How do security communities transform into security regimes? This book compares the construction of cross-border security regimes across five regions of the world to illustrate how trust emerges from the day-to-day relations of coordination, cooperation, or collaboration. Patterns in Border Security: Regional Comparisons studies the way borderland communities develop, implement, and align border policy to enhance their sense of security. Borders have been evolving rapidly in direct response to the multifaceted challenges brought on by globalization, which has had a nuanced impact on the way borders are governed and border security is managed. Taking a methodical comparative regional approach, this book identifies and contrasts determinants of nascent, ascendant, and mature border security regimes, which the book documents in seven regional case studies from across the globe. The findings identify conditions that give rise to cross-border and trans-governmental coordination, cooperation, or collaboration. Specifically, pluralistic forms of communication and interactions, sometimes far from the actual borderline, emerge as key determinants of friendly and trustful relations among both contiguous and non-contiguous regions. This is a significant innovation in the study of borders, in particular in the way borders mediate security. For six decades international security studies had posited culture as the bedrock of security communities. By contrast, the book identifies conditions, a method, and a model for adequate and effective cross-border relations, but whose outcome is not contingent on culture. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics with a Foreword by the Secretary General of the World Customs Organization.

Public Security in Federal Polities is the first systematic and methodical study to bring together the fields of security studies and comparative federalism. The volume explores the symbiotic relationship between public security concerns and institutional design, public administration, and public policy across nine federal country case studies: Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. In addressing specific national security concerns and aspects of globalization that are challenging conventional approaches to global, international, regional, and domestic security, this volume examines how the constitutional and institutional framework of a society affects the effectiveness and efficiency of public security arrangements. Public Security in Federal Polities identifies differences and similarities, highlights best practices, and draws out lessons for both particular federations, and for federal systems in general. This book is essential reading for scholars, students, practitioners as well as policy- and decision-makers of security and federalism.

Historically, national borders have evolved in ways that serve the interests of central states in security and the regulation of trade. Security. Cooperation. Governance. explores Canada–US border and security policies that have evolved from successive trade agreements since the 1950s, punctuated by new and emerging challenges to security in the twenty-first century. The sectoral and geographical diversity of cross-border interdependence of what remains the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship makes the US–Canada border a living laboratory for studying the interaction of trade, security, and other border policies that challenge traditional centralized approaches to national security. The book’s findings show that border governance straddles multiple regional, sectoral, and security scales in ways rarely documented in such detail. These developments have precipitated an Open Border Paradox: extensive, regionally varied flows of trade and people have resulted in a series of nested but interdependent security regimes that function on different scales and vary across economic and policy sectors. These realities have given rise to regional and sectoral specialization in related security regimes. For instance, just-in-time automotive production in the Great Lakes region varies considerably from the governance of maritime and intermodal trade (and port systems) on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which in turn is quite different from commodity-based systems that manage diverse agricultural and food trade in the Canadian Prairies and U.S. Great Plains. The paradox of open borders and their legitimacy is a function of robust bilateral and multilevel governance based on effective partnerships with substate governments and the private sector. Effective policy accounts for regional variation in integrated binational security and trade imperatives. At the same time, binational and continental policies are embedded in each country’s trade and security relationships beyond North America.