Rethinking the border in times of crisis

Ruben Andersson

Chapter 16 in Border Studies, 2025, pp 310-327 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Amid the various crises and uncertainties of today, our politics seems in hock to a ‘borderline disorder’. As catalysts for a politics of fear and anxiety, borders have become stages for security operations targeting trans-frontier flows or ‘threats’, scrambling political fault lines in the process. In this chapter I situate the political obsession with borders – accentuated by crises of Covid, climate, conflict, and displacement – within a wider frame with the aim of starting to rethink their role in world politics. Through a brief look across historical and contemporary border settings, I suggest that, rather than doing away with borders altogether, as some activists and academics argue, we may need a more supple concept of the border for the twenty-first century. The border must be rethought, its pathological disorders overcome; and one starting point for doing so is to examine how borders have long served as zones of exchange and as mechanisms of protection, rather than as razor-wire-clad monuments to sovereignty. Instead of the all-too-common ‘bad and ugly’ borders of today, I conclude by asking whether we may be able to envisage a ‘good border’ as a line of protection in a shared cross-frontier endeavour? Border studies, having long offered us the opportunity to read society from its contested and porous boundaries, may play a fundamental part in this rethinking of our crisis-ridden politics from the margins.

Keywords: Borders; Security; Migration; Surveillance capitalism; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781800375383
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