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The generalised bio-political border? Re-conceptualising the limits of sovereign power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

NICK VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS
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Abstract

This article is a response to calls from a number of theorists in International Relations and related disciplines for the need to develop alternative ways of thinking ‘the border’ in contemporary political life. These calls stem from an apparent tension between the increasing complexity of the nature and location of bordering practices on the one hand and yet the relative simplicity with which borders often continue to be treated on the other. One of the intellectual challenges, however, is that many of the resources in political thought to which we might turn for new border vocabularies already rely on unproblematised conceptions of what and where borders are. It is argued that some promise can be found in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose diagnosis of the operation of sovereign power in terms of the production of bare life offers significant, yet largely untapped, implications for analysing borders and the politics of space across a global bio-political terrain.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 2009, pp. 729 - 749
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2009

Introduction

Borders are vacillating […] they are no longer at the border, an institutionalised site that could be materialised on the ground and inscribed on the map, where one sovereignty ends and another begins.Footnote 1

Étienne Balibar

If Étienne Balibar's pithy observation is taken seriously then the debate about the status of borders between states in contemporary political life appears to be somewhat missing the point. According to this familiar inter-disciplinary debate, which is often associated with arguments about the character and extent of globalisation, state borders are characterised either as a thing of the past or as an enduring feature of world politics post-1648.

The former discourse has it that the transformation of global production, involving the growth of multi-national companies, a 24 hour market and post-Fordist industries, has rendered the notion of a national economy obsolete.Footnote 2 On this view, economic change is said to have ushered in new patterns of governance, in which the role of the modern, sovereign, territorially bordered state has diminished.Footnote 3 Consequently, it is sometimes argued that the erosion of state borders over recent decades threatens the very idea of the so-called Westphalian territorially defined international states-system.Footnote 4

By contrast, the latter discourse maintains that national economies have been left intact if not actually strengthened by globalisation.Footnote 5 From this perspective, the modern state, paradigmatically defined by Max Weber as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory’,Footnote 6 remains the primary political entity in global politics.Footnote 7 Moreover, especially since the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, some writers now argue that state borders are more important than ever before.Footnote 8 Yet, according to this tired and totalising debate, the focus is on the presence/absence of state borders, rather than the possibility, as hinted at by Balibar, that the concept of the border is playing out in different and often unexpected ways at a multiplicity of sites in contemporary political life.

In the context of the theoretical lexicon of International Relations (IR), R. B. J. Walker has diagnosed a dominant spatial-temporal logic of inside/outside.Footnote 9 Spatially, discourses of international relations presuppose a series of demarcations between inside and outside, here and there and us and them, in order to affirm the effect of the ‘presence’ of sovereign political community. Temporally, these demarcations work to secure a primary distinction between a realm of progress ‘inside’ and a realm of immutable violence, warfare and barbarism ‘outside’. On a preliminary reading, therefore, the concept of the border of the state conditions the possibility of thinking in the above terms and this border is taken to be located at the geographical outer-edge of sovereign territory.

As such, the concept of the border of the state can be said to frame the limits of sovereign power as something supposedly contained within fixed territorially demarcated parameters. This is illustrated by Weber's influential formulation in which the realm of sovereign power (‘successful claims to the monopoly of the legitimate use of force’) is defined by territorial borders (‘within a given territory’). In turn, the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state provides a powerful foundation for the theory and practice of international relations: it is codified in international law by the norm of ‘territorial integrity’ (see Article 2 Paragraph 4 of the UN Charter); it acts as an epistemological and ontological anchor on the basis of which seemingly diverse conceptualisations of global politics proceed; and, as Anthony Jarvis and Albert Paolini have pointed out, it allows for a compartmentalisation of global politics into two supposedly distinct spheres permitting a division of labour between Politics on the one hand and IR on the other.Footnote 10

However, despite the imperiousness of the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state, a growing number of critical scholars concur with Balibar's observation about the paradoxical and complex nature of borders in contemporary political life. Walker, for example, not only diagnoses the logic of inside/outside but also seems to call this logic into question throughout many of his texts.Footnote 11 Hence, he argues that, ‘We have shifted rather quickly from the monstrous edifice of the Berlin Wall, perhaps the paradigm of a securitized territoriality, to a war on terrorism, and to forms of securitization, enacted anywhere.’Footnote 12 In the same vein, Achille Mbembe has argued, ‘in [the] heteronymous organisation of territorial rights and claims, it makes little sense to insist on distinctions between “internal” and “external” political realms, separated by clearly demarcated boundaries’.Footnote 13 Similarly, Zaki Laïdi refers to ‘a global social system in which there is no longer a frontier between internal and external’.Footnote 14 Moreover, albeit in different ways and contexts, Louise Amoore,Footnote 15 Didier Bigo,Footnote 16 David Campbell,Footnote 17 Yosef Lapid,Footnote 18 Noel Parker,Footnote 19 Chris Rumford,Footnote 20 Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby,Footnote 21 Michael J. Shapiro,Footnote 22 William Walters,Footnote 23 to name only a few, have all made claims about the need for alternative border imaginaries in the study of global politics.

Yet, despite these insistences, there has been relatively little work on the development and application of new and innovative ways of border thinking in IR. On the one hand, as Walker has argued, such reticence is perhaps unsurprising given the stakes involved: ‘better explanations – of contemporary political life – are no doubt called for, but they are unlikely to emerge without a more sustained reconsideration of fundamental theoretical and philosophical assumptions than can be found in most of the literature on international relations theory’.Footnote 24 On the other hand, there is a danger of a growing disjuncture between the increasing complexity and differentiation of borders in global politics and the apparent simplicity and lack of imagination with which borders continue to be identified and analysed.

In this article, I argue that there are potentially useful resources for developing alternative border imaginaries to be found in the recent work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The following discussion begins with a detailed exegesis of some of Agamben's key arguments as articulated in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Means Without End: Notes on Politics (2000), State of Exception (2005) and several key essays and interviews. By now, the use of Agamben in IR has become popular in the study of diverse aspects of the ‘War on Terror’,Footnote 25 especially in relation to debates about the rule of law and sovereign exceptionalism,Footnote 26 although his work has not gone without criticism.Footnote 27 Departures will be made from extant interpretations of Agamben's work, however, in respect of his central concept of ‘bare life’, the importance of what he calls ‘a logic of the field’ and, perhaps most importantly, the implications of his oeuvre for an understanding of the spatial dimensions of sovereign power. Building upon what I consider to be a distinctive reading of Agamben, I then develop the idea of the ‘generalised bio-political border’ as a re-conceptualisation of the limits of sovereign power: not as fixed territorial borders located at the outer-edge of the territorial state, but infused through bodies and diffused across society and everyday life. As I will suggest, thinking in terms of the generalised bio-political border has potentially radical implications for the way we conceptualise what and where borders are in global politics, which, in turn, raises some provocative questions for IR and security theorists.

