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Bringing Borders Back:
Policing Clandestine Transnational Actors
Peter Andreas
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies
Brown University
Box 1866
Providence, RI 02912
401-863-9611
Bringing Borders Back:
Policing Clandestine Transnational Actors
Abstract
The decline of major interstate military conflict and the economic and technological developments subsumed under the term “globalization” have prompted many International Relations (IR) scholars to conclude that borders and territorial controls are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Challenging this common view, I argue that borders are not simply eroding but changing in function: Even as military and economic border controls have declined, ambitious and technologically innovative police border controls have expanded to deter the entry of what I term clandestine transnational actors (CTAs), defined as non-state actors who operate across national borders in violation of state laws and who attempt to evade law enforcement efforts. The leading policing targets are terrorists, drug traffickers, unauthorized migrants and migrant smugglers. This clandestine side of the transnational world and state efforts to police it has been largely overlooked by IR scholars. Focusing on the United States and the European Union, I examine state attempts to police these “undesirable” border crossings while at the same time facilitating and encouraging “desirable” crossings. Territorial politics in these regions, I emphasize, is increasingly about territorial policing, creating a new geopolitics based on law enforcement concerns that blurs the traditional distinction between internal and external security. These expanding policy initiatives to selectively restrict territorial access suggest that, far from simply being viewed as antiquated, borders should be brought back in as a central part of our analysis of world politics.
Introduction
Border control—the effort to restrict territorial access—has long been a core state activity.[1] As territorially demarcated institutions, states have always imposed entry barriers, whether to deter armies,[2] tax trade[3] and protect domestic producers, or keep out perceived “undesirables.” All states monopolize the right to determine who and what is granted legitimate territorial access.[4] However, there is significant historical variation in border control priorities. Although military defense and economic regulation have traditionally been core border control concerns, in many places the border regulatory apparatus of the state is being re-tooled, reconfigured, and redeployed to prioritize policing. In other words, the demilitarization and economic liberalization of borders has also been accompanied by more intensive policing of borders. The importance of territoriality[5] is therefore changing rather than simply eroding. The policing objective is to deny territorial access to what I term clandestine transnational actors (CTAs), defined as non-state actors who operate across national borders in violation of state laws and who attempt to evade law enforcement efforts.
CTAs are as dramatically varied as their motives. They may be driven by high profits (drug traffickers, migrant smugglers), the desire to carry out politically or religiously inspired acts of violence (terrorists), or simply the search for employment and/or refuge (most unauthorized migrants). What these otherwise radically different types of CTAs all have in common is that they are the targets of border controls and their border crossing strategies are designed to minimize the risk of apprehension. CTAs have existed as long as states have imposed border controls. What has varied over time is the organization of CTAs and their methods and speed of cross-border movement, state laws and the form and intensity of their enforcement, and the degree of political attention and societal anxiety.
While the methods of policing CTAs take a wide variety of forms both at and beyond borders, these can be collectively categorized as “border controls” given that the end-goal is to deny territorial access. The intensification of border controls in recent years is reflected in sharply rising law enforcement budgets, new and more expansive laws, the development and deployment of more sophisticated surveillance and information technologies, stricter visa regimes and more high-tech and forgery resistant travel documents, enhanced cooperation with source and transit countries and a greater extension of tracking and control mechanisms beyond physical borderlines (a “thickening” of borders and the creation of buffer zones), and in some places, growing use of military and intelligence hardware, personnel, and expertise for policing tasks. The importance of policing territorial access is also evident in the more prominent place of law enforcement in international diplomacy and in the official policy discourse about borders, with many states formally elevating policing from the traditional status of “low politics” to the “high politics” of security. These border changes are most apparent in (but not restricted to) the advanced industrialized regions of the world, especially in the United States and Western Europe, and have been dramatically reinforced and accelerated by the policy response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.[6]
Despite the increasing salience of border policing and CTAs in world politics, this has not been a central area of study in International Relations (IR).[7] Even the expansive literature on transnational relations has had remarkably little to say about the clandestine side of the transnational world and state efforts to police it.[8] Police matters have largely been left to criminologists and criminal justice specialists, who have traditionally focused largely on domestic problems such as local crime control.[9] While the dynamics of border law enforcement and law evasion have been a growing concern of policymakers, IR debates over borders and territorial controls have tended to instead concentrate largely on traditionally defined military and economic issues.[10] On the one hand, realists correctly stress the enduring importance of territory and state power, but mistakenly assume that interstate military threats are the overriding border concern.