In this chapter I will argue that there are potentially useful critical resources for developing alternative border imaginaries to the conventional inside/outside model conditioned by the concept of the border of the state to be found in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The discussion begins with a detailed exegesis of some of Agamben's key arguments, building on the thought of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt discussed in Chapter 3, as articulated in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [1998], Means Without End: Notes on Politics [2000], State of Exception [2005] and several key essays and interviews. By now, Agamben's work has been taken up by a range of writers in politics, IR, and related disciplines dealing with questions of: sovereign power, violence and resistance in the context of the ‘War on Terror’; practices associated with security as the new paradigm of global governance; trauma, time and practices of memorialisation; migration and patterns of global movement; the politics of humanitarianism and human rights; and debates about the rule of law and sovereign exceptionalism. Agamben's treatment of sovereignty and the generalisation of exceptional practices associated with it, together with secondary appropriations of such ideas, have not gone without criticism. Several departures will be made from current interpretations of Agamben's work, however, in respect of his central concept of ‘bare life’, the importance of what he calls ‘a logic of the field’ and, perhaps most importantly, the implications of his oeuvre for an understanding of political space.