Policing the (migrant) crisis: Stuart Hall and the defence of whiteness

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the European border regime has become the subject of a growing body of scholarship in critical security studies. In this article, I draw on Stuart Hall’s work on racialized policing, authoritarian populism and conjunctural analysis to argue that this literature has paid insufficient attention to the close relationship between racism, capitalism and state violence. Writing at the dawn of Thatcherism and neoliberal globalization, Hall theorized the growth in repressive state structures as a revanchist response to breakdowns in racial hegemony. Revisiting these insights, the article argues that the ongoing expansion of the European border regime is a hegemonic strategy of racialized crisis management. The imposition of ever more restrictive immigration policies, increased surveillance and heightened forms of deportability are attempts to defend white bourgeois order and to police a (neoliberal) racial formation in crisis. The migrant ‘crisis’ is ultimately the result of one racialized world order collapsing, and another struggling to be born.