Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border

The single word “border” conceals a multiplicity and implies a constancy where genealogical investigation uncovers mutation and descent. Historical research reveals that diverse political rationalities have framed the political means and objectives of state frontiers and borders, just as the diffi cult work of making borders actual has drawn upon a great variety of technologies and heterogeneous administrative practices, ranging from maps of the territory, the creation of specialized border offi cials, and architectures of fortifi cation to today’s experimentation with bio-digitalized forms of surveillance. This chapter argues that we are witnessing a novel development within this history of borders and border-making, what I want to call the emergence of the humanitarian border. While a great deal has been written about the militarization, securitization and fortifi cation of borders today, there is far less consideration of the humanitarianization of borders. But if the investment of border regimes by biometric technologies rightly warrants being treated as an event within the history of the making and remaking of borders (Amoore 2006), then arguably so too does the reinvention of the border as a space of humanitarian government.