Borders and National Security

Catalog description

This course focuses on borders, boundary-making, securitization, and other theories surrounding the territorialization of the nation-state, including the rise of the national-security and homeland security industries. The analysis of the changing complexities of borders and borderlands is driven by a meta-narrative about national security and current developments in the immigration/security nexus, including policies of border control and the surveillance of immigrants, denizen, and citizens with new security technologies. A key piece of the course is the comparative analysis of US and EU border agencies and the militarization and weaponization of borders, including the construction of new border walls, with the objective to protect the global North from the onslaught of desperate, impoverished and persecuted hordes from the global South. Transnational questions focusing, for example, on the dynamics of human trafficking and drug cartels is an essential parts of this comparison. Throughout the course, a special analytical emphasis is given to the meta-narrative and political opportunism that have driven these developments and led to the fortification of the global North.