Abstract
I argue that the conceptual locus of the category banishment in today’s world is not banishment in the historical sense of the term, but a new kind of banishment that is predicated on the formation of geographies of privilege and disadvantage that cut across the divides of our modernity – East-West, North-South. The formation of such geographies includes a partial disassembling of the modern national territorial project, one aspiring (and dependent on) national unity, whether actual or idealised. This also means that there is a weakening of the explanatory power of the nation-based encasements of membership (for citizens, for firms, for political systems) that have marked our modernity. The micro-banishments I refer to are part of emergent and proliferating geographies of disadvantage (for citizens, firms, districts) internal to a country.
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I arrive late to this discussion, to these excellent pieces that cover much ground... not much left to cover. For the sake of debate and commentary, rather than scholarly analysis, let me throw into the discussion what is no more than a little wrench.
Denationalisation is an ambiguous concept. This discussion has given it one sharp meaning: being stripped of one’s nationality and thrown out of one’s country. In my own work I have used it to capture more ambiguous meanings, thereby giving it the status of a variable that can be applied to a range of domains, not only citizenship.Footnote 1
Thus, I see denationalisation at work when, beginning in the 1980s, global firms pushed for and got most national governments to institute deregulations and privatisations so as to maximise their access into any national economy.Footnote 2 It meant that states had to denationalise key elements of the legal framing (i.e. protections) they had long offered their own firms, markets, investors. One might say that in doing so, these states instituted a partial ‘banishment’ of their own national firms from a legal framing that granted these national firms exclusive privileges/rights. This is a form of banishment that does not entail a physical departure from a country’s territory. It only entails a loss of particular exclusive rights and protections. We can conceive of it as a kind of micro-banishment.
Similarly, I would argue that such internal micro-banishments are also present in the decisions of many national states, beginning in the 1980s and onwards, to eliminate a few rights here and there that their citizens may long have had. Examples for the U.S. are, among several others, Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act which took away the rights of citizens to bring legal action against the INS in lower courts; or when credit card companies obtained the right to pursue payment even if a household had declared bankruptcy – a right so abusive it eventually got cancelled. We might argue that in these cases, citizens experienced a partial banishment from specific rights (even as some new rights were also attained, notably gay marriage). The better language to describe these losses may be what Audrey Macklin refers to elsewhere as civil death.Footnote 3
Current examples for the gains of rights for global firms and the loss of protections for national firms and workers can be found in some of the clauses of both the Transpacific and the Transatlantic Trade Partnerships.
Long before we get to the dramatic figure of the terrorist, where the debate about banishment turns clearly pro or contra, I see a range of micro-banishments that take place deep inside national territory. If I wanted to give this image an extreme character, I would say that in today’s interaction prone world (see, for instance, the earlier behind closed-doors negotiations between Iran and the U.S., or, for a period, between the U.S. and the Taliban) there is no more terra nullius for banishment.
If I were to use the term ‘banishment,’ I would want to use its conceptual power to get at the multiple little banishments that happen inside our countries and that often entail a move into systemic invisibility – the loss of rights as an event that produces its own partial, or specialised, erasure. I refer to these micro-banishments as expulsions, a term I intend as radically different from the more common term ‘exclusion,’ which refers to a condition internal to a system, such as discrimination.Footnote 4 I conceive of such expulsions as a systemic capability, clearly a use of the term capability that diverges from the common use which marks it as a positive. Thus micro-banishments can be seen as a profoundly negative systemic capability that is far more widespread than our current categories of analysis allow us to see.Footnote 5
To conclude I would like to return to Audrey Macklin’s argument.
I agree with Audrey Macklin’s proposition that citizens should not be banished even when they engage in terrorist attacks on their own country. I share her concern with the importance of protecting a robust form of citizenship. But I do so partly also from a transversal and dystopian perspective that may have little to do with the rationale put forth by Macklin. Let me clarify. It is not only terrorists that are destructive and attack the innocent; it is also predatory actors of all sorts – corporate firms that exploit workers worldwide, financial speculators, abusive prison systems. Further I agree with Macklin that a country should develop the needed internal instruments to deal with terrorists rather than banish them. But again, I would take this beyond terrorists who are citizens, and include the types of predatory actors I refer to above.
Beyond all of this, I am above all concerned with the larger history in the making that I refer to earlier in this short text. This larger history is shaping an epochal condition that takes me away from prioritising banishment as loss of citizenship and of the right to live in one’s country as discussed in this Forum.
Briefly put, I would argue that the conceptual locus of the category banishment in today’s world is not banishment in the historical sense of the term, but a new kind of banishment. It is one predicated on the formation of geographies of privilege and disadvantage that cut across the divides of our modernity – East-West, North-South. The formation of such geographies includes a partial disassembling of the modern national territorial project, one aspiring (and dependent on) national unity, whether actual or idealised. This then also means that there is a weakening of the explanatory power of the nation-based encasements of membership (for citizens, for firms, for political systems) that have marked our modernity. The micro-banishments I refer to are part of emergent (and proliferating!) geographies of disadvantage (for citizens, firms, districts) internal to a country.
Notes
- 1.
See chapters 4, 5, and 6 in Sassen, S. (2008), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- 2.
Sassen, S (2017), ‘Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math’, Science, Technology & Society 22 (1): 1–15.
- 3.
Macklin, A. (2014), ‘Citizenship Revocation, the Privilege to Have Rights and the Production of the Alien’, Queen’s Law Journal 40 (1): 1–54, at 8.
- 4.
Sassen, S. (2014), Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
- 5.
This also raises the possibility of an obverse condition: that the tissue constructed via the recurrence of micro-banishments inside a nation-state could, with time, become the tissue for a claim to transnational citizenship. Could it be that as citizens experience the limits of national citizenship, transversal notions of membership become more plausible? I am thinking here of substantive conditions for transnational citizenship, not just ideational ones.
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Sassen, S. (2018). Our Epoch’s Little Banishments. In: Bauböck, R. (eds) Debating Transformations of National Citizenship. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92719-0_43
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