Trad1_Eng_Mendiola

Punishment and (In)sensitivity at the Securitarian Border✽

Received: October 31, 2023 | Accepted: February 15, 2024 | Modified: March 4, 2024

https://doi.org/10.7440/res88.2024.02

Abstract | This article expands on David Garland’s proposal that punitive practices are influenced by logics of (in)sensitivity, shaping how punishment is conceived and applied. It argues that (in)sensitivity is not a mere peripheral aspect of punishment but a central element thereof. Drawing from this premise, the article elucidates the most prominent features of Garland’s proposition, highlighting the conceptual framework it builds upon. Based on this foundation, the discussion branches into two closely related directions. Firstly, it analytically explores Garland’s contribution, explicating the depth underlying notions of meaning and sensitivity; a development that will underscore the significance of corporeality in fully understanding the imposition of punishment. Secondly, this analysis will be projected onto the context of the current discursive hegemony of security and, more specifically, in the specific manner it manifests in the regulation of migrant mobility. The undeniable preeminence of securitized borders will thus become the fundamental space of analysis to project Garland’s proposal regarding an underlying (in)sensitivity permeating the imposition of punishment. Within this context, it asserts that migrant bodies crossing the border endure punishment, yet their suffering lacks empathy within the security discourse.

Keywords | body; border; migration; punitiveness; security; sensitivity

Castigo e (in)sensibilidad en la frontera securitaria

Resumen | El artículo recoge y desarrolla una propuesta de David Garland que afirma que las prácticas punitivas están atravesadas por lógicas de (in)sensibilidad que afectan el modo en que se concibe y ejerce el castigo. Se argumentará que la (in)sensibilidad no es tanto una dimensión periférica en la imposición del castigo cuanto un elemento central del mismo. Partiendo de esta premisa, el artículo pretende exponer los rasgos más notorios de la propuesta de Garland, mostrando el andamiaje conceptual sobre el que se sustenta. Sobre esta base, la reflexión que aquí se presenta se bifurca en una doble dirección profundamente interrelacionada. En primer lugar, se desarrolla en un plano más analítico la aportación de Garland, explicitando la hondura que subyace a las nociones de sentido y sensibilidad; un desarrollo en el que se habrá de subrayar la importancia de la corporalidad a la hora de entender en toda su amplitud la imposición de un castigo punitivo. En segundo lugar, se proyectará este análisis en el contexto de la actual hegemonía discursiva de lo securitario y, más concretamente, en la forma específica en que se plasma en la regulación de la movilidad migrante. La indudable preeminencia que adquiere la frontera securitizada se convertirá así en el espacio de análisis fundamental para proyectar la propuesta de Garland en torno a una (in)sensibilidad subyacente que atraviesa la imposición de un castigo. En este contexto, se afirmará que el cuerpo migrante atravesado por la frontera produce un cuerpo castigado cuyo sufrimiento carece de empatía del discurso securitario.

Palabras clave | cuerpo; frontera; migración; punitividad; seguridad; sensibilidad

Punição e (in)sensibilidade na fronteira securitária

Resumo | Este artigo retoma e desenvolve uma proposta de David Garland de que as práticas punitivas são atravessadas por lógicas de (in)sensibilidade que afetam a forma como a punição é concebida e exercida. Argumenta-se que a (in)sensibilidade não é tanto uma dimensão periférica na imposição da punição, mas um elemento central dela. Partindo dessa premissa, o artigo tem como objetivo expor as características mais notórias da proposta de Garland e mostrar a estrutura conceitual na qual ela se baseia. Dessa forma, a reflexão aqui apresentada se bifurca em duas direções profundamente inter-relacionadas. Em primeiro lugar, a contribuição de Garland é desenvolvida em um nível mais analítico, tornando explícita a profundidade subjacente às noções de sentido e sensibilidade; um desenvolvimento no qual é destacada a importância da corporeidade para a compreensão da extensão total da imposição do castigo punitivo. Em segundo lugar, essa análise é projetada no contexto da atual hegemonia discursiva do securitário e, mais especificamente, na forma específica em que ela é incorporada na regulamentação da mobilidade migratória. A indubitável preeminência da fronteira securitizada se torna, portanto, o espaço analítico fundamental para a projeção da proposta de Garland sobre uma (in)sensibilidade subjacente que permeia a imposição de punição. Nesse contexto, afirma-se que o corpo do migrante atravessado pela fronteira produz um corpo punido cujo sofrimento não goza da empatia do discurso securitário.

Palavras-chave | corpo; fronteira; migração; punitividade; segurança; sensibilidade

Introduction: Consenting to the Punishment Imposed

In a reflection that quite possibly has not received the attention it deserves, Garland (1999) suggests that the way we conceive and implement penal architecture is influenced by a sensitivity (or lack thereof) that affects its application. Garland argues that this perspective is not a merely incidental factor impacting punishment. Instead, it lies at its core, shaping both its legal framework and the legitimacy that follows. Punishment, therefore, contains an underlying sensitivity that, in its formulation and application, sets the boundaries of what is legally possible and symbolically permissible. Consequently, this sensitivity reveals itself as a deeply performative dimension.

Garland’s contributions—an extensive body of work on issues related to crime, control, and punishment—are highly relevant and an essential reference in this field. His studies have explored these topics from the perspective of social theory (1991) and their implementation in Western societies (2005a), including specific examinations of punitive practices like the death penalty (2010) and lynching (2005b). However, despite the importance of his analyses, the concept of sensitivity has been largely overlooked in subsequent studies within the political economy of punishment and critical criminology. Notable contributions addressing this aspect include those by Daems (2008) and especially Pratt (2006), who have analyzed the complex ways in which processes of civilization and “decivilization” intertwine.

Generally, the issue of sensitivity, although not entirely overlooked, has often been sidelined in favor of other focuses. Researchers have tended to concentrate on areas such as the functioning of the punitive system in relation to neoliberalism (Wacquant 2010); the managerial and actuarial changes in penal law (Brandariz 2019); the control dynamics in neoliberal penal law (de Giorgi 2011); comparative studies on how incarceration rates relate to different economic contexts (Brandariz 2022); and the shift towards border penal law, which affects the criminalization of migrant populations (Franko 2020).

