Sovereignty in the Age of Securitization: A Study on Borders and Bordering in the United States after 9/11 [electronic resource].

9781321053999

1 online resource (423 p.)

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This dissertation focuses on borders, sovereignty and citizenship, after 9/11. Drawing from qualitative research on contemporary US bordering policy and practice, I reveal borders to be increasingly thick, multi-faceted and bi-national -- rather than thin, legal-topographical instantiations of state sovereignty. At perimeters, states are creating thick webs of infrastructure and law-enforcement that extend many miles inland, and co-locating forces on either side of the line, creating de facto overlapping jurisdictions. At ports of entry, states have moved towards risk-based adjudication of admission, engendering a regime of cross-border data-sharing and interoperability, resulting in binational ports of entry. This new inter-sovereign alignment has great normative and geopolitical significance: when states co-manage their borders in a shared battle against global flows, sovereignty at the border becomes paradoxically both joint and empty, challenging our notions of sovereignty-qua-territoriality (indivisible state rule over a territorial jurisdiction) and sovereignty-qua- decisionism (the ultimate and decisive nature of sovereign choice). This heralds a new phase in border functionality in which borders are not designed for states to oppose one another, or to oppose migratory flows, but rather join forces in the shared fight against transnational migratory flows. This new sovereign alignment could accord with principles of justice, or could not; the dissertation concludes by evaluating the potential benefits and harms of this geopolitical order, offering a blueprint for how it might be shaped in a just manner.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

February 04, 2015

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2014.

Yale University.