Leanne Weber (ed.) "Rethinking Border Control for a Globalizing World." London: Routledge, 2016 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction to "Reshaping the World: Rethinking Borders"
Social Sciences, 2020
This paper provides some historical context to understand border formations. By comprehending how our present system of borders and exclusions function, we can gain a new appreciation for migration. Moreover, it presents arguments for open borders to counter anti-immigrant policies, includes short summaries of relevant research, as well as for each article included in this Special Issue. Together, these articles show how more welcoming policies towards immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers do not threaten popular sovereignty but, conversely, strengthen both democracy and local rights.
Reshaping the World Rethinking Borders
Social Sciences, 2021
This volume provides information and analyses to better grasp the social implications of geographical borders as well as the individuals who travel between them and those who live in border regions. Sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, linguists, and scholars of international relations and public health are just some of the authors contributing to Rethinking Borders. The diversity in the authors’ disciplines and the topics they focus on exemplify the intricacies of borders and their manifold effects. This openness to so many schools of thought stands in contrast to the solidification of stricter borders across the globe. The contributions range from case studies of migrants’ sense of belonging and safety to theoretical discussions about migration and globalization, from empirical studies about immigrant practices and exclusionary laws to ethical concerns about the benefits of inclusion. It is timely that this collective work is published in the middle of a pandemic that has affected every single part of the world. Unprecedented border closures and stringent travel restrictions have not been enough to contain the virus entirely. As COVID-19 shows, diseases, ideas, and xenophobic and racist discourses know no borders. Plans that transcend borders are vital when dealing with global threats, such as climate change and pandemics.
Refuge Canada S Journal on Refugees, 2009
This editorial article argues for No Borders as a practical political project. We first critically examine borders as ideological, generating and reinforcing inequality. We consider some responses to injustices produced by borders: the call for "human rights"; attempts to make immigration controls more "humanitarian"; and trade unions' organizing and campaigning with undocumented workers. Recognizing the important contributions of some of these responses, we argue that nevertheless they have often been limited because they do not question sovereignty, the territorializing of people's subjectivities, and nationalism. No Borders politics rejects notions of citizenship and statehood, and clarifies the centrality of borders to capitalism. We argue that No Borders is a necessary part of a global system of common rights and contemporary struggle for the commons. The article concludes by highlighting the main themes of the papers that make up the Special Issue, a number of which explore practical instances of the instantiation of No Borders politics .
Denys Kiryukhin discusses the forecasts that falsely predicted a global stage deprived of borders because “the modern state is gradually losing its ability to regulate social and economic processes within its fixed territorial boundaries.” Today, borders are becoming significant again. For Kiryukhin, the question of borders is posed in the context of not only the state’s territory but also in the problems of identity, culture and social unity which express a “trend towards re-bordering in the globalized world.” This claim can be justified by the fact that political communities define their own criteria for membership and turn state borders into impregnable walls to protect their identity from immigrants. In terms of immigration policy, Kiryukhin argues that membership policy should not be a sphere of arbitrariness on the part of the community. In the context of the unprecedented interdependence of the globalized world, borders can act not only as an instrument of protection of tradition and culture but also domination and exploitation. The author disagrees with position presented neither by nationalists, who defend the impregnability of borders, not by liberal universalism which advocates open borders. Contrary to the universalists, Kiryukhin thinks that although we have the right to determine our membership criteria and principles of immigration policy, we have obligations beyond our national communities. These obligations are related to the reality that the walls we are building should not contribute to global inequality and the economic exploitation of other communities.
World Borders, Political Borders
PMLA, 2002
The work of the distinguished French political theorist and philosopher Etienne Balibar has emerged as profoundly significant in shaping post-1968 debates around class, race, national sovereignty, citizenship, and international human rights. The following essay is particularly relevant to this issue of PMLA insofar as the essay signals the importance of the border as a limit case for globalization and reflects on what the philosophical bases of citizenship would be in a postnational order of Europe.Borders, Balibar suggests, are products of the state's attributing to itself a right to property, which becomes, in turn, a limit case of institutions (their means of self-stabilization) that allows them to control subjects rather than be subject to their control. The police power of border control is the state's most undemocratic condition, its discretionary exemption from democracy. To democratize the border, he maintains, one must democratize this nondemocratic aspect of democr...
Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2013
xi and pp.; maps, ills., index. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . $. (cloth), isbn . The past decade was characterized by a sharp increase in the number of walls and fences constructed on borders around the world. Major democracies like the United States, India, and Israel built walls, but so did twenty-five other countries. In there were fewer than five border walls anywhere in the world, whereas today there are almost fifty, according to Nicolas Lambert and Elisabeth Vallet (in An Atlas of Migrants in Europe: A Critical Geography of Migration Policy, nd ed. []). These new barriers are supported by massive increases in the number of border guards and in the deployment of sophisticated military technologies at borders. In the United States, for example, the number of Border Patrol agents at the Mexican border increased from approximately , in to more than , in . Just as border policy shifted toward militarization over the past few decades, in the United States, local and state law enforcement focused on incarceration. From until the U.S. prison population increased sevenfold, and in nearly . million people were in prison in the United States, or just under in . Indeed, walls and cages, whether on borders, around prisons, or around gated communities, are perhaps the enduring symbol of our time. Two new books, Michael Dear's Why Walls Won't Work and Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge's Beyond Walls and Cages, make the case against the turn to walls and suggest ways to change the current situation. Dear's book, except for the misleading title, is excellent. Currently at the University of California-Berkeley in the Department of City and Regional Planning after a long tenure in the now defunct Geography Department at the University of Southern California, Dear melds his keen analytic eye and engaging prose with his apparently long-term fascination with the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. Over the past decade Dear traveled the entire length of the ,mile-long borderline on both sides. His photographs and on-the-ground observations are complemented with meticulously researched historical details about who passed through the borderland landscape. What gives the book a depth and punch that is often lacking in other recent books about the U.S.-Mexico border is Dear's decision to begin at the beginning. Rather than starting with the construction of the U.S.-Mexico wall in , or the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol in , or the U.S.-Mexico war of the s, or the founding of the U.S. and Mexican states, or the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, Dear goes back as far as archeological records allow to the first humans who inhabited the Americas. It provides perspective that demonstrates how recent, and rash, the current walled and securitized border really is. Dear also gives equal time to events on both sides
The Making and Unmaking of Borders
Room 2.19 , 2019
This short essay explores the meaning of crossing borders in contemporary times. Borders are proliferating at a rapid rate, and paradoxically they are also being eroded at a rapid rate. This essay claims that this 'making and unmaking of borders' has a profound social impact, and is a central concern in our personal lives and in wider societal and political realms. The making and unmaking of borders produces fear, anxiety, security, liberation and emancipation depending on where you are in relation to the border. Dr Western explores borders utilising a psycho-social lens, revealing how we constantly have to cross and navigate borders, in the 'real world', digital and virtual world, and in our emotional worlds.
Borders: A story of political imagination
Borderlands, 2022
This article traces three different political imaginaries about borders, suggesting that the dominant imaginary-the one of border walls, driven by a fear of invasion-is only one way to live in the world. The goal is to make space in our political imaginations to rethink how we live together, including thinking beyond nation-states as containers that keep people in or out. By first showing how the vision of invasion is built and maintained with intersecting transnational technologies and ideologies, I open the way to thinking otherwise. Second, I trace the counterpolitics of borders developed by artists and activists, resisting borders and walls, as they work towards the end goal of freedom of movement. Finally, I turn to more speculative visions; I argue that we need to create room for alter-visions or alterpolitics-parallel alternatives to the current political order, which differ from oppositional politics. To this end, I read across the fields of immunology and anthropology in order to open an alter-political imaginary based on xenophilia, rather than xenophobia.