In this context, it can be argued that analyzing punitive measures, alongside these essential contributions, requires a close look at the embodied experience of punishment. This is crucial in Garland’s analysis (2011) because the body is the primary surface through which punishment is felt. Sensitivity acts as a link between different socio-historical contexts and how these are experienced in and through the body. Based on the perspective that living in the world means experiencing it bodily, we can approach this analysis by considering the experiences of docile bodies (Foucault 1990), those imprisoned (Oliver 2009), abandoned (Agamben 1998), or subject to torture (Mendiola 2014) that exist within the broad spectrum of punitive geography.

Building on these preliminary questions, the reflection presented here starts from Garland’s suggestion, but focuses more specifically on the current securitarian context (Bigo 2008; Neocleous 2022) and the punitiveness that emerges from it. This involves considering the structure of feeling (Williams 1980) linked to the securitarian ethos (Mendiola 2022), including its ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, and emphasizing the broad spectrum of security related to border issues and the management of migrant mobility (Tazzioli 2020; Vaughan-Williams 2012). It is important to note that the reflections developed here are primarily projected within the geographical area of the Global North and specifically concern dynamics that directly affect the European Union. However, this does not imply that this line of argument is inapplicable to other regions. Instead, it suggests a research approach that would need to be adapted to the specific ways in which the securitarian ethos materializes in different geographies, which do not necessarily involve border issues.

This text focuses on analyzing Garland’s contributions in depth by gathering, refining, and expanding on his ideas. The structure of the article will be as follows. First, we outline the most relevant elements of Garland’s proposal. Next, we develop a more analytical approach to expand its conceptual potential and demonstrate its relevance for reexamining empirical situations. This section serves as a bridge to delve deeper into subsequent reflections. In the third section, we provide an overview of the securitarian logic intertwined with border issues. Finally, the fourth section, proposes a critical analysis of the (in)sensitivity that influences the field of border management.

The Punitive (In)sensitivity in Garland’s Proposal

There is a long-standing narrative, largely influenced by Elias’s work (1993), which suggests that the imposition of punishments has softened due to a structure of feeling that imposes boundaries, thereby preventing the continuation of corporal punishment aimed at directly inflicting pain. Consequently, emerging ways of doing, thinking, and feeling have made it impossible for punishment to remain an isolated practice detached from the broader civilizing ethos. Instead, it now incorporates the inherent boundaries of reasoned and reasonable harm. This narrative assumes that the remnants of the unrestricted punitive violence of the past—characterized by the “murderous splendor” of sovereign power (Foucault 2003) that sought to individualize pain and collectivize terror—can only manifest today as unacceptable deviations. These deviations are viewed not as reflections of the current punitive system but rather as specific, remediable failures.

Without falling into a self-complacent stance, Garland assumes this vision of the civilization of punishment, proposing that the exercise of punishing has progressively redefined itself to embrace the imprint of a penal order governed by a rationality devoid of resentment and the desire for revenge. In this sense, he affirms that

where violence does continue to be used it is usually removed from the public arena, and sanitized or disguised in various ways, often becoming the monopoly of specialist groups such as the army, the police, or the prison staff which conduct themselves in an impersonal, professional manner, avoiding the emotional intensity which such behavior threatens to arouse. (1991, 223; emphasis added)

We would therefore find ourselves in a context of sanitized and invisibilized violence in which there is no longer room for brutal corporal punishment:

Pain is no longer delivered in brutal, physical forms. Corporal punishment has virtually disappeared, to be replaced by more abstract forms of suffering, such as the deprivation of liberty or the removal of financial resources […], the aggression and hostility implicit in punishment are concealed and denied by the administrative routines of dispassionate professionals, who see themselves as ’running institutions‘ rather than delivering pain and suffering. (Garland 1991, 235; emphasis added)

All of this reflects the evident fact that our modern sensibilities “have been attuned to abhor physical violence and bodily suffering” (Garland 1991, 241).

Beyond whether punishment is inflicted violently on the body, it should be noted that all punitive measures, in whatever form they may take, are always corporal. The act of inhabiting a punitive institution, with its strict spatiotemporal regulation that structures a life subject to penetrating discipline (scrutinizing details) and intensive control (extending over all time), already constitutes a mechanism for producing corporeality. Every form of punitive punishment, in one way or another, projects itself onto the body, passes through the body, and is felt throughout the body’s senses, thus, in a literal sense, becoming embodied. A succinct example of this could be the living conditions in a detention center. While this situation may not involve the direct imposition of violent physical punishment, it is certain that, under certain circumstances (for example, when isolation is imposed), the mere fact of inhabiting these spaces can constitute aggravated harm that could eventually be classified as torture. Ultimately, it could be argued that the design and materialization of punitive space already contain the potential actions that can be inflicted on punished bodies.

Therefore, Garland’s assertion that “emotional attitudes and underlying sentiments are, in themselves, unobservable and—at least outside the psychological laboratory—we can only infer sensibilities from the analysis of statements and actions” (1991, 229) should be nuanced to include a critical analysis of the production of punitive geography. While it is possible to apprehend sensitivities through statements and acts that reveal underlying emotions, it is also crucial to consider the spatial aspects that are designed and constructed to exercise punishment. In the punitivity projected onto space—with its specific living conditions and power relations—the contours of the (in)sensitivity experienced by the punished body are already present.

Punitive sensitivity encompasses a broad spectrum (norms, spaces, technologies) that must be fully traversed to understand how it is (re)produced and exercised daily. This involves acknowledging its various gradients of (in)visibility while being aware that this sensitivity does not act as a homogenized affective network; it changes depending on particular circumstances and specific bodies on which it projects. Garland introduces two central elements to this argument. First, the boundaries of what is permissible in the imposition of punishment are distributed differentially. In other words, the symbolic specificity of the punished body affects punitive sensitivity and influences how we relate to the suffering that body can feel. There is a substrate permeated by racism, aporophobia, or gender issues that contingently and modifiably determines what can be done to each body. In Garland’s words: “sensibilities are likely to be unevenly developed in any particular society, revealing variations of attitude between different social groups” (1991, 237).

