The Disappearing State and the Quasi‐Event of Immigration Control

Abstract

Immigration enforcement by sheriffs and police can be characterized as a proliferation of quasi‐events which never quite rise to the status of an event. This poses distinct challenges for feminist‐inspired scholarship on the state which seeks to document, ethnographically, how the state goes about its business on the ground. In this article we draw on our fieldwork experience in North Carolina and Georgia on sheriffs’ and police departments’ use of traffic enforcement and policing roadblocks to scrutinize drivers for their legal status, and ask how our ethnographic approach to the problem of state power inevitably stumbles in relation to the ordinariness of these practices. We conclude that feminist scholarship committed to an ethnography of the state could do much more to think through the potentially aporetic quality of that which is our common object of research—the state in practice.

Beyond Profiling: The Institutional Sources of Racial Disparities in Policing

“…The police training manuals that we relied on in our book to illustrate this practice drew advice and guidance from police departments of virtually every size in all regions of the country (2014,(22)(23). Recent ethnographic studies that follow up on our research observe investigatory stops in many jurisdictions in North Carolina (Coleman and Stuesse 2015 ) and in Nashville, Tennessee (Armenta 2016a(Armenta , 2016b. The recent official report on problems in the Chicago police department observes high numbers of investigatory stops, especially of African Americans, in that city (Police Accountability Task Force 2016 ).…”

Contemporary Refugee‐Border Dynamics and the Legacies of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference ⋆

“…Through the use of extraterritorial processing, offshore detention centers, and interdiction programs, migrants and asylum seekers are immobilized before they reach their intended destinations to seek asylum (Burridge and others ). Borders are also internalized within states through practices such as mandatory and indefinite detention, workplace raids, traffic stops, and multiscalar legal formations (Coleman and Stuesse ; Maldonado and others ; Hiemstra and Conlon ; Gorman ). Bordering, thus, can move to “where the migrant is” (Casas‐Cortes and others, , 73, quoted in Burridge and others , 242).…”

Bridging the Divide: Middle Eastern Walls and Fences and the Spatial Governance of Problem Populations

“…Drawing on the work of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson on borders and labour, 45 as well as that from Étienne Balibar on border zones, 46 Coleman and Stuesse are keen to stress the interrelationship between both topographical and topological forms of control in border practices, arguing that borders should be explored "not as perimetrical limit points but also as spaces of (policed) residence." 47 This notion of spaces of policed residence is one I want to take forward for an analysis of the socio-politics of walls. In so doing, we see how, to borrow from Coleman and Steusse, walls 'police 'things' and 'people' as much as they police edges,' 48 bringing to the fore the coterminous relationship between the policing of people and things at the edges and the policing of people and things in the interior.…”