At the Edges of the Nation-State: Migration Policies and Exceptional Governmentality in Guadeloupe
Relegated to an “overseas” institutional status, Guadeloupe is subjected to a particular configuration that makes the understanding of local migration policies more difficult. This singular regime sets itself apart by the existence of an “internal” border between the overseas department and the French metropole, and the selective suspension of the rule of law. These measures are legitimated by the “specificity” associated with the archipelago and result in a form of marginality that reduces the rights of migrants as well as enhanced controls on movements from/to metropolitan France. How can the existence of this demarcation within the national space be addressed? How to understand this judicial discontinuity with the metropole in a society that was in a colonial situation decades ago? Using these questions as a starting point, this article proposes to address border control practices in Guadeloupe as an illustrative manifestation of an « exceptional » governmentality in French overseas territories. It suggests that migration policies in Guadeloupe proceed from a political rationality that is based on the marginalisation of the territory. Using a qualitative survey based on semi-structured interviews carried out in 2013 and governmental and associative reports, this research aims at demonstrating how border control arrangements used in Guadeloupe - and, by extension, in French overseas territories - by the French state apparatus are guided by a postcolonial paradigm led by the assumption of a labile and suggestible population.