Challenging Managerial Operations: Developing a Discursive Theory of Securitisation

Abstract

An analysis of the contemporary politics of asylum brings to the fore both exclusionary practices of governance and exclusionary articulations of belonging. For example, a raft of measures that are designed to restrict and deter access to asylum systems have become standard across Europe in recent years, while the criteria for recognising asylum claims have widely been tightened (Boswell, 2003b). Indeed, such measures are largely conceived of as legitimate in the face of unauthorised entrance (Boswell, 2007). It is this assumption of the legitimacy of restrictive controls that this analysis seeks to challenge. It shows how the construction of asylum as a ‘problem’ or ‘threat’ needs to be understood in relation to the wider articulation of political community as a territorially defined entity that requires protection from ‘alien’ incursion. In this book political community is thus shown to be precariously reconstructed in territorial terms through the development of exclusionary relations of governance and belonging. While the book works from the assumption that both the inevitability and desirability of a territorial rendering of political community is open to debate, the book also conceive its contemporary rearticulation in relation to asylum to be highly problematic because of the exclusionary tendencies such a relation entails. This analysis thus seeks to challenge the articulation of the asylum seeker as a scapegoat figure onto which various dislocations of the territorial order are projected (see Chapter 1).