Revolutions in rights are always momentous and always surprising. With hindsight, we find ways to explain them: attributing interests, sketching institutional architectures, unearthing material substrata, and artfully tracing key mechanisms and processes. But at the time, on the ground, in the turmoil of real-time politics, revolutions in rights have been either the stuff of dreams – long-term yet evolving objectives, animating activism that is one part strategy, two parts seat-of-the-pants innovation – or barely credible threats, unimaginable transformations of political orders defended by invested elites, backed by material might, and undergirded by old values codified in law. Revolutions in rights are always the product of struggle, generally long and sustained. Yet their triumphs come with a rush. Undercurrents of change break the surface, and suddenly the impossible becomes real: long hostile public opinion swings, new institutional opportunities hand activists unexpected victories, coercion becomes counterproductive, opponents lose the will to fight what was once beyond the pale, and all of a sudden, what constitutes a recognized fundamental right transforms, or the category of humans entitled to such rights expands. The same story has played out time and again: with anti-slavery, workers’ rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and now rights to marriage equality.

The surprising nature of revolutions in rights raises far-reaching questions about the nature of power. Two things stand out. First, how rights are defined and allocated affects the distribution of legitimate power in any social order in which individual rights are the prevailing form of moral and legal entitlement.Footnote ¹ Rights are legitimate powers. They entitle rights-holders to act in particular ways, and circumscribe legitimate action beyond the domain of rights. They demand the exercise of political authority in some areas, but also circumscribe it. Second, because regimes of rights structure the organization of legitimate power in a social order, struggles for rights are struggles for power, and revolutions in rights are the product of such struggles. Yet the workings of power within these revolutions is only partially captured by our prevailing conceptions. For Lucia Seybert and Peter Katzenstein (Chapter 1), these conceptions understand power as control, as the ability to exercise control in situations of calculable risk. Evidence of such power can certainly be found in revolutionary struggles for rights: establishment elites have routinely exercised their material and institutional capabilities in calculated attempts to prevent change, often succeeding for long periods of time. The power that ultimately produces change, however, has been far more complex, and cannot be reduced to actors’ capabilities exercised under conditions of calculable risk. In all struggles, uncertainty has been the order of the day, and power has come, often unexpectedly, through innovation in an order’s cracks and contradictions, not control.

This chapter explores the nature and workings of this “protean” form of power, focusing on a particularly consequential revolution in rights, that associated with the codification of the 1945 human rights regime and the associated reconstitution of the right to self-determination. As I have shown elsewhere, today’s global system of sovereign states is the product of successive waves of imperial collapse, the most significant of which were driven by struggles for individual rights.Footnote ² Post-1945 decolonization was the most momentous of these waves: not only did multiple empires collapse, but so too did the institution of empire. Conventional accounts attribute this transformation to a shift in control power: after the Second World War, European powers lost their material capacity to control their empires; the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were both anti-imperial; and local anti-colonial struggles raging across multiple empires defeated the European powers on the ground. Common though this view is, it sits uncomfortably with the facts. After the war most imperial powers reasserted their commitment to empire, and their material frailties were evident in some colonies but not in others. Washington’s anti-imperialism waned with the onset of the Cold War, and it ended up siding with the imperial powers to oppose any right to self-determination. The Soviet Union’s rhetorical opposition to empire was contradicted by its own quasi-imperial structure, and its stance in anti-colonial debates was increasingly at odds with that of leading post-colonial states. Local anti-colonial struggles varied greatly in strength, and cannot be credited with the near simultaneous collapse of multiple empires, or the demise of the institution of empire itself. Post-1945 decolonization was the product of a struggle for power, but it was protean power, entangled in a complex rights revolution that drove change, not control power.

The discussion proceeds in two parts. The first is theoretical. Building on Seybert’s and Katzenstein’s conception of protean power, I advance three propositions: radical uncertainty is a condition of all systems of rule; some ideas are politically dynamic and defy control; and actors innovate within the cracks and contradictions of institutional complexes, understood as arrays of co-existing, overlapping, but often discordant singular institutions (in this case, the post-1945 complex of persistent empires and the emerging universal institutions of the United Nations [UN], but a phenomenon also highlighted by Phillip Ayoub (Chapter 4) as well as Noelle Brigden and Peter Andreas (Chapter 5). Taken together, these propositions challenge Stephen Krasner’s oft-quoted argument about power in a world of normative complexity. States encounter multiple, often contradictory, international norms, he contends, allowing materially powerful actors to select norms that serve their strategic interests. “In an environment characterized by multiple norms, power asymmetries, and the absence of authoritative structures that could resolve conflict, rulers can select among strategies that deploy normative as well as material resources in different and sometimes original ways.”Footnote ³ Normative complexity thus favors the exercise of control power. Yet in the argument that follows precisely the opposite is true. If the uncertainty inherent to institutional complexes privileges any kind of power, it is protean power not control power. When the meaning of norms is indeterminate, and when multiple norms co-exist in institutional complexes, uncertainty overwhelms the calculable, and innovation in the cracks and contradictions of an institutional complex can challenge the exercise of control. Part 2 illustrates these propositions with reference to the revolution in rights that drove the wholesale decolonization of Europe’s empires and the emergence of a universal system of sovereign states.

Radical Uncertainty

Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall identify four conceptions of power: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. Compulsory power “focuses on a range of relations between actors that allow one to shape directly the circumstances and/or actions of another,” and institutional power concerns “the formal and informal institutions that mediate between A and B, as A, working through the rules and procedures that define those institutions, guides, steers, and constrains the actions (or non-actions) and conditions of existence of others, sometimes even unknowingly.”Footnote ⁴ With structural and productive power, agency is more diffuse and obscure. Structural power “produces the very social capacities of structural, or subject, positions in direct relation to one another,” while productive power constitutes social subjects “through social systems of knowledge and discursive practices of broad and general scope.”Footnote ⁵ While this framework accommodates many of the existing ways that international relations scholars understand power, the “protean” power emphasized in this volume sits uncomfortably within its conceptual distinctions. Control power is easily assimilated within the categories of compulsory or institutional power, but, as we shall see, protean power confounds these categories, particularly institutional power. Furthermore, while protean power can change actor’s subjectivities, as well as their structural positions, how this works is not easily accommodated within conventional notions of structural or productive power. Crucially, protean power comes to the fore under conditions of uncertainty, conditions inimical to structural control.

Seybert and Katzenstein distinguish between two kinds of uncertainty. Operational uncertainty consists of known unknowns, and can, at least in theory, be transformed by greater knowledge into the world of risk. Radical uncertainty is characterized by unknown unknowns, which “are unknowable and cannot be converted to risk” (Katzenstein and Seybert, Chapter 2, p. 41). The closer one moves to the second of these, the more uncertainty appears not simply as a cognitive condition – a lack of knowledge – but an inherent feature of complexity. Some contexts are relatively simple and are amenable to control through the calculation of risk. But increasingly actors must navigate complex, polycentric social, political, and economic contexts in which uncertainty is an existential condition. Furthermore, complex contexts have constitutive effects, creating social subjects. Innovators are not free-wheeling entrepreneurs who step, pre-constituted, into complex environments and work their magic. As Chapter 6 on science and start-ups shows, innovators are products of uncertainty bred of complexity. Innovation is a knowledgeable practice, learnt through engagement with the demands of uncertainty. And “innovator” is a social identity, clearly apparent in Sergey Brin’s recent declaration that “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.”Footnote ⁶

To understand the workings of protean power in rights revolutions, the concept of radical uncertainty requires further elaboration, as does its distinctive manifestation in struggles for rights. In what follows, I advance three propositions. The first is the general proposition that uncertainty can take radical forms, where unknowable unknowns are hard-wired into complex contexts. The second and third focus on two aspects of radical uncertainty peculiar to revolutions in rights: the open, dynamic nature of rights themselves, and the uncertainty inherent to institutional complexes.

The Instability of Mixed Worlds

Seybert and Katzenstein (Chapter 1, p. 10, Table 1.1) rightly argue that pure worlds of calculable risk and control power, on the one hand, and uncertainty and protean power, on the other, are ideal types. Real worlds are always mixed. Arenas of calculable risk that permit control always co-exist with radical and operational uncertainties that demand innovation and improvisation, producing often transformative circuits of protean power. To capture this, Seybert and Katzenstein propose an interactive approach: these “two kinds of power co-exist and co-evolve” (Chapter 1, p. 5). Nothing in this chapter contests this proposition. I want to suggest, however, that mixed worlds of risk and uncertainty, and control and protean power, can be far from stable. Indeed, in crucial cases they are not only unstable, but pull toward uncertainty, innovation, and protean power.

This is especially true in the case of systems of rule. Systems of rule are the framing arenas for politics, and international systems of rule, whether we call them systems, societies, or orders, provide the political architecture for international politics. They define the political game – the principal political units, how they stand in relation to one another, and the bounds of acceptable political action – and their rise and fall alters the basic parameters of political life. International systems of rule take multiple forms, varying principally according to their organizing principles. Some are sovereign, some are suzerain, some are heteronomous, and, importantly for us, some are hybrids. What matters, though, is that stable systems of rule – whatever their form – cannot rest on control power alone. The quintessential form of such power is compulsory: the ability of “one to shape directly the circumstances and/or actions of another,”Footnote ¹⁷ an ability derived from the material command of the distribution of risk. But as Edmund Burke pointed out in a classic statement, “the use of force is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is to be perpetually conquered.”Footnote ¹⁸ Stable systems of rule depend on something additional, on legitimacy: the “generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.”Footnote ¹⁹

Yet as soon as legitimacy enters the equation, so too does uncertainty. To begin with, legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder. Auto-legitimation is impossible; it always depends on the perceptions of others, and these are difficult to control as millennia of politicians have discovered. At best, perceptions of legitimacy are known unknowns. Second, perceptions of legitimacy, as the Suchman quote indicates, are norm-referential. Actors make legitimacy judgments with reference to interpretations of prevailing intersubjective understandings about rightful agency and action. But this brings us into the realm of meaning indeterminacy, where norms, rules, and practices can be open to diverse, and at times contradictory, interpretations. Struggles over legitimacy sometimes see actors appealing to radically different norms or principles, but often contests are over the meaning of the same norms. Finally, legitimacy is seldom constructed, sustained, or contested in singular institutional contexts. More commonly, the politics of legitimacy plays out within highly variegated institutional complexes. When this is combined with the meaning indeterminacy of legitimating norms, the context of uncertainty moves from operational to radical.

If this is true, surely mixed worlds are likely to be stable? A stable system of rule, for example, might settle on an optimal balance of control and legitimacy, risk and uncertainty. While theoretically possible, two empirical reasons suggest otherwise. Seybert and Katzenstein (Chapter 2) argue that open systems are inherently uncertain and privilege innovation and, in turn, protean power. The openness of a system is generally understood in interactional terms, but systems can be open epistemically as well. New ideas can enter a system through creativity – the artful fashioning of new knowledge out of extant ideational resources – and through cross-fertilization and localization: two forms of innovation. Systems of rule are open systems in both interactional and epistemic terms, and the structures and practices of legitimation that sustain them are always vulnerable to the creation and conscription of new ideas. The second reason has to do with elite incapacity. When the mobilization of new ideas challenges the legitimacy of a system of rule, elites can either recalibrate the system’s legitimacy, or they can compensate for a legitimacy deficit by deploy-ing greater control power: most commonly, coercion and bribery. Historically, in the great rights revolutions that have transformed international orders, elites have almost always chosen the second of these paths, ultimately compounding the crisis of legitimacy. For both of these reasons, I suggest, mixed systems, if systems of rule are anything to go by, pull toward uncertainty and protean power, and artful politics is needed to sustain any balance.

