Governing Borders and Security: The Politics of Connectivity and Dispersal (PRIO New Security Studies)

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

Theoretically, the book seeks to establish to what degree, and in what ways, traditional notions of borders, security and (global) governance are being eroded, undermined and contested in the context of a globalising world. Borders are increasingly being re-conceptualised to account for connectivity as well as divisions at the same time as focus is shifting from permanence to permeability. The ambivalence ascribed to bordering processes is at heart a security concern; borders are not only entwined with state formation but are also attempts at governing securities, identities and histories.

Proceeding from a critical rendering of statist conceptualisations of borders, security and governance, the book not only emphasises the politics of borders, mobility and re-locations, 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. 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. Such a focus reveals the necessity of investigating how governing from afar affects the possibilities and tendencies to securitise as well as desecuritise, 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.

Catarina Kinnvall is Professor in the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden, and author/editor of five books and numerous articles.

Ted Svensson is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden, and author of Production of Postcolonial India and Pakistan: Meanings of Partition (2013, Routledge).