Policing the Borders Within

Abstract

Policing the Borders Within offers an in-depth, comprehensive exploration of the everyday working of inland border controls in Britain informed by extensive empirical material explored through the lens of wide-ranging interdisciplinary debates. In particular, this book examines afresh the relationship between policing, borders, and social order through the lens of migration policing. By charting this new landscape of everyday contemporary policing, the book’s main goal is to advance understanding of novel forms of law enforcement in a global age. These new forms of collaboration direct attention to the way in which front-line enforcement agents through their everyday work recreate the border, and not just enforce it. As the book argues, the emphasis on borders and migration controls and the growing importance of it within inland everyday policing is a symptom of the new demands and challenges facing the state in exercising authority in a fast-moving, interconnected world, and its attempt to offer a semblance of order. Such challenges result in practice in the random, capricious, informal, and arbitrary operation of power, which relies on non-rational, magic-like elements to solve policing problems. Through an ethnography of the worlds of police and immigration officers, the book dissects the ethical, political, legal, and social dilemmas, tensions, and contradictions posed by the task of maintaining order in a deeply unequal globalized world. The new impetus to police migration is an insightful entry point to understanding law enforcement in a global age.

No Country For ‘Bad’ Men: Volatile Citizenship and the Emerging Features Of Global Neo-colonial Penality

“…For over two decades, the academic gaze has been steadily fixed on the border as the site of punishment of those who do not 'belong' (Aas 2013). Complementing research on internal aspects of migration regulation (Aliverti 2021), this approach has been immensely important for focusing the attention on normatively loaded distinctions between 'us' and 'them' (Anderson 2013) and for grasping related penal implications on those considered 'foreign' . However, comprehensive considerations of what happens to those rejected by our states once they leave our territory have so far been absent.…”

Law in the Margins: Economies of Illegality and Contested Sovereignties

“…Such unorthodox and pragmatic decision raised a few eyebrows among her colleagues. After all, immigration decision-making is, as its officers boast, a dark quasi-magical art to solve contemporary policing problems (Aliverti 2021b). As many other people I met during my two years fieldwork with the ICE team, Safi from Sham Town poses significant conundrums for Law in the Margins • 9 state sovereignty, and for those exercising its power, in a global world.…”

Manufacturing Obedience: Coercion and Authority in Border Controls

“…2. For a detailed account of the project's methodology, see author (Aliverti, 2021), Introduction. 5.…”

“…Based on empirical research conducted with immigration and police officers in the UK, I show that the use of force in this context give rise to distinctively complex ethical questions which shape institutional and individual practices, and is entangled with the legally and politically fragile authority wielded by frontline staff (Aliverti, 2020b(Aliverti, , 2021. Faced with a morally, socially and politically controversial mandate, these officers devise a range of strategies to either minimize or conceal the use of violence.…”