjects are not predetermined. Territorial
resolutions of ontology are never definitive, but set out a question
about who is to be included and who is not (Rancire 2004, 302).
For Rancire, the constitution of the political subject always has a
surplus; political names are always litiginous; they always carry
the possibility of extension because they are premised on forms of
counting that inscribe the count of the uncounted as supplement
(2004, 305). Because politics is about making visible through forms
of counting, it is necessarily relative; it can only be understood in
terms of what is not counted. This does not mean a condition of ab-
stract ontological solidarity or intertwinement, but a practical sense
of the openness of human subjectivity, society, and politics. Such an
openness leads to a sense of the inherent disputability of rights and
is perhaps strongly evident in the way that colonial struggles were
fought in courts of law from first principles of equality and the like:
colonial law was ambiguously both the means of oppression and the
means of emancipation (Comaroff 2001).
In this volume, Nevzat Soguk finds in Rancires (and Etienne
Balibars) work the possibility of an insurrectional politics that
stretches the borders of belonging through the assumption of fun-
damental equality in communities. There is, Soguk says, a funda-
mental ontological equality in Rancires theory of politics that dis-
places the priority of territorial inscriptions of identity. It is through
a Rancirian politics that the borders that entrench sites of exclusion
and inequality can be transformed and can hark to the cosmopo-
litical. This shifting of borders precisely embraces migrants into the
community. Rancire argues, The point is, precisely, where do you
xxiv introduction

draw the line separating one life from the other? Politics is about that
border. It is the activity that brings it back into question (Rancire
2004, 303).
Rancires reading of the law as instituting, paradoxically, con-
ditions of inequality and equality, conditions located not in a pre-
defined group or individual but in a subject who is always in the
process of becoming, leads to a critique of the contingency of con-
temporary social order. Rancire provides a lens that disrupts the
sense that society and politics may be located in definitive zones.
Justice thus cannot be understood as the managed administration
of law emanating from these distinct zones. Rancire demonstrates
that society is in process, that political order is always contingent,
and that the border between norm and exception, belonging and
nonbelonging, is in a state of flux and dispute.

L A N D S C A P E S O F D I S - P L AC E M E N T
In our attempts to (re)conceptualize the multiple agencies and tem-
poralities at, and of, the border, the concept of landscapes is fruitful.
But before we discuss landscapes, it is helpful to briefly consider all
space as constructed; in this sense, space and spatial relations should
be considered in terms of processes of change, and of landscapes
as always in the process of becoming rather than temporally fixed
spaces. We believe that it is essential to examine different forms and
exercises of power to understand the role and significance of the
border in relation to mobile human life. We also think of space in
Lefebvrian terms: socially constructed, with various spatial prac-
tices (perceived space) producing and (re)producing the conceived
space (Lefebvre 1991, 33). Of course what is perceived and con-
ceived cannot be thought of without references to forms of power, as
noted below. Representational space (lived space) is space as
directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence
the space of inhabitants and users (Lefebvre 1991, 39, original
emphasis). As argued here and in one of the contributions to this vol-
ume (by Dean, chapter 8), these three moments of space are highly
relevant to conceptualizations of the border, which is neither natural
nor neutral but is always a social, cultural, and political construct
(Paasi 2005). Lefebvres notions of space are relevant to our thinking
about landscapes and borderscapes, particularly as these conceptions
hold out possibilities for counterhegemonic spatial and nonspatial
 introduction xxv