Rights and Universal Sovereignty

Today’s global system of rule has one feature that distinguishes it from all prior international orders: universal state sovereignty. Systems of sovereign states have been rare in world history, and always regional affairs: Ancient Greece; the warring states period in China; Renaissance Italy; and post-Westphalian Europe. Today’s order is unique in being global, and unique in having a single legitimate form of polity: the sovereign state. Furthermore, this novel global order is very young, emerging fully only in the wake of post-1945 decolonization. Prior to this, a hybrid order organized political life across most of the globe, an order in which sovereignty in the European core was institutionally tied to empire in the non-European periphery. The transition from sovereign/imperial order to universal sovereignty was one of the momentous shifts in the global configuration of political authority in world history.

The dismantling of the sovereign/imperial order occurred over several centuries, propelled by a series of great imperial implosions: the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries collapse of Europe’s empires in the Americas; the early twentieth-century break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires; and then, most dramatically, the total dissolution of Europe’s remaining empires after 1945. Across these waves of imperial fragmentation, the sovereign core of the hybrid order gradually expanded: the number of recognized sovereign states grew, eventually drawing in non-European states, and the institutional norms of the sovereign order clarified and consolidated. It was not until the final act, however – post-1945 decolonization – that empire, as a legitimate form of rule, was discredited. Individual empires might have fallen, each suffering their own distinct crisis of legitimacy, but the institution of empire remained robust well into the second half of the twentieth century. As Edward Keene explains, until post-1945 decolonization, Europeans (and Westerners more generally) were quite comfortable “adopting one kind of relationship, equality and mutual independence, as the norm in their dealings with each other, and another, imperial paramountcy, as normal in their relations with non-Europeans.”Footnote ²⁰ It was not until the 1960s that these norms were finally undercut, leaving the hybrid order without legitimating foundations.

As noted in the introduction, conventional accounts of post-1945 decolonization emphasize shifts in control power: the waning of metropolitan power; the rise of anti-imperial superpowers; and the diffusion of power to anti-colonial nationalists. According to such accounts, Europe’s far-flung empires were held together by the imperial powers’ material might. After half a century of world war such might no longer existed, and the balance of global power had shifted to the United States and the Soviet Union, both of whom were anti-imperial. Added to this, Europe’s grip on empire was undercut by anti-colonial wars in Africa and Asia, wars that the Europeans lacked both the will and capacity to defeat. Common though this view is, it is contradicted by the facts. The Europeans were greatly weakened by a half a century of war, but in most cases weakness encouraged renewed commitments to empire. The United States and the Soviet Union had long touted their anti-imperial credentials, but as the Cold War intensified, Washington fell in behind the imperial powers, and Moscow’s brand of anti-imperialism clashed with that emanating from much of the colonial world. Anti-colonial struggles were waged in many colonies, but not all were destined for success, and local struggles cannot explain the wholesale dissolution of Europe’s empires.

The greatest failing of these accounts, however, is that shifts in the balance of control power tell us little about arguably the most important feature of post-1945 decolonization: that it involved not only the simultaneous collapse of multiple empires across the globe, but also, and most significantly, the moral disintegration of the institution of empire itself. In the space of two decades, empire went from being the norm, a thoroughly acceptable system of rule, to a moral, if not a legal, crime. The institution of empire suffered a profound crisis of legitimacy from which it never recovered. Scholars debate whether the United States is an imperial power – a move that stretches the concept too far in my view – and some like Niall Ferguson think Washington should come clean and embrace this status.Footnote ²¹ But since the 1960s no state concerned with its moral standing could make such a declaration: “empire” became, and has remained, a term of moral opprobrium.

A focus on control power cannot explain the collapse of the institution of empire, a key factor in the rapid and simultaneous disintegration of multiple particular empires. To understand this collapse, we need to see it for what it was: a collapse in legitimacy. In 1945, the drafters of the UN Charter could still describe Western tutelage of non-Western peoples as a “sacred trust,” but by the 1970s, UN General Assembly Resolution 2621 called “the continuation of colonialism in all its forms and manifestations a crime.”Footnote ²² By 1960, the legitimacy of empire had all but disintegrated, and this in turn undercut the last vestiges of local imperial legitimacy. In the decade following the 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples the rate of decolonization tripled, from 1.26 new states per year between 1946 and 1960 to 3.86 per year thereafter.Footnote ²³

To understand the crisis that befell the institution of empire, we need to see empires as systemic hierarchies: they rest on an unequal distribution of authority between the core and periphery, and a differential allocation of social and political entitlements between metropolitan citizens and colonial subjects. Elsewhere I call these “regimes of unequal entitlements,”Footnote ²⁴ regimes comprising differential special rights (grounded in custom and law, and derived from social position). In empires, a central political challenge sustains the legitimacy of these regimes, both within the metropole and among subject peoples. From the late eighteenth century onward, Europeans justified such regimes with reference to a standard of civilization that in the nineteenth century they codified in international law. This standard, which divided humanity into civilized, barbarian, and savage peoples, placed Europeans at the top of a human pyramid and licensed both their domination/tutelage of the non-European world, as well as the unjust distribution of social and political entitlements within their individual empires.Footnote ²⁵

The dramatic collapse of imperial legitimacy was the product of artful innovation under conditions of radical uncertainty – uncertainty generated by institutional complexity and norm indeterminacy. The struggles over imperial legitimacy that intensified after 1945 took place within a distinctive institutional complex. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the institutional arena for struggles over imperial legitimacy was predominantly intra-imperial. For example, both the Concert of Europe and the Holy Alliance were concerned with the fate of the Spanish empire in the Americas, but anti-colonial forces had no access to these institutions. It was insurgent Cortes of Cadiz, formed in response to Napoleon’s usurpation of the Spanish crown, that provided the principal, intra-imperial institutional setting for debates over the empire’s legitimacy. With the Versailles peace negotiations and eventual settlement after the First World War a more complex institutional environment emerged, in which struggles over imperial legitimacy could play out both within individual empires and in the embryonic fora of the League of Nations. After 1945, this multidimensional institutional context received ever greater elaboration, as the UN developed not only an increasingly robust general assembly of states, but also emergent human rights fora charged with negotiating an international bill of rights. Proponents and critics of empire were thus faced with a highly variegated institutional context, in which local imperial institutions co-existed with new supranational institutional arenas.

This new institutional complex significantly empowered purportedly weak actors, most notably newly independent post-colonial states that joined the UN in its first decade. The emergent institutions of the UN provided unexpected spaces in which to innovate with key norms of international society, particularly those pertaining to membership and legitimate statehood. Crucial here were UN bodies charged with negotiating the two binding international covenants on human rights: the Human Rights Commission and the Third Committee of the General Assembly. As others have shown, the UN’s founders were far from anti-imperial, and the early architects of its human rights instruments did not see them as a tool against empire.Footnote ²⁶ Yet newly independent post-colonial states found spaces in the UN’s emergent human rights bodies in which to redefine and rehabilitate the collective right to self-determination, grafting it onto evolving human rights norms.

After Versailles the right to self-determination was defined as a right of ethnically defined nations, and only those within Europe. This conception emerged from the Second World War as morally and politically denuded. The Nazi Holocaust cast a pall over any claims to ethnic exclusivity, and the idea that only ethnically defined nations could claim self-determination was of little use to colonial peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, most of whom were ethnically heterogeneous. If such a right was to be of any use after 1945 it had to be reconstituted by placing it on more universalist foundations. Newly independent post-colonial states – such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Lebanon, working closely with key Latin American states – used UN human rights fora to achieve this reconstitution.

There is a long-standing myth, taught to all students of human rights, that the international human rights regime was a Western achievement: a myth that gives pride of place to enlightened liberal powers, especially the United States, and iconic norm entrepreneurs, such as Eleanor Roosevelt. The truth is almost the reverse. The myth holds that African and Asian states favored social and economic rights over civil and political rights. But while this was consistently the Soviet Union’s position, key post-colonial states insisted on the primacy of civil and political rights. When debating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Soviet Union tried to subordinate civil and political rights, to which India asserted that it “would never agree to restricting political rights in order to realize social aims.”Footnote ²⁷ The myth also holds that Western states were strongly committed to the universality of human rights. In reality, Australia, Canada, and the United States joined Europe’s imperial powers in seeking to limit the application of human rights norms within colonial territories and federal states. Again, it was newly independent post-colonial states who defeated these moves, thus ensuring a universal zone of application. It was these states who put the “human” in human rights.Footnote ²⁸

What we see here is innovation bred of norm indeterminacy. As noted earlier, human rights, as general individual rights, suffer from two forms of indeterminacy, both stemming from the idea of a worthy moral being. The first concerns the scope of such rights: what rights are essential to protect someone’s moral personhood? The debate about the relative priority of civil and political rights over social and economic rights reflects this indeterminacy. The second concerns the zone of application of core human rights; a zone the new UN institutional fora enabled post-colonial states to expand.

Post-colonial states redefined and rehabilitated the right to self-determination by grafting it onto the emergent human rights norms they were fashioning. This enabled them to transform a norm previously restricted to ethnically defined nations within Europe to a norm of universal reach. The connection was first made by Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia in 1950 when they moved a motion in the Third Committee of the General Assembly calling on the Human Rights Commission to study “the right of peoples and nations to self-determination.” When the Commission failed to do so, post-colonial states called on the General Assembly to compel the Commission to include an article on self-determination in the draft covenants, arguing that “no basic human rights could be ensured unless this right were ensured.”Footnote ²⁹ The Commission not only went ahead and included the requested articles in both covenants, but asked the General Assembly to pass a resolution encouraging states to uphold the right. Resolution 637(A), adopted in 1952, states explicitly that “the right of peoples and nations to self-determination is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of all fundamental human rights.”Footnote ³⁰ In his well-publicized attempt to cast human rights as a post-1970s revolution, and to deny that decolonization had anything to do with human rights, Samuel Moyn misinterprets the meaning of “prerequisite” here. While he assumes that it meant normatively primary, to post-colonial states it meant no such thing. For them, fundamental human rights could not be secured unless people were self-determining, not that self-determination was a higher value than such rights.Footnote ³¹

In Seybert’s and Katzenstein’s schema, protean power is an unintended effect of the innovative practices of knowledgeable actors, in which “micro-level” actions produce “macro” outcomes. In revolutions in rights, such as the one discussed above, this played out in complex ways. First, the model suggests that innovative actors can generate transformative protean power unintentionally. Intentionality is complicated in the rights case, though. Actors innovating with rights who intend to produce transformative protean power, or actors innovating with rights with no such intention, do not exhaust the range of possibilities. Rights are not just tools of innovation, they are constitutive values that when actors embrace them transform their understandings of themselves as moral beings. In doing so, rights may generate new circuits of protean power, manifest in new patterns of agency and identification, irrespective of their innovative mobilization. Second, the rights case is a clear example of how innovation under conditions of radical uncertainty produces transformative protean power. But it is also a case of how protean power defies possession. After 1945, newly independent post-colonial states played a central role in constructing today’s international human rights regime, but many of these states are now being criticized on the basis of the very norms they helped to define and codify. Put differently, the radical uncertainty that characterized the post-1945 institutional environment encouraged innovation that had transformative effects. Yet, as Figure 1.1 captures (Seybert and Katzenstein, Chapter 1, p. 13, above), this first wave of uncertainty was displaced by a new wave of uncertainty, one that now confronts post-colonial states as they navigate the international human rights norms they helped to institutionalize, but are now mobilized by NGOs, international organizations, and leading Western states.

