Articles

Estudios Fronterizos, vol. 24, 2023, e125

From border security to the borderization of security in the mapping of global space

De la seguridad fronteriza a la fronterización de la seguridad en la cartografía del espacio global

Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz^a ^* https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6281-2835

^a Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, Mexico, e-mail: roxana.rodriguez@uacm.edu.mx

^* Corresponding author: Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz. E-mail: roxana.rodriguez@uacm.edu.mx

Received on January 19, 2023.
Accepted on August 29, 2023.
Published on October 16, 2023.

CITATION: Roxana, R. (2023). From border security to the borderization of security in the mapping of global space [De la seguridad fronteriza a la fronterización de la seguridad en la cartografía del espacio global]. Estudios Fronterizos, 24, Article e125. https://doi.org/10.21670/ref.2314125

Abstract:
International coordination of global confinement during the pandemic is the event that made evident a paradigm shift in global border security, a paradigm that forged from the beginning of the 21st century and which consists of the reterritorialization of public space through the borderization of security in the global space cartography. I use cartography as a methodology for comparative studies to identify the dynamics of the borderization of security by mapping and representing two regions (United States-Mexico and external borders of the Schengen area). For this purpose, I utilize the geolocator of the mobile phone. The originality of the text consists in establishing the analytical category border of securitization as an epistemological watershed that brings together a series of events, phenomena, institutions, and policies (in general global border governance) that are translated, differed and displaced to invert the concept of border security by that of borderization of security.
Keywords: political ontology, public space, political space, global space, borderization

Resumen:
La coordinación internacional para el confinamiento durante la pandemia hace patente el cambio de paradigma en la seguridad fronteriza global, un paradigma que se fue fraguando desde inicios del siglo XXI. Dicho paradigma consiste en reterritorializar el espacio público mediante la fronterización de la seguridad en la cartografía del espacio global. Se emplea la cartografía como metodología de estudios comparados para identificar las dinámicas de fronterización de la seguridad mediante el trazo y la representación de dos regiones (Estados Unidos-México y fronteras externas del espacio Schengen). Para ello se utiliza el geolocalizador del teléfono móvil. La originalidad del texto consiste en establecer la categoría analítica fronteras de la securitización como un parteaguas epistemológico que reúne una serie de acontecimientos, fenómenos, instituciones y políticas (en general una gobernanza fronteriza global) que se traducen, difieren y desplazan con la intención de invertir el concepto de seguridad fronteriza por el de fronterización de la seguridad.
Palabras clave: ontología política, espacio público, espacio político, espacio global, fronterización

Original article language: Spanish.

Introduction

The second decade of the 21st century was a period when globalization prevented the open-door hospitality promised in the 1990s. Forty years ago, at the end of the Cold War, the cosmopolitan ideal was sold as a model of society and promoted for the European Union (EU) in the making. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the need for a renewal of the world economy, the transition to neoliberalism was the messianic promise of global development. From the end of the 1980s to the present, globalization, a unifying project of world order, has displaced the functions of the rule of law to favor economic globalization, an aporia in the era of protecting territorial borders. The transition to being global implicitly contained something that was not obvious, a contradiction in the reasoning of closing territorial borders to the other while allowing any type of merchandise to pass through those borders, often illegally.

The closure, militarization and securing of the borders of nation states─phenomena that have been consistent for several decades─are not accidental. Neither is the whim of rulers nor the apparent lack of political expertise for addressing the migratory phenomenon on geopolitical borders worldwide. In reality, the closure of borders in the second decade of the 21st century met the conditional mandate of international law, a cyclical mandate that sustains the world order, as during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-2023). In fact, the international coordination of global confinement during the pandemic is the event that has revealed the paradigm shift in global border security, a paradigm forged in the beginning of this century that consists of reterritorializing public space through the borderization of security. What this global confinement has shown is that when a global governance apparatus is available for minimizing the risk of contagion among the population, evidently attending to a conditional mandate that regularly comes from the global north, border security ceases to be local and becomes global. In other words, the use of the conditional mandate becomes evident when, for example, in the name of the exceptionality of the COVID-19 pandemic, a global event, it is possible to coordinate the (health) borderization of security.

