Benevolent Policing? Vulnerability and the Moral Pains of Border Controls

Abstract

In the United Kingdom, as in other jurisdictions, the language of vulnerability and ‘safeguarding’, protection and care is becoming increasingly prevalent, often dovetailing with punitive rationales and practices. Drawing from empirical material collected during a study on police–immigration partnership in everyday policing, the paper analyses how contemporaneous punitive and humanitarian turns in criminal justice are experienced by law enforcement officers doing border work on the ground and considers what implications these have. To what extent does the impetus to protect and care bolster or complicate the exercise of state coercive powers? And what challenges and tensions does it evince? It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the moral pain of border work and its disruptive potentials.

The Power of Racialized Discretion in Policing Migration

“…Research has confirmed that when established criminal-justice practices intersect with migration control, discretionary behaviour capitalises on the blurriness that ensues and can also create moral ambivalence on the part of individual officers implementing the policies (Aliverti 2020). Canadian research, for example, has found that policing migration at land borders and in everyday street policing is inevitably based on race, because officers have less background information to go on in the way that they might, for example, at airports.…”

Feeling difference: Race, migration, and the affective infrastructure of a Danish detention camp

“…In general, detained men were denied vulnerability (see also Bhatia, 2020; Wyss and Fischer, 2021). Officers’ neglect of detained persons’ emotions demonstrates the racialised emotional stratification (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) at play in the camp, where prison officers’ suspicion and gut feelings about the people detained were considered sources of knowledge and reason (see also Aliverti, 2020). Indeed, the majority of officers insisted that their assessment about the racial classifications and inferiority was colourblind (see Parmar, 2018, who found similar patterns of justification among UK police officers).…”

“…But in contrast to prisons, they confine people not for what they have done, but for who they are: namely, foreign and expellable 'others' (Bosworth, 2018). As such, they are sites of criminalisation (or 'crimmigration'; see Aas, 2013;Armenta, 2017), and exemplify how states expand and instrumentalise penal powers for the purpose of border and mobility control (Aliverti, 2012(Aliverti, , 2020Barker and Smith, 2021;Bosworth, Parmar, et al 2018). Detention camps are also junctions between penal power and border control, and function as technologies of citizenship (Walters, 2002) as they delineate the racial boundaries of membership (Bosworth, 2018;Bosworth, Franko, et al, 2018;Parmar, 2018).…”

“…I therefore build on the work of border criminologists and feminist carceral geographers who have demonstrated the productive role of gendered, racialised and classed hierarchisations in the enforcement and legitimation of migrant detainment and expulsion (Bhatia, 2020; Bosworth, 2018; Bosworth, Parmar, et al 2018; Conlon and Hiemstra, 2016; Esposito, 2021; Hall, 2010, 2016; Mountz, 2020; Turnbull, 2017). Scholars have also shown how everyday policing and borderwork shape the racial and gendered boundaries of citizenship and conceptions of national belonging (see Aliverti, 2020; Armenta, 2017; Bosworth, 2018; Kapoor and Narkowicz, 2019; Parmar, 2018). Importantly, and as this body of literature also highlights, the social hierarchisations underpinning states’ bordering practices operate along the intersecting axes of class, gender, sexuality, and disability oppression or exploitation (Grosfoguel et al, 2015; see also Esposito et al, 2020 for an analysis of intersecting oppressions experiences of detention).…”

“…Firstly, to the literature on incarceration and the role of 'the camp' in mobility control regimes, by demonstrating the productive role of affective infrastructures in the operation of the camp as a carceral junction (see Turner and Whyte, 2022). Secondly, it adds to the literature on border criminology focusing on how state actors and their corporate allies' everyday practices of borderwork partake in sustaining a racist border regime and social order (Aliverti, 2020;Bosworth, 2018;Parmar, 2018). Thirdly, it offers an empirically grounded analysis of how racial affects (Ahmed, 2004;Bonilla-Silva, 2019) underpin and sustain Denmark's mobility control regime in a time when the politics of migration is growing increasingly hostile.…”