Conclusion

Those who wield control power are often the most surprised when revolutions in rights transform the social and political orders they have defended with all their might. How are such transformations possible when they, the order’s elite, hold all the material cards, and when their lofty status ought to breed its own legitimacy? The answers lie in the diminishing value of control power to arrest crises of legitimacy, especially under conditions of radical uncertainty. A distinct pattern characterizes all the rights revolutions that have driven the expansion of the modern international system: those associated with the Westphalian settlement; the collapse of the Spanish Empire; and post-1945 decolonization. In each case, when the legitimacy of the regimes of unequal entitlements that held imperial hierarchy together was challenged by new rights claims, imperial elites sought control through coercion. In short, while objectively the context was one of radical uncertainty, these elites understood it as one of risk, placing them in the upper right-hand quadrant of Figure 1.1 (Chapter 1, p. 13, above). Not only did this further erode imperial legitimacy, it radicalized anti-imperial groups, pushing them from voice to exit. Furthermore, because these groups were animated by ideas of general individual rights, action took place under conditions of radical uncertainty: the scope and zone of the application of such rights is neither fixed nor amenable to control. Add to this the uncertainty that attends institutional complexity, and one has a realm of political action that privileges innovation. Time and again it has been the protean power generated by the innovations of seemingly weak actors that has driven change in the modern international order.

As Seybert and Katzenstein (Chapter 2) note, control power and protean power relate in complex and often contradictory ways. Brigden and Andreas (Chapter 5) show how in the migration case the two were mutually reinforcing. Just as prevailing systems of border control inspired new modes of transgressive improvisation and innovation, these very same modes also led to heightened transit dangers and ever more coercive means of border control. In yet another example of this complex relationship, Ayoub shows how the institutionalization of LGBT rights in the EU created a new form of control power, which then provoked “affirmation” and “refusal” in several Eastern European states, producing a new regime of control over LGBT communities (Chapter 4). This has, in turn, encouraged innovative new strategies of translation to encourage greater local acceptance of LGBT rights. The revolutions in rights discussed in this chapter suggest a third version of this complex relationship, this time working at the level of systems change from one kind of international order to another. The rights revolution that led to post-1945 decolonization replayed a common pattern: in their attempts to shore up the prevailing hybrid system of rule imperial elites relied ever more heavily on control power. Early withdrawal from some colonies was matched by violent repression in others, and the emerging institutions of the UN were used not to recalibrate the legitimacy of empire, but as sites for rearguard resistance against anti-colonialism. This in turn created new opportunities for early post-colonial states to innovate with emerging human rights norms, enabling them to reconstitute the right to self-determination. Their eventual success, however, replaced one system of rule with another: the hybrid order was replaced by a universal system of states. The architecture of control power thus took a new institutional form and created the structural conditions for the post-1970s politics of human rights; a politics characterized by new manifestations of protean power born of the innovations of transnational advocacy networks.

Few revolutions in rights have emerged as suddenly, and with such intensity, as the sweeping changes we have observed around LGBTFootnote ² rights in the last two decades. In multiple states, these monumental changes have transformed many LGBT people from the proverbial “other” – often perceived as criminal and degenerate – into respected and sometimes even celebrated members of society. Coming out of the depths of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, few would have predicted the major victories in rights many states afford LGBT people in 2017. From the passage of gender recognition in Colombia and Malta to same-sex marriage in Ireland and South Africa, the diversity of states that address such norms have surprised even the most pessimistic onlooker. As such, LGBT rights constitute an intriguing example of unexpected and transformative social change on a global scale.

What powers, then, have spurred this transformation? Indeed, the theoretical explanations for this striking revolution have often obscured the very real struggle that LGBT people – and the movements that represent them – have experienced on the ground. Too often our theories have focused on concepts closely tied to control power, such as cond-itionality and the diffusion of formal rules. What is obscured is the resistance that top-down diffusion provokes on the ground and the destabilizing polarization we also see surrounding LGBT rights globally. Undoubtedly, the LGBT rights revolution conforms to the broader characterization of such revolutions painted by Chris Reus-Smit (Chapter 3, p. 59): “Revolutions in rights are always the product of struggle, generally long and sustained. Yet their triumphs come with a rush.” A movement’s struggle consists of the innovative practices and little surprises that come along the way, which taken together explain the big transformations we then remember. By taking protean power seriously, we refocus on the struggle, which has explained more of the path to tangible rights than a singular and homogeneous notion of top-down power. Analyzing a movement’s struggle, as it navigates a complex world, aids our understanding, explanation, and interpretation of power.

This chapter thus applies the concepts of protean and control power to understand transnational advocacy surrounding LGBT rights. Using the cases of the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe (CoE), I rethink the hard mechanisms of conditionality – a type of control power – often associated with the successful transfer and diffusion of rights. Importantly, the control power driving these conceptions of sexuality as human rights can also lead to the inflation of threat in multiple domestic contexts.Footnote ³ As such, control power, in the form of hard law diffusion, has had the effects of affirmation and refusal (without internalization), often provoking active resistance and sometimes increased repression. When it does, it changes the experience of actors on the ground, departing from conventional expectations and making their surroundings more uncertain. I argue that these local advocates, embedded in transnational networks, navigate these uncertain and complex terrains with practices of improvisation and innovation that are inherent to the concept of protean power. These actors are attentive to the realities that remain invisible from the top – realities that render control power ineffective on its own – and help to generate transformative change in world politics.

Faced with competing claims about new norms governing sexuality, especially those that problematically conflate sexual rights with the external imposition of “Western” power over “vulnerable” states, local advocates commonly improvise with a practice of translation. They step in where control power falls short to align “external” norms to local contexts. The product is initially movement survival, and sometimes ultimately transformative change, in response to a troubled “one size fits all” approach that can, at times, be counterproductive to the goal of rights recognition. It is the protean power generated by such improvisation that has sustained LGBT movements in times of seemingly insurmountable odds. While improvisation is a common practice in coping with operational uncertainty as activists navigate the unanticipated consequences of control power, its deeper form comes in practices of innovation during radical uncertainty. Radical uncertainty is present when advocates experience a world in which their local surroundings are uncharted and the underlying context of LGBT rights norms is indeterminate. During these times their innovations often feed back up to change the strategies for transnational human rights promotion. Indeed, for LGBT advocates the world in which they operate is constantly changing. Linking back to Seybert’s and Katzenstein’s Figure 1.1 (Chapter 1, p. 13), their mode of operation in any one cell is rather momentary, shifting between practices of improvisation, innovation, refusal, and affirmation as new obstacles arise and terrains change. In most cases of LGBT activism, however, uncertainty characterizes at least one axis of movement operation (either in context or experience) and control and protean power interact. In sum, protean power and control power complement one another in a relationship that is continuously changing – sometimes alternating and always interacting – under various conditions of uncertainty.

In what follows, I introduce the European LGBT rights regime in the first section; use that empirical case to discuss affirmation, refusal, and improvisation (as effects and causes of power) in the region in the second section; then, I take a step back from the intricacies of the case to reflect on broader processes under conditions of risk, complexity, and uncertainty, and how they relate to LGBT power practices and effects in the third section; before concluding in the last section.

European LGBT Rights Regime

LGBT activism has a long history of generating protean power through niches that innovative actors have created. Centered in Wilhelmine, and subsequently Weimar, Germany, the initial – though small scale and without widespread public recognition – political mobilization around homosexuality dates back to the mid-1800s.Footnote ⁴ During that time, pioneer activists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld operated with no compass in a world where homosexuality was invisible in the public sphere. For Ulrichs, responding to the potential proliferation of anti-sodomy legislation that made his sexual orientation illegal, as well as the social sanction that left him without employment prospects, innovation was the only option available.Footnote ⁵ Innovation was central to this process, since the desires he understood had no name, prompting his writings – which were published and disseminated using pseudonyms in various pamphlets – on what he would call urnings (and later homosexuals).Footnote ⁶ His efforts, therefore, offer an example of the innovation that produces protean power during radical uncertainty, for he was operating in a world where sexual minorities were publicly invisible. Only through interactions with like people did he feel compelled to chart their existence. This ultimately gave his innovation of the urning identity the ability to generate movement power – by “offering previously unavailable modes of consciousness” (Emanuel Adler, quoted in Katzenstein and Seybert, Chapter 2, p. 38) and spurring mobilization and research around a new identity – once it was shared and received by others through his writings. In much the same spirit of innovation, Hirschfeld’s later research focused on charting the existence of sexual and gender minorities and studying their proclivities. Both Ulrichs and later Hirschfeld had several near successes at repealing the Prussian anti-sodomy legislation (paragraph 175) before it was ultimately enhanced by the young National Socialist regime in 1935.Footnote ⁷ That regime extinguished the movement throughout Europe (except for a small organization in Switzerland) and sent thousands of gay men to concentration camps. The innovative practices of activists like Ulrichs and Hirschfeld has informed many episodes of LGBT movement history, including the more contemporary one – as a case of improvisation during operational uncertainty – addressed in this chapter. The need for improvisation, in response to severe backlash and resistance is equally apparent in later episodes of the movement.

It was after the Second World War, as part of a post-1945 rights revolution, that sexual minority rights first evolved on the periphery of the broader human rights regime, eventually attaining high political salience across many parts of the world in recent years. Reacting to unresponsive states that had long prohibited access to sexual minorities, LGBT actors in Europe sought out new sources of power outside the state. Because sexual minorities exist in some form across societies, cross-border ties became of paramount importance to political action for post-war Homophile and post-Stonewall (1969) Gay Liberation activism. Recognizing that several elements of their situations were shared across borders, many activists generated unlikely transformative power by organizing transnationally. In 1978, an enduring transnational constellation emerged as the result of a nationally diverse activist meeting in Coventry, United Kingdom: the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (originally IGA, later ILGA).Footnote ⁸ Due to uneven support among their respective states, ILGA activists – and a handful of pioneering states that supported their cause – began targeting European institutions as a venue to challenge the state powers that had previously closed the door to them. These activists were innovative, if not visionary, because they targeted an international organization, the European Community, more than a decade before it had the social mandate it would attain after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.Footnote ⁹ At the time, the odds of finding institutional allies from an economically focused international organization, and on this contentious issue, were low.

Targeting the EU – and other organizations, such as the CoE and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe – did eventually change the underlying international context by creating a place for sexual minority rights at the periphery of the broader human rights regime. Over time, the articulations of a norm that LGBT people are entitled to fundamental human rights, deserving of state recognition and protection, became increasingly clear in both the rhetoric and the legal framework of EU and CoE institutions.Footnote ¹⁰ Article 13 of the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty introduced the first internationally binding law on the issue: it prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The 2000 Employment Anti-Discrimination Directive; the European Charter for Fundamental Rights; the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria; various European Parliament resolutions; European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decisions; and European Court of Justice decisions further institutionalized the norm as part of European human rights values.Footnote ¹¹ In more recent years, and especially for post-communist states that wish(ed) to join the EU and CoE, the “return to Europe”Footnote ¹² would mean adopting the universal understandings of the LGBT norm that European institutions now proffered. Having access to new-found institutional control mechanisms of support and sanction, European advocates began operating in a complex world where risk and uncertainty interact: a world of operational uncertainty, where protean and control power meet.

From Effects to Causes of Power

Reflections on the Theoretical Framework

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the concepts of protean and control power as they relate to the transnational advocacy networks surrounding the issue of LGBT rights. The case of LGBT rights embodies two aspects of unexpected change. The first concerns what the proponents of LGBT rights would consider positive. The sweeping changes surrounding the adoption of norms governing LGBT rights around the globe are truly surprising, and scholarship has grappled with the failure to predict it. At the same time, the second aspect of unexpected change concerns the resistance to these emerging norms. While backlash itself is common, and thus anticipated by movement actors, the various shapes it takes are not. In this sense, it is much like in the case of migration (Chapter 5), where border enforcers react and adapt to the strategies of migrants, or in the case of anti-terrorism (Chapter 9), where states adapt to their failed attempts at control. The constellations of opposition actors and their methods of resistance are unique, unpredictable, and ever-changing across domestic contexts. In many cases of resistance, the opposition is also connected to state actors at an international level, which the example of Russia’s normative opposition to LGBT rights makes explicit.

