Overview

This book addresses the very recent evolution of borderlines around the world, sealing and hardening what used to be porous and soft borders. Thus, if globalization blurs borders, harder borders simultaneously emphasize a new facet of globalization. It is not, though, a strictly post-9/11 phenomenon: Studies have shown that borders never truly disappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall and that the hardening of old borders and the definition of new borders after 9/11 have their roots in the pre-9/11 period, for this phenomenon is fed not by a specific fear of terrorism but rather by global insecurities bred by globalization. In other words, in a security-conscious and risk-averse world, globalization has led not to the eradication of borders but rather to the redefinition of territory through insecurities, generating therefore new border symbolism. In this context, border walls have become a symbol of hardened borders, their number steadily increasing in the last decade. The construction of such permanent, visible structure to impede transnational movements is anchored in a discourse of securitization of borders that shifted towards a need to control mobility and preserve national identities. Moreover, this discourse is no longer limited to the justification of a physical border wall. Rather, this same discourse is used to legitimize new manifestations of borders: Technological and symbolic walls.

Building on the literature on mobile borders (Amilhat-Szary and Girault, 2015), this book brings together authors from diverse geographical zones and academic fields to study the various movements, functions and articulations of international borders. Divided into two parts, this book addresses two main issues: (I) how international borders have become enforced lines of demarcation and division, consolidating national identity and impacting national and regional dynamics; and (II) the material and immaterial, discursive and concrete articulations of borders and the impacts of the transformation of bodies in threat to be monitored, as daily lives become sites of border enforcement.

Border walls have long been analyzed through specific case studies, but less frequently as a global phenomenon. The recent period, however, has seen a renewal of relevant research in this area. In Chapter 1, Elisabeth Vallet provides an analysis of border walls on a global scale, in order to understand them as interconnected phenomena. Gradually border lines have become more and more fortified and seem to tend towards a never-ending spiral of securitization. Despite the fact that border wall discourses rely on different situations and justifications, the fortification process circularly comes back to its inner link with sovereignty and identity politics. Hence the first part of the book, “Enforcing the Line”, assesses the normalization of the border wall within a broader trend of rebordering and thickening of the border, as well as its symbolic weight on competing identities. In Chapter 2, David Shirk offers an overview of the processes of enforcement at the US-Mexico border throughout the years, highlighting how moral panic has been used by political discourses to justify reinforcement of the borderlands. Lack of cost-benefit analysis reinforces the use of the border as a political tool. Building on the idea of discourses and the role of politics in border walls and border enforcement, Robert Andolina offers, in Chapter 3, an incursion into border walls in South America. Building on a case study that is often invisible in Border Studies, this analysis shows how globalization and antiimmigration sentiment, national politics and local dynamics can come into play and help explain how a border wall comes to be built and is received. Chapter 4 links these discourse practices at the national level with international dynamics. Jussi Laine illustrates how borders are more than spaces, and their reinforcement is linked with ontological insecurity and the perceived security that hard borders can produce through an analysis of bordering practices in the EU. These discourses, both contemporary and historic, are important factors in our perceptions of borders. In Chapter 5, Christine Leuenberger looks at how borders between Israel and Palestine have come to be, and how borders are more than lines in the sand, but rather are products of discourses, politics, people and topographical challenges that have impacts beyond paper. Said Saddiki furthers the discussion on historical borders’ contemporary impacts with a study of the Algeria-Morocco border. The analysis in Chapter 6 highlights how inherited colonial borders are a continuous source of tension - and how in an increasingly bordered world, those borders can come to be sealed. Chapter 7 concludes the first part of this volume linking discourses and biopolitics. James Scott’s research on Hungary brings forward the links between borders and national identity politics, with a focus on both physical and biopolitical manifestations of border controls.

Border walls are much more than a physical artefact along a border line. Through the security and identity discourses that support their construction, border walls have penetrated the daily lives of those who cross the border just as much as the lives of those who live near the line without crossing it. Border wall discourses have extended to the establishment of technological barriers that stretch far beyond a state’s geographical boundaries. This evolution has triggered the permanence of several states of exception, almost Agambian, deep into both the conscious and the unconscious, paving the way for more symbolic walls. One of the chapters included in Part II, "Walled Borders, Walled Lives", addresses the impacts of the wall in relation to the evolution of the border from a simple line to a zone. In Chapter 8, Matthew Longo suggests changing the question we ask ourselves as researchers. Rather than looking at the border, he analyzes how the border sees us. This discussion allows for both a reconceptualization of the border from an object to an active space of state agency and a shift from the politics of the border to the bodies it looks at. Building on the various levels of bordering and the focus on the individuals subject of the border wall’s gaze, Andreanne Bissonnette’s Chapter 9 brings forward the implication of bordering practices on the most intimate form of borders: The body. Through the case study of the US-Mexico border, this chapter analyzes the impact of border policies on access to reproductive health for Latina women. In Chapter 10, Raphaela Kormoll highlights the challenges of bordering practices on farm workers in the Punjab region straddling the boundary between India and Pakistan, where social class, ethnicity and geographical position overlap, creating an array of consequences. In Chapter 11, Margath Walker takes a step back from individuals’ relation to borders to illustrate how one border regime can impact another one through the case study of Mexico’s two borders, at a time where migration increases and individuals are faced with changing policies and insecurities, as their mobility allows for a better understanding of how securitized borders and production of precarity are interconnected. Finally, in Chapter 12, Irasema Coronado looks at what happens when border communities come together and find ways to circumvent federal and state immigration policies. Through the lens of Acompanamiento International, this chapter looks at how border residents can be agents of change and awareness for more vulnerable populations.

Notes

• 1 This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
• 2 The walls studied here are international walls as opposed to sub-national walls. It should be mentioned, however, that the former often respond to the same logic as infranational walls, particularly in a Foucauldian perspective of exclusion outside the city walls.

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