Garland’s notion of areas of insensitivity is highly suggestive, highlighting that some bodies, when not subject to recognition logics, remain in a state of helplessness where the suffering inflicted by punishment no longer serves as a deterrent to its imposition. Punitive power, both in the realm of formal penal law and (para)penal law (Foucault 1990), creates areas of insensitivity where suffering can occur with few or no boundaries. The possibility of insensitivity refers to a contingent process that aligns with the symbolic reading of the body receiving punishment, as not all bodies have the same likelihood of inhabiting an area of insensitivity. Pratt touches on this idea when he states that there is an “unequal distribution of sensitivities” (2006).

Certainly, security functions as a governmental technology where insensitivity is differentially applied according to specific circumstantial needs and the areas on which it focuses. However, within this heterogeneous landscape, the racialized body inhabiting border geographies undoubtedly constitutes one of the most prominent areas of insensitivity today.

The second element Garland points out refers to the fact that (lack of) sensitivity is not only circumstantially linked to the specific corporeality of the person subjected to punishment but also to structural limits that pertain to the very ordering of society. Punitive power can respond more intensely when it has to address circumstances that might challenge what is perceived as the social order. It can thus be concluded that “no matter how refined our sensibilities, they will rarely be allowed to undermine what are seen as fundamental social needs” (Garland 1991, 237). What is understood as social order, logically subject to contingency and mutability, but which emphasizes the importance attributed to issues such as territorial integrity, the maintenance of capital accumulation processes, or compliance with current laws, is thus enveloped in a kind of untouchability that enables the activation of forceful, one might say insensitive, responses to circumstances and subjectivities that presumably could undermine the foundations upon which the order is built. This crucial issue operates on two levels. First, the symbolic primacy of this order takes precedence over other considerations and demands a certain freedom of action (with its various gradients of exceptionality) to protect itself. Second, there is the symbolic inferiorization of those subjectivities that embody the threat.

In this analytical framework, we can broaden and update Garland’s proposal by focusing on the interstitial space that connects the threat to order with the subject embodying that threat. In this interstitial space, we locate the current punitive modulation of security at the border. It will be argued that the conditions for the reappearance of areas of insensitivity arise within the present civilizational context: each era has its specific insensitivities, and there is a growing insensitivity linked to the way security demands are conceptualized and enforced. Security-related punitive insensitivity reflects what needs to be done and what we no longer feel—the violence that must (or should) be assumed. Ultimately, it involves building on Garland’s suggestion that “penal measures will only be considered at all if they conform to our conceptions of what is emotionally tolerable” (1991, 214) and examining how the insensitivity derived from the security has become emotionally permisible.

The Intertwining of Sense and Sensitivity

The potency of Garland’s analysis cannot be overlooked when critically examining the symbolic-political landscape shaped by the securitarian point of view. However, it is necessary to introduce a series of more analytical contributions that can theoretically enrich his approach. This should be done in a way that also begins to show how these ideas can be projected onto the securitized border. Here, we confront the very notion of sensitivity and its close relationship with sense.

Certainly, the complexity of a notion such as sense, which is crucial in social analysis, can be explored from philosophical (Butler 2006, 2016; Nancy 1997; Pardo 1992), anthropological (Le Breton 2007), or sociological (Sabido Ramos 2012; Simmel [1908] 1986) perspectives, far exceeds the scope of these pages. The same can be said for the notion of sensitivity, which, in its analysis, opens up various dimensions such as bodily (Le Breton 1995), affective (Ahmed 2004), historical (Hernández Barborsa 2022), spatial (Pallasmaa 2014), and political-economic (Santamaría 2018) entrenchments. Even when sense and sensitivity have sometimes been analyzed from different analytical frameworks, this text will suggest that they cannot be dissociated. The sense we give to our experiences is largely mediated by how we feel the spaces we inhabit and traverse. Sense carries the imprint of embodied sensitivity, just as sensitivity carries a sense that shapes how we experience those spaces and the bodies within them. On this basis, and even if necessarily briefly, we can outline three analytical moments that will allow us to develop a conceptual framework from which to enrich Garland’s proposal.

The first analytical moment involves considering sense as a preceding presence (Pardo 1992) or anonymous rumor (Foucault 2008) that underpins the specific, contingent, and dynamic significance we assign to social events. As Nancy puts it: “Sense comes before all significations, pre-vents and over-takes them, even as it makes them possible, forming the opening of the general significance (or the opening of the world)” (1997, 10). Empirical subjectivity can hardly be considered the epistemological foundation where sense begins. Instead, subjectivity can be seen as a surface on which that preceding sense is imprinted and experienced, contingent in its socio-historical specificity.

From this epistemic perspective, sense can be viewed as the ways of narrating the world, inhabiting it, and composing a semiotic-material plot that allows spatial-temporal orientation in contingent and changing ways. Similarly, from a sociological perspective that examines the various modulations that sense acquires, it is worth investigating the articulation of the sense of security, in the social order it proposes, by considering its ways of understanding and conceiving the world. Beyond a superficial defense of a civilized society, security reveals itself as a multidimensional machinery that promotes a model of social order based on capital accumulation and the racialized hierarchy of the human. However, that sense, like any other, is not a fixed reality. It can be problematized through a critical ontology of ourselves (Foucault 1999), which examines how we have come to be what we are and to feel what we feel. From this critical perspective, it becomes possible to conceive and imagine other senses (Butler 2006).

In a second moment, as a corollary of the above, it could be argued, taking up Ahmed’s (2004) appreciation of emotions, that meaning operates in the form of an “affective economy” that establishes relationships between subjectivities. Meaning puts us in relation, it inhabits us to connect us (or separate us), to direct us in different ways in one sense or another. It is worth noting that the very etymology of the term “sense” alludes to directionality, an oriented displacement, a being-towards (Nancy 1997). Sense, understood in these terms, recreates an affective relational network that impacts the courses of action we undertake, how we interweave with other bodies, and the various levels of recognition we confer upon them. This is fundamental to the discussion here, as security legitimizes itself by constructing risks and threats that are differentially projected onto subjectivities marked by racialization. The symbolic substrate of colonialism is reactivated in the the field of security by labeling certain bodies as threats. From this sense, performatively reactivated in successive presents, relationships with these threatening bodies are established, leading to differential geographies of exclusion.

