The airport is a quintessential border institution.

As the world has internationalised and state capacity has grown, that this difference between inside and outside local and foreign has collapsed into a permanent state of familiar otherness, a vigilant containment that is not hospitality and never become solidarity.

The airport is a space of both law and lawlessness in which the distinction between those two is often erased. Here I want to bring in philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has theorised extensively the lawless law that characterises the state of exception.

The state of exception, you can think of it as akin to the Roman used iustitium which was generally proclaimed during the state of tumultus when the Roman state was threatened from either without or within. The iustitium was the suspension of law that enabled the Roman state to raise an army and confront whatever the threat was.

This was a zone of anomie in the words of Agamben in which all legal determinations are deactivated and it also functions as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism, and a threshold of indifference between anomie and law.

In other words, if the law encompasses everything or nothing, then the distinction between law and lawlessness is meaningless.