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This article understands the United States' 23-year ban on travellers with HIV/AIDS through the lens of state personhood metaphors and the concept of abjection. Using insights from queer theory as a critique of sovereignty, it argues that the practices and discourses that brought about and sustained the ban, from 1987 until its lifting in 2010, relied upon implicit understandings of the state as a national body free from disease. Having shown the heuristic power of metaphors of the state as a body or person, the article goes on to argue that this identification of the American state as a homeostatic and healthy space facilitates the securitisation of mobility and public health and in turn the exclusion of people living with HIV (PLHIV). This rejection of PLHIV, sustained by conservative political discourse as much as by medical screening, nevertheless shows the impossibility of the state attaining its desired purity against HIV/AIDS and its associated sexual and racial imaginaries. The article concludes with an empirical overview of the context of the travel ban through to its lifting in 2010 and a discussion of the role of queer theory as a critique of state sovereignty.

Recent work on borders has tended to overlook border control actors, practices and rationalities in West Africa. States in this region are considered origin and transit countries for irregular migration, and the Sahel region that they straddle is widely seen as an emerging haven of terrorist activity. This article discusses one response to these migration and terrorism threats by the Islamic Republic of Mauritania: a programmme to build new border posts with help from global partners that include the European Union and the International Organization for Migration. The article builds on Bourdieusian approaches in critical security studies, but draws on concepts from actor-network theory to account for the heterogeneity of border control actors and the mobility of different knowledges about how to control borders. Drawing on ethnographic research in Mauritania, the article discusses four 'actants' of border security: the border posts, the landscape, the biometric entry–exit system and training practices. Throughout, the article highlights field dynamics of competition, cooperation and pedagogy, also emphasizing the role of non-human agency. The article concludes with a reflection on the link between border control and statebuilding, suggesting that this fusion is a broader paradigm of security provision in the global South.