The UK Border Security Continuum: Virtual Biopolitics and the Simulation of the Sovereign Ban

Abstract

This paper analyses the emergence of the UK's new border security doctrine. It argues that the vision of the UK border being put forward is not one that corresponds to conventional understandings of what and where borders are in contemporary political life. Rather, the UK border is increasingly projected overseas and across UK territory, ever more invisible, electronic, and mobile through the use of sophisticated identity management technologies and is based on principles of preemption. In search of critical resources appropriate to the analysis of these practices, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean Baudrillard and argue that the UK case is symptomatic of broader attempts to simulate the effect of security in the West.

The virtualization of security: Philosophies of capture and resistance in Baudrillard, Agamben and Deleuze

“…(Debrix, 1999: 216). Along similar lines, Vaughan-Williams (2010: 1080) points to how new border security technologies simulate the effect of total security. He finds an excellent example of this process at work in the UK's new border security doctrine, in which the traditional idea of protecting a fixed territorial space is significantly altered by a continuum of security practices.…”

“…Mick Dillon has shown how the rise of digital and molecular sciences has led to the creation of a 'virtual politics of security', which transforms the virtual potential of bodies into the constant risk of becoming-dangerous (Dillon, 2003). And Nick Vaughan-Williams has pointed to how the UK's new border security doctrine can be linked to a process of virtualization that locates the 'border' in a variety of offshore and domestic spaces; a process that simulates 'the effect of total security' (Vaughan- Williams, 2010Williams, : 1082. In a very broad sense, the virtual in these analyses highlights something taking place beyond the realm of representation and the actualized layer of reality; something that belongs, rather, to a virtual dimension of reality.…”

“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope1

“…Crucially, however, the analysis departs from recent efforts to bring 'the animal' and animal-human relations back in to political geography and border-making (Philo and Wilbert 2000;Brown and Rasmussen 2010;Collard 2012;Sundberg 2011 example, Balibar 1998Balibar , 2009Bialasiewicz 2011;Bigo 2001;Guild 2009;van Houtum 2010;Rumford 2008;Sidaway 2006;Walker 2000;Walters 2002Walters , 2011. Against this backdrop a number of commentators have noted the neoliberalisation of border control, which is increasingly characterised by the 'managerial language of cooperation and partnership' (Bialasiewicz 2012), the rise of for-profit public-private partnerships as part of a EUropewide homeland security industry (Prokkola 2013), and a new emphasis on 'customer experience' and levels of satisfaction among so-called 'trusted travellers' at 'regular' land, sea, and air border crossing points (Vaughan-Williams 2010). Whereas the traditional paradigm of border control focused on the prevention of movement and defence of territory, more recent bordering practices have also sought to manage and indeed enhance flows of certain people, services, and goods (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013).…”

(Re)locating the border: Pre-entry tuberculosis (TB) screening of migrants to the UK

“…Although geographers and social scientists have recently conceptualised the relocated border in relation to national security (Amoore, 2006;Adey, 2009;Vaughan-Williams, 2010), there has been less consideration of the effects of these changes on the geographies of health security. Granted, concerns have been raised about the impact of heightened human mobility on the rapid spread of pathogens across state boundaries, particularly following outbreaks of SARS and H1N1 influenza during the last decade (Budd et al, 2011).…”