Would-becitizens and ‘strong states’: Circles of security and insecurity

One of the taken-for-granted frameworks of contemporary political theory and practice is that states provide security for their citizens. Going back to Max Weber’s classical definition of states as holding the legitimate monopoly over the means of violence within a given territory, states have been seen as the protectors of the people who reside within their territorial boundaries. More recently, and in line with this definition, there has been serious concern expressed about weak or failing states contributing to foundational issues of human insecurity. Thus, regular calls go out for the necessity of state building support for weak states (Fukuyama 2004). The other side of this process, one less often directly discussed, is that strong states are part of the problem. Strong states contribute to foundational issues of human insecurity through wars of ‘humanitarian’ or pre-emptive intervention, support for corrupt regimes, hardline negotiation over resources and insufficient action on existential issues such as climate change. The fallout from a world-in-tension is that states, in attempting to secure the lives of their citizens, effect contradictory outcomes. The overall argument of this chapter is that attempts by strong states to resecure aspects of their sovereignty are currently either making things worse or flattening out the possibilities of a more complex negotiated human security. One group of people who suffer the brunt of the unintended effects of securing the sovereignty of citizens are those who move across state borders without legally-protected status. In the face of heightened security measures against certain kinds of cross-border movement, asylum seekers and others sometimes turn to ‘people smugglers’ to navigate their passage. In doing so, they confront a circle of insecurity. Citizens who read in newspapers of these transnational markets in human traffic feel increasingly insecure and governments respond, in turn, with ever more restrictive onedimensional security management against unwanted flows. Closing the circle, thus, for an increasing number of asylum seekers makes people smugglers a necessary conduit to movement. This circle is related to two current trends. First, there is an inverse relationship between the material abstraction of the processes of movement and the way in which those processes are regulated in relation to state boundaries. The more embodied the process of movement, the more intense the regulation of boundary.