ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses migrants’ second encounter with the Visa Information System (VIS) upon arrival at the external borders of Europe. Based on ethnographic research at a large international airport, the chapter demonstrates that the Agambian reading of borders as sites of a permanent state of exception and an unfettered exercise of sovereign power is empirically untenable. Besides showing that the capacity to act is distributed at the moment of border examination, this analysis highlights that border guards’ decisions are mediated and shaped by socio-economic forces, which are erased by Giorgio Agamben’s twin concepts of sovereign power and bare life.
