Humanitarian Rescue/Sovereign Capture and the Policing of Possible Responses to Violent Borders
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12401 |
Humanitarian Rescue/Sovereign Capture and
the Policing of Possible Responses to Violent
Borders
Polly Pallister-Wilkins
University of Amsterdam
Abstract
Practices of rescue and assistance based on humanitarian concerns for life have increasingly come to shape both state and
non-state action that responds to the mobility of people on the move at the borders of Europe. These processes of rescue are
presented as counter to processes of border control concerned with preventing and policing migratory flows. Presented and
articulated as an alternative response to the increasingly restrictive and militarised practices that make-up ‘Fortress Europe’,
this humanitarian intervention concerned with saving lives both masks the violence of the border that renders people vulnera-
ble in the first instance and masks the intimate relationship practices of rescue have with processes of capture more tradition-
ally associated with border policing. The ascendancy of rescue as the primary response to irregular mobility also works to
police the boundaries of what is considered ethical politics and the possible responses that result. Rescue does this through
framing such events as unforeseen tragedies, erasing the structures of the violent border in the process and rendering coun-
ter-narratives mute.
On the evening of the 18 April 2016 the philosopher Slavoj
Zi
zek gave an interview to Channel 4 News in the United
Kingdom. In this interview, visualised with an image of a
rubber dinghy full of refugees landing on a beach,
Zi
zek
said the following:
This is not basically a humanitarian crisis. Let me
use an example from cinema. This is the images
[sic] we see, poor refugees saved at the last
moment from drowning in the sea. That’s of course
tragic. But what we need to do in cinematic terms
is the shot beings here and then slowly we with-
drew [sic] the camera until we see what in old
Marxist terms we call the social totality. What is
going on? ... (Channel 4 News, 2016)
Zi
zek continued making increasingly disjointed arguments
concerning responsibility and distance, culture and Euro-
pean enlightenment as the interviewer, Cathy Newman’s
face became more and more incredulous.
I highlight this vignette, not out of agreement with
Zi
zek
on the points he made, but to introduce the argument of
this article concerning the politics of rescue and the struc-
turing of the political field of possibility. What this interview
with
Zi
zek and the subsequent critiques it engendered high-
lights is the ways in which a humanitarian reason (Fassin,
2012), understood as a respect for human life and enacted
through practices of rescue and assistance, are a form of
anti-politics (Walters, 2008) imbricated with European border
control that police possible ethical political action. Even the
usually combative, enfant terrible
Zi
zek is careful to self-
police with the addendum that what he has just described
and criticised is ‘of course tragic’.
Practices of rescue and assistance based on humanitarian
concerns for life have increasingly come to shape both state
and non-state action that responds to the mobility of peo-
ple on the move
1
in the Mediterranean and eastern Aegean
and along the migratory routes of the Western Balkans and
elsewhere. These processes of rescue, like those discussed
by
Zi
zek above, are presented as responding to tragedy and
appear to run counter to processes of sovereign border con-
trol concerned with preventing and policing migratory flows.
Presented and articulated as an alternative response to
the increasingly restrictive and militarised practices that
make-up ‘Fortress Europe’, this humanitarian intervention
concerned with saving lives masks both the violence of the
border that renders people vulnerable in the first instance
and the intimate relationship which practices of humanitar-
ian rescue have with processes of sovereign capture more
traditionally associated with border policing (Jeandesboz,
2014; Tazzioli, 2016). But more than this, the ascendancy of
rescue as the first response to people on the move also
works to police the boundaries of what is considered ethical
politics and the possible responses which result. Rescue
does this through depicting sinking boats and people
drowning as tragedies (Little and Vaughan-Williams, 2016;
Pallister-Wilkins, 2015a), working to fix the incidents in time
and space, erases the structures of the violent border (Jones,
2016) and renders counter-narratives mute.
The argument presented here is based on a sustained
research engagement with what has been termed the
Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12401 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 1 . February 2017 19
Special Issue Article
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