Penal power at the border: Realigning state and nation
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Author | Vanessa Barker |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617724827 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
724827TCR0010.1177/1362480617724827Theoretical CriminologyBarker
research-article2017
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2017, Vol. 21(4) 441 –457
Penal power at the border:
© The Author(s) 2017
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Realigning state and nation
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617724827
DOI: 10.1177/1362480617724827
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Vanessa Barker
Stockholm University, Sweden
Abstract
Penal power at the border relies on coercive tools such as expulsion, eviction,
criminalization, and penalization to respond to mass mobility, which is perceived to
be a social threat rather than a political expression of rights. By deploying its primal
power, its material and symbolic violence invested in criminal justice, the state taps
into unparalleled capacity to impose meaning on others, backed by the moral weight
of censure and sanction. The criminalization and penalization of migrants are effective
precisely because they bring moral weight to this sorting process, separating the worthy
from the wrongdoer. This article develops conceptual tools to understand the structural
and communicative capacities of penal power to reconstitute the nation state, to reset
the national frame of reference, and reassert the state’s dominion over it.
Keywords
Border criminology, crimmigration, penality, punishment, state theory
Structural realignment
In January 2016, Sweden closed its border with Denmark, a landmark move that halted
the country’s open door policy towards asylum seekers. In the same year, France shut
down the Jungle, the infamous camp in Calais where migrants await their chance to cross
the English Channel into the UK. Elsewhere in Europe, Hungary wrapped itself in barbed
wire, fencing off most entries along the Balkan route. Italy and Greece made interna-
tional headlines with their detention islands filled to capacity on Lampedusa and Lesbos.
Corresponding author:
Vanessa Barker, Sociology Department, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: Vanessa.barker@sociology.su.se
442
Theoretical Criminology 21(4)
Across the European Union, almost 200,000 non-EU citizens were “removed” from the
territory and repatriated (Eurostat, 2015). Outside the EU, Australia refused to land refu-
gees who arrived by sea and instead relocated them to detention camps on Nauru and
Manus islands. And like US mass incarceration, over 400,000 migrants sit in locked
facilities in the USA (Global Detention Project, 2017), the largest immigrant detention
program in the world. Despite differences in scale, region, and policy instruments, these
diverse measures all seek the same thing: to block unwanted mobility. They seek to deter,
contain, export, and in many cases, punish it.
How can we explain this turn of events? Why are some of the world’s most open and
affluent societies restricting mobility, undoing their own historical, albeit complex, tra-
jectories towards equality, democratization, and individual liberty?
To some scholars, these developments are not at all surprising. They are simply the
most recent manifestation of long-standing illiberal tendencies within liberal democra-
cies. As Seyla Benhabib (2004) explained in the dilemmas of alienage, democracies are
clubs, they are inherently exclusionary as their “universal” norms and equality princi-
ples apply only to those deemed members, which to some legal scholars and political
theorists justifies differential treatment for noncitizens. These illiberal tendencies are
not new but, rather, like racism in the USA, are “baked” into its foundation (Miller,
2016; Muhammad, 2011).
By contrast, some commentators see these restrictions as precisely a response to dem-
ocratic demands, a populist backlash against global elites and globalization. Others link
mobility restrictions to the needs and demands of a global economy (Hansen, 2017;
Sassen, 2014) where multinationals take what they want, extracting natural resources
and exploiting human ones, and dispose of the rest, including refugees and migrants
(Andersson, 2014; De Genova, 2010; Sassen, 2014). And some argue that mobility con-
trols reflect xenoracism in which the wealthy and white Global North keeps out poorer
people of color from the Global South (Fekete, 2001). These factors have all led to major
breakthroughs in critical border studies and they all call into question the credentials of
these democracies, perhaps calling their bluff.
This article takes a different point of departure even as it seeks to build on these fun-
damental insights. While all of the afore-mentioned factors matter and sharpen our criti-
cal lens, they vary in significance and relevance by context. What is constant is the state.
I argue that the state is at the center of this transformation and without thinking through
its role, purpose, institutions, actors, and interests we will not come to grips with the
historical import of today’s mobility controls. Over 20 years ago, Theda Skocpol (1985)
implored sociologists to “bring the state back in”, to see the state as a formidable actor in
its own right at the forefront of major social changes, an insight incorporated into the
sociology of punishment (Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Garland, 2013; Savelsberg,
1994) and extended here to the study of border criminology, the ways in which criminal
justice tools, practices and legal frameworks intermesh with migration control (Aas and
Bosworth, 2013; Stumpf, 2006; Van Der Woude et al., 2014). The state, following Max
Weber (1919), can be understood as a political association, governed by laws, which
claims to hold a monopoly on legitimate forms of violence over a population within a
specified territory. These features are defining characteristics even as they are contested
across time and space (as several of the articles argue in this special issue). Mass
Barker
443
mobility, no borders movements, and global solidarity, for example, call into question
the state’s dominion over a specific population and territory.
The nation state, its form and function, is undergoing structural realignment. Caught
in the cross currents of globalization that it helped to create, the state faces structural
challenges from above and below, challenges to its sovereignty, moral authority, and to
its very purpose (Brown, 2010; Fraser, 2008). From above, it faces challenges from
supranational entities, particularly influential economic organizations that try to impose
global capitalist principles, markets, trade, and finance onto domestic economies, which
has concentrated wealth and increased inequality (Piketty, 2013; Sassen, 2014). From
below, it faces challenges from grassroots movements that justify their claims with refer-
ences to international law and human rights principles (Darian Smith, 2013; Fraser,
2008). By looking outside national politics, movements such as “Refugees Welcome” or
“No One Is Illegal” can create new forms of transnational solidarity (Isin, 2012) and give
material reality to shared values. But by grafting the global onto the local context (Sassen,
2002), these movements, to skeptics, may be inadvertently trivializing domestic con-
cerns by not taking national interests seriously (see Trägårdh, 2016), especially if politics
is assumed to be a zero-sum game, winner takes all. These pressures from above and
below make national governing more difficult in a fast changing world with multiple
sources of power and authority, especially when the domestic population is agitated and
anxious by the very same currents, including mass mobility.
What then is the purpose of the state if it no longer controls who enters its territory or
determines who can claim rights to its resources? What is the purpose of the nation state
if it cannot provide for the well-being of its own citizens? What is its purpose if it cannot
protect the social fabric, a sense of social security for its citizens?
These are questions of politics, of course, but they speak to deep structural issues of
governance, authority, and the very frames of reference for doing politics and for doing
justice in the first place (Fraser, 2008). In her brilliant Scales of Justice, philosopher
Nancy Fraser explains how the conceptual frameworks for understanding what consti-
tutes legitimate demands on government and what constitutes the parameters and sub-
stance of justice are no longer stable. Competing frames from above and below challenge
the nation state’s claims to represent reality (Schinkel, 2015), in Bourdieu’s terms to
name, to classify (Bourdieu, 2014), to establish the rules of the game that govern social
interaction, or in Arendt’s terminology, its solipsistic will (Hörnqvist, 2014). The under-
lying meaning structures have come undone. Political opponents literally speak past each
other as they sit on different planes that are based on different reference points of mean-
ing. In Sweden, the debate over migration has been informed by fundamental beliefs in
equality but with some actors assuming a global and international reference point while
other actors assert the protection of national interests, in which high standards of living
should be maintained for those on the inside.
The stakes are high. And the state responds in kind. Current mobility controls, par-
ticularly as they are infused with penal power, seek to regulate, control, and even block
population flows. But they go much further than that. They go to the heart of governance.
They seek to...
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