Policing the Borders Within

Ana Aliverti

Jun 2021 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Policing the Borders Within offers an in-depth, comprehensive exploration of the everyday working of inland border controls in Britain, informed by extensive empirical material viewed through the lens of wide-ranging interdisciplinary debates. In particular, this book examines afresh the relationship between policing, borders, and social order, in terms of migration policing. By charting this new landscape of everyday contemporary policing, this book's main goal is to advance understanding of novel forms of law enforcement in a global age. These new forms of collaboration direct attention to the way in which frontline enforcement agents, through their everyday work, not only enforce the border, but recreate it. As the book argues, the emphasis on borders and migration controls and the growing importance of it within inland policing is a symptom of the new demands and challenges facing the state in exercising authority in a fast-moving, interconnected world, and its attempt to offer a semblance of order. Such challenges result in practice of random, capricious, informal, and arbitrary operation of power, which relies on non-rational elements to solve policing problems. Through an ethnography of the worlds of police and immigration officers, this book dissects the ethical, political, legal, and social dilemmas, and explores the tensions and contradictions of maintaining order in a deeply unequal globalized world. The new impetus to police migration is an insightful entry point to understand law enforcement in a global age.

About the author

Ana Aliverti is a Reader in Law at the School of Law, University of Warwick. She holds a D.Phil in Law (Oxford), an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice (Distinction, Oxford), an MA in Sociology in Law (IISL), and a BA in Law (Honours, Buenos Aires). Her book, Crimes of Mobility (Routledge, 2013), was co-awarded the British Society of Criminology Best Book Prize. She received the British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law. Ana is also the recipient of the British Journal of Criminologys Radzinowicz Prize (2020). She serves on the editorial boards of Theoretical Criminology, Delito & Sociedad, and the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. Ana is Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Centre at Warwick and an Associate Director of Border Criminologies.