In another formulation of the same idea, borders become dislocated if not ubiquitous as they are replicated by other “checkpoints” within the territories of the state (Doty, 2011). Understanding the border as the site where selective controls are enacted provides an incredibly dynamic and flexible view of the border. If borders exist where they are enacted, then they can not only be in many different spaces, mapped and unmapped, but they can also move, appear and disappear (Hayter, 2000). Inevitably, this also means that as these practices of control take place throughout national space, the border also moves from a liminal geographic space to something that is enacted and experienced throughout national space. While there are the recognizable infrastructures of control (airport border control, for example, is often explicitly labelled as the border, despite being located internally within the nation), it also allows for a consideration of the less obvious sites where the border materializes. Borders can in fact become ubiquitous when they are thought of in relation to the enactment of control (van Houtum & Strüver, 2002).An example of borders appearing through their enactment is provided by the carrier sanctions administered by the United Kingdom’s government that makes carriers liable for any undocumented persons they may transport to the country, even if these people are stowaways and the carrier was unaware of their presence on the vehicle (Chacon, 2009). Due to these liability laws, carriers seeking to avoid fines for transporting undocumented passengers have introduced measures to deter and police would-be migrants. In particular, lorries arriving to the United Kingdom from Europe more and more often have been built to be securely locked, their design impenetrable to would-be stowaways. The defensive construction of the lorries is accompanied by a compulsory methodical inspection of the carriage area by the driver. It could be argued that these sanctions move the border to the very surface of the lorries crossing international boundaries and that the border moves with these lorries. Thus, the entire road transportation system becomes a kind of networked border. The border transforms into a mobile, non-contiguous zone materializing at the very surface of the lorry and every place it stops. In this manner, the border comes into being (materialises) not only when the driver stops the lorry and inspects it, but also in the very materiality of the lorry that is designed to obstruct the migrant. In other words, there is a border wherever there is a measure taken to prevent migration, and it is a border that can appear and disappear through the performance of specific practices (Diener & Hagen, 2012).
Different Borders for Different People
The border is designed to give different people (those from different social classes) different experiences of the law and of freedom. Border law enables some to pass national frontiers, while denying others the same opportunity; it upholds the freedom of circulation of some, while depriving others of this same freedom (Varsanyi, 2008). Following from these differential experiences, Balibar (2002) highlights how the function of the border is vigorously to differentiate between individuals in terms of social class. This is to say that the fundamental function of the border is to distinguish between people and to produce differential social placements and experiences. For the rich person from the rich country, the border becomes a symbolic reaffirmation of a surplus of rights, while for a poor person from a poor country the border is a solid barrier, one which is confronted as an obstacle and which repeatedly emerges as it marks the limits of life. For this latter figure, the border becomes omnipresent, indeed becomes the place where the migrant resides (Willen, 2010). Therefore, it could be argued, the role of the border is fundamentally to differentiate people from one another. That is, borders must be understood not only as enacting distinction, but as actively administering and producing difference. Their function is not only to separate the rich from the poor, the internationally mobile from the nationally confined, but to construct and enact the categories used to distinguish one person from the next, and then to grant passage and mobility and all of their attendant privileges to some, while denying them to others.
Borders therefore can become instruments of differentiation: this differentiation is always in the service of capital, and indeed the distinction is between those who circulate capital and those who are circulated by capital. Here Balibar’s (2002) contribution allows the opportunity to discuss borders by acknowledging a clearly articulated rationale for a shift away from thinking in terms of stable sites, as well as a defense the beginning of an articulation of what borders do that draws attention to this doing. He locates the implementation of the border as the site of the border: it exists where it is done. As a consequence, borders as operations of power become visible as different for different people (different people are done differently by the border), as implicated in instituting and producing difference, and as not situated at stable and delimited sites. Balibar (2002) encourages a shift toward thinking of borders in terms of existing where they are done, and as most importantly about practices and encounters with these practices.
Addressing the experience of being stateless, especially with reference to children, the shift in border practices leads to more diffuse internal policing and the externalization of border controls consequently defines border(s) in terms of “deterritorialization” (Andrijasevic, 2010). The deterritorialization of borders refers to the ways that borders increasingly and in a variety of ways operate at both sites that are geographically external to the nations that are represented by them, and within the internal space marked by the border. Seeing the border as one that has been “deterritorialized” is a way to look at the dislocation of controls once enacted at national border posts and now exercised in a spatially disaggregated way and via a variety of means (Andrijasevic, 2010). These means specifically including the functions that have been externalized to host countries, as well as other policing measures that are carried out internally, such as identity controls carried out by police and carrier liability legislation that makes transportation companies accountable for the people they transport (Andrijasevic, 2010). In addition to pointing to both international and external practices of bordering, speaking in terms of a deterritorialized border instead of an externalized border has the advantage of not repeating the presumption of a neat inside/outside division between national spaces. Borders for individuals who are stateless emerge from this discussion in a new form and are captured via new metaphors. Instead of being linear structures firmly located at the edges of territory, the borders of a nation can be depicted as “mobile and dispersed” (Rumford, 2012, p.159), “discontinuous and porous” (Andrijasevic, 2010, p.155), “networked” (Walters, 2006, p.195), “ephemeral and/or palpable” (Vaughan-Williams, 2012, p.583), and biopolitical (Vaughan-Williams, 2012). What these accounts have in common is that they shift from considering the border in its most obvious space—where it is resolutely, structurally instituted at the limits of a national territory—toward thinking of the border as the site where the control function of the border is performed.
The right to a nationality implies the right of each individual to acquire change and retain a nationality. The right to a nationality remains a fundamental human right as afforded by article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) providing that “[e]everyone has the right to a nationality” and that “[n]o one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” In this way, article 15, enshrining citizenship and the right to be free from arbitrary deprivation of citizenship as human rights in and of themselves, establishes the bedrock legal relationship between individuals and states. While all states are bound to respect the human rights of all individuals without distinction, an individual’s legal bond to a particular state through citizenship (Wastl-Walter, 2011; see also Weiss Brodt & Collins, 2006) is in practice an essential prerequisite to the enjoyment and protection of the full range of human rights. The proliferation of human rights norms in international and regional instruments has fostered substantive limitations on state sovereignty over citizenship regulation that gives meaning to that provision. In particular, the universal anti-discrimination norm and the principle that statelessness should be avoided have emerged to constrain state discretion on citizenship (Salter, 2008; 2010).
Some significant gaps