Lastly, it is essential to note that the aforementioned significations that come from sense and the relationships that traverse us from the affective economies we are immersed in cannot be fully understood in their complexity if we overlook the fact that both are experienced in and through the body. Sense refers to narrative plots that configure ways of understanding and inhabiting the world, but it ultimately passes through the body, through the bodily senses, and through how a sensitive experience of the world is immediately felt by our body. In further analysis, one could examine not only the sociogenesis of various sensory experiences (Le Breton 2007) but also the different ways in which those senses are conceived and prioritized, and even articulating hierarchical relationships among them, such as the paradigmatic importance attributed to ocularcentrism in the epistemological architecture of modernity (Pallasmaa 2014). Based on this, and to concretize it within our field of analysis, it is relevant to investigate the sensitive experience of pain, the sense we give it, and how we relate to the suffering body (Zubero Beascoechea 2016)—a body that receives and endures punishment. This context helps us understand Butler’s assertion (2020) that the body does not end at the skin, but the skin is a sensitive surface that acts simultaneously as sediment and connection.

The aforementioned dimensions, referring to the exteriority of the meaning that inhabits us, to the affective relationality in which it places us with different gradients of recognition and to the incarnated experience of sensitivity, articulate, in their mutual intertwining, a conceptual scenario that ultimately addresses the production of subjectivity. Thus, from this succinct approach that emphasizes the fact that in order to understand the production of subjectivity it is necessary to locate it in the sense that it (re)creates the weft of anonymous habits through which the sensible world is experienced and (re)signified, one could begin to question, in its concrete formulations, the embodiments that all this entails. That is, the sociohistorical concretions of sensitive regimes, the ways in which these are incardinated with processes of capital accumulation, with logics of power that establish gender, race, or class differences. From this affective materiality (Quintana 2021) that dialogues with the symbolic, it is possible to critically interrogate what some authors have called the sensitive offensives (Sztulwark 2019) or the politics of the sensitive proper to an affective capitalism (Santamaría 2018). On this basis, we must problematize the sensitive impregnation of security, the recurrent allusion to a security that protects us from a threatening exteriority, the need to feel safe, what we feel, in short, when acting punitively on the subjectivities perceived as potential threats to our security.

The Sense of Security

As suggested, there is a certain consensus that security has become one of the grand hegemonic discourses through which we narrate our experiences. The demand for security, influenced by geopolitical conflicts such as the invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis, climate emergency, migratory mobility, and the persistence of dispersed terrorist threats, has become the central discursive axis shaping and structuring institutional actions.

Security condenses a framework of sense from which a narrative is articulated, naming a series of threats and establishing the courses of action to manage a context emphasized as unpredictable. This unpredictability makes it difficult to delimit the spatial and temporal boundaries of the threats. Within an interpretative horizon that objectifies the threat, detaching it from its conditions of possibility and socio-historical contexts, and opposing it to a supposed internal order imbued with enlightened values (such as democracy, progress, or equality), security is exalted as an inescapable demand to maintain an unproblematized social order. For this reason, security adopts a war-immunitarian logic (Neocleous 2022) in its unfolding, determining mechanisms for protection against dangers that undermine it. Thus, risk management, detailed analysis of current and potential events, and continuous data collection to inform diagnoses and establish courses of action become the cornerstones of the juridical-political-economic-technological architecture of security.

However, the immunitarian discourse that underpins the inevitability of protection omits a crucial double consideration. First, as suggested by Marx, security is the central concept of bourgeois society and the multidimensional mechanism necessary to maintain and consolidate a capital accumulation process (Neocleous 2010). This process unequally distributes social positions and opportunities while extolling the logic of competitiveness and private property as guiding principles of that social model that requires protection. It is no coincidence that the emergence and consolidation of the police—aptly termed security forces—are intimately linked to maintaining a social order model (Vitale 2021) that is not alien to neocolonial logics, as evinced by the tendency to racialize the threatening subject (Mellino 2021).

The second consideration addresses the fallacious opposition that security attempts to establish between a civilized, orderly inside and an uncivilized, chaotic outside. In its juridical-political-economic-technological project, security alters the realities it engages with, creating complex relationships with those (supposed) threats that are not entirely separate from its own actions. That is, security and threat exist on a plane of immanence where they do not function as insurmountable externalities but rather within a framework of “belonging” and “implication” (Esposito 2005), which are resolved in various ways. It is not a question of denying, obviously, the existence of terrorist attacks or the flow of migrant people, but rather of investigating the conditions of possibility of those events (the ecological, economic, social, and political destabilization that the capitalist-colonial framework has entailed in the global south, for example, is by no means unrelated to the migratory drive) and of rethinking the narrative frameworks through which what is defined in terms of otherness is named and positioned (without overlooking, continuing with the example, the importance of migration in the consolidation of a precarious labor market and in the maintenance of an informal care economy).

There are certainly multiple dimensions to explore when unraveling the complex social ordering project driven by security. However, one particular dimension, aligned with the argumentative line structuring this reflection, needs to be emphasized. This dimension can be succinctly stated as follows: the field of security is deeply concerned with the need to build sensors and activate what Isin and Ruppert (2020) have called an expansive sensory power. In managing threats and the subjectivities embodying these threats, the key focus is to establish a comprehensive technological framework capable of detecting, tracking, recording, and containing potential risks to the security project. The emergence and consolidation of a techno-business sector dedicated to producing detection, surveillance, and information analysis devices have become one of the defining features of the field of security. This has given rise to a specific big data sector where the aspiration to gather fragments of information (such as location, origin, movements, actions, and connections) continuously drives the demand for and generation of new data in an unending process. Security has expanded a logic of suspicion that manifests both in the unavoidable need to access what is happening, the way these threatening bodies move or communicate, and in the articulation of devices through which these bodies are managed once they have been detected and tracked.

In this securitarian technologization of power, which finds a favorable terrain for development in detection devices and the realm of big data, we witness the deployment of a socio-technical network populated by thermal cameras, radars, satellite images, surveillance cameras, drones, algorithms, or geolocation mechanisms. The sense of securitarian power emerges here as a power that seeks to become a complex, ductile surface where sensing is restricted to the plane of a technified detection (Klimburg-Witjes, Poechhacker, and Bowker 2021), and where the border can emerge as an “electronic battlefield” (Chaar-López 2019). Thus, beyond the technology employed, the objective is (again) to fulfill the desire to penetrate the social, in order to access a whole series of data that, supposedly, would turn the social into a readable surface. Here lies a trace of the utopia of power that Foucault (1990) paradigmatically projected in panopticism. With the exception that the goal is no longer so much to articulate a fixed gaze that observes relentlessly in order to discipline, but rather to construct a mobile and multifocal gaze that wants to see everything, tirelessly, to exert unlimited control.

