(Ebook) Theory of the Border by Thomas Nail ISBN 9780190618643, 0190618647

(Ebook) Theory of the Border by Thomas Nail ISBN 9780190618643, 0190618647

We live in a world of borders. Territorial, political, juridical, and economic borders of all kinds quite literally define every aspect of social life in the twenty- first century.1 Despite the celebration of globalization and the increasing necessity of global mobility, there are more types of borders today than ever before in history. In the last twenty years, but particularly since 9/ 11, hundreds of new borders have emerged around the world: miles of new razor- wire fences, tons of new concrete security walls, numerous offshore detention centers, biometric passport databases, and security checkpoints of all kinds in schools, airports, and along various roadways across the world.
This book provides a theoretical framework for understanding the structure and function of borders across multiple domains of social life. Borders are complex composites. Since each border is actually several borders, there is already quite a crowd. Not only is the indexical question “What is a border?” challenging enough to answer,2 but the questions of
how, when, where, and who makes the border are just as crucial and complex.
Furthermore, historically the border has gone by multiple names: the fence, the wall, the cell, the checkpoint, the frontier, the limit, the march, the boundary, and so on. These are all distinct phenomena in social history, even if they often overlap with one another to some degree.
For all their differences, these types of borders also share something in common. “The border” is the name of this commonality. The border is “a process of social division.”3 What all borders share in common, following this definition, is that they introduce a division or bifurcation of some sort into the world. This definition I am proposing has four important consequences for a theory of the border that is further developed throughout this book.