All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Exceptionality as the Rule: Liberal Geopolitics and US Immigration Policing After 9/11
| Scholarship by legal philosopher and state theorist Carl Schmitt – inflected through Giorgio Agamben’s recent work on the exceptional qualities of liberal government-by-law – provides insight into the spatiality and substance of contemporary US immigration-related geopolitical practice. Schmitt’s inter-war critique of Wilsonian liberalism, for example, suggested that geopolitical statecraft was operative at the domestic scale and specifically through law. That geopolitical practice percolates at scales other than the inter-state, and that liberal government itself might be a key fund of such practices, are two key facets of contemporary US immigration-related geopolitics.
In this paper I will argue that the 9/11 attacks prompted an extension of already extant immigration policing regime in the US. This regime is based on the exceptional character of the undocumented migrant – who is associated with an impossible array of public and foreign policy crises, including teenage pregnancy, food stamp use, wage depression, urban drug addiction, gang activity, and international terrorism – and responds with a series of immigration procedures which, albeit legislated in law, operate paradoxically by exempting immigration procedure from constitutional oversight and protection. Thus, the events of 9/11 have prompted a strengthening of extra-legal law enforcement at the core of (il)liberal government, operative primarily at the municipal scale. The results of this “interior war on terrorism”, I will argue, are twofold. First, there is the likelihood that immigration policing will be used for general matters of social control that do not relate directly to immigration policing (i.e., policing sexuality, economic productivity, health, etc.). Second, there exists the possibility that an uneven patchwork of interior immigration policing will develop in the US, as certain cities opt out or otherwise challenge the extension of federal immigration policing powers. In sum, the exceptional powers of contemporary immigration-related liberal geopolitics in the US force a reconsideration of what counts as geopolitics and where we might find it.
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