When examining the specific field of border management of migratory flows within the extensive security machinery, it is indeed illustrative to recall that the very legal framework of the European Union explicitly expresses the need to deploy a network of sensors across spaces. In Regulation (EU) 2019/1896 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 November 2019 concerning the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, the concept of a situational picture is described in these terms:

“Situational picture” means an aggregation of geo-referenced near-real-time data and information received from different authorities, sensors, platforms and other sources which is transmitted across secured communication and information channels and can be processed and selectively displayed and shared with other relevant authorities in order to achieve situational awareness and support the reaction capability at, along or in the proximity of the external borders and the pre-frontier area. (Article 2, point 10)

The construction of a situational map requires the formation of a diverse socio-technical network, through which the aim is to erect a sovereign vision (Follis 2017) where, perhaps, the modern dream of omniscience emerges once again, where the modern dream of omniscience reemerges. A critical addition for the field of security is that this situational picture, as described in the cited regulation, must extend into a pre-frontier area, a “geographical area beyond the external borders which is relevant for managing the external borders through risk analysis and situational awareness” (Article 2, point 13). In other words, this sovereign vision becomes potentially unrestricted, as the pre-frontier—the geography through which risk emerges and approaches—lacks defined and recognizable boundaries.

Within this logic of security action, two distinct practices can be identified. First, in the context of the European Union’s technologized and militarized externalization of borders, there is a progressive abandonment of rescue mechanisms for migrant vessels in distress, replaced by remote control mechanisms such as border surveillance drones (Moreno-Lax 2024). The goal of this action logic is to detect the presence of these vessels and facilitate their return to the states they departed from, primarily Libya (Cuttitta 2023) and Greece (Karamanidou and Kasparek 2022). This practice, reinforced by the policing framework of Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency), transforms the vital experience of migration into a detectable image managed by security parameters, irrespective of the life-threatening conditions migrants face and the human rights violations they encounter in places like Libya (Human Rights Watch 2019).

Secondly, the recent implementation of the European Union Pact on Migration and Asylum in December 2023 consolidates the existing trend of employing the hotspot model (Tazzioli and Garelli 2018), designed to accelerate the filtering and expulsion processes. This creates a socio-legal scenario that complicates the right to asylum and access to legal guarantees for migrants, while also engaging in the datafication of migration. This approach prioritizes the extraction, storage, and analysis of information, relegating the vital and experiential aspects of migratory transit to a secondary concern. Thus, we witness the rise of an extractive security economy (Andersson 2018) that enables the analysis and filtering of migrants based on collected information, where the country of origin variable plays a determining role. This process subsequently categorizes migrants into various positions, ranging from accepting an asylum request to issuing an expulsion order.

All these actions, at various levels, contribute to an ongoing effort to securitize the (pre)frontier geography through a dual modus operandi that results in two types of governmentalities not alien to each other. The first is a governing of indifference (Basaran 2015), which treats people attempting to reach European external borders as an undifferentiated mass to be contained and repelled, without regard for the specific circumstances they face or the harm it might entail. The second is a governing of filtering (San Martín 2019), which categorizes migrants accessing European soil according to pre-set parameters that determine various relocation possibilities.

What emerges from this cursory review of the securitarian modulation at the border is the deployment of a network of practices, thoughts, and feelings that subtly infiltrate the everyday, setting the conditions for the emergence of the areas of insensitivity mentioned by Garland. This variable geography of punitive exercise reveals the kaleidoscopic face of what Derrida (2010) termed an insensitive power—a modulation of power that hunts its prey without being noticed (through tracking that seeks to remain undetected) and without regard for the suffering it inflicts. The insensible power characteristic of security ultimately establishes a relational framework where the empathic potency of sensitivity is largely reduced to the technological capabilities deployed by a socio-technical network of sensors designed to detect, track, and manage perceived threats. The final point, below, illustrates how this banalized insensitivity consolidates the imposition of an embodied (and eventually embittered) harm that becomes accepted and permissible.

The Insensitivity of a Securitarian Approach

Although this pertains to a realm not analyzed here, Morizot’s reflections on the existence of a sensitivity crisis permeating the eco-social crisis we are immersed in are pertinent: “By sensitivity crisis, I mean an impoverishment of the relationships we can feel, perceive, understand, and weave with living beings. A reduction of the range of affects, objects, concepts, and practices linking us to them” (2021, 19). This crisis, on a more philosophical level, relates to what Nancy (2021) has described as the “catastrophe of sense.” This concept refers to a way of establishing relationships characterized by a rupture of affectivity—the inability to feel the consequences that a whole set of practices and thoughts have for other people and geographies. Losing affectivity is losing resonance (Rosa 2019), resulting in relationships where the logic of co-implication fostered by sensitivity is replaced by a heterogeneous field of action that oscillates between contempt and indifference.

One could argue that the warlike logic underlying the securitarian border, along with the assumption of an immunitarian discourse demanding protection from threatening subjects, constitutes an expanding field marked by a sensitivity crisis. This does not mean that the dimension concerning the institutionalized management of the humanitarian (Pallister-Wilkins 2022) disappears entirely; rather, it becomes subordinated to the ordering driven by security. The ontological primacy granted to the notion of the threatening does not preclude the recognition that migrants might eventually be perceived as vulnerable. However, this vulnerability is seldom linked to the socio-historical processes and political logics that produce rights violations. Moreover, it does not elevate the vulnerable subject to a political status beyond that of a victim (Mezzadra 2020).

In the deployment of a securitarian punitiveness permeated by neoliberalism—turning security into an expanding market niche—and neocolonialism—perpetuating the symbolic subordination of racialized bodies—we encounter a multiform geography. In this landscape, a punitive system, not necessarily formalized, can be discerned. This system punishes the subjects embodying the perceived risk, displaying a blatant insensitivity to the suffering it causes.

