Political imaginaries of border security

What does it mean to secure a border in the twenty-first century? This chapter examines multidisciplinary perspectives on attempts to control human mobility. It identifies three dominant imaginaries in extant debates about what and where borders are, how borders are secured and by whom, and what is at stake politically in connecting borders and security. The first imaginary, associated with the modern Westphalian ideal of sovereignty and European colonialism, involves the militarized defence of borders as ‘lines in the sand’ at the outer edge of states’ territories. The second imaginary, which shifts focus from ‘border’ to ‘bordering practice’ and adopts a broadened and deepened understanding of ‘security’, rethinks border security as a continuum of controls beyond the traditional geopolitical distinction of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The third imaginary, drawing on biopolitical understandings of security, disaggregates border security from territory and considers how the bodies of people on the move become the target for governmental interventions often under the rubric of humanitarian efforts to ‘save lives’. The discussion concludes by sketching a fourth imaginary – a vernacular approach to border security – as a future direction for multidisciplinary scholarship; one that examines de-bordering and de-securitizing in response to human mobility.