Border security has been high on public-policy agendas in Europe
and North America since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World
Trade Centre in New York City and on the headquarters of the
American military in Washington DC. Governments are now confronted
with managing secure borders, a policy objective that in this era
of increased free trade and globalization must compete with intense
cross-border flows of people and goods. Border-security policies
must enable security personnel to identify, or filter out,
dangerous individuals and substances from among the millions of
travelers and tons of goods that cross borders daily, particularly
in large cross-border urban regions.
This book addresses this gap between security needs and an
understanding of borders and borderlands. Specifically, the
chapters in this volume ask policy-makers to recognize that two
fundamental elements define borders and borderlands: first, "human
activities" (the agency and agent power of individual ties and
forces spanning a border), and second, the "broader social
processes" that frame individual action, such as market forces,
government activities (law, regulations, and policies), and the
regional culture and politics of a borderland.
Borders emerge as the historically and geographically variable
expression of human ties exercised within social structures of
varying force and influence, and it is the interplay and
interdependence between people's incentives to act and the
surrounding structures (i.e. constructed social processes that
contain and constrain individual action) that determine the
effectiveness of border security policies.
This book argues that the nature of borders is to be porous,
which is a problem for security policy makers. It shows that when
for economic, cultural, or political reasons human activities
increase across a border and borderland, governments need to
increase cooperation and collaboration with regard to security
policies, if only to avoid implementing mismatched security
policies.
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