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This work argues that a conceptual and methodological shift is required in the way that border security is understood, and that a new approach is urgently required. It examines vernacular narratives of the 'crisis' and how they offer insight into citizens' knowledge of the 'crisis', and actually-existing alternatives to fantasies of control.

Presents a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of borders in the study of International Relations. It turns from the current debate regarding the presence or absence of borders to consider the fundamental change that is occurring in the concept of the border in contemporary political life.

Winner of the Gold Award, 2011 Past Presidents' Book Competition, Association of Borderlands Studies This book presents a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of borders in the study of global politics. It turns from current debates about the presence or absence of borders between states to consider the possibility that the concept of the border of the state is being reconfigured in contemporary political life. The author uses critical resources found in poststructuralist thought to think in new ways about the relationship between borders, security and sovereign power, drawing on a range of thinkers including Agamben, Derrida and Foucault. He highlights the necessity of a more pluralized and radicalised view of what borders are and where they might be found and uses the problem of borders to critically explore the innovations and limits of poststructuralist scholarship.

AbstractThis article is a response to calls from a number of theorists in International Relations and related disciplines for the need to develop alternative ways of thinking 'the border' in contemporary political life. These calls stem from an apparent tension between the increasing complexity of the nature and location of bordering practices on the one hand and yet the relative simplicity with which borders often continue to be treated on the other. One of the intellectual challenges, however, is that many of the resources in political thought to which we might turn for new border vocabularies already rely on unproblematised conceptions of what and where borders are. It is argued that some promise can be found in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose diagnosis of the operation of sovereign power in terms of the production of bare life offers significant, yet largely untapped, implications for analysing borders and the politics of space across a global bio-political terrain.