The art of soft power banishment. New insights into the Swiss deportation regime

Abstract

In the second half of the 1990s, Switzerland established a new state regime of spatial-territorial exclusion in order to keep people out of certain urban areas. From a power-analytical perspective, this reveals a repressive sovereign power banishment. At the same time, novel organizations for outreach social work with public order service tasks emerged, using softer governmental tactics of spatial exclusion. Using two empirical case examples from our ethnographic research, we show how this new type of organization is able to extend the sovereign exclusionary formation of foreign nationals and police law. Our analysis focuses on a marginalized group of foreigners with precarious residence status who ultimately are being deported or put in detention. For them, the social work’s soft power banishment represents a lawless but sovereign power that creates territorial exclusion without having to enact, command or enforce it.