Identifying stagnant, or even central, nodes of power is thus challenging when we consider the diverse realm of contending actors at play in LGBT politics as well as the global polarization of the norm. Just as US state power has been a force for some LGBT people in the Obama years, an array of US non-state actors were responsible for introducing anti-gay bills to various regions in the first place (e.g., anti-gay activist Scott Lively’s involvement in early iterations of the notorious Ugandan “kill the gays” bill).Footnote ⁴⁵ Just as activists improvise to defeat domestic opposition, anti-LGBT counter-movements seek out and find new state and non-state allies. And just as states and counter-movements can refuse the promotion of the LGBT norms, so can local LGBT activists refuse and reshape the ways that states and INGOs advocate on their behalf. Thus, the actors exercising and generating power are always interchanging in a complex and uncertain world. Especially for a chapter on a vulnerable population, it is essential to emphasize this important point, that protean power is not only a tool for the “weak” or the “good.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As Brigden and Andreas (Chapter 5) demonstrate so well, the protean power practices available to actors via improvisation is likewise available to the various contending actors in this dynamic story.

A core goal of this chapter has been to highlight such contestation in a world of complexity. The institutionalization of LGBT rights has shown recurrent, divergent understandings, even contradictions, of human rights at international and domestic levels. This has created opportunities for innovative political mobilization and the creative grafting of new rights onto local contexts.Footnote ⁴⁷ That is, the control power exercised by the EU and CoE was a necessary (if not sufficient) condition to generate conflict between supranational rights and domestic norms, opening spaces for protean power through the introduction of additional uncertainties. Most episodes of LGBT rights diffusion and circulation are in the spaces where control and protean power interact. While the empirics surrounding LGBT rights advocacy drew heavily from the broader European context in this chapter, we observe a related dynamic of this contestation and indeterminacy in other world regions. As Ashley Currier has demonstrated, the universal underpinnings of LGBT rights norms have also clashed in Namibia and South Africa, where they have been portrayed as colonial and un-African.Footnote ⁴⁸ Palestinian LGBT groups face a similar dilemma under occupation in advocating for gay rights while disassociating themselves from the “pinkwashing” politics of Israel’s gay rights promotion.Footnote ⁴⁹

Navigating such uncertainty generates protean power, embodied in the innovative and improvisational practices that have always been paramount to LGBT advocacy. When international standards of human rights in Europe inadvertently provoked backlash, activists creatively reframed them, often rooting them locally with frames that had previously been seen as antithetical to LGBT rights norm promotion. Depending on the time period and context, different frames helped to facilitate translation to the national level. This was evident in the Polish case, in which activists rooted the universal human rights claims by linking them to the frames used by their opposition.

In doing so, LGBT rights activists resist state repression and thus find the power to, more or less successfully, transform the state’s conception of human rights. Often their innovative practices also loop back to amplify uncertainty and influence the strategies of international institutions and INGOs, which may or may not find similar success when they are used again. Thus, the case of LGBT rights in Europe demonstrates how advocates navigate between international and local arenas, translating international norms to local realities. It is under conditions of complexity that most of these interactions between protean and control power occur.

In sum, I have emphasized that LGBT rights advocacy predominantly operates in an incalculable and uncertain world that relies on an entanglement between both types of power. As this volume advocates, the case of LGBT rights compels those analyzing power to withstand the temptation to simplify the world to such an extent that it appears to be readily controllable through risk-based strategies. We must acknowledge the existence of uncertainty and the space it gives to the emergence of protean power and highlight the dynamics of power that will always leave room to the disruptions that innovation creates for affirmation.

In 2005, Maria,Footnote ¹ a humble and devout woman from rural El Salvador, embarked on a clandestine journey to the United States. She made a contract with a hometown smuggler, who then subcontracted with a series of guides along the route. While under the care of one of those guides, her travel party took a van across southern Mexico.Footnote ² Confronted with the possibility of being stopped by immigration authorities and questioned, Maria began to pray and sing for their safe passage. She began timidly at first. Upon hearing her shy voice, the guide turned to face her, and demanded urgently and unkindly to know what she was doing. When she explained, his face broke into a broad smile, and he responded, “Yes! Great idea! If they stop us, we will tell them we are a church group.” The smuggler, faced with the potential for unpredictable traffic inspections by immigration authorities, seized on the idea. For the rest of the journey in the van, her travel party sang their praises to God loudly alongside their smuggler.

This encounter between Maria and her smuggler unwittingly generated a new survival tactic, one of many novel tactics employed during a clandestine journey to evade capture. Encounters between migrants, smugglers, and the state are often creative moments. New strategies are devised. New trajectories are imagined. New roles are crafted. This creativity emerges from their interaction, as people grapple with uncertainty and danger. Maria’s mobility, despite the state’s attempt to thwart her passage, is thus an outcome of a power that neither belongs fully to Maria nor to her smuggler, but instead circulates contingent on uncertain social moments.

An analysis of Maria’s story, to which we will return later, helps to elucidate why attempts to control the US–Mexico boundary have long had an ambiguous, and often counterproductive, impact on clandestine flows. An unrelenting unauthorized traffic rolls north across the US–Mexico line. Nevertheless, while a massive allocation of resources to the border has not succeeded in stemming the tide of contraband and migration, it has dramatically reshaped these flows.Footnote ³ The geographic focal points,Footnote ⁴ modes of transport, protocols, social relationships, and smuggling networksFootnote ⁵ that underpin routes adapt to policing, and policing, in turn, adapts to these adaptations. In the last two decades, border crossings have grown more dangerous for unauthorized migrants, generating a new humanitarian crisis at the doorstep of the United States.Footnote ⁶ Thus, the border remains porous, but policing has altered crossing practices with deleterious consequences for migrants. The exercise of state power has collided with a complex transnational social reality, producing cross-cutting consequences.

Our chapter explores the ambiguous outcome of this collision across the US–Mexico divide. A myopic focus on conventional notions of power, or its failure, contributes to perverse border policies and analytical shortcomings. Public discourse neglects the protean power evident in migrant improvisations, thereby underplaying migrants’ agency and vilifying smugglers with deleterious consequences for border policy; the binary of powerless migrants/victims and powerful smugglers/victimizers justifies further escalation of policing to protect both national and human security.Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, this discourse also tends toward historical amnesia about its own origins, highlighting the supposedly unprecedented nature of migration crises and forgetting that the power dynamics evident across the border extend back more than a century. Indeed, the starting point in most analyses is the past few decades.

Finally, scholarship generally highlights the failure of border control, rather than unpacking its complex consequences from different levels of analysis. A broad consensus of scholars focuses on the inevitability that border patrol displaces migration to new terrain and social practice, but we know less about how exactly this displacement takes place, and how it has varied across place and time. While the flow continues, displacement is a disruptive and painful process in the lives of unauthorized migrants. On the one hand, migrants endure tremendous precarity and violence, and they sometimes die. On the other hand, migrants are not passive victims; if they survive the treacherous journey north, their success can often be attributed to a combination of fortuitous circumstance, intellectual and physical agility, and social flexibility that emerges within encounters with other migrants, smugglers, or state authorities. Scholarship has generally left unexplored how these individual creative moments collectively contribute to displacement.

Moving beyond traditional conceptualizations of power elucidates such moments, and thereby explains the process of displacement over time. The lens of protean power reveals the multifaceted roles played, not only by traditionally powerful actors like the state and organized crime, but also by individual migrants, like Maria, in concert with the social landscape they must cross. Practically, the lens of protean power complicates the binary of victim–villain, and thereby undermines a useful fiction to justify border escalation. Analytically, this lens also provides a window onto the primary mechanism of displacement: improvisation.

Thus, this chapter applies the concepts of protean power and control power in tracing the evolution of the US–Mexico border enforcement and evasion from the nineteenth century to the present. Following the definition in this volume, protean power is the effect of an imaginative agility, which contrasts with traditional notions of power. Protean power navigates a world of uncertainty, where successful responses to danger and/or opportunity must rely, to a much greater degree, on improvisation and a leap of faith. In contrast, control power is rooted in the capacity to manipulate and respond to risk. This capacity presupposes a world of rational calculations and knowable probabilities; under those relatively predictable conditions, control power can be more effectively utilized to incentivize and coerce particular behaviors from other actors.

Combining a historical perspective with more recent ethnographic fieldwork on the experiences of unauthorized Central American migrants, the chapter recasts the escalatory spiral of policing and smuggling at the border as a collision between worldviews of risk and uncertainty, and between protean and control power. The political and bureaucratic theatrics that drive border policing are primarily premised on a world of risk. Policing measures taken at the border are meant to convey an image of control. Smugglers and migrants, however, live in a world of uncertainty, as well as risk.Footnote ⁸ Border policing has increased the probability of dangers befalling migrants on their journey, but it has also intensified the difficulties of judging that probability. Smugglers’ and migrants’ experiences with and reactions to this hostile and unpredictable environment illustrate the agility and adaptation associated with protean power. Thus, the chapter provides a micro-foundation for understanding the dynamic interaction between the state and unauthorized migration flows.

Importantly, we argue that protean power is not an instrument that marginalized people can harness to produce “social justice” in any predictable way. In other words, it is not an effective means to achieve collective political goals or to correct the structural inequities and violence that reproduce the vulnerability of immigrant populations. Migrant and smuggler improvisations generate protean power, but cannot direct or use it to achieve such goals. Despite the fact that they often prove to be capable of resisting and transgressing borders, migrants also experience policing and violence as profoundly disempowering. Therefore, we unpack these consequences for a variety of actors who populate the migration corridor into the United States: migrants, smugglers, crime bosses, and law enforcers. In conclusion, we caution against a celebration of the emancipatory potential of protean power, even as we acknowledge and explore its effect.

The Ambiguities of Power

The level of analysis matters crucially for how we understand this ambiguous outcome of intensified border policing. On the one hand, we can see the resilience of the border crossings when we look at the aggregate. The migration stream continues to flow north, simply changing direction and adapting to the policing with new clandestine practices. Indeed, at the aggregate level, this outcome is easily predictable; the specific form of criminal displacement may be unanticipated, but the general pattern is expected. It is a policy failure foretold. Accepting the inevitability of this general pattern, policymakers have for several decades now pursued border policing that pushes migration routes to less visible terrain and practices.Footnote ⁹ Policymakers traffic in images of control, premised on assumptions of risk management.

On the other hand, migrants may fail to cross the border and, sometimes, they die in the attempt. During their journey from their homeland, migrants sometimes fall victim to treacherous physical terrain or criminal activity, such as kidnappings, extortions, murders, robberies, and rapes.Footnote ¹⁰ Changes in policing often aggravate migrants’ exposure to these dangers.Footnote ¹¹ At the level of the individual, the lived experience of the border is very different. The individual experience and personal consequences of the border are not predictable; migrants must function under both conditions of high uncertainty and risk, depending on the situation.Footnote ¹² Migrants also experience both risk and uncertainty, feeling buffeted both by increased probabilities of some dangers and the sheer unpredictability of other dangers. From their perspective, policing and subsequent adjustments in smuggling circuits require an improvised response, adapting with agility to changing conditions. Smugglers and migrants traffic in creative subversions of state control, choosing their conduct based on assumptions of uncertainty, as well as risk.

In the risk scenario, the past experiences of friends and family members can offer a reliable guide for future journeys. However, there is little stability in the strategic setting of the clandestine route as experienced by migrants.Footnote ¹³ The diffusion of survival information renders it suspect when criminal predators or state authorities can manipulate it to their advantage. A once-trodden path cannot necessarily be safely traversed a second time. A once-trusted guide cannot necessarily be relied upon a second time. Under these conditions, the trustworthiness of information has an immediate expiration date. In this reality, both migrants and smugglers engage in a reflexive and strategic process throughout the journey. They do not simply rely on information gleaned at the outset of their journey through their existing social networks, but instead improvise new understandings en route. In other words, migrants and smugglers, confronted with a mix of experienced risk and uncertainty, as well as an underlying context that combines risk and uncertainty, exude an extraordinarily malleable protean power.

