The Reconfiguration of the State Sovereignty in Japan’s Migration Control: Symbolic and Physical Violence over Irregular Migrants

This presentation will discuss how migration control has influenced reconfiguration of the sovereignty in contemporary Japan. In this presentation, the state that holds the sovereignty is posited as “an X (to be determined) which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence” over the population, as defined by Bourdieu (1989).

Faced with the “globalization,” along with the increase of international migration in the 1990s, there were a lot of arguments on whether the state sovereignty declined or not. Some claimed the decline of sovereignty (Soysal 1994; Sassen 1994), and others criticized the thesis (Freeman 1998). Particularly after the 9.11, the operation of sovereignty over migration control has become more and more stringent (De Genova and Peutz 2010, Kanstroom 2012).

Likewise, in Japan, the migration control has been changing since around the end of the 1980s. Based on the qualitative and quantitative data, the presentation traces the changes by focusing on the symbolic dimension of the state and its impacts on its physical dimension. The presentation argues while there had been a symbolic struggle over the definition of irregular migrants in a social space, the state successfully got the monopoly of the legitimate use of symbolic violence. That is, the state categorizes irregular migrants into “illegal residents,” meaning criminals, which has been naturally accepted as those who should be controlled. This monopoly of legitimacy justified the state to operate the physical violence over the migration control.

The presentation concludes that the reconfiguration of sovereignty in Japan can be seen in the shifting relationship between the symbolic and physical dimensions of the state in the context of migration control.