Borders, Risks, Exclusions

Authors

  • Benjamin Muller University of Western Ontario

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v3i1.1024

Keywords:

security, borders, states, policy

Abstract

In this paper the border is evaluated as a fold of power relations in which sovereign capacity and competence is marshaled in the furtherance of illiberal practices. Drawing from interview data of officials in various agencies engaged in the US-Canada and particularly the Windsor-Detroit corridor, the argument is made that the border is a site for both negative and positive power, for insertion and subtraction, and that surveillance and compliance regimes are ‘run’ not so much in the furtherance of a precautionary or preemptive end-state, but as intermediate values that are sufficiently malleable by an invigorated sovereign, expressed in the residue of discretion in and between the many border agencies.

Author Biography

Benjamin Muller, University of Western Ontario

Benjamin Muller teaches Critical Security Studies and International Relations in the Department of Political Science at King’s University College at UWO in London, Ontario. Ben has taught at Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria, and Queen’s University in Belfast. In 2008, Ben held a Visiting Research Fellowship in the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Ben is a member of both the Critical Approaches to Security in Europe Collective (CASE Collective) and the International Political Sociology Group (IPS) of the International Studies Association, and a founding member of Canadian Critical Security Studies. Ben has published on the application and implication of biometric technologies on border security, its impact on citizenship, the increased reliance on biometrics in the war in Iraq, the politics of risk management and contemporary security strategies and the politics of trusted traveller programs and border regimes at the airport. Ben is completing a monograph for publication with Routledge entitled: Security, Risk, and the Biometric State: Governing Borders and Bodies. For the past 8 years, Ben has presented his work regularly at international academic conferences and workshops, is often invited to speak to public and policy audiences, the local and international media, and was invited to testify to Parliamentary Standing Committee on Canadian border security. CV

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Published

2009-10-15

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2009): Security, Exclusion, and Social Justice

Section

Thematic Articles

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