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This chapter treats North Africa, known in Arabic as the Maghreb. The chapter focuses on Morocco as a way of illuminating the role of transit states situated “in-between” sending and receiving dynamics. Admittedly, “transit state” is a bit of a misnomer, as migrants are more often blocked and not really in transit. Nonetheless, the label as “host country” or “country of immigration” does not work either; the new population does not comprise immigrants who are seeking to settle, as is the case in advanced-industrialized economies. Chapter 4 treats the politics of CIM within a transit state and the ways in which CIM is used to “reborder” a country, cement territorial claims, and control the national space. CIM is also used by transit states as a bargaining chip to enhance the status of their own emigrants—both legal and undocumented—living in North Atlantic countries. Finally, chapter 4 treats the ways in which CIM enhances collaboration between North Atlantic and transit state officials and facilitates the elaboration of a transnational security state—that is, the internationalization of security apparatuses and interior ministries.

This chapter deals with the late 1940s and the 1950s, a period that is generally perceived as a honeymoon between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, albeit one marred by the seeds of future conflict. Though the social and economic fallout of World War II was certainly felt in the borderlands, many things had changed for the better compared to the years leading up to 1945. There was no longer the threat of war to tyrannize the local population and transform the borderland areas into highly militarized zones. On the Soviet bank of the Argun, the siege mentality against enemies from within, the dull hatred of anything and anyone foreign, cultivated in the Soviet Far East and in other regions of the Soviet Union since in the 1930s, gradually withered. Under Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin in power, people in the Soviet borderland no longer feared deportation, imprisonment, and other repressions dealt out by their own government as much.

This chapter explores the devastating experience of the Civil War in the border South. The chapter opens with the secession crisis, which gave western Virginians their long-awaited opportunity to break away from their eastern neighbors. A close analysis of their debates and rhetoric in the secession convention, as well as in their later constitutional convention, reveals the impact of the border South’s particular form of manhood. Without their unique understanding of hierarchy, restraint, submission, and emotion, western Virginians may not have ventured down the path to statehood. This section demonstrates the importance of gendered ideals, forged within the walls of the household, to the political world. The second half of the chapter reveals how the brutal conflict in the border South reinforced the importance of domestic ties and a sense of mutuality within the home.

Borders are ubiquitous in political life. Indeed, they are perhaps even constitutive of political life. Borders are not natural, neutral nor static, but historically contingent, politically charged, dynamic phenomena that first and foremost involve people and their everyday lives. This chapter describes the concept of the border of the state in contemporary political life; a blind spot in International Relations (IR) theory; the vacillation of borders; and the quest for alternative border imaginaries. The concept of the border of the state underpins the arrangement of, and indeed the very condition of possibility for, both domestic and international legal and political systems.

This chapter moves away from the IR and related literature to explore potential resources in post-structuralist thought for an interrogation of the concept of the border of the state, highlighting the relation between state borders and practices of violence, sovereignty and (bio)power. First, it draws upon the work of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to analyse the violent foundations of the juridical-political order. Second, the chapter uses Carl Schmitt's paradigmatic account of sovereignty and later treatment of the relationship between spatial ordering and law to offer an interpretation of borders as exceptional spaces. Third, it explores Michel Foucault's treatment of (bio)power and notion of biopolitics.

This chapter discusses the history and vision of the U.S.–Mexico barrier wall, in particular the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which allowed for 700 additional miles of fencing to be constructed along the border, much of it in Arizona, including the “virtual wall.” It addresses the nature of borders, as chaotic and historically contested spaces, and the logic of building walls along international borders as a means of attempting to control these erratic convergence zones. It also lays out an array of opinions concerning the U.S.–Mexico barrier wall itself, the costs and benefits of such a wall, and the difficulties of construction and maintenance.

This chapter begins by assessing what the implications of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border might be and how this differs from the concept of the border of the state. It returns to the examples of the work that the latter does in contemporary political life in respect of framing the understanding of juridical-political order, the production of identities of citizen-subjects and global security relations. By rereading these examples in the light of the concept of the generalised biopolitical border, the chapter then explores how this alternative frame might entail new modes of practice/theory. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's account of the politics of framing, the chapter ends on a note of caution about the way in which thinking in terms of the generalised biopolitical border runs the risk of foisting the same problematic sense of form, shape and coherence on ‘global politics’ as a totality.

Throughout the Christian era, the church has been recognized as an institution providing sanctuary to those in need. In the contemporary era, sanctuary for migrants in the US has formally manifested itself twice: first in 1981 with the founding of the Central American Sanctuary Movement, and most recently in 2007 with the establishment of the New Sanctuary Movement. Both of these movements were motivated by faith and founded on political and religious principles to challenge US policies, educate Americans, and serve the needs of non-state-sanctioned refugees and undocumented migrants from Latin America who were either fleeing civil strife in their home countries and seeking refuge in the US or fighting deportation orders from the US government. This chapter introduces a third important, but less known, sanctuary movement, the transnational religious network that has emerged since the mid-1990s to challenge and question the morality of state border policies, and protect and serve migrants on the increasingly dangerous journey north from Central America and Mexico to the United States.