Giorgio Agamben: indistinction, sovereign power, and bare life

Over the past twenty years or so, Giorgio Agamben has attempted a critique of the dominant treatment of the relation between politics and life in political philosophy.Footnote 28 According to Agamben, the main influence in the Western context has been Aristotle's account of the connection between the state and the human in his Politics. In the First Book, Aristotle presents the rise of the polis as the joining together of families and villages. The state, originating in ‘the bare needs of life’, continues to exist for ‘the sake of the good life’.Footnote 29 Since for Aristotle ‘the state is a creation of nature’, he argues that ‘man is by nature a political animal’ or ‘politikon zōon’.Footnote 30 Thus, he who is without a state is ‘[…] either above humanity, or below it: he is the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless one” whom Homer denounces – the outcast who is a lover of war’.Footnote 31 To be fully human, therefore, one must be a member of the polis for it is only here that the good life can be achieved.

In Agamben's reading, the distinction between ‘natural life’ on the one hand and the ‘good life’ in the polis on the other is at the heart of Aristotle's conception of the state. According to Agamben, this distinction reflects the way in which the Greeks had no single word for ‘life’. Rather, he claims, two terms were used in its place: zoē (the biological fact of life common to all living beings) and bios (political or qualified life).Footnote 32 As such, the private realm of zoē is taken to be simply excluded from bios, understood as the politically qualified life of the public sphere. Agamben notes that the key insights of Aristotle's Politics – his definition of man as a political animal, his opposition between the simple fact of living and politically qualified life, and his distinction between private and public spheres – have all had a lasting impact on the political tradition of the West. Nevertheless, Agamben argues that these insights concerning the relationship between politics and life have largely been assumed rather than interrogated within political thought. For Agamben, however, one notable exception is the work of Michel Foucault.Footnote 33

In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Power (1976), Foucault refers to the process by which biological life (zoē) has become included within the modalities of state power (bios). He captures this inclusion in terms of the transition from politics to bio-politics with reference to the emergence in the 17th century of attempts to govern populations as populations. Foucault argues that, whereas for Aristotle life and politics are considered separate, bio-politics takes life itself as its referent object: ‘modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question’.Footnote 34 On this view, the entry of zoē into bios has occasioned a fundamental shift in the nexus between politics and life, where the simple fact of life is no longer excluded from political calculations and mechanisms but absolutely central to modern politics.

At certain points in the book Homo Sacer it seems as though Agamben agrees fully with Foucault's historical schematisation. For example, in his introduction, Agamben writes, ‘the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis […] constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought’.Footnote 35 But while Agamben is highly indebted to Foucault he argues that ‘the Foucauldian thesis will […] have to be corrected, or at least completed’ because a historical shift to bio-politics has not actually taken place.Footnote 36 Agamben makes a different claim from Foucault's about the historical-philosophical structure of the West: ‘the production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign power’.Footnote 37 In other words, whereas Foucault reads the movement from politics to bio-politics as a historical transformation involving the inclusion of zoē in the realm of the polis, for Agamben the political realm is originally bio-political. On Agamben's view, the West's conception of politics has always been bio-political, but the nature of the relation between politics and life has become more exposed in the context of the modern state and its sovereign practices.Footnote 38

Agamben shows how the originally bio-political element of politics can be seen to be at play in Aristotle's definition of the polis in terms of the exclusion of zoē from bios. For Agamben, this ‘exclusion’ of zoē is not entirely exclusive, because zoē still remains in a fundamental relation with bios. Indeed, zoē is included in bios through its very exclusion from it: as Jenny Edkins puts it, ‘natural life or zoē is there as that which is excluded, the outlaw that haunts the sovereign order’.Footnote 39 We are not dealing with a straightforward exclusion, therefore, but what Agamben calls an ‘inclusive exclusion’. To explain this paradoxical formulation he introduces a spatial-ontological device used by Jean-Luc Nancy: the ban.Footnote 40 If someone is ‘banned’ from a political community he or she continues to have a relation with that group: there is still a connection precisely because they are outlawed. In this way, the figure of the banned person thus complicates the simplistic dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion. As we shall see, the idea of an ‘inclusive exclusion’ is important in Agamben's theoretical edifice because it is pivotal in his account of the Western paradigm of sovereign power.

Agamben's treatment of sovereignty is influenced by Carl Schmitt's definition of the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’.Footnote 41 According to Schmitt, such a decision declares that a state of emergency exists and suspends the rule of law to allow for whatever measures are deemed to be necessary in response. In addition to the Schmittian logic, however, Agamben also invokes Walter Benjamin's critique that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule’.Footnote 42 I shall return to the Schmitt-Benjamin debate in greater detail but for now suffice it to say that Agamben's diagnosis of the relation between politics, life, and sovereignty fuses Nancy's concept of the ban, Schmitt's definition of sovereignty, and Benjamin's idea of the permanent state of exception.

For Agamben, sovereign power relies on the ability to decide on whether certain forms of life are worthy of living. Such a decision, which is a sovereign cut or dividing practice, produces an expendable form of life that Agamben calls ‘bare life’. The sovereign decision bans bare life from the legal and political institutions to which citizens normally have access. This ban renders bare life amenable to the sway of sovereign power and allows for exceptional practices such as indefinite detention, torture, or even (but not inevitably) execution. Importantly, bare life is neither what the Greeks referred to as zoē nor bios. Rather, it is a form of life that is produced in a zone of indistinction between the two. Agamben, therefore, argues that it is necessary to identify and analyse the way in which the classical distinction between zoē and bios is blurred in contemporary political life: ‘Living in the state of exception that has become the rule has […] meant this: our private body has now become indistinguishable from our body politic’.Footnote 43

Elaborating on his ‘correction’ of the Foucauldian thesis, Agamben thus argues that the decisive characteristic of modern politics is not so much the simple inclusion of zoē in bios, but rather:

The decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.Footnote 44

This ‘zone of irreducible indistinction’ is precisely that which sovereign power relies upon producing in order to sustain its own operation. What Agamben ultimately seeks to show is that the production of bare life is the originary (if concealed) activity of sovereign power. Before dealing with his central claim about the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity, however, it is first necessary to unpack and illustrate aspects of Agamben's central thesis. His understanding and usage of key terms such as ‘zones of indistinction’ and ‘bare life’ are not always clear or even consistent: there is a need to take them as areas for debate rather than as simple givens.

The politics of indistinction: towards a ‘logic of the field’

Agamben contends that thinking in terms of borders, separations, and distinctions is actually quite unhelpful when trying to understand the relationship between politics and life. This contention is significant when trying to come to terms with the privileged status he affords to otherwise seemingly idiosyncratic concepts such as ‘inclusive exclusion’, ‘the ban’, and ‘zones of indistinction’. In an interview published in the German Law Review, Agamben argues for an approach to the study of politics that allows for the identification and analysis of what he calls indistinction:

[W]e need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances. The polarity is present and acts at each point of the field. Then you may suddenly have zones of indecidability or indifference. The state of exception is one of those zones.Footnote 45

Agamben's reference to the need for a ‘logic of the field’ gestures towards the importance of one of the key insights of developments in theoretical physics at the beginning of the last century: that entities within the electromagnetic field are not mutually exclusive phenomena but physically continuous within their milieu of interaction.Footnote 46 On this view, the flow of electrons and protons renders entity x always already part of entity y: entities are shown to interpenetrate each other, collapse into each other and are thus inseparable from each other from the outset.