Indeed, the level of analysis dictates how we see and experience power itself. Control power becomes most apparent when we look from the top down. Control power is the primary instrument of organized collective actors and institutions. However, when we work at the level of individual experience, protean power comes into view, as something that circulates among creative individuals. If we view the state itself through the lens of practice, we can see how protean power constitutes and compliments the exercise of the state’s control power, through a myriad of flexible everyday actions conducted by state agents and bureaucrats.Footnote ¹⁴ Frontline border patrol agents adapt and innovate on the ground, giving rise to protean power that facilitates control. While criminal bosses exercise control power over their territory, their henchmen give rise to protean power as they implement their orders. In other words, depending on whether we look at smuggling gangs and other criminal groups through the lens of an organization or as individuals within that organization, different power dynamics come into view. In contrast, migrants can be understood only as an unchoreographed collection of people engaged in collective practice, not even an approximate of a unified actor. Among the actors caught in this border collision, they are uniquely vulnerable and marginalized, depending almost entirely on protean power as a “weapon of the weak.”Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, this chapter pays close attention to how we view the ambiguous consequences of power.

The chapter is organized chronologically. We take the reader through the collision over time, in order to highlight the dynamic between protean and control power. We trace the evolution of border policing policies from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how such policing has been premised upon assumptions of risk and the projection of an image of control. Against this policy backdrop, we juxtapose the innovations of migrants and smugglers as they adapt to changes in policing over time. Migrants and their smugglers make assumptions of uncertainty and subvert control through improvisation.

However, the alliance between migrants and their smugglers is often an uneasy marriage of convenience and complicated by pressures from other criminal actors and the state. While migrants often improvise together with their smugglers to achieve the shared goal of clandestine passage, migrants also sometimes generate protean power as they resist their smugglers. Indeed, the complexity of these relationships requires us to disentangle the sometimes compatible, sometimes divergent interests of migrants, their smugglers, criminal terrain bosses, and the state. Creative moments emerge from actors’ negotiation of these complex relationships and their contradictions. Border control unwittingly spawns new types of criminal characters, who seem to exude both kinds of power to exploit migrants. In Mexico, these struggles have culminated in the arrival of criminal bosses who more effectively control passage across their territory than the state. The existence of multiple actors with cross-cutting interests and capabilities complicates the effects of power.

The Collision in Historical Perspective

The collision between protean and control power across the US–Mexico border is hardly new, though it has certainly intensified over time.Footnote ¹⁶ Many of the border dynamics of immigration law enforcement and evasion we see today can be viewed as representing the latest chapter in an old story that dates back at least a century – a story that does not simply repeat itself, but nevertheless has a remarkably consistent and recognizable theme: through their interaction, protean and control power have stimulated and reinforced each other. Periods of low control power have typically also been periods of low protean power; likewise, as the exercise of control power by the state has increased, so too has the presence of protean power. Indeed, protean power is integral to the functioning of control power. Thus, ironically, while seemingly in opposition to each other, these two forms of power have also been symbiotic, creating space for one another.

Given all the attention today over the influx of Mexicans and Central Americans across the border, it is especially striking that the first unauthorized immigrants crossing the border from Mexico viewed by US authorities as a problem were actually Chinese. Efforts to prohibit Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century mark the beginning of the federal government’s long and tumultuous history of trying to keep out “undesirables.” The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred the entry of Chinese laborers, who until then were mostly coming in by steamship to San Francisco. But while this front-door entry was closing, back doors were opening, especially via the US–Canada border and the US–Mexico border. The federal government had no stand-alone immigration control apparatus when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, but enforcement of the law would stimulate the creation of entirely new federal administrative capacities.

The US–Mexico border, long a gateway for smuggled goods, was now also becoming a gateway for smuggled people. In 1900, there were just a few thousand Chinese in Mexico, but less than a decade later nearly 60,000 Chinese migrants had departed to Mexico. Some stayed, but the United States was a far more attractive destination.Footnote ¹⁷ In his investigations, US Immigration Inspector Marcus Braun witnessed Chinese arriving in Mexico and reported that “On their arrival in Mexico, I found them to be provided with United States money, not Mexican coins; they had in their possession Chinese–English dictionaries; I found them in possession of Chinese–American newspapers and of American railroad maps.”Footnote ¹⁸ In 1907, a US government investigator observed that between twenty and fifty Chinese arrived daily in the Mexican border town of Juarez by train, but that the Chinese community in the town never grew. As he put it, “Chinamen coming to Ciudad Juarez either vanish into thin air or cross the border line.”Footnote ¹⁹ Foreshadowing future developments, a January 1904 editorial in the El Paso Herald-Post warned that “If this Chinese immigration to Mexico continues it will be necessary to run a barb wire fence along our side of the Rio Grande.” The El Paso immigration inspector stated in his 1905 annual report that migrant smuggling is the sole business of “perhaps one-third of the Chinese population of El Paso.”Footnote ²⁰

Some historians note that border smuggling operations involved cross-racial business collaborations, with white male smugglers often working with Chinese organizers and Mexicans serving as local border guides. A 1906 law enforcement report on Chinese smuggling noted, “All through northern Mexico, along the lines of the railroad, are located so-called boarding houses and restaurants, which are the rendezvous of the Chinese and their smugglers, and the small towns and villages throughout this section are filled with Chinese coolies, whose only occupation seems to be lying in wait until arrangements can be perfected for carrying them across the border.”Footnote ²¹

As US authorities tightened enforcement at urban entry points along the California–Mexico border, smugglers shifted to more remote parts of the border further east in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. And this provided the rationale to deploy more agents to these border areas (this dynamic would repeat itself again at the end of the century). In addition to hiring more port inspectors, a force of mounted inspectors was set up to patrol the borderline by horseback. As smugglers in later years turned to new technologies such as automobiles, officials also pushed for the use of the same technologies for border control.Footnote ²²

Chinese migrants were not the only ones coming through the back door; they were simply at the top of a growing list of “undesirables” that included paupers, criminals, prostitutes, “lunatics,” “idiots,” polygamists, anarchists, “imbeciles,” and contract workers in general. Japanese laborers were banned in 1907. Illiterates were banned from entry in 1917. As seaports became more tightly regulated and policed, immigrants who feared being placed in one of these excludable categories increasingly turned to the back door. Those groups that were disproportionately being turned away at the front-door ports of entry – among them Lebanese, Greeks, Italians, Slavs from the Balkans, and Jews – found Mexico to be a convenient back-door alternative.Footnote ²³

The popularity of the Mexican back door received a major boost by new US restrictions on European immigration through the national origins quotas in 1921 and 1924. Passport rules left over from the First World War formalized in the Passport Act of 1918, also now required immigrants to secure visas at US consulates abroad. The Mexico smuggling route offered a way to sidestep these new numerical restrictions and documentation requirements. This sparked alarm in Washington and provided political ammunition for calls for more border enforcement. The commissioner-general of immigration reported in 1923 that each new entry restriction “promoted the alien smuggling industry and furnished new and multiplied incentives to illegal entry.”Footnote ²⁴ The commissioner’s report the following year predicted that the Immigration Law of 1924 “Will result in a further influx of undesirable European aliens to Mexico with the sole object in view of affecting illegal entry into the United States over the Rio Grande.”Footnote ²⁵

Local media reports reinforced these concerns. A December 22, 1924 article in El Paso’s Spanish-language newspaper La Patria pointed to the booming cross-border business for “contrabandistas de carne humana” (“smugglers of human meat”) in the wake of the new US immigration restrictions.Footnote ²⁶ The article (with the headline “Foreigners who want to cross over to the United States have invaded the city of Juarez”) described Juarez as a depot for foreigners waiting to enter the United States.Footnote ²⁷ The US Congress greatly expanded the immigration bureau’s personnel powers to search and arrest along and near the borderline. In a country otherwise wary of increasing the power and reach of government, border control was clearly one realm where there was a push to bolster federal authority.

Political pressure had been building up for a number of years to create a uniformed border patrol force. The US Border Patrol was formed in 1924 with a $1 million budget and a total force of some 450 officers. Its primary mission was to keep out illegal immigrants, especially the smuggling of Europeans. Wesley Stile, one of the first border patrol agents hired in the summer of 1924, later recalled, “the thing that established the Border Patrol was the influx of European aliens.” Border patrolmen “didn’t pay much attention to the Mexicans” because they were considered merely cheap seasonal farm labor that returned to Mexico when no longer needed.Footnote ²⁸ This meant that the growing influx of unauthorized Mexican workers was largely tolerated and overlooked – at least for the time being.

For Mexicans, crossing the border illegally was relatively simple and largely ignored – successful entry did not require much creative agility. Up to half a million Mexicans may have come to the United States in the first decade of the century. The Mexican Revolution, US labor shortages during the First World War, and the continued expansion of agriculture in the southwest fueled a further influx. There was a growing disconnect between the formal entry rules handed down from a distant capital and the realities, needs, and practices along the border. In other words, the “control power” called for in national immigration laws did not translate into its application on the ground.

As a substitute for European and Asian workers, employers considered Mexicans an ideal labor force: flexible, compliant, and temporary – or so it seemed at the time. Millions of unauthorized Mexican migrants would eventually settle in the United States, becoming a vital source of labor for agriculture and other sectors of the economy but also the main rationale for more intensive border enforcement. It was not until 1929 that US border inspectors even made any real effort to regulate the entry of Mexican nationals; even as late as the 1980s, border controls remained at token levels. US Border Patrol agents could cover only about 10 percent of the nearly 2,000-mile border, and most of those apprehended were simply sent back across the line to try again. Most smugglers caught were simply let go, and those who were not were charged with a misdemeanor.Footnote ²⁹

Anemic enforcement (a bare minimum exercise of control power) meant that illegal entry across the border remained a relatively simple and inexpensive activity: migrants either smuggled themselves across the border or hired a local coyote. The use of a professional smuggler remained more of a convenience than a necessity. Hiring the services of a smuggler generally meant a faster and safer trip across the line. Use of a smuggler did involve personal risks (there was the potential for theft and physical abuse), but attempting the border crossing without such help increased the likelihood of assault by border bandits and abuse by authorities.

The long if uneasy border equilibrium between relatively low levels of control power and protean power became unsustainable in the midst of a growing domestic anti-immigrant backlash that culminated in the 1990s, with California (home to an estimated half of the nation’s unauthorized migrant population) at the epicenter. Just as the late nineteenth-century backlash against Chinese immigrants began in California, so too did the backlash against Mexican immigrants in the late twentieth century – with the fallout spreading across the entire border.

In the heated early and mid-1990s policy debates about illegal immigration and a seemingly “out of control” border, in which politicians from across the political spectrum were scrambling to outdo each other in proposing tough new immigration-control measures, the federal government launched a high-profile border enforcement crackdown. Long viewed as the neglected stepchild of the Department of Justice, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suddenly became one of the fastest-growing federal agencies. The INS budget grew from $1.5 billion in fiscal year 1993 to $4 billion in fiscal year 1999, with border enforcement by far the single largest line item. The size of the Border Patrol more than doubled along the border by the end of the decade. The new border enforcement campaign also included an influx of new equipment, ranging from night-vision scopes and low-light TV cameras to ground sensors, helicopters, and all-terrain vehicles. The military also played a supporting role by assisting with the operation of night scopes, motion sensors, and communications equipment, as well as building and maintaining roads and fences.Footnote ³⁰

Congress assured that the border build-up would continue by passing the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. The sweeping law sharply increased the penalties against migrant smugglers, and authorized the hiring of 1,000 Border Patrol agents a year, reaching a total force of more than 10,000 by 2001. Most of these agents would be deployed to the most popular urban entry points for unauthorized migration, such as El Paso and San Diego, with the goal of disrupting and deterring the flow. Left out of this immigration-control offensive was any meaningful focus on workplace controls – in other words, the application of “control power” was highly selective and focused. It was highly visible, but also extremely thin.

