1 AMID Working Paper Series 39/2005 Migration Control Policies as Spatial Organization – Mobility, Power and Geopolitical Imaginations

Over the last decade or so, many commentators have tried to make sense of the developments that characterize the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union. Many are the attempts; to paint a comprehensive picture of the overall developments commonly referred to as “globalization”, and the resulting visions are certainly varied. Common features nevertheless include increased economic interdependence, the emergence of a single world market in the fields of capital, finance and traded goods, and increased interconnectedness resulting from cheaper and faster transportation, the global reach of media and the new communication and information technology. What all this signals; is that globalization to no small degree is conceptualized in terms of a spatial reorganization including the decreasing importance of state borders, and of territory more generally. For instance, Kenichi Ohmae (1990) has brought forward the notion of an emerging “borderless world”, Richard Rosecrance (1999) celebrates what he calls “the emancipation from land ” in the era of the “virtual state ” and Richard O’Brien (1992) has launched the “End of Geography”-thesis, claiming that the forces of economic integration and technological innovations renders distances as well as geopolitical borders irrelevant. A recurring theme in these narratives of globalization is the increased mobility of people, capital, and information, often conceptualized as “flows”, across these ever more redundant borders. The limitations to this argument are evident when one turns to international migration and immigration controls, but these issues are conspicuously absent from most “mainstream ” accounts of globalization. Whereas borders might be losing much of their previous military and economic relevance this development is paralleled by re-bordering practices in the immigration control field. States may b