Citizenship Studies

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Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics

William Walters

To cite this article: William Walters (2004) Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics, Citizenship
Studies, 8:3, 237-260, DOI: 10.1080/1362102042000256989

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Citizenship Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, September 2004, pp. 237–260

Secure Borders, Safe Haven,

Domopolitics
WILLIAM WALTERS

What implications do emerging spaces, concepts and identities of security have

for the practice of citizenship? This article examines security and citizenship in
the UK. As its focus it takes a recent White Paper published by the British
government called Secure Borders, Safe Haven (2002). Two arguments are
developed. First, it is argued that with this document, and the reforms it
proposes for immigration, asylum and citizenship in the UK, we are in the
presence of ‘domopolitics’. Whereas political economy is descended from the
will to govern the state as a household, domopolitics aspires to govern the state
like a home. Consequently, domopolitics and liberal political economy exist in
tension with one another. Second, we need new forms of comparison if we are
to adequately map domopolitics. To this end, the article compares the domopol-
itics of the homeland and similar securitizations not with the interstate security
games of the Cold War, but with the governmentality of social security.

Pauperism is mobility: against the need for territorial sedantariza-

tion, for fixed concentrations of population, it personifies the
residue of a more fluid, elusive sociality, impossible either to
control or utilize: vagabondage, order’s itinerant nightmare, be-
comes the archetype of disorder and the antisocial: ‘the vagabond,
the original type of all the forces of evil, is found wherever illegal
or criminal activities go on: he is their born artisan’. (Procacci,
1991, p. 161, her emphasis)1

Gates cut into the Wall’s continuity, truces of going and coming:
exchanges with the idea of outside, with the field and the
garden. Instants of risk and betrayal, capture and farewell. Antic-
ipations of journeys and pilgrimages. John Bunyan. Apertures
between life and death: the path out to the dissenters’ burial-
ground. To Blake and Defoe in Bunhill Fields. To the madhouses,
hospitals and markets that sustain, and give meaning to life with-
in the walls. To Curtain Row, Shoreditch, and the first plays of
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson … Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate,

William Walters, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Carleton University,

Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada; e-mail: wwalters@ccs.carleton.ca

ISSN 1362-1025 Print; 1469-3593 Online/04/030237-24  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd 237
DOI: 10.1080/1362102042000256989
 William Walters

Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Newgate, Ludgate, Billingsgate …

(Sinclair, 2003, p. 102)
Every society has its diagram(s). (Deleuze, 1988, p. 35)

Secure Borders, Safe Haven

On 7 February 2002 the UK government released a White Paper called Secure
Borders, Safe Haven (Home Office, 2002).2 It came as part of the Labour
government’s promise to ‘modernize’ the nation’s ‘immigration and asylum’
policy. Set against the backdrop of a number of troubling developments, the
document was widely anticipated. For it was in part a response to the widespread
public perception, fuelled by the sensationalist journalism of large segments of
the popular and middle-brow press, of a crisis of mass ‘asylum-seeking’.
Nowhere was this more dramatically exhibited than in nightly newscasts and
daily frontpages concerning Sangatte, a Red Cross centre near Calais in France.
These revealed migrants, who were housed in this centre, desperately climbing
onto freight and passenger trains in a bid to ‘illegally’ enter the UK through the
Channel Tunnel. By 2001 ‘Sangatte’ had come to symbolize for many a country
that had become a ‘soft touch’ for ‘bogus asylum-seekers’; a desirable desti-
nation compared with most of its EU partners.
But the White Paper was also drafted in the wake of serious civil disturbances
in the cities of Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, all of them former industrial
centres in Northern England. These disturbances pitted young Asians against the
police (Kundnani, 2001; Young, 2003). But their overall context was one where
racist gangs had perpetrated a series of attacks on Asian communities. The
events in these cities drew immediate comparisons with the so-called ‘inner-city
riots’ during the early years of the Thatcher regime. These were amongst the
symptoms of a failing system which the White Paper proposed to fix.
The White Paper contains a number of proposals as part of its modernization
mission. One of the most prominent is its discussion of citizenship and
nationality. ‘To ensure social integration and cohesion in the UK, we need to
develop a stronger understanding of what citizenship really means’ (p. 10). It
diagnoses a situation where debate about ‘shared values’ and ‘civic identity’ is
weak and where entry into Britain has become little more than a ‘bureaucratic
exercise’, bereft of any connection to membership in a national community. To
this end it proposes ‘language teaching’ and ‘light touch education for citizen-
ship for those making a home in the UK’ in the expectation that this ‘will
strengthen the ability of new citizens to participate in society and engage
actively in our democracy’ (p. 11). This is to be accompanied by a ‘simple
examination’, a citizenship test as found in traditional countries of immigration
like Canada. There is also the proposal for citizenship ceremonies to ‘celebrate’
the acquisition of citizenship and make it more meaningful.
A second feature of the White Paper is its concern to reform the asylum
system. Significant emphasis is placed on counteracting its ‘abuse’, and more
generally, combating the rising problem of ‘illegal entry’, ‘illegal working’, and
‘people trafficking’. Amongst the priorities it sets are to rationalize the asylum
process to make it work more quickly on an ‘end-to-end’ basis, streamline the
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 Domopolitics

appeals process, and simplify deportation procedures for unsuccessful cases. The
aim is to create ‘a quick, high-quality, highly-managed system, which will assist
those in genuine need of protection. And enable us to return swiftly those not in
need of protection’ (p. 15). In addition to this rationalization of the asylum
process, further improvements to border controls are proposed, including more
overseas liaison work by British officials, cooperation with European partners,
and pre-travel screening and intelligence-related activity.
The White Paper draws an equation between enhanced immigration and
asylum controls and an improved sense of citizenship and community within
British society. ‘Strong civic and community foundations are necessary if people
are to have the confidence to welcome asylum-seekers and migrants. They must
trust the systems their governments operate and believe they are fair and not
abused’ (p. 3). In other words, a modernized regime of immigration control is to
promote ‘integration with diversity in modern Britain’—the subtitle of the White
Paper. For all its language of modernization, the White Paper is, at least in this
respect, still within the racialized logic that has marked Britain’s approach to
immigration policy since the 1960s. This is an approach based on the fear that
‘uncontrolled’ immigration will inevitably result in ‘racial tension’ (cf. Geddes,
2003, p. 36). Strict immigration controls are therefore rationalized not as a wilful
expression of state racism, but as interventions that, on the contrary, are to
improve ‘race relations’ (Baldaccini, 2003, p. 1).
But if the White Paper continues a relatively well-established convention that
sees immigration as a threat to domestic order that calls for careful management,
it also contains a second, more positive view of migration. In this second view
we find migration affirmed as ‘a consistent feature of human history’; a force
which can bring ‘huge benefits: increased skills, enhanced levels of economic
activity, cultural diversity and global links’ (p. 9). To this end the White Paper
proposes to strengthen existing ‘routes’ as well as create new ones, by which
certain forms of migrants might enter the UK much more easily. These include
a Highly Skilled Migrant Programme ‘to enable the most talented migrants to
work in the UK’ (p. 12), but also improved access for certain forms of
low-skilled, casual work. Operating at different ends of the employment spec-
trum, both initiatives are to improve the supply of labour to the UK economy,
to ‘meet the challenge’ of a globalizing environment.
As in many Western European countries, British immigration policy had taken
the position since the early 1970s that there was no longer a significant need for
‘primary (economic) migration’ (Baldaccini, 2003, p. 1). Because it makes a
strong argument for a more positive approach to economic migration, and
because it lays this over what had previously been an almost exclusive concern
with tough asylum measures, the White Paper has been hailed as part of a
‘remarkable shift in immigration policy and practice in the UK’ (Düvell and
Jordan, 2003, p. 302).

