Abstract
Movement and mobility have always been key geographical concerns. The emergence of a distinct ‘mobilities turn’ over the last decade has only served to extend such an interest and to dramatically enhance the conceptual, methodological and empirical sophistication of discussions of mobility (Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2007). Running parallel to such concerns has been a renewed focus upon the politics and practice of borders as sites of state sovereignty, arrangements of sorting and classification, and spatially complex devices that produce and constrain rights to mobility, asylum, movement and freedom (Anderson, 2013; Salter, 2008). The tensions between the political freedoms associated with mobility, and the political technologies of governance that seek to tame and ‘domesticate’ such freedom in varying ways (Darling, 2011; Walters, 2004), are at the heart of two new texts that speak across discussions in human geography, political theory, critical border studies and political sociology.
The first of these two texts, Hagar Kotef’s Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, offers a conceptually rich contribution that seeks to consider how mobility and movement might be conceived as central to the emergence of liberal models of governance. Kotef’s text is a lucid and well-researched account of the historical context through which ‘the liberal subject was formed in the image of moderation’ (p. 60).
The central argument of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom is that in the liberal political tradition, movement and freedom are often aligned with one another, such that movement and its regulation is an essential facet of any understanding of freedom. However, for movement to have occupied such a constitutive position, Kotef argues, ‘an entire array of mechanisms, technologies, and practices had to be put in place so that this movement would become moderated enough’ (pp. 2–3). Drawing on a historical analysis of the emergence of liberal political thought through the 16th and 17th centuries, Kotef critically examines the ‘array of mechanisms’ that aligned movement with political claims to authority, self-governance, restraint and rule. Kotef argues that a duality between the ordered liberal body and the excessive or unruly movement of ‘other’ bodies marks liberal freedom and traces back to the 17th century, where we see three converging trends in liberal thought – an increasing focus on disciplining the body; an emerging consolidation of power in the state and its ability to manage movement; and an expansion of the reach and authority of the European state to new areas and colonies – thereby ceding the grounds for new bodies to be governed and new subjects formed.
The originality of this argument for geographers lies not in the dichotomies of liberal thought and imperial ambition it touches upon, but rather in approaching the question of movement through a lineage of political philosophy that places Hobbes and Locke at its centre. This marks a contrast to accounts of governmentality inspired by Foucault that have come to dominate many discussions of liberal governance and political subjectivity. This is not to suggest that Foucault is absent from Kotef’s analysis, far from it, but rather the insights of governmentality are placed in a broader context and thought alongside questions of self-regulation, colonial expansion and the production of various ‘others’ as figures of unruly mobility in ways not immediately reducible to forms of governmentality.
The strongest aspects of the book come to the fore when this analysis is applied to the contemporary context of the occupied Palestinian territories. These are discussed as a ‘radical laboratory’ for experimenting with modes of regulating movement that produce subjects through motion. In exploring the constant reworking of boundaries and normative orderings of ‘acceptable’ motion, Kotef illustrates the cyclical nature of regulation and constraint imposed upon Palestinian citizens by the Israeli state. Through the constant shifting of regulatory expectations, and the abstraction of ‘imaginary lines’ that can neither be seen nor crossed without sanction, Kotef argues that Palestinians are subject to demands that are impossible to adhere to, and at the same time, their failure to obey such demands marks them as unruly subjects in need of regulation. In this context, the legitimacy of liberal governance as a freedom within moderation is asserted through the construction of certain forms of movement as almost unrestrainable.
This discussion of the effects of liberal governance was one of this text’s most cogent contributions. By reading liberal thought through the occupied Palestinian territories, Kotef is able to draw out the threads that connect the regulation of mobility in a context of occupation with the less overt models of ‘migration management’ that are a widespread feature of contemporary liberal democracies. In this sense, the book is true to its stated aim to ‘rethink the relations between the abstract and the concrete; between the conceptual and theoretical on the one hand, and the particularities, the small details of reality on the other’ (p. 20). However, this marriage between the abstract and the concrete is not consistent across the text and, as the argument develops, some of those ‘particularities’ of place, context and the practice of bordering are less overtly present. Whilst the argument is rich in historical detail, and incredibly well researched as evident in the extensive end-notes, it can at times feel divorced from the empirical context with which it opens.
The argument relies on a relatively broad definition of movement as any change in the location of bodies, and this enables Kotef to consider movement at a variety of scales, drawing connections between the individual body and the collective social body. This connection is strongest when considering how ‘social movements’ may counter the moderation of movement. Where this link is less successful is in attempting to use the individual as an analogous stand-in for the collective, such that the ‘moving individual often serves as a metaphor, a symbol, and a substitute for the body politic. A bound foot of a Chinese girl serves to symbolise China’s immobility, a man walking confidently marks European entitlements’ (p. 113).
Movement and the Ordering of Freedom is a critical and demanding text, but one which offers the reader considerable insight into the centrality of movement to liberal political thought. In moving beyond governmentality, Kotef offers an often overlooked account of how mobility has shaped liberalism and continues to shape the formation of political subjects. The book closes with a concern to remember the price that is paid by some so others can, precisely, be at home; to recognize that too often the home of one is a destruction of the other’s. Only if we can sustain the two edges of this duality … can we begin to develop and imagine new models of home, as well as ‘principles of mobilities,’ that form a radically different matrix of movement. (pp. 134–5)
Whilst a critical reader might seek more detail on the specific ‘movements’ that may pursue this model of social justice, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom is an important contribution that highlights the urgency of articulating a ‘different matrix of movement’. In this sense, it offers a significant and thought-provoking contribution that highlights the inherently contested politics that come to the fore when we turn to ‘mobility’ as a normative or progressive ideal.