Not surprisingly, tighter border controls in El Paso and San Diego pushed migrants to attempt entry elsewhere along the border. These shifts in human traffic, in turn, generated further political pressures and bureaucratic rationale to geographically expand the border-policing campaign. Consequently, a Border Patrol force that had already more than doubled in the 1990s more than doubled again in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In order to cross a now much more intensively patrolled border successfully, migrants increasingly turned to professional smugglers. As INS commissioner Doris Meisner acknowledged, “as we improve our enforcement, we increase the smuggling of aliens that occurs, because it is harder to cross and so therefore people turn more and more to smugglers.”Footnote ³¹ And as the risks and smuggling fees jumped (from hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars per crossing), smuggling became a much more organized and sophisticated business. Breaking up the traditional routes and methods of clandestine entry turned the once relatively simple illegal act of entry without inspection into a more complex underground web of illegality. Put differently, the greater control power exercised by the state made migrants more dependent on protean power and smugglers.

In turn, US officials went to great lengths to portray migrants as the victims of smugglers, and they used this both to deflect criticism and to provide a further rationale to crack down on smuggling. But this was a much too simple and convenient a characterization of smugglers. Migrants generally viewed smugglers as simply a “necessary evil,” a clandestine business transaction in which they willingly engaged to evade the expanding border enforcement net. Within Mexico, many considered migrant smuggling a shady business, but one that was providing a high-demand service. Smugglers could be abusive and reckless, and their efforts to bypass law enforcement could place migrants at great risk; hundreds were dying every year in trying to cross the border in the harsh and remote terrain where border enforcement was thinnest. Yet smugglers were hired precisely because they generally provided a safer, faster, and more reliable border-crossing experience.

Smugglers also became more skilled as border enforcement became more intensive. Although some of the local freelance entrepreneurs who once dominated migrant smuggling along the border were being squeezed out by the border-enforcement offensive, they were replaced by better organized and more skilled migrant-smuggling organizations. This, in turn, was used to justify tougher laws and tougher enforcement. The number of smugglers being prosecuted mushroomed, and more punitive sentencing guidelines significantly increased the length of prison terms for smugglers. But this did not translate into a shortage of smugglers. More risks translated into higher smuggling fees. And as the risks for smuggling rose, so too did the incentive for smugglers to use more dangerous methods to avoid law enforcement.

The Lived Experience of Today’s Collision

As we have seen, although the collision between protean and control power along the US–Mexico divide is not new, it has intensified. Contemporary relationships between the state, migrants, smugglers, and criminal terrain bosses are themselves an outcome of over a century of these power collisions at the US border. However, the latest chapter of this old story further complicates simple narratives about the interactions of these actors and their relative power. Drawing on ethnographic materials collected in a study of clandestine Central American migration to the United States,Footnote ³² we trace the power dynamics within these relationships. This tracing reveals the sometimes contradictory and sometimes symbiotic connections between protean and control power. It also reveals the lived contradictions of protean power, as experienced by migrants themselves.

The on-the-ground experience of the US government control agenda is a story of protean power. The everyday practice of policy implementation requires discretion and deft maneuvers on the part of the street-level bureaucrats.Footnote ³³ Border control is not an exception to this general rule; it too generates protean power. Routines must be adapted to a lived reality, or they are rendered useless; patrols cannot keep a strict schedule and unchanging route without becoming predictable and easy to evade by smugglers. Frontline immigration agents must rely on discretion,Footnote ³⁴ their wits, innovations and improvisations on protocols and stereotypesFootnote ³⁵ to adapt to unforeseen events at the border.Footnote ³⁶ A border official explained the gut feeling that develops with experience, “But people develop a sense. It’s like at the border. The agents can see a car coming from half a mile away. Maybe the mannerisms are just not right. It’s just that something doesn’t feel right. The agents have a difficult time articulating the probable cause. They just know who to stop.” After further questioning, the border official explained that, “In law enforcement, we call it profiling.”Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, the US courts implicitly recognize the necessary role of protean power, by granting border patrol agents greater discretion in their job than any other law enforcement agent.Footnote ³⁸ In order to empower them to make judgments and act on their wits at the border, the courts have defined standards for probable cause loosely for US Border Patrol. As the state attempts to increase its control power at the border, this discretion, which creates a space for border agents to exercise their protean power, plays an increasingly vital role in the national security agenda.

In response to the increased control power exercised by the state, smugglers and migrants generate a collective protean power. Indeed, smugglers and migrants sometimes co-improvise migration strategies to achieve their common objectives. The most reputable smugglers behave as service providers, treating migrants as valued customers, protecting them from criminal predators, or settling disputes among travel companions. In turn, migrants generally agree to keep the smuggler’s identity secret if they are apprehended by border patrol. For their part, experienced migrants may be called upon to assist smugglers, helping to guide or maintain order in the travel group. Indeed, the boundary between smuggler and migrant may be blurred, when these migrants accept travel discounts, receive upgraded treatment, or other payments for such auxiliary support. Experienced migrants may begin to work as guides. Sometimes migrants co-innovate new migration tactics. As Maria’s story from the introduction illustrates, collective brainstorming or migrant–smuggler partnerships to devise new ways around unexpected barriers to mobility are not uncommon.

When Maria and her smuggler had devised the plan to sing gospel, she and her companions did not know that far greater dangers awaited them in northern Mexico. At a point just north of Puebla, Maria’s guide slipped into the secret compartment alongside the migrants. If stopped, he would pass as one of them, and they had all sworn to protect his identity. His decision to conceal himself among loyal clients proved to be fortuitous. A new guide drove the banana truck in which they were hidden. Squatting in these cramped quarters in the hidden compartment, Maria heard the three gunshots that killed the driver. They had been stopped by a heavily armed group of bandits, dressed in black. Based on their paramilitary appearance and ruthless behavior, Maria presumed these men and women to be the Zetas. Having recently taken control of the territory, this criminal group had not received the appropriate passage fee from the Salvadoran smugglers. Thus, the bandits kidnapped the migrants and held them until family members or friends paid for their delivery. And the bandits began to negotiate with Maria’s hometown smuggler for a more regular fee to cross their territory. The kidnappers treated Maria and her travel companions harshly, but Maria was fortunate because this criminal group delivered her to New York in exchange for the smuggling payment. Every year thousands of migrants are not so lucky; kidnappers often release migrants in Mexico, rather than the United States, or turn them over to Mexican migration authorities for deportation after receiving ransoms. Sometimes they keep their victims indefinitely, breaking promises and demanding ever more money from desperate family members. Luckily for Maria, she arrived and lived in New York for several years, before returning home to El Salvador as a local success story. She saved the money to build her dream home and open a restaurant near the center of town, until extortion demands and threats from a Salvadoran street gang forced her to migrate a second time.

When Maria made the return journey to the United States in 2010, she contracted with the same hometown smuggler for the second passage from El Salvador to New York. She did so despite the killing of the guide he had subcontracted and her subsequent kidnapping during the first journey. However, Maria made this choice of smuggling service provider not primarily to avoid US border agents or Mexican migration authorities, but because the hometown smuggler probably knew which criminals to pay to cross Mexico safely. She was primarily frightened of the Zetas drug-trafficking organization operating in Mexico, which had acquired infamy for their kidnapping of migrants for ransom. Ultimately, Maria and her family crossed Mexico, but were captured by the US border patrol.

They immediately filed an asylum claim based on the criminal gang-based persecution they had suffered in El Salvador, and this claim was eventually granted. Indeed, an increasing number of Central Americans turn themselves in to US border agents or allow themselves to be captured in order to file asylum claims. Some smugglers instruct their clients to do so, improvising upon the legal resources made available to migrants by the state. While many of these claims are in fact well-founded asylum cases, smugglers and migrants nevertheless deftly leverage the state’s own institutions against its control power. Thus, the “cracks and contradictions” of institutions (Reus-Smit, Chapter 3, pp. 60, 61, 66, 68) provide opportunities for improvisation and innovation; in this case, borders and the refugee protection regime collide, demonstrating how, at the right moment, migrants and smugglers can exploit the nexus of “co-existing, overlapping, but often discordant singular institutions” (Reus-Smit, Chapter 3, p. 61).

In the contemporary context of the escalation of the Mexican drug war (post-2006), Central American migrants like Maria no longer only pay smugglers to resist the control power of the state. Instead, these migrants also pay smugglers to help them negotiate a perilous passage across territory controlled by Mexican criminal terrain bosses. For Central Americans, the danger of Mexican criminal terrain bosses is the primary motivation for contracting a smuggler. Well-informed migrants often pay smugglers not because they know their way around US border patrol efforts, but because their smugglers know which criminal to pay for safe passage.Footnote ³⁹ As explained by one migrant, “A good coyote is well connected; he knows who and how to bribe.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The control power of Mexican criminal territory bosses, who extort crossing fees from both migrants and smugglers, guarantees that the profession of smuggling will remain profitable. This shift in control to criminal territory bosses illustrates the dynamic between control and protean power over time, and it signals how actors may be impacted by multiple forms of power depending on which relationship they engage.

When the drug war erupted spectacularly in 2006, Mexican territory began to change hands quickly and without warning among competing criminal gangs. The Mexican crime groups splintered with fighting between and within. These gangs began to kidnap northbound migrants for profit. They also kidnapped migrants to renegotiate passage fees with Central American human smugglers. The fees for criminal crossing increased in tandem with the intensification of violence, rapid shifts in criminal control, the breaking of old business protocols, and the fragmentation of terrain among competing gangs.

At the same time, beginning in the aftermath of September 11 and continuing into the present, bilateral US–Mexican cooperation for contraband interdiction has intensified.Footnote ⁴¹ Most recently, in 2014, Mexico launched a reinvigorated “Plan Sur” primarily policing the southern train routes that the poorest and most vulnerable migrants often board like hobos to get to the United States. To give a sense of the magnitude of this policing effort, the number of Central Americans deported from Mexico has exceeded the number deported from the United States.Footnote ⁴² Such immigration enforcement operations have made migrants ever-more reliant on hiring smugglers for successful arrival in the United States.

Despite this massive Mexican enforcement campaign, as well as ongoing fighting within and between gangs, criminals have proven to be more adept at controlling clandestine traffic through their territory than the state. Working through both civilian informants and corrupt state officials, their intelligence networks actively identify smugglers and migrants who have not paid the requisite passage fee. The efficiency of these stealthy networks is legendary among migrants, who sometimes whisper about the spies who travel alongside them to collect information for criminals. Even if US border enforcement were to disappear, human smuggling would now persist as a profession, because migrants – especially non-Mexican migrants – need the smugglers’ contacts to negotiate passage across criminal terrain. Ironically, Mexican criminal bosses generate protean power; they deftly manipulate expansive social networks, fluid shifting alliances, the recruitment of former soldiers and police with counterinsurgency skills, violent stagecraft and message murders that project an intimidating reputation, and other flexible tactics. In so doing, the Mexican criminal bosses impose greater control power along smuggling routes than do states.

The ruthlessness of the Mexican criminal bosses is infamous by design, not unlike modern-day terrorist organizations that capitalize on their violent and powerful image with carefully publicized acts (Mendelsohn, Chapter 9). As the drug war has intensified during the past decade, criminal groups have employed increasingly brutal methods to extract money from Central American smugglers and their migrant clients. Capture by border patrol may force migrants to begin the journey again, a terrible prospect after coming so far from home. For migrants with criminal records or multiple crossing attempts, capture by the border patrol may even be punished with a lengthy prison sentence. However, these consequences pale in comparison with the torture, trafficking, rape, ransom demands, and, sometimes, murders that occur at the hands of Mexican criminal territory bosses, such as the Zetas or the so-called “Gulf cartel.” Ransoms generally cost migrants’ families thousands of dollars, often money that had been borrowed to pay smugglers for the delivery of migrants in the United States. Without the migrant to work off the debt in the United States, immigrant families that pay these ransoms may be left financially destitute. To extract sufficient information to make these ransom demands or to intimidate migrants into submission, kidnappers sometimes cut off their victim’s fingers or beat them with wooden boards. Female migrants may be trafficked for sex work rather than ransomed. Conditions in the drop houses where migrants are held for ransom can only be described as deplorable. When thinking about making a clandestine journey, US border policing is often the least of Central American migrants’ worries.