Governing Security
One could certainly read Secure Borders, Safe Haven as an important moment
within the history of UK immigration policy. It could also be read in light of
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 William Walters

New Labour and its themes of modernization, community, and social inclusion
(Young, 2003). However, my purpose in this paper is somewhat different. I want
to use the White Paper as the basis for a discussion of the governance of
security. My argument is that we can relate Secure Borders to the emergence of
a relatively new domain of concepts and practices, a space which is contributing
to a redefinition of the relationship between state, citizenship and territory. What
is this space? Empirically speaking, it is identified by different names in different
places. Perhaps its most visible expression is in the United States with the
complex of policies, programmes, but also subjectivities and identities associated
with ‘Homeland Security’. But it is echoed in many other national and regional
settings. The Canadian government has recently created a new portfolio for
Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. Its task has been framed as ‘Secur-
ing an Open Society’ (Privy Council Office, 2004). In the European context it
finds its institutional expression in the programme which began with the
Schengen agreement, but which has now been taken up by the European Union
as it attempts to remake itself as an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’
(European Commission, 1998).
The relative novelty of this emerging space is perhaps reflected in the
problems one encounters in naming it. Political activists sometimes speak
disparagingly of Fortress Europe or Fortress Australia, drawing attention to a
certain siege mentality which invests it (Klein, 2003). But while Fortress X may
be valid as a polemical intervention, the image of walled nations and continents
only vaguely conveys a sense of the mechanisms of power at stake. Ole Waever
and his colleagues speak of ‘societal security’ emphasizing that the focus of
insecurity has shifted from the geopolitical space of interstate relations to threats
to society (Waever, 1995, 1996). This suggests a useful history of what they call
‘securitization’. But the concept of societal security embodies the old state/so-
ciety dichotomy, a formulation which fails to do justice to the mutability of
political space and the inventiveness of power.
Bigo’s concept of an ‘internal security field’ is an important contribution since
it foregrounds questions of bureaucratic power. According to Bigo we are facing
a situation where policing and security agencies have successfully institutional-
ized a new domain where otherwise separate activities and concerns are linked
in a seemingly natural manner. He speaks of a ‘“security continuum” that
stretches from terrorism to regulation of asylum rights, including drugs, action
against crime, clandestine immigration, and migratory flows’ (Bigo, 1994,
p. 164). Within this continuum we see a ‘transfer of illegitimacy’, a transfer that
operates not just at the level of signification but institutional practice, such that
questions of asylum and migration become ‘security’ much more than human
rights or citizenship questions. Increasingly this continuum is organized on a
transnational basis (Bigo, 2000).

Domopolitics
The first aim of this paper is to contribute to the task of mapping this emergent
space of security and offering some ways to analyse the kinds of rationalities,
subjectivities, knowledges and spatialities that it sets in motion. I want to suggest
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 Domopolitics

that with a document like Secure Borders, Safe Haven we are in the presence of
domopolitics.
What is domopolitics? Foucauldian genealogies of government have noted
that the line of emergence which gives us modern political economy can be
traced back to the Greek notion of oikos, meaning household. Until the middle
of the eighteenth century one finds in texts of political oeconomy an image of
rule in which the state is conceived as a vast household requiring the wise
stewardship of a patriarchal sovereign (Dean, 1999, p. 201). This householding
image of governance is largely displaced with the rise of liberalism: ‘the
economy’ comes to be seen as a more or less autonomous sphere, possessing its
own immanent laws and regularities, and calling not for regulation in all its
details but indirect government at a distance. However, Paul Veyne reminds us
that history has generated a great diversity of ways of governing a people:
‘practices for dealing with “the governed” may vary so widely over time that the
so-called governed have little more in common than the name’ (Veyne, 1997,
p. 150). If modern political economy echoes the project of government in the
image of the household, domopolitics refers to the government of the state (but,
crucially, other political spaces as well) as a home.
The Latin word domus means house or home. It is closely related to the verb
domo which can be literally translated as ‘to tame’ or ‘break in’ (today we would
say domesticate). However, it was also possible to use the word domo more
metaphorically: to speak of the act of conquering or ‘subduing men or communi-
ties’.3 I want to propose domopolitics as an analytic which captures certain
significant features and tendencies within the political meaning and governance
of security today.
Domopolitics implies a reconfiguring of the relations between citizenship,
state, and territory. At its heart is a fateful conjunction of home, land and
security. It rationalizes a series of security measures in the name of a particular
conception of home. Of course there is a history to the understanding of
homeland and a notable variance in its meaning across countries (Robin and
Stråth, 2003). However, in a great many of these uses it has powerful affinities
with family, intimacy, place: the home as hearth, a refuge or a sanctuary in a
heartless world; the home as our place, where we belong naturally, and where,
by definition, others do not; international order as a space of homes—every
people should have (at least) one; home as a place we must protect. We may
invite guests into our home, but they come at our invitation; they don’t stay
indefinitely. Others are, by definition, uninvited. Illegal migrants and bogus
refugees should be returned to ‘their homes’. Home as a place to be secured
because its contents (our property) are valuable and envied by others. Home as
a safe, reassuring place, a place of intimacy, togetherness and even unity, trust
and familiarity. Hence domopolitics embodies a tactic which juxtaposes the
‘warm words’ (Connolly, 1995, p. 142) of community, trust, and citizenship,
with the danger words of a chaotic outside—illegals, traffickers, terrorists; a
game which configures things as ‘Us vs. Them’ (Stasiulis, 1997, p. 203). Bigo
is right to suggest that the politics of internal and transnational security both
mobilizes and plays upon fear and unease to legitimate itself (Bigo, 2002). But
241
 William Walters

besides these negative forces, it also plays upon the positive image of home.
These are some of the contours of the domological.
But there is a second aspect to domopolitics—domo as conquest, taming,
subduing; a will to domesticate the forces which threaten the sanctity of home.
Domopolitics is not reducible to the Fortress impulse of building walls, strength-
ening the locks, updating the alarm system. It contains within itself this second
tendency which takes it outwards, beyond the home, beyond even its own
‘backyard’ and quite often into its neighbours’ homes, ghettos, jungles, bases,
slums. Once domopolitics extends its reach, once it begins to take the region or
even the globe as its strategic field of intervention, then the homeland becomes
the home front, one amongst many sites in a multifaceted struggle.4

