The politics of borders: Sovereignty, security, and the citizen after 9/11
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The politics of borders: Sovereignty, security, and the citizen after 9/11 Matthew Longo Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, 260pp., ISBN: 978-1316761663 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00316-0
Humans have been making borders for a long time, but only recently does it seem that borders are absolutely everywhere. Contemporary border politics is a constant topic of political conflict, media attention, and popular opinion in specific ways it has not been before. How did we get here? Matthew Longo’s book answers this question. The Politics of Borders offers one of the clearest and most synthetic histories of US border politics since 9/11 that I have read. I love that the book begins immediately with the big moves. In particular, the aim of the book is to track three main ‘epochal shifts’ that have occurred in US border politics since 9/11 and show how these have affected global border politics (p. 5). It is worth mentioning these briefly. First, after 9/11, border security and national security stopped being considered discrete domains. The USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and other laws and institutions made immigration and national security identical administrative projects. The effect was that immigrants became potential terrorists. The second shift was that the US felt it could no longer deal with international terrorism by itself but needed international cooperation from other states and private contractors to manufacture, assemble, and staff huge new securitization projects. Third, and relatedly, sovereign countries would need to share domestic intelligence and immigration information to combat the global movement of people. Security firms and big data companies would need to be contracted to collect, sort, and store huge amounts of biometric data. Huge amounts of political power and money were put behind these projects. Without a doubt one can easily see how the scholarly and popular literature on US (and international) border politics has hovered tightly around these three axes. Longo’s chapters on these main events stick tightly to the most important events and their consequences. This is an impressive feat because so much has been written on them, it is easy to be overwhelmed. I found them valuable and clarifying. Ó 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
Based on these big events, I think the reader will find the two main theses of Longo’s book instantly compelling – or at least I did. However, I suspect, normative reactions to them may vary. The first thesis, about heterogenous sovereignty, claims that the rise of national/international securitization projects is compromising the structure of sovereignty. The more sovereign states rely on cooperation with other states and private companies for their intelligence and technologies, the more sovereignty becomes increasingly heterogenous. The second thesis, on neo-imperialism, proposes that heterogenous co-bordering efforts m
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