Border formations: security and subjectivity at the border

This paper offers a normative argument for reconfiguring borders that rests on a critique of intersecting logics bearing on security, incorporation, agency, subjectivity, encounter, and citizenship. Especially important to my critique is the mutually reinforcing relationship between border security and prevalent assimilationist and integrationist forms of incorporation associated with the dominant single-citizenship model. I offer instead an alternative framing of incorporation I call enfoldment, which is anchored in the contingent and negotiated agency and subjectivity of mobile persons and a multiversal understanding of societies. As I argue, one avenue for opening the possibilities of migrant agency and subjectivity is via what I term ‘mediated passage’. It entails shielding migrants and travellers from the direct control of movement by states at borders, allowing for passage across borders mediated by civil society organizations possessing independent power and authority.