Rethinking Border Control for a Globalizing World ─ A Preferred Future

This book identifies some broad parameters that could guide a political project of peacemaking at the territorial borders of the nation-state.

Contemporary border controls have been analysed by critical criminologists in terms of criminalisation and state crime, and are often characterised as a form of war at the border. In a policy context in which current understandings of the law and politics of national sovereignty and the economic imperatives of neo-liberal globalization appear to reduce the space available for practical action, this volume adopts an innovative methodology to identify the conditions of possibility for a relaxation of border defences.

Each contributor discusses the prospects for a relaxation of border controls within a specified ‘border domain’ that aligns with their field of expertise. These domains have been identified by asking the question: What is the purpose of contemporary territorial borders? What interests and values are they mobilised to protect? The authors engage in a thought experiment, each addressing an identical set of questions within their assigned domain. The idea is to contain the prospect of unlimited speculation about the future by setting out a series of steps derived from scenario planning techniques, in which a ‘preferred future’ is identified (in this case, a future in which border crossing is available on an equitable and relatively open basis), and practical steps are then identified to reach the imagined goal. The imagined future could be a differently bordered, not a borderless world. There may still be inequalities in mobility and other entitlements in practice in this differently bordered world, and it could be a more physically settled world, not necessarily a world of incessant motion. These possibilities are worked through by the individual authors' giving close attention to the empirical realities and prospects for change within their assigned domain.

This book will be of much interest to students of border studies, migration, peacemaking, critical security studies and IR in general.