How might we historicize the idea of border control? If state borders can be understood as institutional sites of governance, what forms of governance do they enact? This article asks what insights Foucauldian political sociology might offer these questions. Drawing on Deleuze's analytic of ‘control’, the article seeks to bring new meaning to the idea of border control. Under standing control as a particular technology of power, special attention to the changing topography of border control as well as the changing subjectivities presupposed by this form of power is paid.
In this paper I examine the reorganization of border controls associated with the Schengen process in the European Union and some of its close neighbours. Rather than asking the political science question of why states are committed to Schengen (or not, in the case of the United Kingdom and Ireland), I interpret Schengen as a political moment for genealogical reflection and analysis. The purpose is to contribute to a more historicized understanding of borders. Schengen is analyzed in terms of three trajectories, each of which allows us to denaturalize certain key aspects of the border, such as its identity, function, rationality, and contingency. Schengen is theorized in relation to the geopolitical border, the national border, and the biopolitical border. Other possibilities for genealogies of the border are also canvassed.
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