Towards a Genealogy of Security

A second objective of the paper is to make a contribution to the genealogy of
security. More specifically, I want to place the emergence of domopolitics within
a trajectory that has hitherto been overlooked. Perhaps because of their back-
ground in academic international relations, many authors locate the rise of
Schengenland, Homeland and other securitizations within something we might
call a post-Cold War (or, more recently, a ‘post-9/11’) narrative. Refugees,
organized crime, drugs-smuggling, terrorism and people trafficking are seen as
occupying a security field that opened up with the demise of the Cold War.
Increasingly these figures constitute the new enemy, the new threat that under-
writes the politics and policies of security.5
Practices and experiences of internal and transnational security, then, are
typically compared with the logics of international security. But this move tends
to overlook the fact that the twentieth century saw other methods of actualizing
security. Perhaps the most notable of these is social security. The state is
‘polymorphous’ (Mann, 1993). Most western states were welfare states at the
same time that they were national security states (but also bureaucratic states,
capitalist states, patriarchal states, and so on; Brown, 1995). But there is an
academic convention which tends to keep the analysis of social security largely
separate from national, and today transnational security. The former is the
domain of the social policy specialist, the latter the preserve of international
relations. It is this division that I want to challenge here. Placing questions of
social security and internal security, welfare and domopolitics within the same
frame of analysis will enable us to see the latter in a new light. (While it is not
a path I follow here, it could also facilitate a new perspective on the meaning
of social security as well.) Comparing social and internal security is uncommon
but, it seems to me, there are at least two good reasons why this is a valid and
timely move.
First, both social security and domopolitics are governmentalities. That is,
both are concerned with the government of population (Foucault, 1991a). But as
long as the analysis of domopolitics remains confined to the field of international
security studies, this is not adequately addressed. By comparing domopolitics to
social security, I want to focus attention on the particular ways in which
domopolitics governs population. How does it understand risk? Our time is not
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the first to be transfixed with the prospect of dangerous mobilities. In today’s

response to asylum-seekers do we hear echoes of the treatment of the vagrant
and the pauper? How does it divide and classify its subjects? What kind of
security does it promise and for whom? How does it appear when interrogated
as a response to poverty, both national and global?
Second, I want to make this comparison because both social security and
domopolitics are not simply public policies pursued by the state. They are much
more: they need to be understood in terms of diagrams. Rajchman has clarified
the concept of the diagram which comes to us from Foucault via Deleuze (1988).
The diagram expresses ‘something at work in many different institutions and
situations, spread out in several countries, working in a manner not given in the
map of social policies and prescriptions, planned as such by no one’ (Rajchman,
1999, p. 47). Foucault gives us the panopticon as a diagram of the disciplinary
society, revealing how a certain set of techniques and logics—ways of organiz-
ing space and time, accumulating bodies, regulating activities, and so forth—can
be found at work across the social space during the nineteenth century—in
prisons, schools, factories, barracks and hospitals.
Welfare states did not dispense with discipline, but combined it with other
diagrams. According to Ewald (1991), the welfare societies of the twentieth
century had insurance as their pre-eminent diagram. He recognizes this in noting
that insurance was for these societies simultaneously an abstract technology, a
technology of risk and a political imaginary. In other words, social insurance,
and social security more generally, provided a mechanism through which an
important set of identities and practices were established. This included a
definition of the state as a welfare state caring for all its members who are, in
turn, constituted as ‘social’ citizens bearing certain social rights and responsibil-
ities; a definition of society as a solidaristic collective whose members bear
certain risks together; a definition of the family as a household unit comprising
a gendered division of paid and caring work; and so on. Through insurance, the
state was crystallized in this particular form.
My point is that domopolitics should also be read in terms of its diagrams.
With its diagrams of crime, vulnerability, threat, and abuse, its technologies of
‘managed’ borders, identity checks, and its archipelagos of detention, domopol-
itics is proving increasingly influential in defining who we are, what kind of state
it is that governs us, how we are to be governed.
To be sure, the extent to which domopolitics has managed to diagram relations
of power and governance varies from one country to the next. It is probably fair
to say that domopolitics is most intense in the United States. There, where social
security was relatively limited in its capacity to diagram the state and the citizen
(perhaps we could say it never really displaced the diagram of the frontier and
the homestead), where the martial identity of the national security state was
perhaps far stronger than that of the welfare state, domopolitics goes hyperbolic
and functions as a master identity and narrative for the state, a dominant
overcoding. That said, given the demise of the ethos if not the institutions of
social security in Western Europe, domopolitics currently offers an alternative
pole to redefine the state and citizenship there as well.
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 William Walters

None of this is meant to suggest that the game of internal security is about to
supplant that of social security. What I am arguing is that the games of
Homeland Security and Secure Borders are in competition for political capital,
fiscal resources, and public space with the social state. Domopolitics does point
to a reordering and a re-hierarchicizing of political priorities.
Having proposed domopolitics as an analytic for certain developments in the
governance of security, and suggested that we can bring out its rarity through
certain comparisons with the model of social security, let us now return to the
White Paper. To what extent is domopolitics expressed in Secure Borders, Safe
Haven? Conversely, what empirical light can this particular text shed on
contemporary changes in the governance of security and citizenship?

Diagnosing Secure Borders, Safe Haven

Mobile Worlds
[W]hat does the UK need to do to ensure that it has the people
it needs to prosper in the world economy? … Alongside increas-
ing flows of people, developed economies are becoming more
knowledge-based and more dependent on people with skills and
ideas. Migrants bring new experiences and talents that can widen
and enrich the knowledge base of the economy. Human skills and
ambitions have become the building blocks of successful econom-
ies and the self-selection of migrants means they are likely to
bring valuable ideas, entrepreneurship, ambition and energy.
(p. 11)
We noted above that the White Paper represents a cautious opening towards
migration into the UK. But if it makes a positive case for certain forms of
migration, it does this according to a particular form of neoliberal reasoning—
within a discourse of globalization. This recognition is important since the
perception of the state as an entity located within an increasingly globalized
world will prove crucial for understanding how insecurity is now being defined.
The discourse of globalization we find in the White Paper is now very familiar
(Larner, 1988; Bourdieu, 1998; Hindess, 1998). It insists that economic life is
increasingly global. States are unavoidably located within global economic
spaces, traversed by their movements. The pre-eminent task of government is to
attract and channel flows of resources, whether investment, goods, services, and
now flows of (the right kind of) people into one’s territory. Gone, for the most
part, is the image which underpinned social security: the figure of a coherent
national economic system linked in turn to a social order comprised of strata or
classes. Gone is its counterpart, an international order populated by discrete,
bounded socio-economic systems engaged in mutual relations of trade and
cooperation. In its place we find a horizontal, or perhaps ‘multilevel’ space
criss-crossed by movements, flows, and forces. In this context the governance of
the state is reimagined to be like the running of a business: globalization is a
world of profound ‘challenges’ but also great ‘opportunities’ which the well-
managed state is to exploit through its constantly-shifting market ‘strategies’.
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 Domopolitics

