Suchergebnisse

The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell Station, South London, on 22 July 2005, was described as a "tragic mistake" by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. This framing of the killing has come to dominate responses to it in the mainstream media. However, such a framing stymies critical questioning about what happened and colludes in the reproduction of a particular framework of understanding within which sovereign power has retrospectively valorized his death. By contrast this article reads the shooting as one of multiple responses of the British state to the bombings of the London transport network on 7 July 2005 and locates Menezes';s death within the broader context of the global "War on Terror." Rather than a "mistake," the author argues that the shooting is symptomatic of systemic features of Western politics and in particular innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to secure the spatial and temporal borders of sovereign political community.

AbstractThis 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.