Mathew Coleman

What Counts as the Politics and Practice of Security, and Where? Devolution and Immigrant Insecurity after 9/11

If critical geopolitics seeks to upend practices of statecraft as well as mainstream research about it, then the danger is that it does so in terms of spatial structures of intelligibility provided by the latter. I deal with a particular aspect of this problem: how, despite broadening the security agenda, critical geopolitics has for the most part treated geopolitics and security as synonymous with foreign policy and foreign policy studies. One important consequence, as feminist political geographers argue, is that the state and statecraft are treated as abstract forces that float above the contingencies of everyday lives and spaces. To contribute to rethinking the scales of geopolitics and security, I look at the devolution of immigration enforcement in the United States after 11 September 2001 (hereinafter 9/11). So-called 287(g) and inherent authority—two chief elements of post-9/11 local-scale immigration enforcement—have come together to constitute a microgeopolitics of risk intensification for undocumented immigrants in the United States. 287(g) deputizes nonfederal officers as immigration agents; inherent authority empowers nonfederal police to enforce immigration law without cross-designation.

Biopolitics, biopower, and the return of sovereignty

In this paper we want to open up for discussion what counts as ‘biopolitics’—a term frequently used by critics and devotees alike to describe the organization of political power and authority in a world after Bretton Woods, the Cold War, and 9/11. We do so on two fronts. On the one hand, we contrast Foucault on war and the normalizing society, Agamben on thanatopolitics, and Hardt and Negri on biopotenza. Our goal here is to draw attention to multiple competing definitions of biopolitics, and in so doing problematize the term as a catchall category to describe either the ‘nonsovereign’ or the ‘postsovereign’ operation of power. On the other hand, while refusing some baseline definition of what counts as biopolitics, we develop our own specifically geographical criticisms of Agamben and Hardt and Negri on the topic of biopolitics. Following Sparkes recent interrogation of postfoundational thought on account of its oftentimes buried metaphysics of geopresence, we submit that Agamben as well as Hardt and Negri deploy biopolitics in both metaphysical and metageographical ways. We contrast this with Foucaults inductive, genealogical, and time-specific and place-specific use of the concept.

A Geopolitics of Engagement: Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, and the Reconfiguration of US Immigration Enforcement

In addition to a geopolitics of containment model of immigration policing at the Mexico-US border, US immigration-related statecraft has incorporated a geopolitics of engagement model in which spaces previously at arms reach from US immigration authorities and at some remove from the border have been aggressively brought into the purview of US immigration enforcement. These newly engaged spaces are at once local (i.e., US cities) and regional (i.e., Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean Basin). This shift has in large part been a response to the tension between trade and security at the border, and thus allows us to see differently how statecraft is being multiplied, reactivated and transformed at and away from the border in light of the war on terrorism and its complex relationship with economic globalisation and the neoliberalisation of the Mexico-US border region.

US Immigration Law and its Geographies of Social Control: Lessons from Homosexual Exclusion during the Cold War

Despite its preoccupation with issues of space, power, and subjectivity, as well as being a prominent home for immigration-related scholarship, geography includes little research on the intersection of immigration and sexuality as well as on their joint regulation through immigration law. This paper looks at the intersection of immigration and sexuality through the lens of the Cold War practice of homosexual exclusion in US immigration law. By drawing linkages between homosexual exclusion and current immigration law, I argue that homosexual exclusion is not an aberrant part of US immigration law history, that immigration law has important social control functions, and that, as a result, immigration researchers in geography attend to immigration control beyond border enforcement per se.

Between Public Policy and Foreign Policy: U.S. Immigration Law Reform and the Undocumented Migrant

Why it is that U.S. lawmakers are so fixated on the undocumented migrant as a figure of threat? By looking to congressional immigration law reform politics during the 1980s and 1990s, I argue that a possible answer lies in the way that the undocumented migrant is tied to both public policy and foreign policy issues and spaces. I also suggest how this representation of the undocumented migrant at a public policy/foreign policy crossroads links up with the recent reconfiguration of U.S. immigration-related statecraft in the form of heightened interior immigration enforcement.

An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene

This article is an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, by Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff. It addresses Povinelli’s approaches to ‘geontologies’ and ‘geontopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, her retheorization of power in the current conditions of late liberalism, and the situation of the inhuman within philosophical and anthropological economies. Povinelli describes a mode of power that she calls geontopower, which operates through the governance of Life and Nonlife. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction.