Crisis in Crisis

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of incarceration inside the city or within the state where refugees or suspected terrorists are placed without rights of citizenship, or without rights of trial, or without rights of humanitarian law. Another good example is the SARS crisis of 2003, where it wasn’t really the edge of the nation that was concerned, territorially-speaking. Rather, it was the airport, because the airport is now where the border is located. So there’s a real sense of the state trying to organize and filter-in new surveillance and security devices to stop pathogens—and people deemed to be carrying pathogens—from coming right into the heart of the city. Another example is the Container Security Initiative in the US. There’s an effort being made by the Homeland Security Department to basically change the whole global system of container port traffic, based on its own idea of the homeland being secure. So every container port in the world who wants to trade with the US now has to have its own information systems, its own tracking systems, that operate in a way like a global homeland. While all these borders come together inside the nation, the question about security of the homeland also goes beyond the nation to inflect global systems of airline traffic, port security, information technology flow, financial flow: all of the flows that sustain the city. This is all about the micro-geographies of the city and the global geographies of the security coming together. GB A crisis carries with it extreme urgency. How do borders function under such moments of extreme urgency and duress? SG Extreme events tend to heighten state efforts to tighten borders. With the SARS crisis, for example, there was a very heavy investment in emergency measures to track people, to scan people, to do new sorts of testing whether or not individuals were carrying infection—this is all about the idea of re-drawing boundaries. Remember, in the 90s there was a huge celebration of the end of geography: a celebration of a neoliberal utopia of perfect mobility. Suddenly, that was all backtracked—bringing in new


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