(Dis)locating Control: Transmigration, Precarity and the Governmentality of Control

Abstract

In this essay, the author takes up William Walters’ (2006) incitement to theorize transmigration through the Deleuzian concept of control. The importance of mechanisms, or technologies, that modulate population flows are explored by paying close attention to novel strategies of migration policing and securitization in the United States, the European Union, Australia, and North Africa. These technologies no longer take the border as their "proper" site, but instead rely on processes of internalization, externalization, and excision to produce conditions of generalized precariousness. The author argues that these technologies of control resist simple categorization as biopolitics, and instead are more fruitfully considered through the lens of control societies and precarity. Ultimately, the inclusion/exclusion dialectic is put under erasure.