[11] Viewing the world through the geopolitical lens of great power military rivalry and conflict, realists largely fail to notice recent shifts in state border security priorities. Globalists,[12] on the other hand, challenge realism by emphasizing that territorial conquest has sharply declined and that technological and economic transformations have eroded the importance of borders. Yet, like their realist counterparts, globalists largely ignore the growth of territorial policing, with some even dismissing territory as antiquated.[13] Many globalists tend to view transnational actors optimistically as part of a benign, emerging global civil society, overlooking the substantial clandestine dimensions of transnational activity. A common globalist assumption is that greater economic interdependence generates more harmonious cross-border relations, reduced state intervention, and more open borders. Glossed over is the fact that the clandestine dimensions of transnational activity are sources of rising border anxieties, often fueling greater state intervention in the form of policing territorial access. Globalists who stress the pacifying influence of interdependence and transnational interactions tend to overlook this source of border tensions and the expanding exercise of state policing power. In short, while realists stress continuity and globalists stress decline, both accounts of borders fail to capture how territorial controls are being reconfigured, becoming less relevant in some policy spheres (deterring military incursions by other states, taxing commerce) but more relevant in others (policing CTAs). These border shifts are illustrated in the following table:
Types of borders / Role/Function / Form/characteristics / Historical trajectoryMilitary borders / Deter interstate military threats / Physical barriers and buffer zones, military alliances, arms races / Decline: demilitarization
Economic borders / Collect revenue/tax commerce, protect domestic producers / Tariffs, quotas, customs houses / Decline: economic liberalization
Police borders / Deter non-state transnational threats / Physical barriers and buffer zones, high-tech tracking and inspection, “smart borders” and pooling sovereignty / Expansion: criminalization
The next section briefly reviews and critiques realist and globalist accounts of borders and territorial controls. I then trace the rapid expansion of border policing in North America and Europe in recent years, where growing anxiety over CTAs has fundamentally transformed state border regulatory practices and cross-border relations, and blurred traditional distinctions between external and internal security concerns. Territorial politics in both regions, I argue, is increasingly defined by territorial policing, creating a new geopolitics based on law enforcement concerns. I conclude by emphasizing that regardless of its effectiveness as an instrument of territorial exclusion, policing has high symbolic appeal and will likely continue to be an increasingly important area of state activity.
Contending views of borders and territorial controls
Borders have traditionally been viewed first and foremost in military terms. Most interstate wars, after all, have historically been about territorial defense and conquest.[14] Early geopolitical thinking, reflected in the works of Friedrich Ratzel, Sir Halford Mackinder, and Captain A.T. Mahan, stressed the centrality of territorial competition and acquisition.[15] Classic geopolitical analysis fits comfortably within a realist theoretical framework, with its emphasis on interstate competition and conflict over territory. In the view of Robert Gilpin, states “throughout history” have had as a principle objective “the conquest of territory in order to advance economic, security, and other interests.”[16] Not surprisingly, the influence of realist thinking is most evident in the IR subfield of security studies, which has largely focused on strategies of war-making and war-preparation.[17] In the realist conception of security, threats are external and military-based and the actors are rational unitary states. The security goals are territorial defense or acquisition, and are operationalized through the use of compellance, deterrence, strategic alliances, and military force. From this perspective, borders are strategic lines to be militarily defended or destroyed. State survival is based on the deterrent function of borders against military incursions by other states. In other words, the realist conception of borders and territorial security is fundamentally about interstate rather than transnational relations.[18]
There is certainly justification for this military-focused worldview. After all, as Charles Tilly and others have emphasized, the modern state was created as a war-fighting machine: states made war and war made states.[19] Yet state-making is a continuous process. The state is not a static, unchanging fixture in an anarchic international system. Major interstate military conflicts have greatly diminished and borders are rarely contested militarily. As documented by Mark Zacher, there has been a sharp downward turn in the use of force to alter interstate boundaries. Indeed, there has not been a single case of successful territorial aggrandizement since 1976. This astonishing border trend is partly the result of growing international respect for what Zacher calls the “territorial integrity norm.”[20] Consequently, the traditional military function of borders has become much less important.
But while a territorial integrity norm helps to inhibit states from militarily altering borders, there is no equivalent norm that inhibits CTAs from crossing borders in violation of state laws. And states have defined many of these CTAs as “new” security threats,[21] merging internal and external security concerns and providing a rationale for more expansive and ambitious border control campaigns. This shift away from traditional military border concerns and toward law enforcement border concerns tends not to be noticed by those realists who insist that the end of the Cold War will necessarily lead to a return to military rivalry and conflict amongst major powers.[22] As a result, there is a deepening gap between the traditional realist conception of security and borders and what many states are actually doing in the realm of security and border defenses.[23] The gap between theory and policy practice has become even more pronounced in the post-September 11th security environment.[24] Transnational threats rather than interstate military threats increasingly drive state border security concerns. Geopolitics is alive and well, but is increasingly based on policing matters.
