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This article: • Provides a necessary critical reflection on the changes to the UK family migration visa 2012; • Responds to the recent call made by Nick Vaughan-Williams and Victoria M. Basham in BJPIR for Critical Border Studies to better appreciate the interlocking elements of race, gender, class in border practices. It does this by also paying attention to sex; • Challenges the presentism in the recent literature on border practices/immigration by situating the family migration visa in a broader history; • Makes a strong contribution to the cross-over debates which are taking place in International Relations and governmentality literature regarding the postcolonial. It offers a Foucauldian analysis of government which takes colonial and postcolonial relations seriously. This article explores the changes to the family migration visa (2012) through a history of postcolonial government. It explores how the visa shares a familiar function to previous forms of rule which targeted the household and family as a site of regulation. Under Empire, 'marriage restrictions' were used to manage the 'intimate' connections between coloniser and colonised. Over the course of the 20th century UK border regimes also targeted the intimate and the familial to regulate racial proximity. In tracing this history, I argue that the family migration visa works as a similar technique. The visa manages the intimate space of the couple, family and household through an ideal domesticity; in line with certain raced, gendered and class norms. It highlights how government techniques make claims over whom can live with, raise a family with, be intimate with whom in Britain.This article examines the implementation of changes to the UK family migration visa (or the 'family of a settled person' visa) which occurred in 2012. This is the visa which gives non-EU spouses/partners, children and dependents of British citizens/ 'settled persons' limited right to reside in the UK. The changes to the visa mean that a family (including a non-EU citizen) must fulfil both a financial and language requirement to be granted the right to live together. The Home Office justifies these bs_bs_banner

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This article proposes that 'internal colonisation' provides a necessary lens through which to explore the relationship between violence and race in contemporary liberal government. Contributing to an increasing interest in race in IR, this article proposes that whilst racism remains a vital demarcation in liberal government between forms of worthy/unworthy life, this is continually shaped by colonial histories and ongoing projects of Empire which manifest in the Global North and South in familiar, if not identical ways. In unpacking the concept of internal colonisation and its intellectual history from Black Studies into colonial historiography and political geography, I highlight how (neo)metropolitan states such as Britain, were always active imperial terrain and subjected to forms of colonisation. This recognises how metropole and colonies where bounded together through colonisation and how knowledge and practices of rule were appropriated onto a heterogeneity of racialised and undesirable subjects both within colonies and Britain. Bringing the argument up to date, I show how internal colonisation remains diverse and dispersed under liberal empireenhanced through the war on terror. To do this, I sketch out how forms of 'armed social work' central to counterinsurgency in the Afghanistan and Iraq, is also central to the management of sub-populations in Britain through the counterterrorism strategy Prevent. Treating (neo)metropoles such as the UK as part of imperial terrain helps us recognise the way that knowledge/practices of colonisation have worked across multiple populations and been invested in mundane sites of liberal government. This brings raced histories into closer encounters with the (re)making of a raced present.