Governing Borders and Security

This book explores and maps the relationship between borders, security and global governance.

Theoretically, the book seeks to critically engage traditional notions of borders, security and (global) governance in order to establish to what degree, and in what ways, these are being eroded, undermined and contested in the context of a globalizing world. Processes of integration and globalization have forcefully exposed the contingent and particular nature of territorially based systems of governance and spawned a need to attend to the changing role of state borders. The ‘border’ is at present not an entity, process or term that is assumed to be given or always-already existent, neither as an object of analysis nor as an analytical modality or site for normative political thinking. Borders are hence increasingly being re-conceptualized to account for connectivity as well as divisions at the same time as focus is shifting from permanence to permeability. This ambivalence ascribed to bordering processes is at heart a security concern. Borders and boundary drawing incessantly permit or prevent those deemed desirable or undesirable from gaining entry or access into a particular country, community or group. Borders as sustenance, enactment and becoming is hence not solely or primarily entwined with state formation in a strictly material sense as it involves more diffuse attempts at governing securities, identities and histories. Expressed theoretically, security—consonant with revised perceptions of borders—does not therefore belong foremost to the domain of inter-state relations. Rather, it is progressively seen as finding resonance in threats and vulnerabilities that arise within states or in challenges to international or global society as such.

The book proceeds from a critical rendering of statist conceptualizations of borders, security and governance in order to enable an acknowledgment of the post-liberal imaginary, in which the limits to liberal rule, and to its mobilization of legitimacy, transpire and find accentuation. This does not solely emphasise the politics of borders and mobility, but also provides a shared groundwork for interrogating the spatial conditions for bordering and border work as manifestations of a continuously deferred becoming rather than being. It is hence not only interested in depicting and mapping how borders have undergone re-locations and re-ordering from one spatial and delimited context to another, or in how state borders are re-centered and re-inscribed. Rather, a principal contribution of the volume is its scrutiny of how borders are enacted and perceived in and through the everyday, and of how such production and construal can make sense as acts of resistance to various forms of governing. As a consequence, the volume is constructed in a manner that encourages and facilitates attentiveness towards how security issues on all levels of analysis, including the level of the individual, to a significant extent are framed by movement, mobility and bordering practices. Such a focus necessitates a treatment of how governing from afar, from a distance, affects the possibilities and tendencies to securitize as well as desecuritize, within as well as beyond elite settings.

This book will be of much interest to students of border studies, human geography, governmentality, global governance and IR/critical security studies.