Criminal territory bosses are not the only non-state actors who attempt to dominate migrants. Despite their shared enemies of the state and dangerous criminal terrain bosses, smugglers have also long been infamous for the exploitation of their clients, imposing control over migrants. This is perhaps even truer today than in the past. Even in early periods of border crossing, smugglers had been known to threaten and intimidate female migrants into having unwanted sexual relations. Smugglers may not keep promises about travel and living conditions en route, subjecting migrants to more suffering than expected. Smugglers sometimes steal from and cheat migrants, abandoning them in dangerous places along the route. They may sell their human cargo to traffickers. Smugglers may collaborate with kidnappers, who demand ransoms from family members in the United States without delivering them there. Finally, smugglers may suddenly attempt to renegotiate their contract with the migrant at a vulnerable moment during the journey, extorting more money than the original agreement had entailed.

At some point during the journey, virtually all Central American migrants experience a deprivation of liberty at the hands of their smuggler, even when the migrant–smuggler contract is consensual, rather than the outcome of a kidnapping.Footnote ⁴³ Migrants may be locked inside a hidden compartment of a vehicle, incapable of escaping if conditions turn dangerously hot or oxygen-deprived. They may be locked in an unsanitary drop house with other migrants for days or weeks to wait for an opportune moment to make the next segment of the journey, or to wait for a payment to the smuggler from US-based relatives.

It should be pointed out that this predatory protean power, benefiting smugglers as well as other criminal organizations, ultimately contributes to the US policy goal of making the border harder for migrants to cross (even as migrants rely on smugglers and the bribing of criminal organizations to make it across the border). In this way, predatory protean power serves as an unintended accomplice in control power objectives. Nevertheless, migrants are not powerless. They resist smugglers and kidnappers. Escape stories abound, as migrants flee buildings that are poorly equipped to hold hundreds of captives or take advantage of drunken debauchery during football matches or holidays to slip past inebriated guards. In interviews, a migrant found a window in a bathroom, another carefully learned the schedule of his captors, and yet another broke through a shoddily constructed wall to find freedom. Acts of collective resistance also erupt in these drop houses, and in one particularly dramatic story, migrants grabbed pitchforks and shards of broken glass to defend themselves against armed assailants.Footnote ⁴⁴ Migrants may submit to their captors outwardly in appearance only, but continue to conspire quietly to regain their freedom.

However, protean power comes at a terrible cost for many migrants. The Honduran man, Maynard, who told the dramatic story of resisting kidnappers with pitchforks and broken glass wept when he remembered how the kidnappers beheaded his co-conspirator; their plan had been discovered prematurely, because a particularly hungry captive had informed on them in exchange for food rations. It had been the second time Maynard had been betrayed by another migrant; a Honduran “friend” had sold him to the kidnappers. Other migrants who survived kidnappings wept, rather than congratulate themselves on their impressive feats of resistance and wit, as they thought of the people left behind or the expense of the ransoms to their families. Migrants often do not experience a sense of empowerment from their capacity to negotiate a humiliating, morally compromising and physically difficult journey.

The physical sacrifices of the journey are common knowledge across the region, leaving lasting scars on the bodies of border crossers. For those that survive the passage, the price of protean power still potentially includes extreme hunger and malnutrition, exposure to the elements or wildlife, illness from contaminated water, suffering assaults, disembodiment from falls from the train, and injuries in the desert. However, these scars often run deeper than the skin and bones of a migrant.

The trauma of the journey can leave lasting social and moral traces in the psyche of border crossers. Even the most successful border crossers must lie or alienate themselves from loved ones to survive. A Salvadoran woman, Ana, traveled with her two small children and a military-age nephew across Mexico in the late 1980s.Footnote ⁴⁵ She tearfully described the ethical dilemmas she faced in transit. Her husband had already fled due to political persecution during the civil war. Her nephew had been a low-ranking infantryman, and he deserted to flee the violence. On the way north, they boarded a bus, pretending to be Mexican. The guide kept them separate, and told them that they must all act like strangers. Her nephew was sitting a few seats from her when police boarded the bus and took him away. At this point in the story, Ana wept remembering how she could only assume that he was being led away to his death, “Imagine pretending you don’t know your own nephew … But that is how it is on the road.” To survive, she had to momentarily disavow her kin, silently watching him be led to potential slaughter.Footnote ⁴⁶ She thereby maintained her disguise and continued north, exercising her power to move and protecting her children, but at a terrible emotional and, in Ana’s interpretation, moral cost. Her power to migrate was inexorably tied to her acceptance of her powerlessness to help her nephew.

Later in the journey, Ana traveled in a private car with her children and smuggler. Before passing through the highway migration checkpoint, Ana and her smuggler had to coach her young son. The smuggler instructed the boy to say he was his father if anyone asked. The seven-year-old boy became indignant at the suggestion, “You are not my father! My father is in the US and we are going to him!” The smuggler was patient, but the situation was critical. The boy had to be taught how to lie. While interviewing her, Ana shook her head with sadness at the memory of threatening her son to dissuade him from telling the truth. While she did not say it aloud, perhaps, her thoughts briefly skipped ahead to the rebellious young man he later became, a regret that she had discussed on other occasions. Deception is part of the power that migrants can draw upon, but they do so at a cost. In Ana’s estimation, she paid with her son’s virtue and her own responsibility as his mother. Teaching her son to lie went against her principles as a mother and a devout Catholic, but morality must be bent (in this case, somewhat gently) in the realm of protean power.

However traumatizing the journey might be for Ana, telling lies to migration police is one of the lesser moral quandaries that migrants face in transit today. In the contemporary context, migrants may be forced to collaborate with criminal terrain bosses and kidnappers. A small minority of migrants become spies infiltrating the migration stream. They lead groups of migrants into ambush or monitor the activities of human rights activists, smugglers, and other migrants for criminal bosses. These co-opted migrants become the eyes and feet of criminal networks along the smuggling route. Migrants’ capacity to go undetected among their co-nationals is a form of protean power that comes from the ability to cleverly disguise intentions and improvise upon social expectations and stereotypes to forge new relationships. In turn, this protean power serves as a resource for criminal territory bosses to exert control power over the smuggling route. Such protean power enables the migrant’s survival and mobility, but at the expense of others.

This form of collaboration represents neither outright resistance nor acceptance of the control power of the state. Such collaboration on the part of migrants is a survival tactic that mirrors relationships that form across a variety of violent settings, generating what Primo Levi calls a “grey zone,” where distinctions between victims and perpetrators become blurry.Footnote ⁴⁷ The fact that this power comes at the price of solidarity among Central Americans and an increase in the suffering of a vulnerable population does not go unnoticed by migrants. As a Honduran woman ruefully lamented, “They are us, same as us: Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans. My own paisanos are those that rob. That’s why you can’t trust people in the [Catholic migrant] shelter either.” The Honduran woman turned to a Guatemalan girl next to her, “You don’t know who they are, your own paisanos.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, a sense of betrayal often accompanies the experience of the journey. A shadowy world of mistrust, chameleon-like characters, and ephemeral alliances is the price of protean power.

Conclusion: Protean Power and Predation

As this chapter has suggested, protean power should not simply be equated with “empowerment.” It is worth noting that migrants themselves do not celebrate protean power. They would much rather see a dramatic immigration policy change than be forced to improvise a terrible and dangerous clandestine journey. They would rather the state leave them alone than be forced to respond to it with agility and ingenuity. In fact, the practices in which they must engage during the journey are often experienced as profoundly disempowering and dehumanizing. As Maria’s and Ana’s stories suggest, survival often requires painful compromises of morality or extraordinary physical sacrifices.

Protean power is not a form of solidarity that promises to bring us to a more just or equitable world. It is a fragmented force that enables some individuals to navigate a path to the United States, but does not address the larger socio-economic and political structures that motivate migrant journeys and shape the migration route. Predatory patterns emerge from protean power generated by some migrants as they survive violence at the expense of their compatriots. Such predation may thwart some political projects and undermine a sense of shared identity. Furthermore, protean power seems better fit for creative resistance of control than to capturing and controlling the direction of state policy.

As far as migrants are concerned, “weapons of the weak” are a distant second best to a US immigration policy revolution. For this reason, Reece Jones calls everyday practices that transgress state boundaries, but without an overt political motivation, a form of “refusal” rather than “resistance.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Such activities are disruptive and have structural effects, but their participants do not necessarily understand them as resistance or empowerment. Protean power clearly complicates control power. Nevertheless, control power also necessitates and, in an important sense, generates its own antithesis in protean power. Likewise, protean power constitutes control power. When viewed through the lens of experience, even the state requires the protean power of individuals to implement its control. Finally, given the perverse escalation spirals that sometimes emerge from the interaction of the two forms of power, the future structural effects of protean power remain unclear, and may ultimately reinforce control power rather than undermine it. Nevertheless, protean power is creative and, thus, a form of agency that cannot be overlooked if we wish to understand the dynamic process of control and evasion at the border.

Indeed, using different levels of analysis, we have explored the interaction of control power and protean power, showing how their collision has produced a humanitarian catastrophe at the border, not just a failure to curb migration. If we only look from the top down at the border, we see a mirage of control that might be heralded as a victory for policing. Nonetheless, it is a pyrrhic victory of control power, representing a decrease in the visibility of an otherwise continuous flow of unauthorized migrants across the US–Mexico line. Nor, however, can continued border crossings be heralded as a victory of protean power. If we look through an ethnographic lens from the bottom up, where protean power becomes visible for individuals, we have seen the true consequences of the attempt to impose control: dramatically intensified human suffering. The interaction of control with protean power produces this tragic outcome. Shifting the line of sight of our analysis brings the tragedy, as well as the victory, of protean power into focus. Border guards and border crossers both experience profound uncertainty and risk, and ethnographic methods bring this experiential level into view. Thus, for the contemporary period, we augment our historical analysis with ethnographic research on the day-to-day experience of Central American migrants attempting to clandestinely reach and cross the US–Mexico border.

From this analysis, we find that at key moments control power is constituted by protean power. We can see this complementarity when we move up and down the levels of analysis from collective actors to practice. At the level of practice, the state generates the protean power as its individual immigration agents exert control power at the border. These improvised practices constitute the state, and the protean power generated by individuals engaged in such improvisations constitutes the state’s control power. Similarly, organized gangs that control territory require the protean power of individual criminals, that is, the smugglers, look-outs, enforcers, and others. Moving up and down the levels of analysis shows us how protean power complements, and in some ways creates spaces for the operation of control power.

In other moments, control power and protean power of various actors interact, leading to a spiral of intensification with yet unpredictable outcomes. As the state exerts control power, it calls protean power into existence. Necessity is the mother of invention, and border control is the mother of improvised smuggling and migration practice. The protean power generated by migrants and smugglers then destabilizes the façade of control, justifying further control effort by the state. We see this interaction by moving across history.