Social security designated different categories of person based on income and

occupation. The Keynesian construction and management of the macroeconomy
and the redistribution of income and risk across a hierarchical space of classes
were central features of its production of security. What kind of population space
does Secure Borders imagine? Class is no longer a privileged governmental
category within in its globalizing world. There is certainly a recognition of a
global poor, located in developing countries whose needs should also be
considered within discussions of ‘managed migration’. Likewise there is ac-
knowledgement of certain groups of citizens ‘who are excluded from meaningful
participation in society’, such as certain segments within ‘white working class
communities’ (p. 10). In light of the disturbances in declining industrial areas,
their situation and possible antagonism towards immigration cannot for a
moment be ignored. But on the whole the somewhat static concept of class has
given way to a dynamic notion of flow.
We need to bring order to the disparate flows of people by
developing legal routes of entry for those who will benefit our
economy and those who need our protection. The traffickers
thrive on disorder and disharmony. Where there is a demand they
will seek to meet it and where there are differences they will
exploit them. (p. 26)
The task of governing is to disentangle, to tap the energies of one flow while
taming and suppressing the other. In order to do this government must itself
become more transnational. Hence, the recognition of the need to work ‘with
European partners and others to strengthen the EU’s common borders and
enhance border controls’ (p. 30). But given that the national control of immi-
gration has been powerfully and rhetorically cast as a limit test of state
sovereignty in the UK, any move to a more transnationalized form of policing
migration runs the risk of politicization.

Insecure Societies
What is the nature of the insecurities which underpin the White Paper? How are
they understood? Here again a comparison with the game of social security is
helpful. For it reveals significant mutations—and absences—in the way that
security and insecurity are framed.
Mobile worlds are open worlds. But this openness, this form of freedom that
is associated with the political construction of extended social and economic
spaces renders them vulnerable. ‘At the heart of our challenge lie those who will
take advantage of global movements to traffic or smuggle migrants’ (p. 16). The
danger is posed by the proliferation of illicit and clandestine mobilities—the
movement of illegal immigrants, drugs, biohazards, contraband, weapons, terror-
ists, and so on.
The White Paper certainly engages in Bigo’s ‘transfer of illegitimacy’:
immigration and asylum are tainted by their semiotic and institutional proximity
to a range of mobile ‘bads’ which exploit the liberalized spaces of globalization.
But there is more we can say about its production of insecurity. Perhaps one of
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 William Walters

the most striking things about the discussion of security one finds in the White
Paper, but also in most documents of this kind, is the non-social character of its
problematic. What do I mean by this? Here the comparison with social security
is instructive.
In framing his famous blueprint for social security, William Beveridge
identified ‘five giants’ which any truly ‘comprehensive policy of social progress’
would have to defeat. These were Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and
Idleness (1942, p. 6). By linking these scourges together in this way, we should
observe in passing how Beveridge contributed to the territorialization of ‘social
security’ as a particular security field. But the point I want to emphasize here
concerns the way these problems were understood, and the space and logic of
governance this opened up.
Despite his use of vaguely Victorian language in naming his giants, Beveridge
situates them within a social space. The nineteenth century located the causes of
unemployment or squalor largely in an explicitly moral conception of persons
and their communities. The condition of the poor was seen to be linked to moral
defects and bad habits.6 While twentieth-century social policy retains a moral
view of its subjects (for example, its gendered view of the family), it is no longer
prepared to reduce its explanation of their condition to their personal actions.
Instead, and this is what distinguishes it, modern social policy identifies various
social and economic processes which are the underlying cause and explanation
for poverty, unemployment, ignorance and so on. The theorists of social security
aspired to many ends, not least, as Keynes observed, the aversion of a fuller
socialization of private property (Cutler et al., 1986, p. 26). But foremost among
these was to govern not primarily by shaping the conduct of individuals, as was
the case with philanthropy, but by acting at the level of the social, that is,
engaging with these social and economic processes. Here the apparatus of social
insurance was pre-eminent as a technique which would redistribute income over
time and between classes, and socialize risk across the social/national body. But
other techniques were equally important, including the complex of ‘Keynesian’
measures to manage the national economy, and national schemes for every-
thing—from mass education to public broadcasting.
Secure Borders, Safe Haven also reveals a land stalked by giants: ‘people
trafficking’, ‘illegal working’, ‘war criminals’,7 and ‘abuse’ of the asylum
system. But they do not inhabit a ‘social’ domain. There are certainly specific
references to what we might call the wider structural context. For instance,
developments associated with ‘globalization’—such as advances in communica-
tions technology and transportation—are cited as underpinning the rising mo-
bility of people (p. 23). Likewise, ‘our strong economic position’ as well as
historical cultural factors are given as reasons why the UK appears as such a
popular destination for migrants (p. 24). And, not surprisingly, it is recognized
that flows of refugees are the consequence of violence and instability in many
parts of the world. But the White Paper is hesitant about whether these
fundamental causes of displacement might be managed. ‘Globalisation’, it
observes, ‘means that issues previously considered “domestic” are now increas-
ingly international’ (p 25). But the reverse is not the case, apparently. There is
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 Domopolitics

nothing to suggest that ‘international’ problems might be amenable to some of

the methods used to bring a form of social security to domestic spaces.8
It is well beyond the scope of this paper to outline a ‘social’ approach to the
issues which the White Paper tackles.9 It would not be a global welfare state, but
it would have to be genuinely global approach, engaging other states and
non-state actors. But as with social security, it would also begin by recognizing
that the mass movement of people is tied to all manner of systemic social and
economic factors. As such a ‘social’ approach would seek to go beyond the
reactive stance of ‘immigration policy’ and ‘border control’. It would take
responsibility for the role which the practice of Western countries—from the
regimes of agriculture, trade and finance they have encouraged to their arms
industries and security games—play in producing and reproducing the conditions
of poverty, distress and conflict which set in motion the movements which the
White Paper seeks to ‘manage’. This is not to say that local regimes are
blameless or helpless pawns. But it is to decry the way in which documents like
Secure Borders discuss issues like global movements and their consequences for
the UK in almost total isolation from wider issues of social justice and global
inequality. This allows them to utilize a phrase like ‘managed migration’ as
though they are tackling the ‘bigger picture’, and adopting a more comprehen-
sive approach. But the fact is that ‘managing’ migration largely amounts to a
more rational and holistic approach to preventing ‘uninvited’ people from
entering the UK.
But if we have established that the giants of the White Paper are not accounted
for in a fully social or structural manner, the question remains: how are they
understood? What kind of problem-space do they inhabit? Certain clues can be
found in the very language used to diagram the problem-space—illegal immi-
gration, people trafficking, abuse of the asylum system. Insecurity is bound up
with themes of mobility: it is the movement, the circulation, the presence of
unauthorized bodies which have violated the borders of the nation-state. But
insecurity is connected at the same time to criminality, with activities occupying
a domain outside the law, transgressing ‘our’ values, ‘our’ way of life. We are
confronted with illegal acts: it’s almost as though our response to them needs no
further explanation. Domopolitics: ‘our’ homes are at risk.
The White Paper hence illustrates the attempt to govern central aspects of
global migration by strategies of criminalization and illegalization, to ‘govern
through crime’ (Simon, 1997). Others have explored these productions of
illegality so I won’t analyse the tactics here (De Genova, 2002; Berman, 2003;
Sharma, 2003). The one point I do want to make concerns the ambiguities and
tensions embedded in this emergent, quasi-criminal space. David Garland (1996)
has observed how contemporary discourses of crime control can be analysed in
terms of two poles. The first involves a ‘criminology of the self’. Here the
criminal act is a rational act perpetrated by utility-maximizing subjects; a
response to ‘opportunities’ for crime, such as unlocked cars or houses. The
second involves a ‘criminology of the other’. Here there is a demonization of the
criminal. He or she is monstrous, evil. A tautology is set up so that their acts
both explain and are explained by their location outside the norms, structures and
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codes of civil society. The appropriate response must be to defend ourselves,

