The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: New border politics?

The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell Station, South London, on 22 July 2005, was described as a "tragic mistake" by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. This framing of the killing has come to dominate responses to it in the mainstream media. However, such a framing stymies critical questioning about what happened and colludes in the reproduction of a particular framework of understanding within which sovereign power has retrospectively valorized his death. By contrast this article reads the shooting as one of multiple responses of the British state to the bombings of the London transport network on 7 July 2005 and locates Menezes's death within the broader context of the global "War on Terror." Rather than a "mistake," the author argues that the shooting is symptomatic of systemic features of Western politics and in particular innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to secure the spatial and temporal borders of sovereign political community.