The conditioning and moderation of movement that Kotef argues is at the heart of the liberal political project also finds expression in the second text discussed here. As the editors of the extensive edited collection Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders highlight in their introduction, ‘border studies over the past 20 years have once again become a fertile topic of discussion and debate’ (p. 1), garnering attention across a range of disciplines, with liberal political thought at the forefront of considering how to balance divergent imperatives to enable selective mobility, provide for complex economic and labour demands, and appease political calls for territorial integrity and security. In this context, and as Kotef notes in examining the experimental governance regimes of the occupied Palestinian territories, it seems that borders are very much back as a focus of interdisciplinary attention.
What, though, distinguishes this interest in borders from previous concerns with the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the nation-state? For the contributors to Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders, complexity, mobility, and contingency are the attributes that characterize contemporary bordering. Whilst there is a recognition that the building of physical walls never left the arsenal of the nation-state (Brown, 2010), Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders looks to a more ‘mobile’ account of the border as simultaneously deterritorialized and reterritorialized in diverse ways.
To open the collection, the editors coin the term ‘borderities’, defined as ‘the multiple rules and experiences of what a border can be’ (p. 3), and suggest that the collection represents an attempt to examine this question of what and where a border can be. For them, ‘borderities’ reflect the ways in which borders have both ‘mobile and individualized characteristics’ (p. 19), such that borders may be detached from the territorial fixity of the nation-state and aligned with varying spaces, technologies, objects and bodies, and yet are neither ‘everywhere’ nor homogeneous.
Addressing this opening question makes for a worthwhile addition to current critical border studies. Not least given the range of empirical cases examined across the collection – from eco-frontiers, smuggling networks, and the maritime borders of ‘Fortress Europe’, to mobile migrant communities in Europe and Africa, and resistant practices of counter-cartography. In each case, unpacking the practice of borders offers new insights into the sheer diversity of contemporary borderings. We learn of an array of different objects and technologies enrolled in the service of classifying and controlling migration – from advances in biometric mobility and embodiment, to the precarity of boats attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
However, the collection goes beyond being a repository of cases and weaves together a series of conceptual insights on what borders may mean in their current configurations. As the editors highlight, the aim is not to construct a model of the border, but rather to examine the border as a ‘laboratory for studying socio-spatial relations’ (p. 3). The significance of the border as a laboratory, as highlighted by many of the chapters, is that borders are sites of constant adaptation, experimentation and improvisation, as Kotef’s study also illustrates. They not only shift in their spatial reach and the functions they enrol, but they also effect changes in migratory patterns, routes and temporalities, producing new relations of adaptation and response. This is a significant point, as there is often a tendency to valorize the adaptability of migration within much critical scholarship (see Papadopoulous et al., 2008), without always recognizing the often improvised nature of governmental responses. Intentionality and agency can at times be problematically applied to the practices of the nation-state. Importantly in this collection, a constant tension between adapting to manage new forms of mobility, and the resilience of attempts to overcome and evade even the most mobile of border regimes, is maintained.
A second important contribution of the collection is that whilst it certainly engages with the technological advances made through mobile borders – in chapters on biometric identification, cartographic representation and personal crossing regimes among others – it does not remain wedded to any notion of technological determinism or inevitability. What emerges instead is a sense of the social and political stakes involved in the maintenance and production of borders, not only for nation-states and dispersed authorities, but also for stakeholders ranging from private sector security firms and civil servants to NGOs and migrants themselves. Read as a collection, the insights gathered together here offer the different perspectives of those involved in making, contesting and investing in borders and the distinctions they promote.
The stakes involved in borders leads me though to two areas of oversight within the collection. Firstly, the collection lacks a real engagement with the investment into borders and bordering made by populations and the discursive and affective terrain on which such investments are based. A concern with ‘borderities’ illuminates the myriad of ways borders are being performed across the world, but it says far less about how the desire for borders is maintained through channels of individual and collective identification, affect and sentiment. Tracing the cultural and discursive politics of ‘borderities’ may thus offer an area of further work emerging from this collection.
Secondly, whilst the collection examines how contemporary borders are attached to an array of different things – from boats and ships to passports and bodies – the material effects and politics of these things are largely silent. Technological advances in bordering are part of the story here. Yet, borders and their functioning are also operated, constrained and remoulded through the agential capacities of mundane objects and their relations, as recent work on the more-than-human nature of border politics has illustrated (Darling, 2014; Squire, 2014). Thus, whilst the expansive and inclusive notion of mobile borders intended with the term ‘borderities’ is a welcome one, there may be a need to ensure that such inclusivity is extended to the kinds of material politics associated with thinking borders from the perspective of assemblages that exceed purely human intentionality and agency (Dittmer, 2014).
Despite these minor shortcomings, Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders is a cohesive collection that contributes to ongoing debates over the nature of borders and their relation to sovereignty, territory and spatial politics. The continuity of focus and clarity across the chapters is admirable for a collection of this breadth and means that it should be well received by students as well as fellow researchers. In seeking to ask what and where contemporary borders may be, this collection does not produce a definitive or exclusive answer. Indeed, given the pace of investments into new forms of bordering across the world, we should be suspicious of any claims to definitive answers. Rather, what it offers is an insightful series of orientation points to the complexity, contingency and human cost of constructing and maintaining the lines, processes and practices that divide populations the world over.
Taken together, these two texts offer a sense of the vitality of discussions around borders, mobility and the governance of movement within the social sciences. Geographers have been at the heart of many of these discussions, and both of these texts will speak well to debates within political geography over how best to account for the practices, philosophies, and closures of contemporary migration and its governance.