incarcerate or eliminate these wrong-doers.
I think we can find both these currents at work within the White Paper, and
many documents like it. Both are particularly evident around the question of
trafficking. We find the criminology of the self when it is observed that the
‘traffickers thrive on disorder and disharmony. Where there is a demand they
will seek to meet it and where there are differences [between national immi-
gration systems] they will exploit them’ (p. 26). A large part of the justification
for harmonized border controls at the EU level, or stiffer penalties for migration-
related offences, follows from this depiction of traffickers (and migrant ‘flows’
in general) as rational movements which seek out the point of least resistance.
But casting its long shadow over the entire White Paper is the criminology of
the other. Foregrounded here we find the image of the traffickers and smugglers
as evil predators who ruthlessly exploit the most vulnerable. Within the domo-
politics of Homeland Security it is of course the figure of the terrorist who has
recently displaced the drugs-smuggler as the embodiment of evil. Complex
social and geopolitical questions are obscured by an emphasis on bad persons,
and the task becomes one of rooting them out. These evil Others are thus
important for two reasons. First, they are used to explain why these troubling
things are happening. Second, they provide the project with a moral grounding.
Various ‘wars’ on traffickers and illegals allow Western governments to position
themselves as a force for good, acting in many cases to protect the human rights
of illegal immigrants who are cast as victims of sinister forces, but most of all
to protect their citizens who, in a secondary effect, also become subjectified as
potential victims.
At this point we should note that the White Paper actually combines two
conceptions of in/security, corresponding to its twofold conception of migration.
Both oikos and domus are present. Oikos is there as the desire for economy and
utility: the need for an efficient migration system which can identify and harness
the ‘human skills and ambitions’ of migrants to promote the economic security
of the state. Domus is present as the quest for domesticity and order: the
protection of the homeland in a world of dangerous mobilities.
In conjunction they produce a particular politics of mobility whose dream is
not to arrest mobility but to tame it; not to build walls, but systems capable of
utilizing mobilities, tapping their energies and in certain cases deploying them
against the sedentary and ossified elements within society; not a generalized
immobilization, but a strategic application of immobility to specific cases
coupled with the production of (certain kinds of) mobility. This becomes clearer
as we consider other aspects of our diagram.

Dividing Practices
Disentangling the many motives—from seeking better economic
prospects to seeking protection—which people have for coming
to the UK is not always easy. But we need to do more to ensure
that clear, managed routes into the UK exist so that people do not
use inappropriate routes to effect their entry. (p. 13)
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The pre-twentieth-century history of poverty and unemployment policy in many

Western countries reveals how charities and parishes were perplexed and
confounded by the white noise of the poor (Harris, 1972; Walters, 2000).
Whenever relief work or charitable funds were made available, they were
typically inundated with the great multitude of the indigent. The desire to help
the ‘worthy’, the ‘genuinely unemployed’ was repeatedly frustrated by the
supreme difficulty of establishing who they were. Hence, the administrators of
poverty invented all sorts of tests—breaking stones, interviews to discern a
person’s character, visits to the home—all without much success. Social in-
surance is typically regarded today as one of the great pillars of a ‘universalistic’
approach to social welfare. But when it was first taken up within public policy
at the start of the twentieth century, one of the great hopes it carried was to be
a new kind of dividing practice, one that would work efficiently and automati-
cally. Only those whose stamped insurance booklets could prove they were
‘regular’ workers would be eligible for insurance benefits when sick or unem-
ployed. The irregular would be weeded out and redistributed to less dignified
forms of support (Squires, 1990).
It seems this will to classify and divide immiserated populations is alive and
well, not just within modern social policy, but in the response to mass migration
(den Boer, 1995). The will to divide appears as a core element within modern
governmentality. Dividing practices appear to be deeply ingrained in modern
political culture, and capable of migrating across historical periods and social
sites. ‘Over half of people who apply for asylum are currently found not to be
in need of any form of international protection’ (p. 13). Official definitions of the
refugee emphasize persons who have fled from political violence. But political
and economic factors in mass migrations are frequently tightly interwoven.
‘Political violence is often triggered by worsening economic conditions, and
economic hardship often results from the exercise of repressive political power’
(Overbeek, 1995, p. 15; quoted in Stasiulis, 1997, p. 204).
Never mind this complex interrelation of the political and the economic in the
production of exodus. Nor that the decision to pack one’s bags and move
thousands of miles facing all sorts of life-threatening risks in the process is never
made lightly. If this complex reality doesn’t fit our moral categories, we’ll make
it. We’ll filter the white noise of multiple mobilities and establish clear ‘routes’
and ‘channels’. If we can just identify the genuine refugee, or the high-skilled
migrant, this will allow us to deal with the others, the ‘bogus’, with greater
confidence from the public and thus with more firmness. Just as with the old
poor law, we’ll send the undeserving and the illegitimate on their way. The
difference is the next parish is no longer just down the road. Instead, it’s a
specially-chartered plane-trip to the nearest applicable ‘safe third country’ or
most recent ‘country of transit’.10

Reterritorialize the State—Control the Borders!

The challenge here is to allow those who qualify for entry to pass
through the controls as quickly as possible, maximising the time
spent on identifying those who try to enter clandestinely or by
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presenting forged or stolen documents. Increasingly, we are

looking at new methods of detecting and deterring. (p. 17)

