Leanne Weber (ed.), Rethinking Border Control for a Globalizing World: A Preferred Future
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Author | Alessandro De Giorgi |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516681284 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Schept J (2015) Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth and the Neoliberal Logic
of Carceral Expansion. New York: New York University Press.
Taylor K-Y (2016) From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket
Books.
Judah Schept
Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Leanne Weber (ed.), Rethinking Border Control for a Globalizing World: A Preferred Future,
Routledge: London, 2015; 234 pp. (including index): ISBN: 978-0415708333, $155 (cloth);
$44.95 (pbk)
Over the past 20 years, global borders have increasingly turned into sites of mass
death for thousands of people attempting to escape war, famine, genocide, and
other human-made catastrophes. This humanitarian tragedy is unfolding simultan-
eously at the four corners of the globe. Everywhere, it is met with a deadly mix of
hostility from national governments anxious to protect their territories against
unwanted migrants and refugees and of relative indifference from international
bodies, which are powerless to enforce international human rights. According to
UNITED for Intercultural Action (2015), an NGO based in Amsterdam, between
1993 and 2015 approximately 23,000 migrants died at the southern borders of the
European Union. Official data from the Department of Homeland Security (2016)
reveal that between 1998 and 2015, close to 6,600 people lost their lives while
attempting to cross the southwestern border of the United States. Finally, data
gathered by the Border Crossing Observatory (2016) indicate that 1986 people died
at the Australian border between 2000 and 2016. Overall, in the course of two
decades close to 31,600 human beings perished at the frontiers of the Western
world—more than ten times the toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.
And this is an extremely conservative estimate, as it does not include the thousands
of deaths occurring every year at other borders (e.g. Asia, Africa, and Latin
America) nor the thousands of migrants who disappeared during their long and
perilous journey to reach those borders.
These grim statistics alone would be enough to make the case that Rethinking
Border Control for a Globalizing World: A Preferred Future (2015) is a timely and
necessary book. Yet, this collection also emerges as an innovative and original
contribution to the expanding field of border studies. Its originality resides in the
particular approach adopted by the contributors to the volume: a thought experi-
ment in which they attempt to envision a ‘‘preferred future’’ for global borders.
Instead of simply denouncing the deadly and oppressive nature of contemporary
borders, contributors were asked to exercise their sociological imagination and
explore possible pathways towards a future in which global borders—although
Book reviews 271
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