Description
In the contemporary international system, various forms of colonial structures (both historic and emerging) interact to produce institutional frameworks that construct some people as trustworthy, some as suspicious. Indeed, if we look at the international system as a whole, some people may find themselves constructed and reconstructed as either suspicious or trustworthy from multiple directions. One to see this is through studying the implications of global migration governance. Through analysis of: visas (requirements for visas as well as acceptance rates), irregular migration dynamics, asylum systems, and internal migration controls (such as barriers to domestic labour markets and welfare systems based on the checking of documents for example), it becomes clear that the heavy migration governance infrastructure cannot be understood only as directed at the governance of human mobility. Rather, it seems to govern access to membership of the global system of mobility. In this paper, I will propose that access to that membership seems to be built on trustworthiness, and non-access to suspiciousness. Furthermore, I will suggest that this sits within colonial and neo-colonial traditions which justify colonial practices on the basis of the trustworthiness or suspiciousness of colonial subjects.
