The state is a central frame of reference for virtually all political scientists. And yet it is astonishing how little attention is paid by political scientists to the ways that states limit, regulate, and restrict the freedom of movement of millions of people in extreme but increasingly common and important instances, through attempts to control borders through policies of detention and incarceration. The two books under review provide welcome attention to these issues.

Thanks to Nicholas De Genova, Nathalie Peutz, and Duke University Press, social scientists now have, in The Deportation Regime, an urgently needed compendium providing copious information and analysis of deportation regimes in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, and the Middle East. And kudos as well to Perspectives, which had the perspicuity to inform this audience about a volume that is edited by two anthropologists and includes only two essays by political scientists, members of a discipline, especially in the United States, that has stunning and embarrassing gaps in scholarship on citizenship studies and deportation politics. Political scientists interested in initiating research into a topic on the front pages of newspapers and largely absent from the discipline's research journals should start by reading this collection, along with Daniel Kanstroom's Deportation Nation (2007), a history of US deportation laws and politics since the colonial era.

The Deportation Regime not only conveys detailed information about a large number of countries; it also provides exposure to a wide variety of archives through the diversity of the authors' countries of training (Canada, England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States), their careers (in law, NGOs, as well as the university), and the variation in the stages of their careers. Moreover, the editors did a fabulous job of selecting fourteen extremely well-written and illuminating essays that nicely complement each other.

The essays reveal that the skill sets possessed by social scientists are crucial for lifting the curtain on information that is shown dramatically but only partially by the ad hoc work of journalists. For instance, the March 23, 2011 New York Times ran a story with the headline “U.S. Returns Young Girl, a Citizen, to Guatemala” describing what sounds like an unusual episode of a family torn apart because of the different citizenship status of parents and child. The chapter “Deportation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” shows that this situation is not unusual, providing a systematic ethnography and data documenting the daily hardships and anxieties of families throughout the region who are negotiating the separations of the toddler depicted in the Times article: “Nationally, 3.1 million children are U.S. citizens living in families with unauthorized immigrant members; 67% of children in those families are citizens” (p. 195n9). This sort of information is necessary for contextualizing the individual episodes appearing in the news as political and systematic attacks on human dignity and not just random bureaucratic blunders.

In her remarkable chapter describing the experiences of thirty-one long-term US residents who were deported as “criminal aliens” to Somaliland, Nathalie Peutz writes, “Anthropologists are well placed for locating deportees, witnessing their ordeal, and finally translating their narratives for an audience of citizens who may not view these punishments as arbitrary” (p. 403). But the lay audience is not the only one in need of the empirical information this collection provides. Scholars drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben are also taken to task for their inadequacies in explaining the specific operations of the deportation regime. Sarah Willen, for instance, writes that one “theoretical goal” of her work is to “offer a critique of the manner in which Agamben's concept of homo sacer has come to be applied in analyzing locally specific biopolitical regimes” (p. 265). Willen goes on to describe the “radical reconfiguration of unauthorized migrants' status in Israel from ignored and excluded others into actively hunted criminals” (p. 289). Her point is that political theorists writing on this topic may rely on grandiose theory instead of empirical analysis of banishment on the ground and thus fail to notice the state violence inconsistent with, say, Agamben's paradigm for homo sacer.

Indeed, the authors throughout this volume are deeply engaged with the theoretical stakes of their research. Two issues receive particular attention: (1) how to reconcile the consensus among many left scholars that the neoliberal ascendancy of the 1990s has produced a decline of the sovereignty of the nation-state, on the one hand, with the intensification of deportation regimes enlisting old-fashioned norms of sovereignty during this same era, on the other; and (2) whether the rule of law is best seen as a charade manipulated by the national security–industrial complex institutionalizing a state of emergency or as an arena that provides liberals viable possibilities for resistance to, and even the suppression of, nativist state violence.

The more benign hopes for the postsovereign state also attract skepticism. After noting the proliferation of “postnational,” “flexible,” “cosmopolitan,” and “global” citizenship theorized in the late twentieth century, the editors write, “Nevertheless the continuing significance and ever-intensifying magnitude of deportation as a presumptively legitimate and merely ‘administrative’ state practice seriously challenge any theoretical advances and undercut even empirical evidence toward an alternative world, or way of life in which membership, entitlement, and virtue would not be always already inscribed in one's relationship to the spaces of (nation-)states, their borders, and their appalling inequalities of wealth and power” (p. 7).