One of the most significant features of the diagram of domopolitics is the

equation it draws between security and the exercise of border controls over the
movement of people and goods which it grasps from the perspective of mobile
risks.11 It is tempting to assume that such border controls are a natural and
eternal feature of political life. Indeed, the case for ‘upgrading’ border control
is frequently made in terms of ‘protecting’ and ‘preserving’ the ‘sovereignty’ of
the state, as though sovereignty were inconceivable without border control. Yet
contrary to our assumptions about the permanence of borders and their functions,
it seems that administrative barriers to migration between nations in nineteenth-
century Europe were quite minimal.12 ‘For the best part of the 19th century’,
observes one historian, ‘the British government deliberately denied itself any
control over immigration, and appeared indeed for the most part to take no
interest in it’ (Porter, 1979, p. 4 quoted in Lippert, 1999, p. 299). In the US, a
principal destination for migrants, no federal records were kept of immigrants
until the 1820s (Bernard, 1998, p. 55), and immigration was not federally-regu-
lated until the 1880s (Castles and Miller, 1993, p. 45).
Perhaps it goes without saying that the twentieth century has been a different
matter. Beginning sometime around World War I, border control became an
distinctive feature of Western states. Passports and visas became ubiquitous
(Hammar, 1986, pp. 736–7). Many factors were involved, including fears about
newly-identified ‘foreigners’ related to a racialized biopolitics of population; a
desire to regulate immigration in the interests of governing unemployment; and
the emergence of a notion of refugees as a ‘crisis’ and an international ‘problem’
(Sassen, 1999, pp. 77–9).
Border controls would remain in place following World War II, varying in
intensity between countries and regions. Perhaps the most publicly-visible and
patrolled borders were those regions that were overdetermined by the Cold War,
the geographical meeting points of East and West (Balibar, 2002).
Nevertheless, border control has recently acquired a prominence and a priority
within politics that is arguably qualitatively different. If the 1980s and early
1990s saw the expectation of a borderless world, such talk is now definitely
suspended. Peter Andreas has noted that ‘it may be more accurate to say that the
importance of territoriality is shifting rather than simply diminishing … far from
disappearing, many borders are being reasserted and remade through ambitious
and innovative state efforts to regulate the transnational movement of people’
(Andreas, 2000, p. 2). But if Western states are currently engaged in what
Andreas and others call ‘re-bordering’, it would be wrong to suggest a single
cause for this process. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore this
phenomenon at any length, we should note that re-bordering needs to be
understood as an ‘event’ (Foucault, 1991b, pp. 76–8), the unique outcome of
multiple determinations and logics. In this way we might locate its genesis in a
number of sites and trajectories, each with their own timing. These would
include the United States’ long-running ‘war on drugs’; the militarization of
borders like the US/Mexico frontier and parts of the eastern frontier of the EU
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as a response to the increasing mobility of the global poor (Bort, 2002; Nevins,
2002); and, of course, the acts of ‘September 11’, an event that exposed the US
national territory and its citizens to a form of political violence from which they
had previously been largely exempt.
With this in mind, we can observe that the White Paper is about much more
than reforms to asylum, immigration and nationality policies. But it is not just
a contribution to the re-bordering of the UK either. This becomes apparent once
we reconnect our discussion to the world of social security. Whether it is
Beveridge’s diagram of a socially-insured society, or Keynes’ diagram of a
managed economy, the welfare state did not equate security with border controls,
but with the governance of social and economic processes. Certainly, there was
the assumption that social security would address the needs of a bounded
national community. But the boundaries of that community were not instruments
of security in their own right.
Within the logic of Secure Borders, the state is actualized as a territorial
state, albeit in a new form. Weber is famous for defining the state in starkly
territorial terms, as that form of ‘human community that (successfully) claims
the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’
(Weber, 1958, p. 78, his italics). Insofar as the domopolitical elements within the
White Paper emphasize border controls as interventions whose task is to carve
out a secure and pacified space of order within a dangerous world, perhaps we
should observe that a quasi-Weberian identity is being re-emphasized for the
state.

Deterritorialize the Border

But just as the call goes out to defend the borders, right when it seems we can
once more imagine the state as a territorial space delineated by its borders,
something else happens. The border begins to spread, its control functions start
to disperse into networks of information and surveillance. A number of re-
searchers have observed how border controls seem to be shifting into the
interior. Balibar cites the example of hospitals and welfare agencies running
selective identity checks on their users. Far from disappearing, as some of the
more breathless globalization theorists predicted, borders are, he suggests,
becoming ubiquitous (Balibar, 2002, p. 84). Foucher (1998, p. 238) observes
something similar: ‘On the one hand, frontier functions are disintegrating in a
spatial sense. On the other hand, in certain respects, the entire national territory
is now being treated as an expanded frontier’. This move is further confirmed by
the UK government’s proposal to gradually introduce national identity cards for
the entire population (Home Office, 2003). But controls are shifting in other
respects as well: implicating airlines and other transportation agents in surveil-
lance activities through ‘carrier liability’ sanctions (Guiraudon, 2003); joining
police and security agencies together in cross-border networks of ‘information
exchange’ (Bigo, 2000); pre-inspecting goods and people long before they reach
the border; or swarming around the space of the international airport, in many
ways a border inside the territory of the state (Virilio, 1986). In these ways
borders are not what or where they used to be.
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Many of these measures are codified in the Schengen Convention, which came
into effect in 1996 and catalysed the development of new forms of cooperation
in policing, immigration and asylum policy within the EU. Schengen paved the
way to the removal of the ‘internal’ borders of its member-states, ‘compensating’
the ‘security deficit’ created by this move by inventing a new border—the
‘external frontier’—which is to protect their combined territory. For this reason
Schengen has been described as an ‘experiment’ and a ‘laboratory’ (Monar,
2003). One of the interesting aspects here is that each state becomes responsible
for Schengenland’s security. As Balibar astutely observes, ‘from now on, on
“its” border … each member state is becoming the representative of the others’
(Balibar, 2002, p. 78). Put differently, as ‘Europe’ becomes ‘enlarged’, this
means that France’s border begins in Poland and so on. Hence, Schengen might
be considered as a signal moment within this deterritorialization of the national
border.
Britain is not formally a member of Schengen, though it retains a right to opt
in to its arrangements on an issue-by-issue basis (Uçarer, 2003). If it is not
prepared to fully entrust its border controls to its European partners, there is
nevertheless plenty within the White Paper to suggest that Britain is not an
exception to this move of deterritorialization. Among its observations and
proposals implying this move are: airline liaison officers deployed ‘overseas’ to
help prevent ‘improperly documented passengers’ travelling to the UK (a tactic
of interception at a distance) (p. 92); a visa regime imposed on countries that
systematically ‘abuse … our controls’ (the identification of rogue migration
states) (p. 93); ‘mobile task forces’ as part of a new emphasis on ‘intelligence-
led’ control (mobile borders) (p. 96); and ‘juxtaposed controls’ which relocate
passport control functions in certain French ports servicing the UK (p. 94).
There is clearly much to support the thesis of deterritorializing borders. But
some caveats and cautions are also in order. First, it would be mistaken to
assume this is all driven by the inexorable logic of the surveillance society.
Security professionals may have a stake in ever-expanding surveillance systems,
but the White Paper suggests that the main dynamic driving this dispersion of
the border as something else. It is the more practical end of reconciling territorial
security with economic liberalism. It is the challenge of devising systems of
security that are compatible with government conducted in the image of the
‘mobile world’ discussed above. These measures are about identifying and
separating flows of people. Like Schengen, they are as much about speeding up
the movement of (certain categories of) people as they are anything else. Seen
from this perspective, border controls will no longer define the edges of the state.
In the future they will operate as a policing mechanism inside a global territory.
Israel may be building its own Wall of Jericho, but the borders imagined by the
White Paper are more like membranes than walls.
Second, we should avoid the overly dramatic position which assumes that
internal controls on populations (such as identity checks) are entirely new. They
are doubtless becoming more intense, widespread and perhaps more sophisti-
cated. But many continental European countries in fact have considerable
experience in this field. For instance, Belgium adopted a system of registration
for nationals as well as aliens as early as 1846, and from World War I required
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all residents to carry identity cards (Caestecker, 1998). Whereas Britain, Canada
and the US have historically favoured what Brochmann (1999) calls ‘external
controls’ at the border, ‘internal controls’—such as identity checks—have been
more common in continental Europe. If there is a deterritorialization of frontier
controls, it did not happen overnight, or as some kind of ‘post-9/11’ phenom-
enon, but rather as the result of multiple processes, each with their own timing,
their own play of forces.
Third, it is important not to speak in overly general terms about ‘the border’,
as though all borders were going the same way. The White Paper speaks
positively of how British liaison officers and pre-clearance activities in the
Czech Republic have successfully ‘disrupt[ed] the flows of those who do not
qualify’ (p. 17). But we have to emphasize that this is not a mutual process. The
Czech government is not stationing its officials in Heathrow airport.13 The
deterritorialization of the border follows specific trajectories and gradients;
controls are exported from the core to the periphery. Their movement mirrors
both the pathways created by migrants (for example, entering Germany from
Ukraine through Poland), but also the relative wealth and political power of
states (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2003) and the North/South ‘citizenship divide’
(Bakan and Stasiulis, 2003).
So we have two lines, then. Along the first the state is reterritorialized as a
particular place, a territory with an inside and an outside. Along the second its
border controls are dispersed and laid over other states, intergovernmental
organizations, private agents like airlines, and mobile task forces. In the space
between these two lines we find something new. It would be mistaken to regard
this as merely the reassertion of the sovereign state; as though, after the
excitement about globalization dies down, and the dust settles, we find the
state—still standing, still sovereign. For that would obscure the changes at work.
What emerges between these two lines are new configurations of power, new
conceptions of territory and control—Schengenland, Homeland, zones of
confidence, smart borders, areas of freedom, security and justice, perimeters,
extra-territorial zones. Future research will need to examine these and other
spaces in terms of their implications for our understanding of sovereignty,
territory, and much else besides.

