"The women were demanding an end to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers, minors, pregnant women, and survivors of torture, rape and trafficking, a practice that is sanctioned in no European country apart from the UK; in the US, it was introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act and signed into law under President Obama.
The political philosopher Howard Caygill goes so far as to argue that violence at the borders of the modern nation-state has been the chief means by which modernity has contained and denied the violence of its own civility: ‘The possibility of feats of extravagant and unrestrained violence at and beyond the border [have historically] contrasted with the constraints of rational management of violence within the borders of nation-states.’ To put it simply, violence at the border serves a purpose, and so does the shock it provokes. It obscures the violence of the internal social arrangements of modern nations, which fight to preserve the privilege of the few over the many. ‘The rational management of violence within the nation-state,’ Caygill continues, ‘was only possible when potential and actual violence had been displaced to the border.’ We should recognise violence against migrants at the border not as the exception but as the rule. There is a long history here too. Christian moral freedom, Caygill observes, after Hegel, could ‘only become certain of itself and its inner spiritual possessions by means of the violent subjugation of the infidel at the borders of Christendom’. ‘Become certain’ is crucial: what is being enacted through these policies is the futile attempt of unjust regimes to justify themselves. And who, exactly, decides what we are allowed to understand as violence? As Judith Butler has long maintained, the exercise of such decisions is in itself a form of violence. Binding migrants into the legal process with no hope of exit (other than prison or return) obfuscates the violence of the state. It is the perfect way to distract the rest of us from the corpses lying on the shore."