practices together with alternative ways of visualizing space and

society.
Human landscapes are contested creations, and as such are sub-
ject to an ongoing attempt to fix identities and meanings to a par-
ticular place for example, through expressions of political and
social belonging (Massey 1992; Kong and Law 2002). Lily Kong
and Lisa Law, citing Doreen Massey, note that the processes of
place-making that lead to a proprietary sense of the meaning of a
landscape are located within particular sets of social relations inter-
acting at a given moment and space. The particularity of any given
place is due to the specificity of the interaction at that place (Massey
1992, 11; Kong and Law 2002, 1504). This means that landscapes
do not have a fixed meaning but are always dynamic, provisional,
and contingent (Kong and Law 2002, 1504). Kong and Law sug-
gest that the meaning of landscapes is subject to processes of contes-
tation that proffer a particular understanding of the meaning of the
landscape as normal while thereby insinuating the deviancy of other
meanings.
Cultural geography understands landscapes as repositories of
contesting interpretations of the meaning of a piece of land and
of its appropriate use. Landscapes denote different and contesting
technologies of the self (Bunnell 2002). They assert particular moral
geographies that denote a hierarchy of land use, and in this way
act as an instrument of governmentality, attributing a sense of cor-
rect and incorrect behavior. For instance, national landscapes are
constructed, both physically and semantically, to lend a particular
sense of belonging (and thus outline the possibility of distinguish-
ing deviant readings or uses of the landscape) (Cerwonka 2004).
Janet Sturgeon (2005) has examined border landscape dynamics
over time, examining how Akha people across the modern border-
lands of China, Burma, and Thailand have adapted their land uses,
local environments, livelihoods, intervillage connections, and cross-
political space linkages, patronclient relations, and so on, to pro-
cesses of enclosure, state-induced agriculture and forestry changes,
and changes in property rights to land and resources. She views the
complex changes over time in response to local needs, state plans,
and border possibilities as examples of landscape plasticity in
which numerous actors and agencies are involved (Sturgeon 2005,
9). However, we can also see that state-centered issues of belonging
xxvi introduction

and ways of seeing have done much to transform the political land-
scape of citizenship (Toyota, chapter 4 in this volume), which relates
to issues of political geography and power in the landscape.
There are many ways in which practices of power influence, shape,
manipulate, and construct the landscape. Politics operates in and
through places and is often specifically of or about places (Jones,
Jones, and Woods 2004, 115). As Foucault (1984, 252) noted, space
is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamen-
tal in any exercise of power, and landscapes are produced and re-
produced as sites and outcomes of social, political, and economic
struggle (Keith and Pile 1993, 24). Thus, we are not simply con-
cerned with landscapes per se, but with landscapes of power. In other
words, landscapes are more than just an assemblage of sites and
places of struggle; they are actually essential to the analysis of power
and politics. To quote from Jones, Jones, and Woods (2004, 116):
landscapes are powerful because of the role they play in structuring
everyday lives. . . . We refer to landscapes that work in this way as
landscapes of power. A landscape of power operates as a political
device because it reminds people of who is in charge, or what the
dominant ideology or philosophy is, or it helps to engender a sense
of place identity that can reinforce the position of a political leader.
This is the link among border, power, and landscape. Winchester,
Kong, and Dunn (2003) also discuss landscapes of power and power
of landscapes, combining particular ideas about ideology and hege-
mony in the process. They use J. B. Thompsons (1981, 147) reference
to ideology as a system of signification which facilitates the pursuit
of particular interests and sustains relations of domination within
society (Winchester, Kong, and Dunn 2003, 66). And they combine
this idea with Gramscis (1973) notion of hegemony as a process by
which domination and rule is achieved involving hegemonic con-
trols or sets of ideas and values which the majority are persuaded
to adopt as their own and are eventually portrayed as natural and
common sense (Winchester, Kong, and Dunn 2003, 66). This con-
cept of ideological hegemony can relate to notions of the conceived
and perceived space of human landscapes and, clearly, any official
notions of boundaries and border space may be thought of as dimen-
sions of a particular form of hegemonic control and ideology. The
most successful ruling group is the one which attains power through
ideological hegemony rather than coercion, and aspects of this are
 introduction xxvii

