Book Review: Emotional labor and moral weight of border work
| Author | Vanessa Barker |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221136454 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Note
1. It is striking that Aliverti always refers to citizenship enjoyed by members within national
boundaries as a ‘privilege’. This take on citizenship clearly opens important new questions
about global inequalities and the ways in which border control protects them. It also calls
to attention the practices of colonial extraction that enabled these privileges. But the term
‘privilege’nonetheless seems partial, and can strike a tin-eared note. It overlooks the long pol-
itical and social struggles that produced citizenship recognition and rights for the poor and
excluded within nation-states. To term the hard-won and still-fragile outcomes of these strug-
gles ‘privilege’is to overlook important dimensions of the history and lived experience of citi-
zenship acquisition and retention. It also hints at the idea that the citizenship of members is the
problem, something that might need to be undone because it rests of the exclusion of the
world’s poorest who are locked out of the enjoyment of such benefits.
References
Bosworth M (2013) Can immigration detention centres be legitimate? Understanding confinement
in a global world. In: Aas KF and Bosworth M (eds) The Borders of Punishment. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, pp. 149–165.
Franko K (2020) The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Hughes EC (1962) Good people and dirty work. Social Problems, 10(1): 3–11.
Weber L (2015) Rethinking Border Control for a Globalized World: A Preferred Future.
Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Author biographies
Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford, UK, and Honorary Professorial
Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Emotional labor and moral weight of border work
Vanessa Barker
Stockholm University, Sweden
Policing the Borders Within is a model of thoughtful research. It is an empirically rich,
theoretically sophisticated account of a difficult and sometimes controversial area of
border policing in contemporary Britain. With its detailed and nuanced reading of every-
day encounters between immigration officers and people who may or may not have a
right to remain in the country, Ana Aliverti has made a series of contributions to both
academic and public debates. She provides a much needed cultural framework of
morals and emotional labor to the exercise of state power and its effects on those
tasked with carrying it out, and raises questions about the nature of this kind of power
itself. Below I highlight a few of these key contributions and raise questions for
further research.
How state power, particularly state violence, is wielded, by whom, for whom, against
whom and for what purposes is central to any understanding of democratic society and its
legitimacy. One of Aliverti’s main findings, for example, that immigration policing
174 Theoretical Criminology 27(1)
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