It is important to remember that “borders are pre-eminently bodily experiences. Borders are perceived through the senses. They are built to be felt” (Khosravi 2019, 414). There is always a felt experience of the border, and more specifically, an embodied experience of the security apparatus. This holds true for any border crossing, even when they are carried out without incident by presenting proper documentation. However, it takes on more severe connotations when border control prevents passage, forcing individuals to precariously navigate the diffuse geography of the (pre)border.

In this geography traversed by the illegalized migrant, and considering the wide range of possibilities for feeling the spectral presence of the border, for crossing it, and being crossed by it, insensitivity can be approached from a dual perspective. Firstly, this involves examining what happens within a geography formally or (in)formally managed by the state. This geography is populated by jails, police stations, and detention centers, as well as precarious and provisional spaces, all of which establish different containment or detention strategies for migrants in a context often marked by housing deficiencies, insufficient food, and inadequate medical and legal care. Additionally, harassment practices by public-private security forces in charge of surveillance can further complicate this already challenging situation. This perspective does not exhaust the reading of what occurs within this dispersed detention geography but introduces a crucial vector that manifests in various forms. These practices contribute to what has been termed the “necropolitics of uncare” (Inda 2020) or the “formation of torturing environments” (Pérez-Sales, Galán-Santamarina, and Manek 2023) in various research.

Secondly, attention should be given to what occurs during the migratory transit itself in the (pre)border area. Here, the externalization of border control punishes illegalized bodies without necessarily involving a formal sentence, making them feel the exclusion and abandonment in their very skin. Despite the absence of a formal sentence, this situation can be likened to an effective unscripted sentence, similar to what Sayad (2011) refers to as double punishment. This manifests in the multifaceted production of suffering as migrants precariously traverse hostile geographies (deserts, mountain ranges, seas) that are allied with security power (Doty 2011). For those denied visas, the only passage is through these barely passable terrains. In the thousands of deaths resulting from migratory transit through hostile geographies (Cuttitta and Last 2020), the returns to countries that systematically violate human rights (Human Rights Watch 2019), the so-called push-back practices that expel migrants and leave them in a state of absolute neglect (Keady-Tabbal and Mann 2022), or the practices that criminalize solidarity (Tazzioli 2020), we find diverse manifestations of securitarian insensitivity. These actions could potentially be labeled as crimes against humanity (Mann 2021).

The sensible experience of the border encompasses two contrasting perspectives. On one hand, there are subjects at risk confronting supposed threats, who must embrace the securitarian logic and its implications, thus feeling the need for the proposed action framework to feel protected. On the other hand, we encounter the experiences of those subjects of risk who embody the threat, what they must feel, as a preemptive punishment for attempting to navigate an access route made illegal: feeling the persistence of border harassment, the daily exposure to death, and the racialized precarization of existence that perpetuates colonial symbolic matrices. They feel all this while also sensing that the securitized subjects at risk can become entirely insensitive to their feeling.

Consequently, the subject of risk, who internalizes the sense of security, while traversing a (pre)border geography marked by areas of insensitivity, becomes a central figure in what Agier conceptualizes as the undesirable. This undesirability refers to a despised subjectivity that “embodies the idea of a generic, absolute, and unsubstantial exterior, repeated and disseminated in contexts that are constantly renewed” (Agier 2022, 25). The undesirable is the subject who is on the margin and remains on the margin, an otherness that is not recognized (Honneth 2011) and that, consequently, does not fully call upon us when we sense their suffering, when they expose what securitarian violence does to them. Thus, undesirability not only speaks to the suffering of the other subject and their concrete life circumstances but also to the political-narrative horizon that security can weave and the affective relational structure that positions these spectral subjectivities stripped of recognition. The undesirable becomes the ungrieved body (Butler 2006), suffering the “immunitarian closing effect” (Quintana 2021, 245) enabled by securitarian insensitivity. This subject thus becomes an abandoned figure, enduring the symbolic violence of “an atmosphere, a toxicity that invades the air” (Butler 2020, 47-48) that ultimately embeds in their damaged skin. Given the ethical impossibility of accepting the violence of racism infiltrating the folds of securitized institutions managing migration (Mellino 2021), the demand to critically examine the production of the undesirable becomes a task that must be at “the center of political reflection in the contemporary world” (Agier 2022, 25).

Conclusion: Becoming Sensible to the Insensible

The entire preceding reflection builds on Lordon’s (2018) suggestion that social sciences could be rethought through a Spinozist lens as a theorization of affections and passions. This approach is used to problematize the hegemony of security and the passions it mobilizes. In contrast to the security power that prioritizes surveillance and insensitivity toward the racialized subjects embodying threats, this text advocates for the importance of what Didi-Huberman (2010) calls a “sensible event”. Such an event exposes the violence inflicted on others, prompting an interpellation that makes the continuation of these violences untenable.

In the same vein, it is crucial to explicitly acknowledge and assert the urgent need to disrupt the securitarian sensitivity that renders us insensible to the suffering of the undesirable. We must change, as Nancy suggests, “the meaning of the sense” and problematize the political genealogy that has shaped this sense, ultimately exposing its inherent violences embedded in the political-juridical order. This opens the way to another “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 1996), creating a dissensus that undertakes the dual task of rethinking ourselves—along with the semiotic-material wrapping that produces the subjectivity demanding and desiring security—and rethinking our co-implications with all those other subjectivities striving to reach or already inhabiting these spaces. Ultimately, this translates into a necessary collective exercise inquiring into non-violent ways of cohabitation (Di Cesare 2019) and reconsidering the form the border should take (Tazzioli 2023).

The threefold consideration of sense traversing this reflection—regarding its performative exteriority, the affective relationality it inaugurates, and its embodied experience—allows us to approach how, in at least some dimensions, a sense of security is reconstructed. This reconstruction does not align with the self-complacent vision of civilized punishment that aims to transcend the unrestricted violences of the past. The potency of Garland’s analysis elucidates the existence of an insensitivity logic linked to a securitarian governmentality that oscillates between indifference and filtering. This insensitivity, as Butler suggests, refers to a noxious atmosphere permeating the symbolic foundation that enables effective violence projected both directly and indirectly on bodies inhabiting both formal and informal detention spaces and those in transit approaching a border that denies them entry. Ultimately, this insensitivity permeates the effective exercise of a multiform punishment that does not necessarily require a formal sentence to become real.