Although beyond the scope of this chapter, this type of analysis could be extended to the recent plight of African and Middle Eastern migrants attempting to enter Europe. Attempts to control illegal traffic across the Mediterranean have had an ambiguous, and often counterproductive, impact on clandestine flows. An unrelenting unauthorized traffic drifts north from the northern African coastline. For the last two decades of policing intensification, the bodies of failed border crossers have washed ashore on European beaches alongside tourists. While a massive allocation of resources to fortify the European continent against these flows has not succeeded in stemming the tide of contraband and migration,Footnote ⁵⁰ it has dramatically restructured the lived experience of migration in ways similar to those survived by Central American migrants seeking to enter the United States.Footnote ⁵¹ The geographic focal points,Footnote ⁵² social relationships, and smuggling networksFootnote ⁵³ that underpin routes adapt to policing.

Since the 1990s, the Mediterranean crossing has grown more dangerous for unauthorized migrants,Footnote ⁵⁴ especially in recent years. In response to the Syrian refugee crisis and a recent series of high-profile calamities suffered by boat migrants during clandestine passages, NATO ships have been deployed to the Aegean Sea to deter human smuggling.Footnote ⁵⁵ Our analysis leads to the expectation that, despite its humanitarian justifications, these militarized deterrence efforts will lead to a formidable increase of suffering, but ultimately prove incapable of halting clandestine flows into Europe. Instead, the complex collision between the control power of the state and the protean power generated by migrants will likely continue to expand and intensify on the periphery of Europe.

Our chapter has shown how a ground-level line of sight helps us to sort out precisely these complex effects of power on diverse actors and their relationships. We find that different forms of power alternate, cross-cutting between empowerment and disempowerment at key moments in interactions between state actors, smugglers, migrants, and criminal territory bosses. Furthermore, the ground-level line of sight, at the level of experience, brings surprising instances of protean power into view, sometimes constituting the control power exerted by collective actors like the state. In this way, we complicate the dichotomy between state–non-state actors and their relationship to control–protean power. Recently, much to the chagrin of low-ranking smugglers, more powerful criminal actors have imposed control over clandestine flows through their terrain. The tightened control of terrain by criminal bosses represents a new iteration of, and increasingly complex interplay between, control and protean power. Migrants must sometimes resist the control of their own smugglers, and the very existence of smuggling as a profession is predicated on the imperfect but potent control power of the state and now criminal territory bosses. Power reverberates in often unpredictable ways through these layered and shifting relationships between the state, smugglers, territory bosses, and migrants, as experienced by the individuals implicated within them. Across the US–-Mexico border and across the globe, states have tightened enforcement, thereby restructuring these layered and shifting relationships, intensifying the experience of uncertainty along clandestine routes, and often unwittingly complicating (though not undoing) control power by calling protean power into existence.

In scientific inquiry and technological change the presence of uncertainty, linked to power, is explicitly acknowledged and actively explored. Innovation and improvisation define and constitute manifestations of protean power that are related closely to more familiar control power. The resulting technological and knowledge shifts have important consequences, as actors cope with questions and solutions that arise in the face of risk and uncertainty.

This chapter focuses on these dynamics. They unfold in especially interesting ways when the most relevant actors agree that uncertainty is pervasive and unavoidable. Two empirical illustrations, knowledge frontiers and bitcoin technology, explore the different manifestations of protean power in detail. The first example traces improvisation, learning, and advances in science and technology fields, taking us well beyond the narrow bounds of the “controlled” experiments on which they rest. The innovation fueling scientific discovery and start-up industries occurs in contexts so complex that the outcomes and underlying processes remain in the realm of unknown unknowns. The second example explores the bitcoin revolution that combines radical and operational uncertainty, the responses they elicit, and the co-evolution between control and protean power.

Knowledge Frontiers

The drive to improve the human condition unites innovators of all stripes. With each discovery or novel solution, new hurdles arise. Some obstacles can be the direct result, anticipated or not, of changes initially labeled as progress. A common theme across scientific disciplines and fields of innovation is the continuous debate about the adequacy of questions asked and the reliability of answers offered. When a scientist sets out to conduct a series of experiments, she or he cannot know whether she or he will get a publication or the Nobel Prize. When an entrepreneur presents the plans for a new start-up, the viability, profitability, and overall impact of his or her endeavor is unknown. What drives these actors is not a pre-determined risk calculation. Instead, curiosity, intuition, understanding of particular conditions, and the ability to spot opportunities as they arise fill the air in science laboratories and start-up incubators. The levels of eventual payoff, if any, are unrelated to actor expectations. The pursuit of solutions and improvements may bring about transformative change that falls well beyond the intended reach. The uncertainty surrounding such projects allows no guarantees; even highly promising projects can disappoint or turn into sources of danger.Footnote ²

This section draws on examples from the outer bounds of science and technology that illustrate the varying degree to which actors seek or relinquish control power. The question is particularly resonant in these areas. Innovators understand better than most that whatever projects they launch, deep-seated uncertainty is their constant companion. They do, however, opt for different approaches in their daily confrontations with unknown or unknowable unknowns. And this produces different types of relations between control and protean power in a context marked by different constellations of risk and uncertainty. The following episodes span the range from attempts at carving out as much control power as possible; to instances where its advantages are exploited with its limits fully recognized, and, finally, to situations where no control is sought in the first place.

Bitcoin: Spinning Gold out of Straw?Footnote ²³

Famously, the Grimm Brothers told the story of Rumpelstiltskin, an imp who helped a peasant girl spin straw into gold and could disappear into thin air. Updating this story for the twenty-first century requires only slight adjustments. Straw then is numbers now, crunched by tens of thousands of computers whirring 24/7 in electricity-rich, Icelandic-cold caves all over the world, but increasingly in China. The imp then disappearing into thin air when the girl guesses his name correctly, now is bitcoin’s anonymous Japanese-named creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, who published a paper detailing the bitcoin protocol in November 2008, developed the necessary software in 2009, and took her or his farewell in 2011.Footnote ²⁴

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency invented to bypass the political and financial centers of power. A prime example of protean power, it came on the scene in 2008–9 at the height of financial uncertainty and with the hope of undermining the state’s and financial sector’s control over currency. In the words of a former advisor on innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Alex Ross, bitcoin illustrates a “wider trend towards networked and globalized power structures that tend to undermine the nation-state-based systems to which we have grown accustomed.”Footnote ²⁵ Not so. What we have grown accustomed to is overlooking the protean power potentials that are lodged in the controls that the nation-state-based system has always harbored within itself. This case illustrates the close connections between protean and control power that run like a red thread through all the other cases reported in this book.

The resourceful initiatives of a broad assemblage of innovative actors – nerds, libertarians, and cyber-cosmopolitans – seeking to circumvent the control of financial institutions and financial actors undercuts the notion of the unchallenged control by any one sector or group of actors. Admittedly, the new currency may not have lived up fully to some of the more optimistic, initial expectations of revolutionizing the world of finance. Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology, however, has great potential for the creation of distributed, fully transparent ledgers that could revolutionize many practices of those exercising control in the fields of finance, government, and law. Ironically, banks and financial institutions, the primary targets of bitcoin’s mysterious inventor Satoshi Nakamoto and his or her libertarian allies, are beginning to exploit a new technology originally designed to undermine them. The story of bitcoin is one of multi-cornered political struggles, unanticipated effects, and the lack of control.Footnote ²⁶

Bitcoin undercuts notions of money as an instrument of control developed, for example, by Talcott Parsons.Footnote ²⁷ His consensus theory of power built on an analogy between the circulation of money in the economy and power in the polity. Interested in the nature of power more than its effects, Parsons downplayed conflict and imposed on an inchoate political reality a self-perpetuating practice of affirmation in the political legitimacy of established centers of authority. This perspective catches part of money’s power dynamics, but it overlooks both refusal and innovation that mark protean power’s disruption of financial and technological routines.

Instead of Parsons, many early users of bitcoin reflect the views of other theorists. Friedrich Hayek, for example, argued that government should not have a monopoly over the issuance of money.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, there should be a competitive market in which currencies would be traded at variable exchange rates among both public and private actors. And currencies could be of different kinds: traditional gold- or silver-based, novel commodity-based, foreign, or virtual currencies like bitcoin. Currencies able to guarantee stable purchasing power, Hayek argued, would drive inflation-prone currencies out of business. Anticipating bitcoin by decades, Milton Friedman looked not to markets regulated by the Federal Reserve, but to a computer program as the preferred mechanism for increasing the money supply at a constant and well-publicized rate.Footnote ²⁹

Understood as both currency and technology, bitcoin points to the interaction between protean and control power, as Hayek and Parsons argued. And that interaction is reflected in processes and practices of innovation and refusal as well as affirmation. In a world “where innovation expands and complicates choice … local forces are in constant motion.”Footnote ³⁰ The bitcoin world provides a graphic illustration of local forces in motion – with the local here understood to be part of the virtual rather than the geographical world. A twenty-four-year-old bitcoin entrepreneur charged with money laundering and other crimes, Charlie Shrem, has likened Nakamoto to a second Columbus who “gave us the new world.”Footnote ³¹ One enthusiastic characterization argues that bitcoin is “about freeing people from the tyranny of centralized trust. It speaks to the tantalizing prospect that we can take power away from the center – away from banks, governments, lawyers … and transfer it to the periphery, to We, the People.”Footnote ³² In the words of a young Argentinian woman trading bitcoins, “It feels good, doing things that you are not supposed to, saying to the structures of power they don’t have power over you.”Footnote ³³ In the summer of 2014 there existed reportedly 434 bitcoin meet-up groups with close to 50,000 members in 309 cities and 68 countries.Footnote ³⁴

Conclusion

The blending of control and protean power produces interesting outcomes in areas characterized by a consensus about procedures needed to minimize risk, while the majority of actors recognize that uncertainty, and therefore the futility of risk calculations, remains the overwhelming norm. The Cancer Moonshot and the efforts to pull off a “Mars-shot” illustrate a different blending of the control power tools that scientists wield and the agility and improvisation that they need. The research teams behind the CRISPR gene-editing technique resorted to extracting what limited control patent ownership might provide. Cancer and space-flight scientists use probability-based calculations sparingly and open their minds to fundamental unknowns. And start-ups do not set out to control the surrounding context at all. The knowledge frontier thus illustrates a range of responses that contradict the notion of effective control power. Seeking to challenge established patterns of (control) power, innovators are agile as they seek to harness potentialities that might help them to take the next step.

Rather than showing that control power has limitations, the bitcoin story is one of fighting fire with fire. The emergence of bitcoin, following the financial crisis of 2007–8, leveraged profound uncertainty about the future of global finance, further complicated by the intricate architecture of interdependent financial systems. Support of the blockchain technology came first from individuals seeking to bypass an irremediably crisis- and inflation-prone financial system and later from corporate actors who instead sought to increase its efficiency. Thus, the creation of an alternative and highly volatile currency was intended to undermine failing financial structures and practices, illustrating the limits to a world of exclusive risk calculations. At the same time, central banks and financial institutions quickly realized the potential of the underlying blockchain technology for future growth and profits.

This study of power in areas that, more than most, hinge on improvisation and innovation reveals that uncertainty affects power dynamics both by the nature of the questions asked and the degree to which actors appear satisfied with the answers they receive. The experience of uncertainty is associated with unexpected threats as much as the promise of novelty and improvement. Both stir human creativity. Accidental discovery, for example, unites the possibilities of a disciplined approach to science while allowing the possibility of interpretation and creative connections that determine its ultimate success. From a different angle, the bitcoin case shows creativity in two important ways. The mathematics undergirding bitcoin the currency was genuinely innovative. It was sprung on the world at a moment of great uncertainty at the height of a global financial crisis. Furthermore, the creativity shown by venture capitalists and bankers seeking to exploit and adapt bitcoin technology was impressively improvisational. It is impossible to know at the outset where such disruptive but generative efforts end up, yet acknowledging uncertainty throughout the process of invention alters the range of the actualization of power potentialities in important ways. We may still be far from finding a cure for cancer, a landing on Mars, or finding a reliable buffer against financial crises, but we can be sure that seeking opportunities in uncertainty mixes elements of protean and control power.