Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering, Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier
| Date | 01 October 2013 |
| Author | Magdalena Kmak |
| Published date | 01 October 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513490909 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
The chapter on the Australian policing of internal borders with the practice of
immigration status checks on people who are suspected of not being a citizen
dovetails with the Japanese chapter regarding the conflation of the everyday role
of the police and immigration enforcement. Weber maintains that Australia’s colo-
nial history has reduced the emphasis on public accountability, which subsequently
allows for the broad drafting of police powers in which ‘immigration status checks
will be conducted at will, and are likely to be prompted by judgements of non-
belonging mediated by ethnicity, and other indications that individuals are ‘‘out of
place’’’ (p. 113). The broad discretionary use of stop and search was found in the
volume to be widespread and normalized in the countries with colonial histories.
While colonial histories can underlie the legitimization of draconian stop and
search practices, To
´th and Ka
´da
´r argue that one likely explanation for
Hungarian police conducting so many ID checks disproportionally targeting the
Roma population despite their low effectiveness in detecting or preventing crime is
the organizational culture originating from the former socialist regime’s objective
to keep citizens under control. National cultural contexts help shape the how,
where, and not least the why behind specific stop and search powers.
The 12 chapters in the volume were originally published in a special issue of
Policing and Society 2011. The question arises as to whether the articles which are
available online warrant their now expensive hardcover. Normally I would ques-
tion this publication strategy. Further, given this research strategy I would have
expected a second language editing; particularly the chapter on the Netherlands
would have thus gained in readability. However, the volume does make, as the
editors had hoped, ‘a genuine contribution towards reconceiving criminology as a
globally connected mutual learning process’ (p. 4). The value of the volume and the
research contained in it is an important reminder that global perspectives shed light
upon stop and search practices around the world making differences and simila-
rities in new ways theoretically and empirically relevant for further research.
Abby Peterson
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering, Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier,
Palgrave Macmillan: Hampshire, 2011; 284 pp. (including index): 0230247342, £58
Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering’s book Globalization and Borders: Death at
the Global Frontier focuses on the relationship between deaths of illegalized immi-
grants attempting to cross borders between the Global North and Global South
and border control policies in Europe and the Anglophone West. Leanne Weber is
Senior Research Fellow at Monash University Australia, specializing in migration
policing. Sharon Pickering is Professor of Criminology also at Monash University,
researching irregular border crossing. The main question posed by the authors in
Globalization and Borders refers to who is responsible for the risks faced by those
Book reviews 431
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