through the control and manipulation of landscapes and the prac-

tices of everyday life (Winchester, Kong, and Dunn 2003, 67).
Landscapes of power can help to make particular ideologies and
political practices more tangible, natural, familiar, acceptable, mean-
ingful, and so on (Duncan and Duncan 1988), precisely because they
are inscribed in aspects of the landscape. As such, practices deemed
to be out of place help to reinforce that which is conceived to be in
place. From the perspective of our book, most of the contributors are
interested in aspects of the control, surveillance, and management of
migrants and of displaced persons. The very existence of boundaries
and the landscapes of the state-citizen-nation nexus means that
undocumented mobility and border crossings become transformed
into actions that are perceived as transgressions and threats (Soguk
1999). Dominant landscapes of power are effectively based upon
rigid territorial sovereignties, and humanitarian responses to dis-
placement crises are mostly concerned with the perceived symp-
toms (rather than causes) of being dis-placed. Humanitarian ob-
sessions with safe return imply that conditions of dis-placement
are themselves a disorder. In other words, the dominant ideological
hegemony (which, in relation to refugees, exiles, and many other
groups of displaced people is implicated in the world political map)
helps to create the abnormality out of multiple conditions of dis-
placement regardless of circumstances and multifarious causes. In
this sense, within dominant landscapes of power, once dis-placed,
you are automatically lost in sovereign space, whether this is
on one side of an international border (as an internally dis-placed
person) or on the other (as a refugee, exile, irregular migrant, or
member of whatever category is applied) (Grundy-Warr 2002).
We would like to argue that conditions of dis-placement help
to create new possibilities, lived spaces, and ideas about borders.
We have suggested elsewhere that landscape-oriented approaches
are useful for teasing out the complex and multilayered implications
and meanings of human movement, specifically in relation to ideas
about place, being dis-placed (Prem Kumar and Grundy-Warr
2005). Flows, mobility, and networks are dimensions that help to
(re)mold and creatively (re)shape in dynamic processes relating to
landscape plasticity (Sturgeon 2005).
Further, we wish to stress human mobility and conditions of mov-
ing from one place to another (or of being forcibly or voluntarily
xxviii introduction

[dis]-placed) as a norm or, at least where coercion is involved,

as a common aspect of human existence (Appadurai 1996) rather
than as an aberration of human life. And it is in this context, and in
relation to our readings of Agamben and Rancire, that we consider
borderscapes as both a derivative dimension of human landscapes
and as ways of thinking through, about, and of alternatives to domi-
nant landscapes of power.

BORDERSCAPES
For both Agamben and Rancire, in our reading, politics is about the
questioning of the border that would restrict the meaning of what
it is to be human within a territorial frame. Their approach differs.
For Agamben, sovereign power is encompassing; resistance has nec-
essarily to be thought outside its scope if it is not to remain within
sovereign powers categories of ethics and justice. For Rancire,
politics is not about the acquisition and maintenance of power, but
rather about processes of counting: thinking the border between dif-
ferent forms of life is to consider those forms of life that have been
miscounted. Rancire argues that society is in process, that political
order is always contingent, and that the border between norm and
exception, belonging and nonbelonging, is in a state of flux and dis-
pute over processes of counting.
We use the concept borderscapes to emphasize the inherent con-
testability of the meaning of the border between belonging and non-
belonging. The above discussions about the relation of state, society,
and ontology emphasize that the conception of the political border
as located in a specific zone at the edge of the nation-state is prob-
lematic. Such conceptions are attempts to clear territorial space of
dissension and difference; they are instrumental means of asserting
the limits of territorial justice and belonging. Yet the instrumental-
ization of the border, which clarifies a distinct space of politics and a
space outside politics (a zone of exception), rests on an occlusion of
the role that society plays in ameliorating and influencing territorial
place-making. The borderscape is thus not contained in a specific
space. The borderscape is recognizable not in a physical location but
tangentially in struggles to clarify inclusion from exclusion.
The term is coined by Suvendrini Perera in chapter 9 in this book.
Perera writes of the Australian border as something in flux. In Ran-
cires terms, it is always under process. The border is an open predi-
 introduction xxix

