Thickening the border: a transnational sovereign assemblage and the privatization of sovereignty

Abstract

Australia, the United States, and the European Union enact bordering mechanisms to armor themselves against people who seek asylum transferring the burden of enforcement and containment to countries from the Global South. This configuration reinscribes a regime of limited mobility for certain subjects that reproduces a neocolonial order. The measures developed by these regions to keep people who seek asylum away from their territories thicken the border by effectively creating an overarching transnational sovereign zone that is not country-specific but rather an assemblage of Western countries’ buffer zones. Although the result is a fairly monolithic barrier for refugees, this assemblage is not homogeneous in structure but is instead composed of differently balanced, dyadic relations between countries, heterogeneous dehumanizing narratives prevalent among domestic publics, externalization measures, confinement practices, and other deterrence mechanisms, with different degrees of reach and success. Using a transnational feminist lens and a Critical Border Studies framework, this article shows how the border externalization measures that uphold this assembly rely on public-private partnerships that governments establish with private corporations; and agreements with third countries. The privatization of sovereignty then become the necessary conditions to exercise transnational sovereignty.