Reterritorialize Citizenship—The Production of Trust

[C]itizenship is not just for those entering the country—it is for
all British citizens. (p. 10)

Under what circumstances could citizenship fail to be for citizens? What kind of
citizenship are we dealing with? The vision of immigration policy which the
White Paper articulates is not reducible to border controls, however sophisti-
cated. As the subtitle suggests, the question of ‘integration with diversity’ is also
at stake. To this end there are a series of proposals as to how to ‘prepare’
immigrants for citizenship, including language training, ‘education for citizen-
ship’, and a ceremony to celebrate the acquisition of citizenship (a sort of civic
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graduation day). Immigrants are to become better acquainted with the rights and
responsibilities of being a British citizen.
But this task of integration does not stop with the recent immigrant. What is
perhaps more interesting is the way it problematizes the host population. The
following observation is particularly telling:
Strong civic and community foundations are necessary if people
are to have the confidence to welcome asylum seekers and
migrants. They must trust the systems their governments operate
and believe that they are fair and not abused. They must have a
sense of their own community or civic identity—a sense of shared
understanding which can both animate and give moral content to
the benefits and duties of citizenship to which new entrants aspire.
Only then can integration with diversity be achieved. (p. 9)
This is the source of the anomaly we just noted: a situation where, apparently,
citizens do not experience ‘citizenship’. We noted earlier how domopolitics
exists in tension with oikos, that is, with liberal political economy. But here we
see how it intersects with another terrain, a governmentality which Nikolas Rose
identifies as ‘etho-politics’:
Etho here is for ‘ethos’—the sentiments, moral nature or guiding
beliefs of persons, groups or institutions. By etho-politics I mean
to characterize ways in which these features of human individual
and collective existence—sentiments, values, beliefs—have come
to provide the ‘medium’ within which the self-government of the
autonomous individual can be connected up with the imperatives
of good government. (Rose, 1999, p. 477)
In the White Paper we can see that questions of integration and citizenship—and,
more specifically the explanation for the 2001 civil disorder in Bradford, Oldham
and Burnley—are being reframed on an ethopolitical terrain. For the integration
of newcomers is posed as a specific kind of problem. It is one where the grossly
unequal distribution of property, income and employment in the UK is de-em-
phasized. Instead, the emphasis is placed on explicitly ethical objects and
variables—a space of values, identities, and communities.
The White Paper is speaking to a sort of citizenship and identity deficit in the
UK. Generally speaking this deficit is manifested, and perhaps in part caused, by
a loss of faith in governmental systems—parliamentary, church, and the admin-
istrative system. In this instance it is a problem of ‘trust’ and ‘faith’ in the
asylum and immigration system. This mistrust is then displaced into relations of
unease and hostility between citizens and immigrants. Hence the reform of the
asylum system, and immigration management more generally, becomes impera-
tive. These systems must be seen to work by the public. Only then will people
‘have the confidence to welcome asylum seekers and migrants’.
Within this ethopolitical conception of citizenship we find questions of trust
are privileged. However, this emphasis on trust is more than just rhetoric.
Instead, it is possible to identify governmental mechanisms through which trust
is to be produced.
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How is trust produced? The political ambition of the White Paper is to

combine two forms of security—the imperative of economic security which now
entails attracting mobile human capital, and personal and internal security.
Hence the quest to make the border into a membrane, a tissue which can filter
movements across its threshold. But perhaps a different metaphor is in order. In
keeping with the fetishization of information technology—so much a part of
contemporary public policyspeak—perhaps a more apt figure for immigration
control is antivirus software. The image is of the state/home as a computer
terminal located in a proliferating network which is both a space of resources
and risks. The asylum system is a core element of this scanning infrastructure
regulating the passage of flows which traverse the state/home. Properly orga-
nized it is to work in the background, effectively and silently. It blocks malicious
incoming traffic, while the non-malicious can smoothly cross its threshold.
Crucially, it allows us to work with materials in confidence that we are not at
significant risk; that they are not ‘abusing’ the welfare or the asylum systems. It
confers a kind of safety mark upon the elements which circulate within the
system: they have been checked; you can trust them.
This metaphor can be useful in other respects as well.14 It captures the fact that
immigration control is not a static, once and for all time accomplishment but a
dynamic, strategic affair—a field of tactics and counter-tactics. It is forced to be
dynamic by the autonomy of migration. No sooner have particular ‘countries of
transit’ been identified and enrolled into the ‘fight against illegal immigration’,
no sooner have human detection scanners been installed in certain vulnerable
seaports, than migrants discover new modes of entry and create new pathways.
The ‘virus’—and from the perspective of the security professional the clandes-
tine migrant is just that—mutates or takes new forms. Antivirus software must
be continually updated, patches downloaded. Very quickly a market offering
security expertise flourishes with a vested interest in the persistence of the very
threat it is supposed to eliminate.
I mentioned the autonomy of migration as something which ensures that
immigration control can never stand still. I want to conclude by thinking about
the autonomy of migration and its implications for domopolitics and citizenship.