The Dutch-German state border south of the river Rhine was established in 1830. Before that time, the administrative borders in this region frequently changed. The Kleverlandish dialect area, which extends from Duisburg in Germany to Nijmegen in The Netherlands, crosses the state border south of the Rhine. This chapter assesses the impact of the Dutch-German state border on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area by relating linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other. Three models for explaining today's pattern of linguistic variation in the area are tested. In each model, another variable is used as the determinant of linguistic variation: geographic distance (continuum model), the state border (gap model), and social distance (social model). For the social model, perceptual data for friends, relatives and shopping locations are used. Testing the three models shows that nowadays the dialect variation in the research area is closely related to the existence of the state border and to the social structure of the area. The geographic spatial configuration hardly plays a role anymore.

This chapter continues the story of the Unionist Offensive in the Border South, carrying it through the tumultuous period when six Lower South states followed South Carolina out of the Union. The secession of the Lower South placed added pressure on the Border South states, as did the fact that John Crittenden and his allies in the U.S. Congress were unable to get a comprehensive compromise package passed. This chapter focuses closely on the conditional nature of Border South Unionism and shows how without a compromise settlement, many white border southerners became more amenable to the possibility of secession. Some also adopted a neutral attitude at this juncture, hoping to avoid taking sides with either the Union or the Confederacy.

This chapter tracks the course of the Border South during a critical interval in the secession crisis when war breaks out between the United States and the Confederacy. Without a compromise in hand at the end of the Thirty-Sixth Congress’s session, John J. Crittenden and other Border South Unionists called a Border State Convention with the goal of keeping hopes for a settlement alive. This plan was dashed with the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter in April 1861. With the beginning of war Border South Unionists had to change their strategy. From this point forward, Crittenden and his allies try to frame the war as an effort to rebuild the Union, not an attack on slavery. Many white border southerners adopted a neutral attitude during this period, and in many cases frustrated secessionists in the Border South decided to leave the region and offer their services to the Confederacy. This chapter also illustrates how political tensions spilled over into violence in the Border South, as Baltimore and Saint Louis endured large-scale riots in response to the presence of federal troops.

This chapter covers the last half of 1861 and demonstrates how Unionists within the Border South managed to defeat the secessionists within their midst. This chapter emphasizes the movement away from neutrality in each of the Border South states and the forces that tilted the balance towards Unionism. A major factor contributing to the defeat of secession in the Border South was the increased presence of the Union army. In Maryland, Missouri, and eventually in Kentucky, federal troops were used to keep Border South secessionists in check. This chapter also chronicles how Unionists overcame John C. Frémont’s emancipation proclamation, which he announced in August 1861. By the end of 1861, all of the Border South states had abandoned neutrality and cast their lot with the United States. Internal divisions continued, but the secession movement had been defeated in the Border South.

This chapter analyses one of the core norms of international law under the two-pillar standard of thin justice—the claims of peoples for self-government, and in particular the law on self-determination that has evolved to address those claims. It contrasts the law's endorsement of full statehood for colonial peoples seeking independence with the very limited acceptance of secession as an option for groups dissatisfied with their own state. It also considers alternative rules either to constrain secessions even more or to allow them more liberally. Along with the rules on self-determination are corresponding rules on the determination of borders. The chapter contrasts the merits of the uti possidetis rule that turned the imperial boundaries of colonies into the international boundaries of new states, with the costs of a rule, that would turn the administrative boundaries of seceding provinces into the international borders of states.

Chapter Nine explores the range of opinion among Republicans in the US House in early 1861. Hard-liners led by Thaddeus Stevens and Owen Lovejoy disavowed all intention of attacking slavery in the states where it existed but argued that it would be wrong to offer concessions in the face of secessionist recklessness; the Constitution should be “obeyed rather than amended.” By contrast, conciliatory Republicans denied that the constitutional amendment would appease secessionists. It would instead strengthen those Southerners who had done the most to challenge disunion, and who had thereby kept secession from engulfing the eight slave states of the Upper South.

From the beginning of the war to the summer of 1862, officers in the West adopted policies toward fugitive slaves that ranged from barring them altogether from their lines to aggressively liberating them. In August 1861, Congress offered some guidance on the issue with the First Confiscation Act, but the act’s limited scope led to minimal confiscation or none at all by top officers. Sensitive to the sentiments of border states like Missouri, who supported the Union but wanted slavery preserved, Lincoln was not yet ready to push for emancipation. At times, however, officers in the Border South still carried out the First Confiscation Act, but much depended on the dispositions and political views of the officers. Some Union officers, like William T. Sherman, Henry Halleck, and Ulysses S. Grant, held conservative views and pushed back against letting fugitive slaves enter Union lines and confiscating slaves belonging to Unionists. Officers, particularly in states like Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, had very different ideas about how to handle fugitive slaves, and they were willing to pursue them even if it meant conflict with each other, their superiors or subordinates, or Washington.