Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power

by Nick Vaughan-Williams

Overview

This book, newly available in paperback, presents a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of borders in the study of global politics. It turns from current debates about the presence or absence of borders between states to consider the possibility that the concept of the border of the state is being reconfigured in contemporary political life.The author uses critical resources found in poststructuralist thought to think in new ways about the relationship between borders, security and sovereign power, drawing on a range of thinkers including Agamben, Derrida and Foucault. He highlights the necessity of a more pluralized and radicalised view of what borders are and where they might be found and uses the problem of borders to critically explore the innovations and limits of poststructuralist scholarship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748644858
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/29/2012
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nick Vaughan-Williams is Associate Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick, UK. He is co-author of Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (2010), and co-editor of Critical Theorists and International Relations (2009) and Terrorism and the Politics of Response (2008).

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Borders are Not What or Where They are Supposed to Be: Security, Territory, Law; 2. The Study of Borders in Global Politics: From Geopolitics to Biopolitics; 3. Violence, Territory and the Borders of Juridical-Political Order: Problematising the Limits of Sovereign Power; 4. The Generalised Biopolitical Border: Security as the Normal Technique of Government; 5. Alternative Border Imaginaries: The Politics of Framing; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

An urgently needed book.

Yosef Lapid

The study of international boundaries ... has evolved from a rather descriptive study at the intersection of the legal and the geographical fields into a dynamic and exponentially growing field of boundary making, bordering, and othering ... [Border Politics is a] strong contribution to these academic debates ... [It] provide[s] insightful points of departure for those aspiring to contribute to this exciting research agenda and formulate[s] thought-provoking puzzles and moral dilemmas for all of us.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space - Virginie Mamadouh

Offers a significant contribution to debates about borders that deserves wide-spread attention.

John Williams

Border Politics is a wonderfully ambitious book, which outlines alternative conceptualizations of the border while avoiding the clichéd themes of geopolitical border studies... This is an agenda-setting book, both in terms of demonstrating how new and challenging ideas can be incorporated into border studies, and more importantly, in leading the way in thinking the problem of the border afresh in order to understand the diversity of bordering strategies which exist in world politics.

Association for Borderlands Studies - ABS Book Awards 2011