Law in the Margins: Economies of Illegality and Contested Sovereignties.

This article critically examines the relationship between law, violence, and state sovereignty through the lens of migration policing in the UK, drawing on ethnographic research with immigration and police officers. It challenges the liberal theory myth that state law functions as a clear, impartial protector against disorder, revealing instead how legal fictions and zones of ambiguity underpin enforcement practices amid complex "economies of illegality" reliant on migrant labor. The study highlights the paradoxes and moral dilemmas faced by frontline officers enforcing immigration and modern slavery laws, showing how these laws produce both violence and legal uncertainty that expose the limits and contradictions of state sovereignty. Ultimately, the article argues that the state's efforts to assert control through law simultaneously reveal its fragility and the artificiality of legal categories such as "illegality," which have profound social and human consequences.