The chapters engage evidence of persistent state sovereignty differently, some rejecting the neoliberal paradigm outright by stressing the continuities of deportation law today with the persistence of the modern nation-state—as Galina Cornelisse writes, “depriving unwanted foreigners of their liberty is a consequence of the territorial foundations of the modern state” (p. 105; see also p. 113). Others, like De Genova, adduce the deportation regime as the latest site for instruments of capitalism, although capitalism is reconciled to sovereign governments: “The successive governmental management of citizenship and alienage by territorially defined states, then, may best be understood in terms of the global politics of the capital-labor relation” (p. 51, emphasis in original).

Agamben's work on homo sacer and the “state of emergency” is engaged as well. Rutvica Andrijasevic adheres the closest to Agamben's paradigm—unsurprising in light of her focus on Italy's notorious Lampedusa island detention center and the government's outsourcing of asylum-seekers to Libyan camps (pp. 147–65). But elsewhere, Agamben's analysis receives challenges on several grounds, perhaps the most important emerging from several authors' alertness to the subjectivity of people who are deported. Of Agamben's description of deportation centers as a site of bare life, William Walters writes “it is rather one-sided and crushingly dismal” (p. 95). Walters goes on to “consider some of the various ways in which camps have been contested, both by antiracist activists and by potential deportees themselves” (p. 95). De Genova issues a similar challenge: “Surely the politicization of Elvira Arellano,” a Chicago immigrant rights activist deported to Mexico, “did not evoke the iconic figure of bare life that Agamben identifies in the space of the Nazi concentration camps” (p. 37).

Indeed the incisive voices and perspectives of people who are deported come through time and again, importantly shaping the volume's findings, including accounts of how those facing deportation enlist the rule of law against the government. Deporten a La Migra (Deport Immigration Agents) is a Bay Area coalition that includes groups ranging from low-income activists to La Raza Centro to produce, as Sunaina Maira argues, an overarching critique of state power “related to the economic and political logics of immigration and deportation policy and the War on Terror” (pp. 318–19). Peutz notes of those deported to Somaliland descriptions of the immigration agencies as a “bureaucracy that neglected or even feared the law” and that depicted those deported as law's truest disciples who thus “continually invoked [the law] as an ally in their struggle” (p. 400). After Abdullahi tells Peutz how “good it felt to stand up in front of the judge and before the law” during a successful habeas argument, Peutz responds to him, “But you said the U.S. had thrown out all the laws,” and he replies, “Yes, but not if you take them on” (p. 400). Peutz herself is more skeptical and suggests Abdullahi is naive on this point. However, Abdullahi's notion that law in the hands of liberals, with its tacit goals of justice and fair play, may be invoked to undercut the brutal and often unlawful administration of immigration policies is reinforced elsewhere in the collection, e.g., the episodically successful interventions of Kein Mensch Ist Illegal in Germany, as discussed by Heide Castañeda; and Montreal's Comite d'Action Des Sans-Statut Algeriens. Such political victories on behalf of noncitizens suggest, says Peter Nyers, an “abject cosmopolitanism,” one that is working within the parameters of exclusion and “re-creating citizenship” (p. 440). (Nyers is riffing on Bonnie Honig's “democratic cosmopolitanism.” Honig's subjects are formally empowered within particular democratic regimes and Nyers' are not, but both start from positions of particularity and nonetheless act and effect change on a transnational stage in a manner Agamben's homo sacer never could.) In addition to engaging overarching theories of sovereignty, the essays provide a number of fascinating insights into how detention indicates the government's control over time, i.e., the gaps in life caused by nonpunitive custody arrangements, as well as the similarities and differences between deportation regimes now and in earlier periods.

Wendy Brown's Walled States, Waning Sovereignty engages with a specific piece of the deportation regime—namely, the fence or wall, its rhetoric and funding precipitated by a waning of state sovereignty characteristic of the post-Westphalian political-economic landscape. “[I]t is the weakening of state sovereignty, and more precisely, the detachment of sovereignty from the nation-state, that is generating much of the frenzy of nation-state wall building today” (p. 24). In its stead, “[c]apital alone appears perpetual and absolute, increasingly unaccountable and primordial, the source of all commands, yet beyond the reach of the nomos … turning populations around the world into homo sacer” (p. 64) such that “[Carl] Schmitt appears as the quintessential owl of Minerva flying at dusk” (p. 82). The revelations of unaccountable sovereign power he “so brilliantly stipulated and braided together in the interwar period were entering the final decades of their modern form” (p. 83).

