The deportation bus. Or, border politics after Walter Benjamin

This paper conducts a conversation between materialist perspectives in international political sociology (IPS) and certain methods inspired by Walter Benjamin, especially his unfinished Arcades Project. Given his commitment to understanding social and historical change by thinking through objects and fragmentary artefacts, the marginality of Benjamin to IPS debates is somewhat perplexing. A conversation with this thinker is therefore timely. In the spirit of Benjamin’s granular and heterogeneous approach to the modern city, the paper is not an exercise in high theory. Instead, it intervenes in debates about migration, deportation and border politics through a focus on one particular object: the bus. Buses feature in deportation struggles in a variety of ways. Deployed not just for carceral transportation between detention centres and airports, or in the conduct of deportation raids, vans and buses are also sometimes used to advertise deportation as a populist political project, while artists and activists have targeted the bus to enact a politics of sabotage and solidarity. By confining ourselves to one largely neglected object but tracking it across multiple contexts and encounters the paper will demonstrate the promise of a Benjamin’s methods for studying border politics today.