This article was published in Politics and Governance on June 15 2022. You can read the complete text here.
Against the current mobility and security backdrop, this collection of articles takes stock of the meaning, roles, and practices of border activities. Now is the moment to consider the special role that borders perform as an institution of state security in a contemporary world exposed to massive international flows of people and goods, as well as technologically‐driven control and management systems.
The articles constituting this thematic issue show that borders have lost none of their prominence as sites of security governance when it comes to transnational mobility. Geographic borders are regaining their classical properties of territorial protection, security checks, and everyday management of migrating people. But this is a “back to the future” moment, and the disinterment of old practices has actually led to generation of new border types and experiences reflecting the emergent complexity and diverse temporal and spatial trajectories of migrants. Physical entries into geographical territory have classically been subject to peculiar regulatory practices; today those practices are spurring a proliferation of the social networks and informal methods which are used to circumvent them.
Moreover, proven old methods of controlling cross‐border movements have been given a new lease of life precisely because of the novel ways that geographic borders have shifted into society, the economy, and non‐geographic spaces. The authors of this issue make an attempt to explain the meaning of borders in several interrelated contexts, re‐visioning borders as part of a serious reflection on contemporary meanings of freedom, security, connectivity, and exception. Mobility and transboundary exchange have been the most prevalent features of 21st century globalization and transnationalism. There has been a significant increase in the volume, diversity, scope, technique, practice, and territorial reach of the world, with an analytical focus that encompassed diasporic communities, global (neo‐)nomads, and transnational advocacy networks (Mau, 2020; Mazlish, 2017; Ribas‐Mateos, 2015).