Accordingly, ‘a logic of the field’ provides an alternative paradigm of thought in which the concept of the border no longer makes much sense. Such a logic reads binary oppositions such as inside/outside not as ‘dichotomies’ but as ‘di-polarities’, not substantial, but tensional’.Footnote 47 In order to illustrate this alternative topological register, Agamben makes reference to the figure of the Möbius strip: a surface with only one side so that what is ‘presupposed as external […] now reappears […] in the inside’.Footnote 48 Whereas the zone of indistinction remains obscured within the horizon of an inside/outside topological relation it is brought into relief when thinking in terms of a logic of the field. Such a shift is paramount for Agamben since it provides a spatial theory that informs his analysis of sovereign power and the nomos – or spatial-juridical orientation – of the West: ‘It is precisely this topological zone of indistinction […] that we must try to fix under our gaze’.Footnote 49

As I have already noted, Agamben applies a ‘logic of the field’ to his analysis of the relationship between politics and life by focusing on the classical distinction between zoē and bios.Footnote 50 He argues that in order to better understand the logic of sovereign power it is necessary to isolate and analyse the way in which the classical distinction between zoē and bios gets blurred in contemporary political life. It is within the zone of indistinction between zoē and bios that sovereign power produced bare life: a form of life that scrambles the Aristotelian co-ordinates with which the relationship between politics and life is conventionally studied. Bare life is a form of life that is amenable to the sway of sovereign power because it is precisely caught in a sort of legal and political vacuum conducive to the permanent instantiation of ‘exceptional’ practices. According to Agamben, the ‘locus par excellence’ of contemporary blurring of zoē and bios and the production of bare life is the detention camp at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay.Footnote 51

Bare life in Guantánamo Bay

Despite the centrality of the concept of bare life in Agamben's work, it nevertheless remains somewhat elusive and a site of debate.Footnote 52 Indeed, there is sufficient ambiguity (and inconsistency) in Agamben's usage of the concept for a multiplicity of possible interpretations to emerge. Many writers who draw on Agamben refer to bare life as if it were synonymous with zoē.Footnote 53 I want to suggest, however, that a more faithful reading is one that sees bare life as a form of life produced immanently by sovereign power in a zone of indistinction between zoē and bios:

The foundation (of the modern city from Hobbes to Rousseau) is not an event achieved once and for all but is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision. What is more the latter refers immediately to the life (and not the free will) of citizens, which thus appears as the originary political element. […] Yet this life is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer […], a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture.Footnote 54

On this alternative reading, bare life is not something antecedent to or outside of sovereign power relations. It is not something we are born with and can be stripped down to: ‘life conceived as a biological minimum […] to which we are all reducible’.Footnote 55 Bare life is not zoē: any attempt at qualifying life as ‘bare’ or ‘good’ is a move away from zoē.Footnote 56 Rather, as Agamben states clearly, bare life is something that is actively produced by sovereign power for sovereign power: ‘bare life is a product of the machine and not something that pre-exists it’.Footnote 57 What Agamben shows is that sovereign power depends upon creating and exploiting zones of indistinction in which subjects' recourse to conventional legal and political protection is curtailed: a technique of governance he argues is illustrated by the status of detainees held indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay.

As is by now well known, the US government established the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002 to hold suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan. Since its establishment approximately 520 detainees from 40 different countries have been held there, some of who are cab drivers, farmers and 13 year-old children.Footnote 58 A UN report on the ‘Situation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay’ highlights the conditions under which they are detained. Detainees are housed in 8ft by 8ft cells with wire walls, metal roofs and permanent electric lighting. Interrogation methods, approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, consist mainly of: the use of stress positions (like standing) for up to four hours; isolation up to 30 days; sensory deprivation; removal of comfort items; forced grooming; use of individual phobias (for example, fear of dogs) to induce stress.Footnote 59 Other policies include: degrading treatment (such as the removal of clothing – sometimes in the presence of women); cultural and religious harassment (such as using female interrogators to perform ‘lap dances’ and kicking the Holy Koran); and beating detainees who resist.Footnote 60 Moreover, the uncertainty generated by the indeterminate nature of confinement has, according to the UN, led to serious mental health problems: as of 13 June 2006 there have been three suicides and many more attempted suicides.

Detainees in Guantánamo are held in what Amnesty International calls a ‘legal black hole’.Footnote 61 Under the ‘Military Order on the Detention, Treatment and Trial of Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism of 13 November 2001’ (hereafter the ‘Military Order’), the US government has denied most detainees the right to trial and legal counsel.Footnote 62 As such, the UN has concluded that the US is in breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which seeks to guarantee the right to challenge the lawfulness of detention before a court (ICCPR, Art. 9(4)) and the right to a fair trial by a competent, independent and impartial court of law (ICCPR, Art.14). According to the US Defense Department, the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists in Guantánamo is a ‘military and security necessity’ in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’.Footnote 63 As the UN report points out, however, detention ‘without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities’ amounts to a radical departure from established principles on human rights law.Footnote 64 Further still, as far as the UN is concerned, the global struggle against international terrorism ‘does not, as such, constitute an armed conflict for the purposes of the applicability of international humanitarian law’.Footnote 65

Formally, the Bush administration classified detainees held in Guantánamo as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’, but this is not a term recognised by the UN or any other international institution.Footnote 66 Such a classification itself constitutes ‘arbitrary deprivation of the right to personal liberty’ since it creates a deliberate legal and political ambiguity surrounding detainees' status.Footnote 67 In contravention of Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, and despite repeated calls from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), none of the detainees have been declared prisoners of war or presented before a competent tribunal in order to establish who or what they are.Footnote 68 It is precisely this production of a deliberate uncertainty surrounding the status of detainees that allows for the indefinite use of exceptional measures against them. As ‘pure killing machines’, Guantánamo detainees are not deemed to be ‘humans with cognitive function’ who are ‘entitled to trials, to due process, to knowing and understanding a charge against them’.Footnote 69 Rather, as Judith Butler argues, ‘they are something less than human, and yet – somehow – they assume a human form’.Footnote 70 Indeed, the subject of sovereign power in Guantánamo is precisely ‘the subject who is no subject, neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death’.Footnote 71

Guards who stand watch over the detainees in Guantánamo confront a peculiar form of ‘human life’. Stripped of political and legal status, it bears no resemblance to Aristotle's conception of man as politikon zōon in the public sphere or bios. Yet, importantly as far as the interpretation of Agamben advanced here is concerned, neither does this life in any simple way conform to what the Greeks would have called zoē. Rather, the life confronted by the guards is a life that scrambles these Aristotelian co-ordinates: we no longer have any idea of the classical separation between zoē and bios in this context.Footnote 72 It is a bare life produced by the sovereign practices of the camp that is caught in a zone of indistinction between zoē and bios: a life that is mute and undifferentiated. For Agamben, such a life belongs to homo sacer or sacred man: a figure in Roman law whose very existence is in a state of exception defined by the sovereign. The figure of homo sacer is sacred in the sense that it can be killed but not sacrificed and is both constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Moreover, as the state of exception is arguably less anomalous and more a permanent characteristic, according to Agamben we all run the risk of becoming bare life: ‘we are all (virtually) homines sacri’.Footnote 73

The problem of sovereignty and subjectivity in Agamben

Agamben's seemingly hyperbolic claim that we are ‘all (virtually) homines sacri’ raises many interesting and important questions that are not dealt with explicitly in his oeuvre to-date: What is meant by the idea that we are all ‘virtually’ bare life? Does the concept of bare life allow for any form of differentiation between subjects? What are the limitations of adopting Agamben's logic of sovereign power? How might it be elaborated upon?

