The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility

Sociological Inquiry, 2010

The article takes a position against recent theories of globalization and mobility by arguing that there are important trends toward increased immobility. Whereas goods travel relatively freely in a global market, the same cannot be said for people. Various forms of immobility are explored through the key notion of enclaves. While ghettoes and wall building have been traditional aspects of the enclosure of people, the article argues that new biological technologies offer enhanced methods of tracking and containing people. The principal cause behind these developments is a greater emphasis on securitization by the state and hence globalization theories are criticized insofar as they propose that state borders have become more porous.

Lindemann, Gesa (2009) Thinking the social from the perspective of its borders. Introduction to the book: Thinking the social from the perspective of its borders, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft

2019

Borders and bordering practices became important multidisciplinary themes in social sciences during the 1990s. This period has also witnessed the rise of the borderless world thesis, which resonated with globalization and optimistic, neoliberal beliefs on the positive effects of expanding global markets. Several dramatic events, especially the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11 led soon to the rapid politicization of border issues, resulting in massive deliberations on security issues and investments in practices and technologies related to security, securitization and border controls. These events also gave rise to wars and conflicts, migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, (rightwing) nationalism and racism, and to debates on the nature of citizenship. All these tendencies reflect the uneven developments in contemporary world and have challenged naïve ideas of a borderless world, yet giving rise to social movements that claim Open or even No borders. Present political importance of borders can be largely ascribed to the fact that borders/bordering practices are mirror images of various forms of human mobility. This chapter reflects the contemporary forms of mobilities (especially migration and tourism) and their relations to borders.

This chapter investigates how, in response to trends in transnational migration, borders are governed through practices such as the confinement and deportation of foreign migrants and asylum seekers. In particular, the increasing prominence of camps or other restricted areas in which migrants or illegal aliens are held for varying lengths of time highlight a new distribution of power defined by access to mobility. An empirical investigation into these spaces shows how democratic governments manage non-citizen populations and examines the ways in which the types of restriction and surveillance brought to bear on these people reconfigure physical, moral, and political boundaries. Several issues shape policy on border detention: confinement, albeit in a humanitarian form; the administrative application of different standards of rights for various alien populations; the conflation of humanitarian care and control for populations identified as vulnerable; the redrawing of frontiers through networks and zones; and, lastly, the experience of mobility produced by the differential management of movement within the modern archipelagos of surveillance. Border policies frame a network within the territory, which maintains the individuals in spaces of administrative suspension (such as the ambiguous figure of the clandestine-asylum seeker) and in interdependent spaces of confinement (such as the network of border detention, administrative detention for sans-papiers and prisons). The paper sheds a light on how this device emerges, by which national borders are reactivated within the social sphere. Ce chapitre se penche sur le phénomène des migrations transnationales et sur le gouverne-ment des frontières qui y répond, à travers des pratiques d'enfermement et d'expulsion des étrangers en Europe. La construction des camps d'étrangers, dont relève ce champ d'investiga-tion, témoigne de nouvelles distributions du pouvoir qui passent par l'accès à la mobilité. Une enquête empirique dans ces espaces nous invite à comprendre les pratiques par lesquelles les gouvernements démocratiques administrent des populations non-citoyennes, et la façon dont ces modalités de prise en charge et de surveillance opèrent une reconfiguration des frontières physiques, morales et politiques. Le confinement des étrangers entrecroise plusieurs dimensions : la construction d'un enfermement humanitaire, et les usages institutionnels et militants de différents régimes de droits qui y sont en jeu; les pratiques de prise en charge de populations identifiées comme vulnérables; les reconfigurations de la frontière à travers de nouvelles formes réticulaires et zonales; et enfin, l'expérience de circulation que dessinent les archipels de surveillance, et les pratiques de gestion différentielle des mobilités dont participent les zones d'attente. Ces politiques de contrôle migratoire créent un réseau frontalier à l'intérieur du territoire, qui saisit les individus dans des espaces de suspension administrative (celle du « demandeur d'asile-sans papier » mis sous procédure d'asile prioritaire) et des espaces, inter-dépendants, d'enfermement (le centre de rétention administrative, la zone d'attente, la prison de droit commun). Comment se met en place ce dispositif qui réactive les frontières nationales

Sociological Theory, 2005

While globalization is largely theorized in terms of trans-border flows, this article suggests an exploratory sociological framework for analyzing globalization as consisting of systemic processes of closure and containment. The suggested framework points at the emergence of a global mobility regime that actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders. The mobility regime is theorized as premised upon a pervasive “paradigm of suspicion” that conflates the perceived threats of crime, immigration, and terrorism, thus constituting a conceptual blueprint for the organization of global risk-management strategies. The article draws on multiple examples, singling out some elementary forms of the mobility regime, emphasizing the sociological affinity between guarded borders on the one hand and gated communities on the other. In particular, the article aims at theorizing the translation of the paradigm of suspicion into actual technologies of social screening designed to police the mobility of those social elements that are deemed to belong to suspect social categories. Specifically, the article points at biosocial profiling as an increasingly dominant technology of intervention. Biosocial profiling, in turn, is theorized in juxtaposition to other modalities of power, namely, legal and disciplinary measures.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11(3): 289-302., 2004

Available as a pdf by request to [email protected] . Our central agenda is to rethink the concept of movement in anthropology and other social sciences. We do this through two themes-mobilities and enclosures-both of which draw our attention to power and its diverse outcomes, especially at borders. Enclosure addresses processes that delimit and restrict the movement of specific goods, people, and ideas, while mobilities concern processes that enable and induce such movements. Consideration of these themes breaks with theoretical tendencies that celebrate unbounded movement, and instead focuses us on the political-economic processes by which people, nature, commodities, and knowledge are bounded, emplaced, and allowed or forced to move. Mobilities and enclosures are plural, favoring close-grained ethnographic studies. They involve unequal rights and powers, demanding precision about the political implications of movements of various sorts. This introduction situates these themes in recent border studies and social theory more generally and summarizes how the authors in this special issue advance scholarship on these matters.

In this essay, I consider what a sociology without borders would look like through an exploration of two questions: 1) How can sociology be mobilized to make the world a better place? and 2) What does a sociology of human rights look like? To answer these questions, I take the reader through a discussion of the history of Sociologists without Borders, the influence of Professor Judith Blau, and my own excursions into the sociology of human rights in the United States and abroad.

American Journal of International Law, symposium on “Infrastructuring International Law”, 117: 11-15. January 2023., 2023

Since 2015 when migration across the Mediterranean was declared a "crisis" in Europe, the language of crisis and invasion has persisted, structuring conversations and political imaginations. This has led many to argue for the strict closure of borders and the deportation of migrants or "people on the move," 1 and to a deepening set of racisms within borders. But this "crisis" has also led to a less publicized, opposing struggle against borders, in the service of a more egalitarian world. I argue that in order to really understand how borders are being regulated or unregulated, we need to look not only at the international legal realm, but also at infrastructural politics. 2 In this Essay, I will discuss two different terrains of infrastructural struggle over migration and borders: the first is about border walls, which are built to close off resources and partition the world into haves and have nots; the second is an infrastructure of collective living, where people-on-the-move are occupying abandoned spaces and working against borders and private property. I suggest that it is important to attend to the infrastructural dimensions of migration and border regimes, as they can produce and regularize exclusion and conceal it from the conventional field of political discussion and legal contestation. At the same time, new infrastructures can prefigure better, more equitable worlds.

Identities Glob Stud Cult Pow, 2004

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Dislocating Globality, 2015