Sleights of Hand: Free Ports, Bordering, and the Racial Capitalist Roots of Economic Nationalist Strategies in the US and the UK

Abstract

Sleight of hand economic nationalist strategies by recent administrations of the US and UK emphasizing the “freedom” of those selectively imagined as belonging to the nation while quietly but pivotally discouraging human mobility and encouraging elite capital mobility, are discussed in this article. The US and UK’s distinct but connected recent policies – Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) and Boris Johnson’s Brexit strategies -- are not viewed as exceptional, or unique to those specific administrations of each country, but as embedded within long-term, interconnected transnational racial capitalist projects. The sleights of hand promoting selective publics’ freedom are not only hypocritical but complex to see, especially with white-impaired lenses. Two interrelated technologies of power on which these economic nationalist strategies have relied, bordering and free zones, are examined ethnographically in this article, contributing to research on the complex, varied, and experience-inflected responses US and UK residents have to these policies.

Ágnostoi: Greece and the forensic bordering of Fortress Europe

“…The notion of 'bordering' has been taken up by various scholars (see e.g. De Genova 2017;Kingsolver 2023;Mezzadra and Neilson 2013;Tervonen, Pellander, and Yuval-Davies 2018) to draw attention to various acts which constitute the border in everyday life, often to deter and/or brutalise those not deemed worthy of crossing the borders. These are people who do not 'know their place' in urban spaces, a geographical ordering of nation states, or (post/neo)colonial hierarchies, and includes the poor, the minorities, and the migrants.…”