Though highly indebted to Agamben, Butler argues that the universality implied by the claim that we are all ‘virtually homines sacri’ exposes an area of weakness in his understanding of political subjectivity. Butler's chief criticism of Agamben is that he does not tell us how ‘power functions differentially’ among populations.Footnote 74 Focusing on issues of race and ethnicity, Butler argues that the generality of Agamben's treatment of the political subject fails to appreciate the ways in which ‘the systematic management and derealization of populations function to support and extend the claims of a sovereignty accountable to no law’.Footnote 75 For Butler, certain populations are more likely to be produced as bare life than others. Although security warnings issued to citizens do not currently involve overt racial profiling, Butler suggests that the creation of an ‘objectless panic’ all too often ‘translates […] into suspicion of all dark-skinned peoples, especially those who are Arab, or appear to look so to a population not always versed in making visual distinctions’.Footnote 76 As such, Butler's criticism presses Agamben's thesis on its tendency to universalise and over-simplify the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity: a charge that William Connolly has also made.

Connolly advances a similar critique to Butler's of Agamben's account of the logic of sovereignty.Footnote 77 Connolly's main objections are twofold. First, he argues that Agamben naively and problematically assumes that there once was a separation between zoē and bios: ‘What a joke […] [e]very way of life involves the infusion of norms, judgements, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private and public levels’.Footnote 78 While Connolly accepts the way in which ‘new technologies of infusion’ have ‘intensified’ bio-political life, he maintains that ‘the shift is not as radical as Agamben makes it out to be’.Footnote 79 Second, according to Connolly, Agamben's answer to the problem of sovereignty is to simply transcend it altogether by offering a diagnosis that is too elegant, cerebral, and convenient: ‘biocultural life exceeds any textbook logic because of the non-logical character of its materiality […] [it] is more messy, layered, and complex than any logical analysis can capture’.Footnote 80 Connolly thus arrives at the damning conclusion that ‘Agamben displays the hubris of academic intellectualism when he encloses political culture within a tightly defined logic’.Footnote 81

Running throughout Butler's and Connolly's criticisms of Agamben is an understandable worry that his perspective ultimately closes off questions about subjectivity, sovereignty, and politics more generally.Footnote 82 At the heart of this critique is a common complaint that the concept of bare life is too homogenising and thus too simplistic to appreciate the detailed complexity of the production of differentiated subjectivities. On the one hand, with its seemingly universalistic pretensions, the notion of bare life might indeed appear too sweeping to allow for nuanced analyses of subjectivity. On the other hand, I want to suggest, the sting of this criticism is largely neutralised once the notion of bare life is untied from the concept of zoē. If bare life is treated as precisely an indistinct form of subjectivity that is produced immanently by sovereign power for sovereign power then the true undecidability of the figure of homo sacer is brought into relief. This move allows for a more differentiated approach to the production of subjectivities under bio-political conditions because it does not fix bare life as some sort of pre-given outside sovereignty. On this reformulation, bare life can be interpreted as a form of subjectivity whose borders are always already rendered undecidable by sovereign power; a form of subjectivity whose identity is always in question. Therefore, a subjectivity whose inhabitation of a zone of indistinction requires different modes of political analysis such as a ‘logic of the field’. Adopting a logic of the field, with its privileging of analysis of the production of zones of indistinction, does not only have implications for the way we consider the production of subjectivities in world politics, however. Rather, Agamben's work opens up provocative lines of enquiry for thinking differently about the politics of space and bordering practices.

Re-conceptualising the limits of sovereign power

While Agamben's diagnoses of sovereign power, the generalised state of exception, and bare life are all relatively well known in IR and related disciplines, the spatial dimension of his work is perhaps the least explored.Footnote 83 In many ways this is surprising since Homo Sacer ends with the provocative claim that the contemporary bio-political nomos, which has seen the holy trinity of order, territory and birth lapse into crisis, can only be diagnosed on the basis of the alternative spatial register of a logic of the field: ‘Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoē and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man's political existence in the city’.Footnote 84 So, we might ask, what are the implications of this conclusion for thinking about sovereign space and the construction of an alternative border imaginary?

Security as the normal technique of government

As we have already seen, Agamben's approach to sovereignty is indebted to Schmitt's theory of the decision on the exception.Footnote 85 Embellishing this theory of sovereignty, however, Agamben invokes Benjamin's critique of Schmitt in an attempt to move the notion of the exception away from the issue of emergency provisions towards a more relational and original function within the Western political paradigm. In this way, for Agamben, Benjamin's engagement with Schmitt ‘proves the necessary and, even today, indispensable premise of every inquiry into sovereignty’.Footnote 86

Schmitt's theory of exception was in part attempting to neutralise Benjamin's concept of divine violence outside the law outlined in his 1921 essay, ‘Critique of Violence’.Footnote 87 Through the concept of the exception, Schmitt was able to show how there is no pure violence outside the law: the exception is a mechanism by which extra-legal operations can function as part of the juridical-political order. Yet, in his ‘Eighth Thesis on the Concept of History’, Benjamin responded to Schmitt's theory of exception by arguing that, ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule’.Footnote 88

According to Agamben, the ‘Eighth Thesis’ is the ‘decisive document in the Benjamin-Schmitt dossier’ because it effectively ‘[puts] Schmitt's thesis in check’.Footnote 89 Benjamin's counter-argument, while not dismissing Schmitt's thesis entirely, points to the way in which the Third Reich thrived on confusing the difference between norm and exception, law and fact and order and anomie.Footnote 90 It is precisely Benjamin's identification of the role of this confusion in the Nazi state that inspires Agamben to attempt to then re-configure the activity of sovereign power in terms of the creation of zones of indistinction: ‘the essential point […] is that a threshold of undecidability is produced at which factum and ius fade into each other.’Footnote 91

In his brief history of the state of exception, Agamben emplaces Benjamin's ‘Eighth Thesis’ within a broader tradition of early twentieth century thought dealing with the transformation of democratic regimes during the two world wars. One of the cases Agamben draws upon is the post-1914 British legal system, which witnessed the generalising of formerly exceptional measures within the state apparatus. After Britain declared war on Germany the government asked parliament to approve laws without debate. On 4 August 1914 the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was passed giving the government powers to regulate the economy and limit citizens' rights. Later, parliamentary activity virtually ceased altogether and on 29 October 1920 the Emergency Powers Act was introduced in which Article One stated that: '[…] His Majesty may, by proclamation […], declare that a state of emergency exists.Footnote 92

