The generalised bio-political border? Re-conceptualising the limits of sovereign power

This article is a response to calls from a number of theorists in InternationalRelations and related disciplines for the need to develop alternative ways of thinking ‘theborder’ in contemporary political life. These calls stem from an apparent tension betweenthe increasing complexity of the nature and location of bordering practices on the one handand yet the relative simplicity with which borders often continue to be treated on the other.One of the intellectual challenges, however, is that many of the resources in political thoughtto which we might turn for new border vocabularies already rely on unproblematisedconceptions of what and where borders are. It is argued that some promise can be foundin the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose diagnosis of the operation ofsovereign power in terms of the production of bare life offers significant, yet largelyuntapped, implications for analysing borders and the politics of space across a globalbio-political terrain