Moving Borders (The Politics of Dirt)

Who can move? Who can speak? Who can act politically? The struggles of refugees and migrants have problematized conventional answers to these questions in a profound manner. Their struggles have demonstrated that, despite the considerable risks and dangers, new political subjects are being formed within securitized sites and border zones. Struggles by refugees and migrants around issues of detention, deportation, regularization and freedom of movement have debunked some of the most cherished assumptions about political subjectivity. While refugees, irregular migrants and the undocumented have long been associated with victimhood, helplessness and dependency, recent theorizations of citizenship challenge these assumptions, showing how migrants negotiate, contest and evade borders and, in doing so, constitute themselves as political subjects. These studies represent a shift in how we conceptualize citizenship, from a formal status to an enactment of political subjectivity through unexpected, unfamiliar and irregular acts. They also enable an appreciation of what a growing and fascinating literature calls ‘noncitizen citizenships’.1

Some commentators, especially those working from the ‘autonomous migration’ perspective, have posited that there is something primary – or, better, uncontrollable, indefinable, uncapturable – about human movement, with borders and their various apparatuses of control coming only afterwards.2 We typically think of migrants confronting borders. Less often do we consider the ways in which borders are also always following migrants, being forced to adapt to the inventiveness of human mobility. For the migrant is not the only mobile agent at the border. The border, too, moves. While there has been some very interesting work on the proliferation of mobile borders in their virtual forms (e.g. biometrics and dataveillance),3 there is comparatively little analysis of the movement of borders in material terms. When I speak of the moving border, I mean exactly that: the movement of the territory – the dirt, the soil – that constitutes the border. In this context, smuggling takes on new and quite literal terms. It is not only people and goods, licit or illicit, that are being smuggled across the border; it is the border itself...

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