Therefore, to fully apprehend the critique of bordering practices that confront us with the brazen exercise of securitarian violence against migrant bodies, it must be complemented with an analysis of the constitutive insensitivity inherent in securitarian punitiveness. By transitioning from a sensor-based logic to a relational sensitivity that co-implicates in the production of lives worth living, we can start to outline, through a process inevitably marked by tensions, the contours of an affective geography that radically rejects the creation of the figure of the undesirable.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. El poder soberano y la nuda vida. Valencia: Pre-Textos.
Agier, Michel. 2022. “Indeseable. Un concepto político.” La Maleta de Portbou 51: 24-28. https://lamaletadeportbou.com/articulos/indeseable/
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22 (2): 117-139. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-2_79-117
Andersson, Ruben. 2018. “Profits and Predation in Human Bioeconomy.” Public Culture 30 (3): 413-439. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-6912115
Basaran, Tugba. 2015. “The Saved and the Drowned: Governing Indifference in the Name of Security.” Security Dialogue 46 (3): 205-220. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614557512
Bigo, Didier. 2008. “Globalized (In)security: The Field and the Ban-Opticon.” In Terror Insecurity and Liberty. Iliberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/11, compiled by Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala, 10-48. London: Routledge.
Brandariz, José Ángel. 2019. El modelo gerencial-actuarial de la penalidad. Eficiencia, riesgo y sistema penal. Madrid: Dykinson.
Brandariz, José Ángel. 2022. “Beyond the Austerity-driven Hypothesis: Political Economic Theses on Penality and the Recent Prison Population Decline.” European Journal of Criminology 19 (3): 349-367. https://doi.org/10.1177/14773708211000640
Butler, Judith. 2006. Vida precaria. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Butler, Judith. 2016. Los sentidos del sujeto. Barcelona: Herder.
Butler, Judith. 2020. Sin miedo. Madrid: Taurus.
Chaar-López, Iván. 2019. “Sensing Intruders: Race and the Automation of Border Control.” American Quarterly 71 (2): 495-518. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2019.0040
Cuttitta, Paolo. 2023. “Bridgeheads of EU Border Externalisation? NGOs/CSOs and Migration in Lybia.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 41 (4): 752-770. https://doi.org/10.1177/239965442211439
Cuttitta, Paolo and Tamara Last, eds. 2020. Border Deaths. Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-related Mortality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Daems, Tom. 2008. Making Sense of Penal Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Giorgi, Alessandro. 2011. “Post-Fordism and the Penal Change: The New Penology as a Post-disciplinary Social Control Strategy.” In Travels of the Criminal Question, compiled by Dario Melossi, Máximo Sozzo, and Richard Sparks, 113-145. London: Bloomsbury.
Derrida, Jacques. 2010. La bestia y el soberano. Buenos Aires: Manantial.
Di Cesare, Donatella. 2019. Extranjeros residentes. Una filosofía de la migración. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2010. “Hacer sensible.” In ¿Qué es el pueblo?, translated by Javier Bassas, 75-112. Madrid: Casus Belli.
Doty, Roxanne Lynn. 2011. “Bare Life: Border-Crossing Deaths and Spaces of Moral Alibi.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (4): 509-612. https://doi.org/10.1068/d3110
Elias, Norbert. 1993. El proceso de civilización. Mexico City: FCE.
Esposito, Roberto. 2005. Immunitas. Protección y negación de la vida. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu.
Follis, Karolina S. 2017. “Vision and Transterritory: The Borders of Europe.” Science, Technology & Human Values 42 (6): 1003-1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243917715106
Foucault, Michel. 1990. Vigilar y castigar. Madrid: Siglo XXI.
Foucault, Michel. 1999. “¿Qué es la ilustración?” In Estética, ética y hermenéutica. Obras esenciales, vol. III, edited by Ángel Gabilondo, 335-352. Barcelona: Paidós.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Hay que defender la sociedad. Madrid: Akal.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. El pensamiento del afuera. Valencia: Pre-Textos.
Franko, Katja, 2020. The Crimmigrant Other. Migration and Penal Power. London: Routledge.
Garland, David. 1991. Punishment and Society. A Study in Social Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Garland, David. 2005a. La cultura del control. Crimen y orden social en la sociedad contemporánea. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Garland, David. 2005b. “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America.” Law & Society Review 39 (4): 793-833. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1540-5893.2005.00245.X
Garland, David. 2010. Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Garland, David. 2011. “The Problem of the Body in Modern State Punishment.” Social Research 78 (3): 767-798. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2011.0033
Hernández Barbosa, Sonsoles. 2022. Vidas excitadas. Sensorialidad y capitalismo en la cultura moderna. Vitoria: Sans Soleil.
Honneth, Axel. 2011. La sociedad del desprecio. Madrid: Trotta.
Human Rights Watch. 2019. “No Escape from Hell. EU Policies Contribute to Abuse of Migrants in Libya.” Human Rights Watch, January 21. https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/01/21/no-escape-hell/eu-policies-contribute-abuse-migrants-libya
Inda, Jonathan Xabier. 2020. “Fatal Prescriptions: Immigration Detention, Mismedication, and the Necropolitics of Uncare.” Death Studies 44 (11): 699-708. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2020.1771852
Isin, Engin and Evelyn Ruppert. 2020. “The Birth of Sensory Power: How a Pandemic Made It Visible?” Big Data & Society 7 (2): en línea. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720969208
Karamanidou, Lena and Bernd Kasparek. 2022. “From Exception to Extra-Legal Normality: Pushbacks and Racist State Violence Against People Crossing the Greek–Turkish Land Border.” State Crime Journal 11 (1): 12-32. https://doi.org/10.13169/statecrime.11.1.0012
Keady-Tabbal, Niamh and Itamar Mann. 2022. “Weaponizing Rescue: Law and the Materiality of Migration Management in the Aegean.” Leiden Journal of International Law 36: 61-82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156522000528
Khosravi, Sharam. 2019. “What Do We See if We Look at the Border from the Other Side.” Social Anthropology 27 (3): 409-424. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12685
Klimburg-Witjes, Nina, Nikolaus Poechhacker, and Geoffrey C. Bowker. 2021. “Sensing In/Securities: An Introduction.” In Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Transnational Security, compiled by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Poechhacker, and Geoffrey C. Bowker, 23-49. Manchester: Mattering Press.
Le Breton, David. 1995. Antropología del cuerpo y de la modernidad. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión.
Le Breton, David. 2007. El sabor del mundo. Una antropología de los sentidos. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión.