Brown's account of the dialectic between neoliberalism and waning sovereignty producing an anxiety about state boundaries sounds quite plausible, perhaps even likely. But I suspect this is because claims about major historical shifts often appeal to a generation's narcissism, and not because this moment is sui generis. Consider, for example, the funding and rhetoric for one of the two walls Brown highlights, the one dividing Israel-Palestine: its existence and justifications are inextricably linked to a political history predating Israel's founding, a historical event that is unrelated, and indeed in opposition, to agendas of neoliberalism or transnationalism. Many other counterexamples suggesting Schmitt may not be the owl Brown suggests come to mind, though space allows listing just a few: the boycott of Iraqi oil in the 1990s (neoliberals would prefer buying it at market prices, regardless of the profits going to a repressive dictator or Hamas); the invasion of Iraq despite strong opposition from a broad swatch of corporate America, including the leadership of Citigroup and US oil companies; the arrests of several House members for corruption charges post-2001; the crackdown by the US Department of Justice on offshore bank accounts, including via the secretive Swiss banking system indulged by the superrich to evade the US Internal Revenue Service; the US government's recent leadership of NATO attacks on Libya; and, of course, the entire deportation regime itself. In all these cases, the rule of wealth lost out to AIPAC, nationalism, or the rule of law.

If the nation-state is waning, then why were neoliberals unable to pass comprehensive immigration reform despite two full-throttle efforts on its behalf by the Bush and Obama administrations? Is it because of a last vicious backlash of nativists desperate to save their waning nation-state, or is it because this is just the latest episode of political-economic struggles based on irrational fault lines of ethnicity and national origins? Or, to reflect on another moment of this struggle, if nativists are so riled up by waning sovereignty, then why did a majority in the House and Senate, though not a super majority, vote to pass the Dream Act at the end of 2010?

Indeed, especially in light of Brown's recognition that political sovereignty always has been some sort of “fiction” (p. 69), why invoke a zero-sum relation between state sovereignty and neoliberalism, or nativism and neoliberalism, as opposed to seeing new technologies of nativism as part of a fundamentally persistent instantiation of intergenerational political communities invoking birth and sacred territory to negotiate mortality, not unlike the way ancient Athenians managed their resident aliens? Brown does suggest that her argument may be “counterintuitive” (p. 24) and acknowledges that the “new walls thus seem to stand as a certain kind of rebuke to every poststructuralist theorization of power as well as to every liberal hope for a global village” (p. 81), not to mention Brown's own insistence here and in her earlier work that neoliberalism has triumphed over liberalism and the nation-state.

So many questions arise because Brown is stingy with discussing empirical work at odds with her own assumptions. Brown relies for evidence of waning sovereignty on Saskia Sassen's Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, published in 1996, in other words before Sassen or anyone else could assess the impact of the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform Act or the wars and national security measures occasioned by the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It would have been useful if Brown provided some criteria for evaluating when increasing nativism is evidence of the nation-state bulking up and when it indicates its waning. What about earlier rejections of cheap incoming labor? Was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act also evidence of waning sovereignty? What about the massive deportations of US residents of Mexican ancestry in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of corruption by party bosses that also called the rule of law and other prerogatives of government sovereignty into question, making today's lobbying and campaign contributions seem relatively benign?

These two books raise excellent questions about deportation policies that are timely even if they may not be unique to the twenty-first century. Moreover, the paradoxes on which they invite us to reflect suggest that state power and markets are not inherently good or evil but terrains of struggle on which many conflicting values may thrive or perish. For instance, the Arizona state legislature passed legislation that would seriously encumber the lives of immigrants and anyone profiled as an immigrant, legal or otherwise, but then rescinded portions of it in response to a boycott of the state by professional associations that was hurting the convention industry. (Likewise, the American Political Science Association changed its annual meeting venue in solidarity with San Francisco hotel unions, resulting in a labor deal the unions found attractive.) In these cases, the market is not a vehicle for flattening social relations into one-dimensional profit-maximizing encounters but a venue for expressing vital progressive political commitments and using economic power to back them up. Perhaps one might view legislators giving way to business interests as evidence that the nativists are right to suspect waning sovereignty, or perhaps the progressive organizing behind the boycotts means a triumph of abject, democratic, and even corporate or professional cosmopolitanism. State power and markets will be used to hurt those whose values or unmanaged existence threatens the inherently fraught and unstable institutions of the nation-state and capitalist democracy, but, as Abdullahi suggests, perhaps “not if you take them on.”