Exteriorising terror: inside/outside the failing state on 7 July 2005

Despite continuing to emphasise how globalisation reduces the relevance of separate ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ spheres, the British government’s response to the London bombings sought to exteriorise the event as foreign, even though it appeared largely domestic. This helped construct it as unusual, contingent, part of the uncontrollable ‘otherness’ of the ‘foreign’. However, it also drew the response into the arena of British foreign policy, where the ‘failing states’ has been the dominant conceptualisation of insecurity and terrorism, especially since September 11. When the bombings are examined through the ‘failing state’ disturbing and important problems are uncovered. Primarily, the ‘failing state’ discourse deconstructs under the influence of the terrorism in London, revealing that Britain itself is a ‘failing state’ by its own description and producing a generalisation of state ‘failure’. It thereby reveals several possible sites for responding to and resisting the government’s representation

Shame on EU? Europe, RtoP, and the Politics of Refugee Protection

The EU's politics of protecting refugees through deals such as that struck with Turkey in 2016 have been vilified by human rights campaigners. This article asks whether a full engagement with the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) could offer the EU a way out of its current ethical and political malaise. It argues against such a proposition for two reasons. First, the EU already proclaims a long list of values that it asserts both contributed to its founding and continues to guide its actions; the addition of RtoP, which contains no obligations to protect refugees in other territories, would add little. Second, when the logic underlying the EU and RtoP's politics of protection are examined, a similarity emerges which would make such supplementation redundant. Both primarily entail a solidarity with, and a bolstering of, the sovereign capacity of the modern state. All that is offered to refugees, and other suffering populations, is a minimalist humanitarian solidarity through the “outsourcing” of protection. Neither the EU's ethos nor RtoP can therefore provide the firm ethical grounds from which to build protection for the figure most clearly failed by modern states—the refugee

Everyday immigration ethics: Colombia, Venezuela and the case for vernacular response

In the last decade, Venezuelans have faced a range of challenges such that by 2023, nearly 7.2 million have fled, the vast majority hosted within the region. One country particularly stands out: Colombia has accepted over 2.5 million. Colombia’s behaviour does not appear motivated by legal obligations or universal ethical principles; it is hard to make sense of in terms of international ethical and political theory. Rather, Colombian state and society make reference to mundane, localised concepts of friendship, fraternity and the reciprocity of a shared history. Such everyday ethics is generally ignored in existing debates. I argue that immigration ethics could helpfully begin from concrete, everyday ethical behaviour rather than idealisation and abstraction. Instead of initially asking what states and societies should do regarding immigration, we could ask what do they already do, why and how? This article therefore explores how Colombian politicians and civil society actors understood their welcoming actions through an awareness of entangled histories, reciprocity, friendship and solidarity: everyday, vernacular ways in which responsibility-taking is rationalised and practiced. My argument is not that Colombia’s actions are normatively right, or an enactment of immigration justice. Rather, these actions were ambivalent: the messy, pragmatic result of negotiating different, competing responsibilities, principles and emotions. The results were imperfect, heavily gendered, but also unprecedented. Those advocating greater societal responsibility for immigrants would perhaps do best to look beyond the global north, shun the universal and start from local activities founded in vernacular, everyday ethics

Ethics at the airport border: flowing, dwelling, atomising

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on airports, addressing a current gap between literature that focuses on the cosmopolitical experience of the airport and that which focuses on the potentially dehumanising impacts of a technologized, securitised border by investigating the ethos of the space. We do not present an account of how the airport ought to work; rather, we consider what ethical relations and subjectivities are constructed, encouraged and made (im)possible in the airport space. We argue that the airport border assembles a variety of commercial, security and spatial technologies in areas of both ‘flow’ and ‘dwell’ which generate and privilege a particular type of ethical subject – the temporarily suspended, atomised individual. We begin with an understanding of space as produced through plurality and movement, and analyse how atomisation is produced and sustained before reflecting on the potentially dangerous implications of such processes

The political import of deconstruction—Derrida’s limits?: a forum on Jacques Derrida’s specters of Marx after 25 Years, part I

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s

Producing and Governing Community (Through) Resilience

This article argues that the UK government's Community Resilience Programme is less about responding to disasters and more a matter of producing community and governing its behaviour. The passing over of responsibility to local volunteers and organisations is not only about empowerment, but also about forming identities and relationships that can be more efficiently managed and directed. However, this attempt is hamstrung by its basis in a nostalgic, romantic view of community and the effacement of poverty and inequality as central to the vulnerability/resilience binary. The effect may be a more intense government of communities rather than their empowerment through resilience. </jats:p

Ethics at the Airport Border: Flowing, dwelling and atomising

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on airports, addressing a current gap between literature that focuses on the cosmopolitical experience of the airport and that which focuses on the potentially dehumanising impacts of a technologized, securitised border by investigating the ethos of the space. We do not present an account of how the airport ought to work; rather, we consider what ethical relations and subjectivities are constructed, encouraged and made (im)possible in the airport space. We argue that the airport border assembles a variety of commercial, security and spatial technologies in areas of both ‘flow’ and ‘dwell’ which generate and privilege a particular type of ethical subject – the temporarily suspended, atomised individual. We begin with an understanding of space as produced through plurality and movement, and analyse how atomisation is produced and sustained before reflecting on the potentially dangerous implications of such processes.</jats:p