Border Detention in Europe: Violence and the Law.

Practices of border detention in western democracies are the result of legal evolutions in modern rule of law, technical adjustment in the disciplinary management of alien populations and evolutions in the political speech on migrations, which are now commonly referred to in terms of control of stocks and flows. These changes have led the European Union in the past two decades to build its frontiers in terms of camps and to literally detain people within the borders. Indeed, the will of states to control movement of people have created contested spaces of sovereignties at their borders, populated by a "floating population" of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. The paper will focus on these extra-territorial zones of border detention, the "waiting zones", implying national political devices for the administration of alien populations and security constructions around the notions of citizenship and frontier. Practices of border detention combine questions of sovereignty and disciplinary devices along two axes: administrative institution within a procedure of exception, and the management of alien populations in the spatial and political form of the camp. Then, the question is the following: How does a regime of exception within the law open the space for specific power relations that shape in return the political subjectivities of those confronted to them? What do such processes of subjectivation teach about evolving regimes of government within the liberal rule of law? Analyses are based on field observation in the "waiting zone" of Charles de Gaulle airport in France, but also on a set of interviews with detainees who were admitted to the French territory after facing several attempts of expulsion. By setting forth the shadowed hand-to-hand fight between detainees and guards (where the body in its biological functions is at stake), this anthropological insight help to think on how power relations are being reshaped at the borders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]