Book Review: Matthew Longo The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Author | Sara Svensson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919896180 |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) NP1 –NP2
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
896180PSW0010.1177/1478929919896180Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2019
Commissioned Book Review
The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty,
Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 by
Matthew Longo. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018. 264 pp., ISBN
978-1-107-17178-7
Academic prose can be tedious to read, but
Matthew Longo’s book is anything but. The
opening scenes could have been written by an
author of fiction or poetry, and the text contains
enough drama and passion to keep up the read-
er’s interest. At the same time, the content is
closely aligned with relevant academic dis-
courses and concepts. It is not surprising that the
PhD research upon which the book is based won
the American Political Science Association’s
Leo Strauss Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation.
The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty,
Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 investigates
the nexus of sovereignty, security, and citizen
experiences at national borders. It explores the
meanings and normative implications of the bor-
der as “perimeter” (Part 1) and “ports of entry”
(Part 2). Unusually, for a work of political theory,
it draws heavily on empirical fieldwork. Longo
interviewed border guards and port officials at
the US borders (the “peripheries”) as well as
government officials and tech industry partici-
pants in the capital (the “core”) where much of
the bordering actually happens. He especially
emphasizes the value of ethnographic-like
research at conferences and expos that act as
“bazaars,” which provide what he calls a “win-
dow into the future” that does not exist at either
at the border or in media coverage, which would
be the main alternative sites of exploration.
From the point of view of someone who has
followed the literature on borders, bordering,
and borderlands in Europe for a number of
years, one line of argument stands out in particu-
lar. First, he introduces the concept of co-bor-
dering as a descriptive and prescriptive notion
for what is happening at borders. To the best of
my knowledge, this term has not been used in
the borderland literature, which has instead
extensively focused on processes of de-border-
ing and re-bordering, and the extent to which
these are competing and/or happening in paral-
lel. This is a welcome addition, since it retains
the constructivist understanding of borders as
institutions and processes, while allowing more
room for deliberate agency. As Longo writes,
the “state is not only simply reacting to de-bor-
dering by re-bordering, it is forging a new path:
co-bordering” (p. 5). Second, co-bordering
implies that countries are giving up parts of the
sovereignty that seek to protect in the first place
through these intensified bordering practices.
Thus, paradoxically, we see more instances of
shared or pooled sovereignty at the border
which at the same time is the “definite marker of
the political, defining in and out, friend and
enemy, us and them” (p. xii). Importantly, this
shared sovereignty is different from the way this
notion is discussed in the discourse around
global governance, which depicts national sov-
ereignty as challenged by supra-national and
sub-national structures of public and private
characters. Third, the normative part of his
exploration leads to policy recommendations
that are in part both innovative and radical. He
suggests the introduction of “perimeter zone
citizenships,” which would contain various
rights and duties including influence over deci-
sion-making that affect the residents in border-
lands. Likewise, the jurisdiction over third
country nationals in borderlands could be the
subject of policies special to borderlands.
Longo engages with a range of thinkers
across times and disciplines, but noticeably
does not cite border studies scholars, with the
exception of the Dutch geographer Henk van
Houtum. This means that an interdisciplinary
and growing body of literature is ignored,
including names such as Joachim Blatter,
Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, Anssi Paasi, Doris
Wastl-Walter, Birte Wassenberg, and David
Newman, to name but a few. Generally, this
gives certain freshness to the ideas; like seeing
your family with an outsider’s eyes. At the
same time, he comes across as unaware of
some practices and recent developments that
To continue reading
Request your trial