In their reflections on the role of radical theory, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt call for the ‘proposition of new concepts for political theorising today adequate to our conditions’. Virno and Hardt tie conceptual revision to political change, and this move reorientates the relationship between theory and practice so that the two are not conceived as separate but rather inextricably linked: ‘the relationship between theory and practice remains an open problematic, a kind of laboratory for testing the effects of new ideas, strategies and organisations’. The task of inventing new concepts apposite to the study of contemporary global politics not only assists in political analysis but constitutes a critical praxis, with significant ethical and political implications, in its own right. This is because the question of whether a given concept is ‘adequate’ or ‘apposite’ to our conditions will depend upon a prior judgement about who ‘we’ are and what ‘our’ conditions might be in the first place.

On the one hand, the concept of the border of the state, under – pinning the modern geopolitical imaginary and conventional inside/outside model, has occupied and continues to occupy a prominent position in conceptualisations of global politics, both explicitly and implicitly. This is illustrated in the cases of United Kingdom and European Union border security arrangements considered in Chapter 1 which, alongside innovations in understanding what and where ‘the border’ is, retain a traditional understanding of it in their operations at ports, airports and the outer-geographical edge of the sovereign territories they seek to protect.