Borrelli, Lisa Marie, Luca Pfirter and Doris Niragire Nirere

Discipline
2024

With Discipline, we focus on techniques and mechanisms that advance corporeal, attitudinal, and behavioural docility and thereby contribute to contemporary processes of social differentiation and exclusion. Exploring the intersection of migration policy and welfare governance, we discuss disciplinary measures deployed at the intersection of welfare and migration regimes with the aim of understanding how internal border and welfare controls discipline poor non-citizens by criminalising certain kinds of behaviour. Drawing on concepts including micro-violence and micro-aggression, this keyword looks at bureaucratic practices, their justifications and their consequences for non-citizens, before moving on to theorise how such practices have come to permeate the wider society. Disciplinary systems of welfare governance depend on the threat of punishment: individuals are prompted to discipline themselves because they could become the object of disciplinary power at any moment. Such disciplinary techniques are efficient, productive, and subtle, and can result in the increasingly ‘automatic’ internalisation by non-citizens of certain kinds of behaviour.