Political Science

The past 10 years have seen an increase in legislation pertaining to marriage migration in Europe. Such attention betrays various concerns and anxieties that intersect not only with issues of risk management, rights, and citizenship, but also with less tangible dimensions such as emotions, which become embedded in legal as well as in surveillance practices. Emotions such as love are integral to the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculation, and tactics that Foucault identified as part of governmental processes; the latter should not necessarily be
equated with (and limited to) rationalized technocratic processes
detached from emotional components. Technologies of love are central to the governmentality of marriage migration; as modes of subjectification and governing practice, they connect intimacy with citizenship. More than the manifestation of the rationalization of a specific emotion, technologies of love allow for an exploration of what an engagement with emotions such as love does to governmentality. Illustrations of the “attachment requirement” in Denmark, and the case of “Catgate” in Great Britain, show that technologies of love play a significant role in stirring and disciplining specific migration flows (what kind of marriage
migrants the state welcomes or keeps at bay), but also in challenging, even if inadvertently, those policies and practices designed to gauge “true” relationships.

Increased legislation pertaining to marriage migration regulations in countries such as France, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom reveal a process of increased securitization and concerns over marriage migrants that belies assumptions of marriage migration being a private, apolitical issue. This chapter examines how a logic of risk management and premediation permeates discussions, policies and practices that aim at disciplining marriage migration flows in various European countries. This logic of premediation relies on what I call technologies of love, which constitute an important interface of mediation between sexuality, identity, citizenship, institutions, and territory.

**FEEL FREE TO EMAIL ME FOR FULL ARTICLE, IF YOU CANNOT ACCESS IT ONLINE *** Marriage migration has recently drawn some attention, notably to the ways in which third-country nationals face increased challenges compared to European citizens when it comes to reunite with their spouse or partner. Foregoing a detailed legal analysis, this article rather seeks to interrogate the following: what connections can be drawn between law, love, mobility and sovereignty? Relying on various instances of management practices in Europe, I examine what marriage migration regulations tell us about their entanglement. On the one hand, I claim that love can and should be accounted for in the governmentality of marriage migration. On the other hand, by being attuned to the ways in which love is connected to different marriage migration management practices, we can see that governmentality cannot fully capture the different forms of power deployed and enacted in specific settings. What we have instead are complex assemblages that highlight a productive tension, as love becomes both a target and object of governmental calculations in projects of immobility, and a movement that participates in projects of mobility. It thus intermeshes with, yet also challenges, attempts at fixity.

The nature of the debates surrounding international relations (IR) as a social science have pointed to issues of ontology, epistemology, methodology, philosophy of science, history, and sociology of knowledge, yet they are all crucial in understanding the character of international relations. Such an idea was brought about by Stanley Hoffman’s 1977 article, “An American Social Science: International Relations.” For Hoffmann, IR developed the way it did out of a set of distinctive intellectual predispositions, political circumstances, and institutional opportunities. His insights, however controversial, thus reveal fundamental questions about the work of IR scholars. The key issues here are the definition of IR as a discipline, the definition of IR as a science, and the definition of IR as an American social science in particular. The large variety of inquiries explored in IR, the “kind” of social science IR scholars are engaged in, as well as how “progress” is assessed, all reveal some important nuances in international relations as a discipline. Moreover, the debates surrounding the scientific legitimacy of IR scholarship reveal how IR gained legitimacy as a discipline. The historical development of IR could in fact be described as a series of debates, known among those in the field as the “great debates,” which eventually became the coherent whole understood to be the field of international relations.

In his article, Barnett makes a convincing case for the need to consider securitization as a mode of problematization. When it comes to security, he enjoins us to consider the role of publics and publicness without necessarily committing to an unreflexive liberal ideal of transparency, non-interference and openness. This response focuses on two central issues that emerge when we pay attention to publics, security and the spaces of their unfolding. The first one entails a reflection on the different understandings of the political and the legitimacy conferred to the different publics attached to them. The second one is the need to deepen our understanding of subjecthood in relation to security and resilience. Acknowledging and better accounting for the great variation in different subjects’ capacity to enact resilience or internalize security norms cast doubts on some security studies’ and resilience studies’ bleak assessment of governmentality and its workings.

When it comes to marriage migration and family reunification more generally, love becomes transport, a way of traveling. Love moves people across borders, as attachment to a citizen or a permanent resident often becomes the very ground for securing legal entry into another territory. This intervention examines the relationship between love, nationhood, and mobility through a mobilization of the concept of “technologies of love”. Focusing on the case of Friendship Park/El Parque de la Amistad located along the San Diego/Tijuana border, I gesture towards the movements brought about by love, along with their diversions and resistance, while also taking into account how they are interwoven in other flows and assemblages (those of law and sovereignty, especially), whose material and spatial features should be addressed.

This multidisciplinary collection investigates the ways in which marriage and partner migration processes have become the object of state scrutiny, and the site of sustained political interventions in several states
around the world. Covering cases as varied as the United States, Canada, Japan, Iran, France, Belgium or the Netherlands, among others, contributors reveal how marriage and partner migration have become battlegrounds for political participation, control, and exclusion. Which forms of attachments (towards the family, the nation, or specific individuals) have become framed as risks to be managed? How do such preoccupations translate into policies? With what consequences for those affected by them, in terms of
rights and access to citizenship? The book answers these questions by analyzing the interplay between issues of security, citizenship and rights from the perspectives of migrants and policymakers, but also from
actors who negotiate encounters with the state, such as lawyers, non-governmental organizations, and translators.