Book Review: Response to reviewers
| Author | Ana Aliverti |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221136455 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
References
Carvalho H and Chamberlen A (2018) Why punishment pleases: Punitive feelings in a world of
hostile solidarity. Punishment and Society 20(2): 217–234.
Fassin D (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Karstedt S (2002) Emotions and criminal justice. Theoretical Criminology 6(3): 299–317.
Response to reviewers
Ana Aliverti
University of Warwick, UK
I am grateful to all three reviewers for their thorough reading of my work and their critical
insights, and to my colleague Henrique Carvalho for stimulating this exercise. It has been
a great pleasure to share with them various platforms at Warwick, Oxford and the Law
and Society Association (LSA) annual conference in Lisbon where we discussed with
other colleagues some aspects of Policing the Borders Within. I shall try to do justice
to their comments within the limited space provided, although I am aware that they
raise broader issues that deserve longer discussions, and which might open new
avenues for further research in this area.
Before delving into individual comments, I would like to make a general remark on the
book itself. In Policing the Borders Within, I documented the everyday worlds of the state
officers tasked with policing migration in the UK. The book seeks to disentangle the insti-
tutional and professional values and norms that shape their actions, and the social, moral,
political and cultural milieus where their work unfolds, is enabled and often thwarted. In
so doing, the book situates this labour within a broad context that connects the local,
national and global in routine yet complex ways, and lays open to scrutiny the social, pol-
itical and moral challenges of policing human mobility. As such, this book seeks to
understand the relationship between policing, order and state power under contemporary
conditions.
As many of my informants acknowledged, border policing boils down to the patrolling
of social order, dictated to a large extent by a lottery of birth. It connects state power, citi-
zenship and social inequalities in novel forms, not least because of the transnational
actors and processes involved, the colonial pathways and categories on which it relies
and its global reverberations. As Franko notes in her comments, the very existence of
this force aimed at singling out and pushing out mainly poor and racialised populations
from the Global South raises critical legitimacy questions, and –I would add –exposes in
the starkest and crudest terms the crux of policing: maintaining order.
In this sense, then, the British immigration enforcement agency –and its police-trained
officers forming the Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams –although
sharing key features, is distinctive from the police and other criminal justice institutions.
In responding to Franko’s and Loader’s questions around legitimacy, I pose that ICE is an
institutional attempt to tackle the legitimacy problems raised by the policing of migration
by offloading the police of this dirty work. This outsourcing does not fully resolve them,
Book Reviews 177
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