Border Politics

Nick Vaughan-Williams is Interim Provost and Vice-Principal at the University of Birmingham, 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).

Border Politics is a wonderfully ambitious book, which outlines alternative conceptualisations 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.

• 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.