Was the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) designed as a definitive trade agreement, or as a stepping stone? This book reviews NAFTA's performances on trade, investment, intellectual property rights, dispute-settlement, as well as environmental and labor side-agreements within a theoretical construct.

Even after its decisive Cold War victory and resounding anti-terrorism military campaigns, why is the United States unable to tackle soft security border threats? Five authors who examine illegal US immigration (Schiavon), Mexico's similar predicament (Gonzalez-Murphy), the conjunction of both (Hussain), a failed 43-year anti-drug war (Dominguez and Velazquez), and the threat expanding to Canada (Hussain), fault policy unilateralism and explore collective action. Utilizing multilateral security governance theory (Kirchner/Sperling, 2007), they propose a post-Westphalian outlet to better help (a) policy-makers control problems, (b) the academic community to solve puzzles, and (c) the public to feel secure.

Reevaluating NAFTA seeks to answer the question: has NAFTA integrated North America? A fifteen-year NAFTA appraisal finds trade expansion boosting optimism, but also unveils stark asymmetry between developed and developing countries as well as top-heavy NAFTA regulations seriously constraining ground-level integration. Using empirical data analysis and a wide-reaching theoretical context, this book seeks to evaluate the results of NAFTA's 'fifteen-year itch' to identify what worked and what didn't, and ultimately, to point to the future of North American integration.

Why was NAFTA  not extended, even after fulfilling several stated objectives? Investigating a number of roadblocks (balancing regional and multilateral environmental obligations, migration and refugee spillovers, synchronizing federal, state, and local investment laws, societal transnationalism over education, for instance, sociological/anthropological concerns over transformations at the local level, gender relations, and the impacts of the 2008 recession and H1N1 pandemic), several scholars elevate the growing but neglected importance of parallel intra-state and transnational dynamics demanding attention. Utilizing James Rosenau’s state-multi-centric models, their conclusions/implications shed light not just why North American integration is not working, but on broader regional experiments.

Though 9/11 tightened borders against hard threats, why were soft threats able to create havoc in the cracks? How could these threats become multilateral while policy remedies could not? What is preventing collective action against common threats when unilateral policies continue failing? Consisting of eight border-defying case studies (elite networking, languages, political refugees, diasporic dynamics, drug organizations, migration, and cross-border comparisons), the volume finds the state retreating, multi-centric governance opportunities blooming, and illegal flows breaking borders faster than state policy prescriptions--all explained by turbulence theory (Rosenau 1997) rather than traditional theories (realism and liberalism). The studies explored by the contributors of this volume lead to the conclusion that the state is not, and should not be, the only viable actor in successful border governance.

The authors use multilateral security governance theory to propose mutual persuasion, institution-building, incorporation of non-state actors into multilateral strategies, collective action, and multilateral governance as a strategy for modern Mexico.

Though 9/11 tightened borders against hard threats, why were soft threats able to create havoc in the cracks? The studies explored by the contributors of this volume lead to the conclusion that the state is not, and should not be, the only viable actor in successful border governance.

Why was NAFTA not extended, even after fulfilling several stated objectives? Investigating a number of roadblocks and utilizing James Rosenau's state-multi-centric models, the book's conclusions shed light not just on why North American integration is not working, but on broader regional experiments.

Depicting NAFTA to be but a stepping stone rather than final product of regional economic integrative efforts, a chapter-specific 15-year assessment conveys the upsides and downsides of North America's Camelot moment.