For Agamben, Article One of the Emergency Powers Act constitutes a decisive event in British legal history because it established the principle of the state of exception within the juridical-political order. Since then, Agamben claims, ‘the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones’ like Britain.Footnote 93 In other words, on Agamben's view, the state of exception (or ‘security’) has increasingly appeared as what might be referred to as the ‘dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’.Footnote 94 In support of this view, which resembles something like an ‘unstoppable global civil war’, Agamben refers to contemporary sovereign practices that blur the otherwise taken-for-granted threshold between democracy and absolutism.Footnote 95 One example is President George W. Bush's ‘Military Order’ authorising the ‘indefinite detention’ and ‘trial by military commissions’ of non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities. This Order, justified with reference to national security imperatives, works to secure sovereign power by removing the legal and political status of a suspected individual thereby producing a ‘legally unnameable and unclassifiable being’, as we have already seen.Footnote 96

It is possible to identify something of a tension in Agamben's account of the history of the state of exception, which can be summarised as a question of intensity or structure.Footnote 97 On the one hand, Agamben sometimes talks about the becoming-general of the state of exception in the West as if it were a gradual turning of the screw since World War I, through fascism, to our current situation.Footnote 98 On the other hand, Agamben also emphasises on many more occasions that the transformation of the state of exception into a paradigm of government is not a modern innovation but a systemic feature of Western politics: it is the constitutive paradigm of the juridical-political order.Footnote 99 Agamben argues that the years since World War I have seen the ‘testing and honing’ of this paradigm of government that is in a fundamental sense an originary aspect of the juridical-political life of Western societies.Footnote 100 In other words, as Didier Bigo usefully puts it, ‘the state of emergency in which we live is not an exceptional moment, limited in object, space and time, but the norm, or more exactly it is the perpetuation of the emergency as a rule, as a form of prolonged state of exception’.Footnote 101

Some readers will no doubt be displeased with the apparent tension above, although the extent to which one must choose between intensity or structure as if they were mutually exclusive is debatable. If the production of bare life is not a new or particularly recent phenomenon, as Agamben maintains and illustrates with reference to the figure of homo sacer in Roman law, then the exception must be seen as a fundamental feature of Western politics. However, as I will go on to argue, what has arguably changed within this over-arching framework is the historically contingent character of both the method and location of the production of bare life. In this way, reflecting Agamben's commitment to a ‘logic of the field’, it is also possible to read intensity and structure not as dichotomous but fundamentally inter-related.

The generalised space of the exception

Agamben argues that what is at stake in the sovereign exception is the ‘creation and definition of the very space in which the juridical-political order can have validity’.Footnote 102 He also claims, however, that such activity, which constitutes what Schmitt calls the sovereign nomos,Footnote 103 is not simply the taking of land but the taking of an outside or exception. Borders, typically understood in terms of the delimitation of sovereignty at the territorial outer-edge of the state, might be seen as exceptional spaces on one reading: a zone of anomie excluded from the ‘normal’ juridical-political space of the state, but, nevertheless, an integral part of that space (in fact the very condition of its possibility).Footnote 104 Yet, for Agamben, the ‘constitutive outside’ of sovereign territory is not a space that is localisable or to be found literally at ‘the edge’ of the state in a geographical sense. Rather, Agamben sees the constitutive outside as something fundamentally interior to the Western bio-political juridical order.

According to Agamben, the constitutive outside of sovereign territory is the generalised state of exception that brings together the otherwise separate realms of law and life. The constitutive outside refers precisely to the sovereign decision on the worthiness of life itself as belonging to either the citizen or bare life as its ghostly shadow. As such, if we are to consider the spatiality of the constitutive outside, it makes little sense to think of this as occupying a localised and static terrain associated with traditional state borders. Instead, Agamben's work prompts a re-conceptualisation of the limits of sovereign power and a re-situation of the constitutive outside of sovereign territory in a more generalised way. It is through the inclusive exclusion of bare life, resting upon a decision about its status, that sovereign power establishes its constitutive outside. Such a ‘decision’ is not necessarily isolatable in space-time (though it can be), but rather simulated throughout everyday life that places us all, virtually, under conditions of great uncertainty.Footnote 105 The generalisation of the space of exceptionalism is captured by Agamben's reference to the camp as ‘in some sense […] the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we live’.Footnote 106

Agamben refers to the emergence of concentration camps in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, historically associated with the state of exception and martial law, in order to illustrate how the simple dichotomies between inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, zoē and bios fail to hold in the final analysis. For Agamben, the space of the camp is fundamentally paradoxical: ‘the camp is a piece of territory that is placed outside the normal juridical order’ and yet ‘it is not simply an external space’.Footnote 107 The camp excludes what is captured inside, which, as an inclusive exclusion, blurs conventional spatial distinctions such as those above. Because law is suspended in the camp and arbitrary or exceptional decisions on the status of life become the rule, Agamben argues that the camp represents: ‘the most absolute bio-political space that has ever been realised – a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation’.Footnote 108 As such, people in camps, as we have seen in the context of Guantánamo, ‘move about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit’.Footnote 109

To some extent the camp is another figure that is characterised somewhat ambiguously in Agamben's work. The camp can be read as a historically contingent manifestation of the operations of sovereign power: ‘the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule’.Footnote 110 However, for Agamben the camp is not understood as an anomaly or merely a historical fact.Footnote 111 Rather, he argues that the camp is itself a structure: ‘if sovereign power is founded in the ability to decide on the state of exception, the camp is the structure in which the state of exception is permanently realised’.Footnote 112 On this basis, Agamben claims that the camp reveals something fundamental to the Western paradigm born of the exception: the attempt to materialise the state of exception and create a space in which bare life and juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction.Footnote 113 Thus, even if President Barack Obama succeeds in his stated intention to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay by January 2010, the fundamental bio-political structure of which it is symptomatic would for Agamben persist and simply be manifested elsewhere.

The generalised bio-political border?

On the one hand, the production of bare life in zones of indistinction is most visible in contemporary camps specifically designated for that purpose (not only Guantánamo, but, for example: Bagram and Kandahar air bases in Afghanistan; Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in Iraq; the Baxter immigration facility in Southern Australia; the new Sodhexo-run detention centre near Heathrow; and various so-called CIA ‘black sites’ in Eastern Europe). At these sites, as I have shown against the backdrop of Guantánamo, exceptional practices have become routine and bare life is produced through the blurring of zoē and bios.