cate; its meaning is not distinct. The border expands or contracts and
operates differentially before different groups of migrants, giving rise
therefore to multiple resistances, challenges, and counterclaims.
The borderscape cannot sit still, because it is a zone of multiple ac-
tors and multiple bodies each calling on different histories, solidari-
ties, and discourses of protection, care, or security. Perera writes:
There are multiple actors in this geo -politico-cultural space, shaped
by embedded colonial and neocolonial histories and continuing con-
flicts over sovereignty, ownership, and identity. The bodies of asylum
seekers, living and dead, and the practices that attempt to organize,
control, and terminate their movements bring new dynamics, new
dangers and possibilities, into this zone. Allegiances and loyalties
are remade, identities consolidated and challenged, as border spaces
are reconfigured by discourses and technologies of securitization
and the assertion of heterogeneous sovereignties.

Border spaces are zones of specific social interactions that give

a particular meaning. These social interactions are not contained
entirely within a physical space outlined by the political border, but
incorporate and speak to temporalities, solidarities, and cosmopoli-
tanisms that refuse the categorizations of inside/outside generated
by the border. Arjun Appadurais typology of different scapes
characterizing a disjunctive, fluid, irregular, and perspectival glo-
bality has affinities with our conception of borderscapes. Appadurai
points to the subjective and contested nature of spatiality: its fluid
irregularity constituting similarly irregular communities, temporali-
ties, and agencies (1994).
The term borderscape reminds one of the specter of other senses
of the border, of experiences, economies, and politics that are con-
cealed. The instrumental usage of the border as a tool of govern-
mentality must always be incomplete. It is through the identification
of spaces and social practices that are alien or inappropriate (out
of place, Tim Bunnell says), that the dominant meaning is made
known (Bunnell 2002). Yet the meaning of the landscape must not
be traced back to the state. The landscape is not organized through a
central body; landscapes are to be understood as an effect of power,
disembodied from intentionality. The meaning of landscapes derives
from its social interactions. The ruse of territorial power is centered
on the concealment or disparagement of these social interactions.
xxx introduction

The borderscape is thus not a static space. The border cannot be

seen in purely instrumental terms. The usage of the border as a zone
demarcating norm from exception depends, Rancire might argue,
on a particular political accounting, one that reads border society
as a sum of its parts, where each part has a particular function,
aggregating into a static and usable border. This type of counting
presents the border as one of many reference points from whence
territorially centered narratives (and policies) of justice and belong-
ing ensue. However, if the border between bare life and citizen,
between belonging and nonbelonging, is imbedded in nothing so
strong as contingency, then the instrumentalization of the bor-
der cannot be sustained. Rancire suggests that social space is not
static, but episodic (Shapiro 2003). Society is made up, in Masseys
(1992) terms, of a series of interactions that are temporally and spa-
tially contingent, and that hence give a particular meaning to a
place. Because societyin this sense the society of the border, the
borderscape is always in process, the meaning of the border can
only be understood in terms of ongoing encounters.
The borderscape is thus a zone of varied and differentiated
encounters. It is neither enveloped by the state nor semantically ex-
haustible. The borderscape is a zone of competing and even con-
tradictory emplacements and of temporalities that hark to forms
of spatial organization that refuse the territorial imperative. If the
borderscape is understood as a zone of contingent meanings, then it
may (and does) hark to conceptions of belonging that stretch across
(and into) the territorial divisions that stand in the stead of our con-
siderations of solidarity and justice. The borderscapes that we inves-
tigate in this book point to hidden geographies and insurrectionary
political forms that question the territorial restriction on justice and
belonging. We investigate these in two ways. We take note of the
creation of a zone of exception where normal law does not apply, but
we do not forget society. We focus on the condition of abjection into
which migrants are placed, but we do not conflate the ruse of sover-
eignty with actuality: zones of abjection are not without resistance.
Underlying our endeavors is the potential of a community premised
not on the closed predicates offered by a prior organization of so-
ciety but on the possibility of justice premised on a fundamental
capacity to perceive and respond to otherness without, or outside
of, the restrictions of territorial authority.