ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I turn to the specific context of healthcare to explore how state borders are reproduced, negotiated, and tested in and through situated encounters between service providers and irregularised migrants. The chapter thus addresses the role of territory in contemporary government, particularly the changing meaning and location of state borders and the role of territory in valorising and distinguishing between lives. I use an ethnographic account of a medical appointment as a starting point to investigate the role of discretionary decision-making in (re)producing or challenging state borders in the medical encounter. Understanding these decisions as a form of sovereign decision on the exception or (non-)value of life, I seek to contextualise sovereignty as a practice within mundane institutional practices and expert knowledge. The ethnographic focus in this chapter brings forth the multiple and dispersed, as well as negotiated quality of the sovereign decision and hence the border in everyday practices and situations. It also shows how ambiguous outcomes were produced, not only by the friction between ‘decisions’ at different branches and levels that make up the state but also between different normalising frames informing those tasked with translating state policy into practice.