On the other hand, Agamben draws attention to the way in which the production of zones of indistinction, where exceptional activities become the rule, is more and more widespread in global politics. Indeed, the notion of the generalised space of exception points to the way in which characteristics usually associated with the edges, margins, or outer-lying areas of sovereign space gradually blur with what is conventionally taken to be the ‘normality’ of that space. Whereas the space of the exception was once localised in spaces such as the camps, Agamben implies that in more recent times it has become increasingly generalised in contemporary political life: ‘the camp, which is now firmly settled inside [the nation-state], is the new bio-political nomos of the planet’.Footnote 114

In Homo Sacer Agamben refers to zones d'attentes in French airports (where foreigners seeking refugee status are detained) as an example of the way in which the structure of the camp permeates everyday life: ‘in […] these cases, an apparently innocuous space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not the atrocities are committed depends not on law but the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign’.Footnote 115 Under bio-political conditions in which ‘the paradigm of security has become the normal technique of government’, Agamben argues that we can no longer rigorously distinguish our biological life as living beings from our political existence.Footnote 116 In this way, as Claudio Minca has put it, there has been a ‘normalisation of a series of geographies of exceptionalism in Western societies’.Footnote 117

Agamben's central thesis, that the structure of the camp is the ‘hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we live’, calls for a reconsideration of what and where borders in contemporary political life might be. Instead of viewing the limits of sovereign power as spatially fixed at the outer-edge of the state, Agamben reconceptualises those limits in terms of a decision or speech act about whether certain life is worthy of living or life that is expendable. Such a decision performatively produces and secures the borders of sovereign community as the politically qualified life of the citizen is defined against the bare life of homo sacer. The concept of the border of the state is substituted by the sovereign decision to produce some life as bare life: it is precisely this dividing practice, one that can effectively happen anywhere, that constitutes the ‘original spatialisation of sovereign power’.Footnote 118 Such a decision is very much a practice of security because the production of bare life shores up notions of who and what ‘we’ are.

Although Agamben does not refer to it in his work, one way of capturing the alternative border imaginary he proposes is in terms of what I want to call the ‘generalised bio-political border’. This concept refers to the global archipelago of zones of indistinction in which sovereign power produces the bare life it needs to sustain itself and notions of sovereign community. Here, following Eyal Weizman, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ is used to refer to ‘the spatial expression of a series of ‘states of emergency’, or states of exception that are either created through the process of law (through which law is in fact severely undermined or annulled) or that appear de facto within them’.Footnote 119 Thinking in terms of the generalised bio-political border unties an analysis of the activity of sovereign power from the territorial limits of the state and relocates such an analysis in the context of a bio-political field spanning domestic and international space. As such it reflects Balibar's observation that borders are being ‘thinned out and doubled, […] no longer the shores of politics but […] the space of the political itself’.Footnote 120

By way of illustration, the dynamics of the generalised bio-political border can be seen to be at play in two episodes of the ‘war on terror’ in the UK: the case of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005 and the Forest Gate raids on 2 June 2006.

In the immediate hunt for those behind the so-called ‘failed’ bombings in London on 21 July 2005, UK anti-terrorist officers killed Jean Charles de Menezes the following day onboard an underground train at Stockwell station, South London.Footnote 121 The shooting was an arbitrary decision on the status of life. Crucially, however, in the light of my overall argument, it was an arbitrary decision that did not occur in a particular zone or space designated for exceptional practices. On the contrary, the shooting took place within what is usually considered to be the ‘normal’ juridical-political space of the state. Yet, Menezes, a Brazillian citizen working in the UK, was produced as bare life within the ‘normal’ space: not safeguarded by the rule of law but subjected to the whims of CO19 who, as temporary sovereigns, assessed his description and demeanour, considered his identity to be that of a bomber suspect, and concluded his annihilation would not constitute a crime. In this case, Menezes had effectively been banned from – or rather abandoned by – the law: ‘exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’.Footnote 122

As I have argued elsewhere, the Menezes shooting provides an illustration of the way in which bare life is not a form of life into which one is somehow born.Footnote 123 Rather, since Menezes was a Brazilian citizen, his case demonstrates how sovereign power works to produce bare life immanently: temporary sovereigns rendered his life ‘bare’. Furthermore, the shooting can also be read as adding credence to Agamben's claim otherwise seemingly sensationalist claim that ‘we are all (virtually) homines sacri’.

Similar dynamics reflective of the generalised bio-political border are illustrated by the Forest Gate raids in East London. On 2 June 2006, 250 police officers surrounded 46–48 Lansdowne Road in the Forest Gate area of London on suspicion that a chemical bomb had been hidden in the property.Footnote 124 At 4am, the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Squad raided the house and, without any warning and at close range, shot a suspect in the chest, narrowly missing his heart.Footnote 125 The injured man was identified as Mohammed Abdul Kahan and he was rushed immediately to hospital, while another man, Kahan's brother Abdul Koyair, was taken to Paddington Green High Security Prison. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, both men were detained for a week for further questioning despite having not been charged with any specific offence according to their solicitor.Footnote 126

What these events demonstrate is the way in which sovereign power blurs the traditional distinction between zoē and bios so that, as Agamben remarks in Homo Sacer: ‘we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between […] private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man's political existence in the city’.Footnote 127 As such, whereas the Menezes case illustrates the difficulty of upholding any rigorous distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ space, the Forest Gate raid takes the illustration of Agamben's argument further by showing how the home itself offers little refuge from the sovereign operation.

The scenes at Stockwell tube station and Lansdowne Road respectively resembled what might be conventionally, though perhaps not exclusively, associated with a border site: a heavy police presence; the use of exceptional measures; shootings legitimised by an emergency situation and national security imperatives. Both episodes took place in what is ordinarily considered to be the ‘normal’ space of the state, however, not an ‘exceptional’ space on its margins, outer-edges, or peripheries. In both cases sovereign power produced bare life caught in a zone of indistinction between zoē and bios.

Although the character and outcome of the shooting of Menezes and the Forest Gate raids are different in some important respects, Agamben's portrayal of the logic of sovereign power is common to both. They also indicate that, if the production of bare life in zones of indistinction constitutes the limits of sovereign power, those limits are not necessarily coterminous with the territorial borders of the state. On the contrary, the concept of the generalised bio-political border enjoins us to rethink ‘the border’ as a far more complex and differentiated site than that portrayed by the traditional geopolitical imagination.

Conclusion: re-thinking the border in IR and security studies

The concept of the border of the state has acted, and continues to act, as a lodestar in the theory and practice of global politics. Yet, as Balibar and others have sought to point out, it is possible to identify how, under current global conditions, ‘the border’ has become an increasingly complex, differentiated, and dispersed array of practices. Instead of being solely fixed at the territorial outer-edge of the state, as represented by the dominant modern geopolitical imagination, borders are evermore electronic, invisible, and mobile. Despite the increasing sophistication of diverse bordering practices, however, there is a sense in which border thinking within IR, security studies, and related disciplines, continues to lag behind. This lag is detectable in at least two senses: first, in terms of the somewhat limited range of concepts, metaphors, and vocabularies available to talk about the possibility of empirical shifts in the nature of ‘the border’; second, in the sense that much of the theoretical literature produced by these disciplines continues to rely upon an unexamined epistemological and ontological anchor point provided by the concept of the border of the state. These problems are fundamentally inter-related in that many of the theories, categories and logics to which we might turn for the development of new analytical tools beyond the modern geopolitical imaginary are themselves part of that very horizon of thought.