Concluding Remarks: Domopolitics and Citizenship

It is tempting to ask: does domopolitics provoke resistance? Is its conception of
security and citizenship contested? We could then look for the activists and the
movements who have resisted it, and, perhaps, proposed alternative visions of
citizenship and security. But rather than follow such a line, fruitful as it might
be, I would like to invert the question. What if we see domopolitics not as that
which comes first, and to which subjects must respond, but as itself a reaction?
What if we see domopolitics not as the power which always dictates and
establishes the ground rules, but as a resistance to power?
To follow this line of analysis is, I think, to explore the theme of subject-
ivity and citizenship. In his work on the subjectivity of migrants, the Italian
political theorist Sandro Mezzadra argues that besides its formal, institutional
definition, there is a second face to citizenship.15 This second dimension
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concerns the social and political practices that challenge the formal definition of
citizenship. He insists there is an irreducible element here—’an autonomous
space of subjective action than can force significant institutional transformations’
(Mezzadra and Neilson, 2003, p. 22). It follows from this that we might see
migratory movements as ‘themselves a practice of citizenship that, over the past
ten years, has placed more pressure on the borders of formal citizenship’ (p. 22).
Through their assertion of what Mezzadra calls a right to flee, a right to move
and to reside elsewhere, migrants can pose a challenge to the formal order of
states and citizenship. A complementary argument is made by Peter Nyers in his
analysis of the possibility of ‘abject cosmopolitanism’ (Nyers, 2003). Drawing
on Bonnie Honig’s work on ‘taking subjectivities’, he observes how the political
struggles of non-status migrants can articulate an expanded view of citizenship
through the way that they interrupt the political order and challenge understand-
ings of who can speak, who can occupy political space.
If migratory movements involve an assertion of subjectivity, a right to flee
oppression whatever its nature, or simply to live otherwise and elsewhere,
domopolitics resists this assertion. It mobilizes images of home, a natural order
of states and people, of us and them, in such a way as to suppress and deny these
subjectivities. It casts the mobilities of survival and the assertion of a right to
settle as ‘illegal’ and ‘dangerous’. Domopolitics is an attempt to contain
citizenship, to uphold a certain statist conception of citizenship in the face of
social forces that are tracing out other cultural and political possibilities. That
Western societies are presently diagramming themselves in terms of domopoli-
tics is not necessarily a sign of the strength of official definitions of citizenship,
but perhaps of their weakness.

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the
International Studies Association, Montreal, March 2004. I am grateful to
participants for their comments, and especially to Barry Hindess, Daiva Stasiulis
and Peter Nyers who acted as discussants. I would also like to thank Simon
Dalby, Aaron Doyle, Christina Gabriel, Pat O’Malley and Bo Stråth for discus-
sions and encouragement. Funding was generously provided by Canada’s
SSHRC.

Notes
1. Procacci is quoting Honore Frégier, Des classes dangéreuses dans les grandes villes, Vol. 1 (Paris, J.B.
Baillière, 1840), p. 50.
2. Unless stated, all page numbers are page references to this document.
3. Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary, D.P. Simpson (London, Cassell), pp. 201–2.
4. Simon Dalby (2003) has argued that ‘Homeland Security’ offers a new geographical terminology to
distinguish spaces and forms of security within a much wider imperial arrangement of power.
5. Ó Tuathail emphasizes that we should avoid a simple equation between these new forms of ‘deterritorial-
ized threats’ and the end of modern geopolitics. Instead, they are ‘layered upon a state-centric and
territorially delimited “national security” problematic’ (Ó Tuathail, 1999, p. 19). This is made quite clear
by George W. Bush, who insists that the US will hold responsible those states which host or assist those
agents the US regards as ‘terrorist’.

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6. Procacci explains how, in the context of the politics of poverty, ‘morality’ means something quite specific.
It is not a matter of identifying philanthropists as being ‘pedantic moralists’ gripped by a nostalgia for the
past. Rather, ‘“Morality” signifies a discursive mediation which allows a whole range of technologies to
be brought to bear upon the social as behaviour’ (1991, p. 158). Morality is a discourse that formulates
‘the poor’ as its privileged category, as a series of adversaries who undermine a condition of social order.
It is also a discourse which is remote from the ‘statistical-mathematical’ discourses whose rise, at the end
of the nineteenth century, will allow for the disaggregation of the poor, and the reformulation of the social
question in terms of abstract categories like unemployment and income.
7. ‘The Government … is … committed to ensuring that those who have been involved in the commission of
war crimes and crimes against humanity are not able to abuse the hospitality of the UK’ (p. 19).
8. Elsewhere I have argued that the strategy of European integration associated with Jean Monnet is precisely
this (Walters, 2004). To the European space of interstate relations, a space characterized by geopolitical
conflict, it applies a technology of planning and modernization that had hitherto featured only ‘within’
states. That is, it seeks to bring security to ‘Europe’ by constituting it as the site of a planned economy.
Here interstate rivalries and insecurities can be sublimated in a game of mutual cooperation towards goals
of economic productivity and growth. If the welfare state ‘dedramatized’ (Donzelot) the war of classes,
perhaps we can say the common market dedramatizes a space that was previously governed as a
intra-European balance of power.
9. ‘An environmental and anti-imperialist analysis refuses to be silent on the role of rich nations in creating
the conflict from which people flee, and points out the significance of (European and) British colonialism
in creating contemporary patterns of migration to places people identify as the mother country or speak
the language of. Economic conditions often result from the political decisions taken by Western
governments, the World Bank and the IMF’ (Alldred, 2003, p. 153).
10. There is much we might learn by exploring the resonances and dissonances associated with the
contemporary treatment of asylum-seekers and historical responses to the mobile poor. On this note see,
inter alia, Bhutta (2001); Lucassen and Lucassen (1997); Seabrook (2003); and Sassen (1999).
11. This paragraph draws on my previous work; see Walters (2002, pp. 571–2).
12. Although movement across borders within Europe may have been only lightly controlled by states,
population movements within empires was, perhaps, a different matter. In the words of Talleyrand,
Napoleon’s foreign minister, empire is ‘the art of putting men in their place’. As the example of the
transportation in the 1840s of indentured Indian servants to British imperial possessions like Mauritius and
Natal suggests, modern empires invented numerous methods to regulate the movement of their subjects
(Pagden, 2003, pp. xxiii–xxiv; see also Tinker, 1974).
13. However, see the growing literature on the ‘externalization’ of EU controls. This examines the dynamics
by which so-called ‘applicant’ countries adopt EU type border controls in order to prove their fitness for
membership in its club (Grabbe, 2000; Lavenex and Uçarer, 2003).
14. I am grateful to Peter Nyers for pointing me towards these further implications of the antiviral metaphor.
15. Some other recent and noteworthy attempts to open up conventional understandings of citizenship include
Isin (2002) and Hindess (2000).

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