Countering Containment: Chronoscopy and Resistance in an Era of Externalisation

Abstract

This epilogue offers a blunt response to diverse explorations of varied forms of externalised bordering modalities. It argues that when taken together, such approaches reflect a form of chronoscopic policing that uses data and narrative framing to pre-criminalise potential migrants. Collaboration among agencies, states and researchers visibilise and moralise, framing poor people’s inclinations to move as misguided, dangerous betrayals of law, community, country and self. Wealthy states then use the accounts and materials they produce as foundations for externalised controls that seek to prevent future deviations through current interventions. This short piece reflects on possibilities for addressing this emergent regime in ways that can produce systemic, humane change. More specifically, it considers three potential affronts–alternative narratives and practices–on contemporary border mechanisms at work between and within states: bodily assault on borders or ‘storming the gates’; ‘migration as decolonisation’; and broader practical and narrative efforts to destabilise histories and territories. I propose that this latter approach–informed by notions of ’nomadic power’ and decolonial imaginaries–offers the most potent opportunities for countering the moralising affect underlying the current chronoscopic project.