In their reflections on the role of radical theory, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt call for the ‘proposition of new concepts for political theorising today adequate to our conditions’.Footnote 128 Responding to those who have called for the development of alternative border imaginaries, and in the spirit of radical theorising suggested by Virno and Hardt, this article has developed the concept of the ‘generalised bio-political border’ as one possible route forward in terms of re-thinking what and where borders are. Building upon the otherwise largely overlooked spatial dimensions and implications of Agamben's controversial thought, the generalised bio-political border reconceptualises the limits of sovereign power as a decision on the status of life that can effectively happen anywhere: a multi-faceted and decentred bio-political apparatus that is as mobile as the subjects it seeks to control. Agamben reveals the reproduction of the juridical-political order as a bio-political border performance: a dividing practice that leads to the perpetuation of the production of bare life detained indefinitely in camps, shot in public spaces such as the London underground, or left to die in cargo containers at sea. This border performance is also, therefore, a body performance: subjects' bodies do not simply encounter pre-existing borders as if they were timeless territorial artefacts waiting to be transgressed. Rather, borders are continually (re)inscribed through bodies in transit that can be categorised into politically qualified life on the one hand and bare life on the other. Agamben's diagnosis of the activity of sovereign power thus prompts a more pluralised and radicalised view of what borders are and where they might be found in contemporary political life. Thinking in terms of the generalised bio-political border opens up new and provocative ways of identifying and interrogating bordering practices that would otherwise remain obscured as such.

References

1 E. Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, trans. J. Swenson, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 217–8.

2 C. Brown, ‘Globalisation’, in C. Brown with K. Ainley (eds), Understanding International Relations, 3 (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 167.

3 S. Strange, ‘The Westfailure System’, Review of International Studies, 25:3 (1999), pp. 345–54.

4 D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalisation Debate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 39; J. A. Scholte, Globalisation: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), pp. 135–6.

5 P. Hirst and G. Thompson, ‘Globalisation in Question’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); P. Hirst and G. Thompson, ‘The Future of Globalisation’, Cooperation and Conflict, 37 (2002), pp. 255–66.

6 M. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Kegan Paul, 1948), p. 78.

7 B. Carlson, J. Warner and K. Wang, ‘Foreword’, The SAIS Review of International Affairs, Special Issue on ‘Borders’, 26:1 (Winter-Spring, 2006), pp. 1–2.

8 H. Starr, ‘International Borders: What They Are, What They Mean, and Why We Should Care’, The SAIS Review of International Affairs, Special Issue on ‘Borders’, 26:1 (Winter-Spring, 2006), pp. 3–10; E. Zureik and M. Salter, ‘Introduction’, in E. Zureik and M. Salter (eds), Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity (Cullompton, Devon and Portland, Oregon: Willan Publishing, 2005), p. 1; D. Newman, ‘Borders and Bordering: Towards an Inter-Disciplinary Dialogue’, p. 181.

9 R. B. J. Walker, ‘Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

10 A. Jarvis and A. Paolini, ‘Locating the State’, in J. Camilleri, A. Jarvis, and A. Paolini (eds), The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995), pp. 1–4.

11 Walker frequently implies the inadequacy of the inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state, see: R. B. J. Walker, ‘Inside/outside’, p. 20, p. 159, p. 161; R. B. J. Walker, ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice’ in R. B. J. Walker and S. H. Mendlovitz (eds), Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990), p. 180; R. B. J. Walker ‘Foreword’ in J. Edkins, N. Persram and V. Pin-Fat (eds), Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), p. xii; R. B. J. Walker, ‘On the Immanence/Imminence of Empire’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31:1 (2002), p. 343; and Walker, After the Globe/Before the World (Unpublished manuscript) p. 1.

12 R. B. J. Walker, ‘International/inequality’, International Studies Review, 4:2 (2002), p. 17.

13 A. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture, 15:1, pp. 11–40. See also A. Mbembe, ‘At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality and Sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture, 12 (2000), pp. 259–84.

14 Z. Laïdi, ‘A World Without Meaning: the Crisis of Meaning in International Politics’ (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 97.

15 L. Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography, 25 (2006), pp. 336–51.

16 D. Bigo, ‘The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies)’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson and Y. Lapid (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 91–116.

17 D. Campbell, ‘Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity’ (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

18 Y. Lapid, ‘Introduction: Identities, Borders, Orders: Nudging International Relations Theory in a New Direction’, in M. Albert et al (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders, p. 2.

19 N. Parker, ‘A Theoretical Introduction: Spaces, Centres, and Margins’, in N. Parker (ed.), The Geopolitics of Europe's Identity: Centres, Boundaries, and Margins (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 3–24.

20 C. Rumford, ‘Introduction: Theorising Borders’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9:2 (2006), pp. 155–69.

21 G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 29.

22 M. J. Shapiro, ‘Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War’ (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

23 W. Walters, ‘Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalising the Border’, Environment and Planning (D): Society and Space, 20:5, (2002), pp. 564–80 and W. Walters, ‘Border/Control’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9:2 (2006), pp. 187–203.

24 R. B. J. Walker, ‘Inside/outside’, p. 159.

25 A. Closs Stephens and N. Vaughan-Williams (eds), Terrorism and the Politics of Response (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (eds), Living, Dying, Surviving: the Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror (New York: Palgrave, 2007); J. Edkins, V. Pin-Fat, and M. J Shapiro, (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2004).

26 A. Neal, ‘Exceptionalism and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism: Liberty, Security, and the War on Terrorism’ (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); M. Neocleous, ‘The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to “Permanent Emergency”’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31 (2006), pp. 191–293; S. Prozorov, ‘X/Xs: Towards a General Theory of the Exception’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 30 (2005), pp. 81–112.

27 J. Butler, ‘Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence’ (London and New York: Verso, 2004); W. Connolly, ‘The Complexity of Sovereignty’, in J. Edkins et al, Sovereign Lives, pp. 23–41.

28 At the time of writing the Homo Sacer series translated into English includes: G. Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); ‘Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive’ (New York: Zone Books, 1999); and ‘State of Exception’, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

29 Ibid., p. 28.

30 Ibid., p. 28.

31 Ibid., p. 28.

32 See G. Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 1 and G. Agamben, ‘Form-of-Life’, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 151.

33 By now there is growing literature on the relationship between Agamben and Foucault, which, especially in the Politics and IR literature, tends to privilege the importance of the latter over the former. See, for example, A. Neal, ‘Cutting Off the King's Head: Foucault's Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of Sovereignty’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 29 (2004),pp. 373–98; A. Neal, ‘Foucault in Guantanano: Towards an Archaeology of the Exception’, Security Dialogue, 39:1 (2006), pp. 31–46; M. Ojakangas, ‘Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault’, Foucault Studies, 2 (May 2005), pp. 5–28.

34 (Quoted in) Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 3.

35 Ibid., p. 4.

36 Ibid., p. 9.

37 Ibid., p. 6 (emphasis in original).

38 Ibid., p. 6.

39 J. Edkins, ‘Trauma and the Memory of Politics’(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 180.

40 J-L Nancy, ‘Abandoned Being’, trans. B. Holmes, in J-L Nancy (ed.), The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 36–47.

41 C. Schmitt, ‘Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty’, trans. G. Schwab, 3rd Edition, (Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 2005).

42 W. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in H. Eiland and M. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) [1940], pp. 389–400.

43 G. Agamben, ‘Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics’, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000), p. 139.

44 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 9 (emphasis added).

45 G. Agamben, ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: the State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder, and Private Life’, German Law Review, 5:5 (2004) p. 612.

