Border Politics

Catalog description

This course explores how border politics has evolved from historical practices of territoriality and the rise of the nation-state system, including the social construction of "imagined communities" and the boundaries that define them. Yet this system faces many challenges. Drawing from critical theories of identity, state formation, and intersectionality, students explore erosions of state sovereignty through globalization, climate change, crisis migration, refugee flows, asylum seekers, transnational crime, and terrorism. As case studies from the global north and south illustrate, states are increasingly turning to global and domestic disciplinary regimes to wall up, fence out, surveillance, detain, and deport the "other." Students examine these trends in the context of the moral, political, security, corporeal, and human rights questions at stake.