Lordon, Fréderic. 2018. La sociedad de los afectos. Por un estructuralismo de las pasiones. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo.
Mann, Itamar. 2021. “Border Crimes as Crimes Against Humanity.” In The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law, compiled by Cathryn Costello, Michelle Foster, and Jane McAdam, 1174-1190. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mellino, Miguel. 2021. Gobernar la crisis de los refugiados. Soberanismo, neoliberalismo, racismo y acogida en Europa. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Mendiola, Ignacio. 2014. Habitar lo inhabitable. La práctica político-punitiva de la tortura. Barcelona: Bellaterra.
Mendiola, Ignacio. 2022. El poder y la caza de personas. Frontera, seguridad y necropolítica. Barcelona: Bellaterra.
Mezzadra, Sandro. 2020. “Abolitionist Vistas of the Human. Border Struggles, Migration and Freedom of Movement.” Citizenship Studies 24 (4): 424-440. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2020.1755156
Moreno-Lax, Violeta. 2024. “Meta-Borders and the Rule of Law: From Externalisation to Responsabilisation in Systems of Contactless Control.” In Queen Mary Law Research Paper 421/2024. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4710194
Morizot, Baptiste. 2021. Maneras de estar vivo. La crisis ecológica global y las políticas de lo salvaje. Madrid: Errata Naturae.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1997. The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2021. La frágil piel del mundo. Madrid: De Conatus.
Neocleous, Mark. 2010. La fabricación del orden social. Una teoría crítica sobre el poder de policía. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros.
Neocleous, Mark. 2022. The Politics of Immunity. Security and the Policing of Bodies. London: Verso.
Oliver, Pedro. 2009. “Prisionización y bioprotesta.” In Rastros y rostros de la biopolítica, compiled by Ignacio Mendiola, 247-270. Barcelona: Anthropos.
Pacto de la Unión Europea sobre Migración and Asilo. 2023. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/es/policies/eu-migration-policy/eu-migration-asylum-reform-pact/#reform
Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2014. Los ojos de la piel. La arquitectura y los sentidos. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.
Pallister-Wilkins, Polly. 2022. Humanitarian Borders. Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives. London: Verso.
Pardo, José Luis. 1992. Las formas de la exterioridad. Valencia: Pre-Textos.
Pérez-Sales, Pau, Andrea Galán-Santamarina and Julia Manek. 2023. “Torturing Environments and Migration.” In Migration and Torture in Today’s World, compiled by Fabio Perocco, 71-92. Venecia: Edizioni Ca Foscari.
Pratt, John. 2006. Castigo y civilización. Una lectura crítica sobre las prisiones y los regímenes carcelarios. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Quintana, Laura. 2021. Rabia. Afectos, violencia, inmunidad. Barcelona: Herder.
Rancière, Jacques. 1996. El desacuerdo. Buenos aires: Nueva Visión.
European Parliament and of the Council. 2019. “Regulation (EU) 2019/1896 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 November 2019 on the European Border and Coast Guard and repealing Regulations (EU) No 1052/2013 and (EU) 2016/1624”. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A32019R1896
Rosa, Harmut. 2019. Resonancia. Una sociología de la relación con el mundo. Buenos Aires: Katz.
Sabido Ramos, Olga. 2012. El cuerpo como recurso de sentido en la construcción del extraño. Madrid: Sequitur.
San Martín Segura, David. 2019. “Las lógicas de gobierno de lo fronterizo en el espacio Schengen: la frontera como estriación.” CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals 122: 15-37. https://doi.org/10.24241/rcai.2019.122.2.15
Santamaría, Alberto. 2018. En los límites de lo posible. Política, cultura y capitalismo afectivo. Madrid: Akal.
Sayad, Abdelmalek. 2011. La doble ausencia. De las ilusiones del emigrado a los padecimientos del inmigrado. Barcelona: Anthropos.
Simmel, Georg. [1908] 1986. Sociología. Madrid: Alianza.
Sztulwark, Diego. 2019. La ofensiva sensible. Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo político. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra.
Tazzioli, Martina. 2020. The Making of Migration. London: Sage.
Tazzioli, Martina. 2023. Border Abolitionism. Migrants’ Containment and the Genealogies of Struggles and Rescue. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tazzioli, Martina and Glenda Garelli. 2018. “Containment Beyond Detention: The Hotspot System and Disrupted Migration Movements Across Europe.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 49 (4): 272-288. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818759335
Vaughan-Williams, Nick. 2012. Border Politics. The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Vitale, Alex S. 2021. El final del control social. Madrid: Capitán Swing.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2010. Castigar a los pobres. El gobierno neoliberal de la inseguridad social. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Williams, Raymond. 1980. Marxismo y literatura. Barcelona: Península.
Zubero Beascoechea, Imanol. 2016. “Espectadores del dolor ajeno: una imagen no vale más que mil palabras.” Revista de Estudios Sociales (57): 89-99. https://doi.org/10.7440/res57.2016.07

✽ This article is part of the research project “Historia y presente del control social, las instituciones punitivas y los cuerpos de seguridad en España (siglos XX-XXI): prácticas, discursos y representaciones culturales” (reference: PID2021-123504NB-I00), of which the author is the main researher. The project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, valid from January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2024. The article was translated with funding from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, through the Patrimonio Autónomo Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento Francisco José de Caldas fund and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Creation at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). The article was originally published in Spanish in the issue 88 of the Revista de Estudios Sociales.

Ignacio Mendiola

Ph.D. in Sociology, University of the Basque Country. Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of the Basque Country. Member of the History of Prison and Punitive Institutions Study Group. His main lines of research revolve around the way in which power relations affect the production of subjects and spaces, and the reflection on biopolitics and necropolitics, particularly in the study of punitiveness and border geographies. Latest publications: El poder y la caza de personas. Frontera, seguridad y necropolítica (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2022); and “La figura del migrante en tránsito: la experiencia (in)móvil del hostigamiento securitario”, in El tránsito de personas migrantes desde la perspectiva de los derechos y la acogida digna, edited by Iker Barbero, 49-70 (Valencia: Tirant Lo Blanc, 2022). ignacio.mendiola@ehu.eus | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2703-5743