Mark B. Salter

The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics

This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community, and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessionary regime. The global visa regime and international borders are crucial in constructing both international mobile populations and international mobile individuals.

When the exception becomes the rule: borders, sovereignty, and citizenship

Borders are a unique political space, in which both sovereignty and citizenship are performed by individuals and sovereigns. Using the work of Agamben and Foucault, this article examines how decisions made at the border alienate each and every traveler crossing the frontier, not simply the ‘sans papiers’ or refugees. The governmentality at play in the border examination relies on an embedded confessionary complex and the ‘neurotic citizen’, as well as structures of identity, documentation, and data management. The state border is a permanent state of exception that clearly demonstrates the importance of biopolitics to the smooth operation of sovereign power.

To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and the Assemblage of Circulation

ABSTRACT The ‘mobilities turn’ in human geography and cognate disciplines has a natural methodological predisposition towards privileging mobile subjects, or the structures, policies, or authorities that constrain them. The article sets out two additions to mobility studies’ theoretical toolbox: the idea of the assemblage and the foregrounding of circulation. The civil aviation sector demonstrates the utility of this frame.

Border security as practice: An agenda for research

The ambition of this special issue is to contribute to contemporary scholarly analyses of border security by bringing more focus onto a specific field of inquiry: the practices of the plurality of power-brokers involved in the securing of borders. Border security is addressed from the angle of the everyday practices of those who are appointed to carry it out; considering border security as practice is essential for shedding light on contemporary problematizations of security. Underscoring the methodological specificity of fieldwork research, we call for a better grounding of scholarship within the specific agencies intervening in bordering spaces in order to provide detailed analyses of the contextualized practices of security actors.

Israeli Biopolitics: Closure, Territorialisation and Governmentality in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

This paper argues for the inclusion of biopolitical practices of mobility regulation into study of Israeli control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). State investment in bifurcated infrastructure, checkpoints, identity documents and a permit system underlines the centrality of closure to occupation. Through closure, Israeli agents of government aim beyond sovereign control of the Israeli-Palestinian border or narrowly conceived security for Israeli subjects. Differentiating, quantifying, documenting and disciplining, closure constitutes biopolitical control of the occupied Palestinian population. Palestinian agents are tasked with minor administrative responsibilities, but only within a framework of Israeli biopolitical control. Our analysis draws on empirical material from fieldwork in the West Bank and three case studies of Palestinian life in East Jerusalem. Findings point towards an Israeli “governmentality” of Palestinian mobility informed by incomplete territorialisation of the West Bank and demographic anxiety.

Theory of the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies

Borders are crucial sites of political and spatial contestation: and in an attempt to evade the lamentation for an ideal model of a single line or the empty insistence of the dominance of that line, this article argues that the trope of the suture better captures the dual world-creating functions of the border. By examining the critical border theories of Agamben, Walker, and Galli, the suture better focuses analytical attention towards the role of borders in the creation of both sovereign states and the system of sovereign states.

The Geographical Imaginations of Video Games: Diplomacy, Civilization, America's Army and Grand Theft Auto IV

Video games are important sites for critical geopolitics, and this article engages in the analysis of Diplomacy, Civilization, Americas Army, and Grand Theft Auto IV in order to understand how the geopolitical imaginary works in popular culture. It makes the argument that the claim to geopolitical and tactical verisimilitude is at odds with the representations of violence and the body in war. It concludes by mapping new directions for the study of video games.

On Exactitude in Disciplinary Science: A Response to the Network Manifesto

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. (Borges, 1998: 325)

Securitisation and Diego Garcia

To advance the on-going debate on Securitisation Theory (ST), we argue that the important questions of audience and attention can be addressed through careful historical study. In an analysis of the securitising moves concerning the American military base on Diego Garcia, we are able to demonstrate that the Copenhagen and Paris Schools are not methodologically incompatible, and empirically that public attention for security issues has a tendency to dissipate without continual discursive investment.

Crowdsourcing: Student-Driven Learning Using Web 2.0 Technologies in an Introduction to Globalization

This review essay proposes a crowdsourcing platform that takes advantage of technologies that students are already using to generate an exciting classroom, to enrich the student experience, and to encourage a sense of global civic responsibility in a large introductory lecture class. After an introductory lecture on a problem, students choose case studies from a predetermined menu. This kind of “choose their own adventure” generative platform is a fresh, stimulating approach that is innovative and can be adapted for both on-campus and distance learning. In traditional lecture courses, the professor makes all of the decisions for what to study, but this platform can enable students to make those decisions, to gain responsibility and earn ownership, and to get feedback about their choices. Thus, students are not just learning to read what someone else chose but learning how to decide themselves what is a good case, what is a good source, and what makes a good course.