Regimes of Separation Old and New: Rethinking the (Anti) Political

This essay deals with the political implication of a condition in which within certain territories all movement, however mundane, is subject to management. What happens when movement inside political spaces is the state of permitted exception rather than the norm? The prerogative of sovereign power is increasingly dependent on its monopoly over border crossing. The ubiquity of borders suggests that their function as a mechanism restricting movement matters more to the institution of political sovereignty then the actual territories delineated by them. Rather than looking at how border regimes distinguish one sovereign territory from the other, I examine political spaces & subject/citizen categories produced by the management of movement through space. A particular type of political sovereignty which I call regime of separation is a case in point. I argue that this regime & its peculiar features survived the demise of South African Apartheid & is resurfacing in contemporary Israel/Palestine as an instance of a generic type. 27 References. Adapted from the source document.