A ROOM WITH A VIEW

As I write this Introduction I am in my study, in my house, on the outskirts of the city of Bristol in the United Kingdom. From where I’m sitting, I have a view. That view is of a global order of things that, in my experience, is stable and enduring, and which gives me a clear position in the world, as a citizen of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a nation state in an international order of such states, and it has a territory clearly demarcated by its borders. Those borders are themselves clear, represented by lines on a map, and they are stable; they have been where they are for such a considerable period of time that I have no need to ask how they got there or why. The rest of the world is made up of similar states with similar territories marked by similar borders, and other people, like me, have their position conferred upon them within those states, such that the globe is inscribed with a stable, enduring and legitimate political order of things that I have no reason to question.

Sitting here, I am aware, of course, that the global order is not really how it appears to me from my window. In the course of writing this book, however, I have learned just to what extent this view is illusory, and that there are other perspectives which provide a far more realistic understanding of the global ‘order’, from which it is experienced as a violent disorder. What these experiences reveal is that nation states are in fact not stable and enduring things, but violent processes, as those states continually constitute themselves and their inside and outside. Borders are not clear lines on a map but are again processes and practices that take place in border zones, spaces of extreme brutality, which are highly mobile and can erupt anywhere, either on the peripheries of states or deep within them. Within these zones people are constituted as citizens, aliens, immigrants, refugees, as stateless, as wanted or unwanted, again often through extremely violent processes.