Challenging realism, globalists point not only to the declining military relevance of borders but also to the border-blurring effects of “globalization,” generally characterized as an intensification of interdependence and cross-border interactions.[25] Major transformations—the internationalization of production, the liberalization of trade, the mobility of finance, and advances in transportation and communication technology—are viewed by globalists as indicators of border erosion. Beginning in the 1970s, many scholars argued that these technological and economic changes facilitate and encourage growing cross-border linkages between societal actors, constrain the policy options of states, and diminish the primacy of traditional security concerns.[26] While these perspectives were overshadowed in the 1980s by the renewal of geopolitical tensions between great powers, they have been revived in the post-Cold War era and occupy a prominent place in scholarly debates. Whether celebrated or bemoaned, a popular view is that the state is bowing to global market forces and pressures from non-state actors.[27] In the liberal variant of this globalist perspective, more pacific “trading states” are replacing traditional “warfare states,” with economic exchange prioritized over territorial conquest.[28]
Borders are therefore seen as increasingly blurred and open, becoming bridges for commercial transactions rather than economic barriers and fortified military lines. Global economic transformations seem to confirm this. For example, encouraged by economic liberalization, the volume of world trade in goods and services increased by more than thirty nine percent between 1995 and 2001.[29] Tariff barriers have been drastically reduced.[30] Trade tariffs for industrialized countries fell from nearly 10 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in 1999, while tariffs for less industrialized countries fell from 27.6 percent in 1980 to 11.3 percent in 1999.[31] Encouraged by financial deregulation, money has become particularly mobile, with some $1.5 trillion moving through the world’s foreign exchange markets every day.
The eroding economic importance of borders is part of what one prominent IR scholar has called an “unbundling” of territoriality.[32] Other observers suggest that globalization is about “debordering the world of states,”[33] and that there is a progressive “desacralization of territory” going on.[34] James Rosenau sums up the globalist conventional wisdom: “the close links between territory and the state are breaking down….In the political realm…authority is simultaneously being relocated upward toward supranational entities, sideward toward transnational organizations and social movements, and downward toward sub-national groups and communities….These shifting tendencies are diminishing the competence and effectiveness of states and rendering their borders more porous and less meaningful.”[35] Some upbeat market liberals even argue that a “borderless world” is emerging, and that dynamic cross-border regions are replacing “dysfunctional” states.[36] This perspective stresses the benign, pacifying effects globalization, and assumes that this necessarily leads to the rollback of the regulatory state and an erosion of borders and territorial controls.
There are important elements of truth in these globalist claims, yet they too often miss the more complex dynamics of state territorial retreat and reassertion, of border erosion and reinforcement at the same time. A more nuanced perspective recognizes that territorial controls have multiple functions and take many forms, and that these can vary dramatically across place and time. Although the military and economic functions of borders have indeed declined, the use of border controls to police the clandestine “underside” of globalization has expanded.[37] Globalization may be about tearing down economic borders, as globalists emphasize, but it has also created more border policing work for the state. At the same time as globalization depends on (and indeed is defined by) mobility and territorial access, states are attempting to selectively reinforce border controls to deny entry to CTAs. The reconfiguration of border controls is particularly evident in the United States and the European Union. Although U.S. and E.U. policing initiatives are in many ways distinct (the U.S. policing mode is more unilateral and bilateral, and the E.U. policing mode is more multilateral and embedded in a regional institutional framework), in both cases states are attempting to reconcile the imperatives of economic integration and the mounting pressures to erect more exclusionary border controls.
U.S. border policing
Echoing what has become a common U.S. policy view, in 1995 Deputy U.S. Attorney Jamie Gorelick told the Senate Intelligence Committee: “The end of the Cold War has changed the nature of the threats to our national security. No longer are national security risks exclusively or predominantly military in nature. Transnational phenomena such as terrorism, narcotics trafficking, alien smuggling, and the smuggling of nuclear material all have been recognized to have profound security implications for American policy.” Gorelick concluded that “both conceptually and on the ground” there has been “a real shift in the paradigm of national security.”[38] An important component of this shift has been enhanced border controls, first evident in high-profile campaigns against drug trafficking and illegal immigration and now substantially expanded and sped up by the policy initiatives following the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.