Description
Scholars in IPS engaging with issues relating to mobility grapple with how various dynamics “escape” nation states and their borders. These approaches challenge understandings of the international that are often locked in conceptions of space and the political that are based around territory and states. Yet, the spatial and material implications of concepts such as the “space of exception”, or spaces that materially challenge the logics of territory (cyberspace, the high seas, refugee camps) have been left undertheorised. These spaces however are not “negative space” outside territory but rather sites with their own material and political specificity.
Through a focus on mobility as a global challenge, this paper explores this friction, to consider how the exceptional and international become diffused in ordinary living and everyday practices. We offer two distinct examples through which to analyse these dynamics; the ability of humanitarian practice to consign spaces to the realm of exception and the ways in which commercial logics of maritime transport have carved out the space of the sea as beyond legal oversight and protection. These show the crucial frictions behind the production of the exceptional through the everyday, as both a conceptual and methodological tool.