46 See A. N. Whitehead, ‘Science and the Modern World: the Lowell Lectures 1925’ (London: Free Association Books, 1985) and S. Kwinter, ‘Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture’ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

47 G. Agamben, ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, p. 612.

48 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 37.

49 Agamben, Ibid, p. 37.

50 Ibid., p. 612.

51 G. Agamben, ‘Interview with Giorgio Agamben’, p. 612.

52 The term ‘bare life’ is Daniel Heller-Roazen's translation of ‘nuda vita’, contained in the sub-title of Agamben's original Homo Sacer: Il Potere Sovrano e la Nuda Vita. However, not all scholars agree with this translation. For example, Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino translate ‘nuda vita’ as ‘naked life’, see ‘Translators’ Notes' in G. Agamben, ‘Means Without End’, p. 143.

53 See, for example, J. Edkins and V. Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’. Edkins and Pin-Fat note that the concept of bare life is contentious and open to different readings. However, they set-up and use the terms ‘bare or naked life’ and ‘zoē’ interchangeably (pp. 6–7). For other examples of this tendency see: J. Butler, ‘Precarious Life’, p. 67; J. Edkins, ‘Missing Persons: Manhattan, September 2001’ in E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (eds), Living, Dying, Surviving; C. Lausten and B. Diken, ‘Zones of Indistinction: Security, Terror, and Bare Life’, Space and Culture, 5:3 (2002), pp. 290–307; A. Norris, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead’ in A. Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); and M. Ojakangas ‘Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault’, Foucault Studies, 2 (May 2005), p. 7.

54 G. Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 109 (Emphasis added).

55 J. Butler, ‘Precarious Life’, p. 67.

56 I must acknowledge my thanks to Alex Murray for this formulation.

57 Agamben, ‘State of Exception’, pp. 87–8.

58 Response of the United States of America, dated 21 October 2005, to the inquiry of the Special Rapporteurs of the UN dated 8 August 2005 pertaining to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, p. 52.

59 United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights, ‘Situation of Detainees in Guantanamo Bay’, 15 February 2006, E/CN.4/2006/120, p. 24.

60 Ibid., pp. 24–5.

61 {http://web.amnesty.org/pages/guantanamobay-index-eng}

62 In June 2004 the Supreme Court held that US courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of detention of foreign nationals in Guantanamo. However, no habeas corpus petition has been decided on the merits by a US Federal Court. E/CN.4/2006/120, p. 15.

63 Ibid., p. 3 (Emphasis added).

64 Ibid., p. 12.

65 E/CN.4/2006/120, p. 13.

66 Ibid., p. 12.

67 Ibid., p. 12.

68 The UN report on the situation of detainees in Guantanamo points out that the US government relies upon the deliberate cultivation of ambiguity in order to flout the Geneva Conventions. E/CN.4/2006/120, p. 23.

69 Butler, ‘Precarious Life’, p. 98.

70 Ibid., p. 74.

71 Ibid., p. 98.

72 G. Agamben, ‘Means Without End’, p. 138.

73 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 111.

74 Butler, ‘Precarious Life’, p. 68.

75 Ibid., p. 68.

76 Ibid., p. 68.

77 W. Connolly, ‘The Complexity of Sovereignty’, in Edkins et al, Sovereign Lives.

78 Ibid., p. 28.

79 Ibid., p. 29.

80 Ibid., p. 29.

81 Ibid., p. 29.

82 For examples of other attempted critiques of Agamben's work along these lines see A. Neal, ‘Cutting Off the King's Head’ and A. Neal, ‘Foucault in Guantanamo’.

83 The notable exception here is the work of Political Geographer Claudio Minca. See C. Minca, ‘Agamben's Geographies of Modernity’, Political Geography, 26:1 (2007), pp. 78–97; C. Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, Geografiska Annaler, 88B:4 (2006), pp. 387–403; and C. Minca, ‘The Return of the Camp’, Progress in Human Geography, 29 (2005), pp. 405–12.

84 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 187.

85 C. Schmitt, ‘Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty’, trans. G. Schwab, 3rd Edition (Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 2005).

86 Ibid, p. 63.

87 W. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in M. Bullock and M. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume One 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA and London: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 236–52.

88 W. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in H. Eiland and M. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press), p. 392.

89 Agamben, ‘State of Exception’, p. 58.

90 The Nazi state proclaimed a state of exception in 1933 but this was never repealed.

91 Agamben, ‘State of Exception’, p. 29.

92 (Quoted in) Agamben, ‘The State of Exception’, p. 19.

93 Ibid., p. 2.

94 Ibid., p. 2.

95 Ibid., p. 2.

96 Ibid., p. 3.

97 I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for this formulation and their critical commentary on Agamben more generally.

98 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 4, p. 9; Agamben, ‘Means Without End’, p. 39; Agamben, ‘State of Exception’, pp. 2–3.

99 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 6, p. 7, p. 8, p. 19, p. 28, p. 83; Agamben, ‘Means Without End’, p. 37; Agamben, ‘State of Exception’, p. 3, pp. 6–7.

100 Ibid., p. 87.

101 D. Bigo, ‘The Ban the Pan and the Exception’, p. 5.

102 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, pp. 18–9.

103 C. Schmitt, ‘The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum’, trans. G. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003).

104 See, for example, M. Salter, ‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31:2 (2006), pp. 167–89.

105 N. Vaughan-Williams, ‘Virtual Border (In)Security’, paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New York, February, 2009. See also F. Debrix, ‘Banning Space: The Nomos of Exception and Virtual Territoriality’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Las Vegas, March 2009.

106 Agamben, Means Without End, p. 37.

107 Ibid., p. 40.

108 Ibid., p. 41.

109 Ibid., pp. 40–1.

110 Ibid., p. 39.

111 Ibid., p. 37.

112 Ibid., p. 40.

113 Ibid., pp. 171–2.

114 Ibid., p. 45.

115 Ibid., p. 174.

116 Ibid., p. 39.

117 Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, p. 388.

118 Ibid., p. 388.

119 E. Weizman, ‘On Extraterritoriality’, in G. Agamben et al (eds), Arxipèlag D'Excepcions: Sobiranies de l'extraterritorialitat (Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona: 2007), p. 13.

120 Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’ (1998), p. 220.

121 BBC News Report, Menezes death a ‘state execution’, 19 September 2005, {http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4261136.stm}

122 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 29.

123 For further elaboration of my argument on the shooting of Menezes in this context see N. Vaughan-Williams, ‘The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: New Border Politics?’ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 32:2 (June 2007), pp. 177–95.

124 Account given by BBC news website, {http://bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5075952.stm} accessed on 14 June 2006.

125 According to police shooting guidelines officers can shoot ‘to stop an imminent threat to life’. However, firearms officers must identify themselves and give oral warnings of their intent to shoot. Shots are only to be fired in the ‘most serious and exceptional circumstances’. See {http://bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5042724.stm.}

126 Account given by BBC news website, {http://bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5075952.stm} accessed on 14 June 2006.

127 Agamben, ‘Homo Sacer’, p. 187 (Emphasis added).

128 P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 7 (Emphasis added).