(Re)Branding the State: Humanitarian Border Control and the Moral Imperative of State Sovereignty

By taking the 2014 US Customs and Border Protection 'Dangers Campaign' as an exemplar of what we see as an emerging new form of border control management, we argue that the sovereign state is re-branding the politics of migration under the guise of a humanitarian imperative. Three intertwined phenomena allow for this humanitarian and moralistic shift: first, a strategic designation and staging of a state of nature; second, an emphasis and utilization of the materiality of death; and third, the de-branding of state sovereignty so as to employ neoliberal market mechanisms as means to depoliticize its strategy for migration control.