According to border epistemologies, borders are artificial and plastic; therefore, it is still assumed that border security is static and that it can only be accounted for as a form of migration control at the territorial borders of a nation state. To address this issue, this text is divided into three sections. In the first section, the category border of securitization is developed based on the focal controversy (aporia), observed in international law, a controversy that privileges the deontological (the law) over the ontological (justice, the defense of rights). The second section considers the process of reterritorializing public space according to how the borderization of security is visualized, viralized and virtualized in two regions: the United States-Mexico border and the Schengen area. This work then ends with the conclusions of the investigation.

In depicting this illustration, cartography, and outline, the representation of the two focal regions comprises the adopted methodology to establish the dynamics of border security via certain categories, already periodically adopted with the intention of demonstrating that the borderization of security is only one meaning of a more ambitious project, the reterritorializing the public space. This is a worldwide project where the aporia, contradiction, and controversy of the deontological and ontological border come together, a controversy that involves destatizing the nation-state through the exceptionality of sovereignty in the management and treatment of border policy.

Border of securitization

Border security policy has been analyzed from political ontology and border studies, published between 2013 and 2023. The first salient writing proposals focused on an event that marked the beginning of the 21st century, the attack on the Twin Towers (9/11) in 2001. What occurred and what was widely analyzed by different theorists of this major event, as stated by Derrida (Borradori, 2003), represented the trigger for proposing an evaluation of border security based on three analytical categories (sovereignty, territory and citizenship); these allow us to understand how the border regime was channeled around the world (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2016, 2020). However, the global border regime has not been exclusively linked to migration and human mobility, at least not in this century, nor was it in the nineteenth century when the borders of nation states began to be drawn. Global confinement is a clear example of this, as is the international coordination that favors the borderization of security in certain regions and territories to promote megaprojects, such as the Mayan Train in Mexico─but not for the defense of the rights of nature, an analogy with respect to migration control and the defense of human rights.

Hence, in this article, the category border of securitization is applied¹ to demonstrate that the border security practices that are deployed with the intention of controlling borders respond to a categorical imperative of international law, which favors, on the one hand, destatizing territorial borders and, on the other hand, reterritorializing public space. The analytical category of securitization was initially derived from various etymological (frons, frontis, limes), genealogical and philological proposals on the territorial reservation first enunciated as the modern state was being built and delimited. The typologies that have been used in different centuries include a military border, extension border, tension border, and pressure border (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014).

Second, these semantics have since been used to account for border delimitation, an abundant topic in the literature, and updated based on what philosophy and other disciplines have tried to translate and interpret: the beginning of the world wars, regional or local issues such as genocide, the banality of evil, policing of the other, terrorism, biopower, necropolitics, autoimmunity and so many more (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2016, 2020). The twentieth century, in this sense, was a century that potentiated the glossary of analytical categories to identify all those dehumanizing activities; it was a century where, as Derrida affirms, in which

The use of state power is here originally excessive and abusive. As it is for the rest, the resort to terror and fear that has always been, this is old as the world and Hobbes theorized it perfectly, the ultimate instance of the sovereign power of the State. (Derrida, 2005, p. 186)

Third, in the writing of this text, the starting question is therefore: can border security² and the borderization of security be used synonymously to account for the reconfiguration of geopolitical borders in the 21st century? The answer is no. Alluding to border security implies quantifying the public spending that is needed to control human mobility at the borders, a global migration policy, while the securitization of borders Groups a series of timeless, asynchronous, logical-dimensional phenomena and events, which can take place without when proposing border epistemologies.

The securitization of borders shows the assemblages that make it plausible to reterritorialize public space and destatize the nation state with the intention of displacing political space. Based on this, it is essential not to confuse border security with the borderization of security in the academic nomenclature; since the beginning of this century, a phenomenon different from that traditionally studied in border epistemologies has been confronted. As Derrida states,

This destatification,³ which is absolutely new and unprecedented, would lead us to think, beyond what Kant or Arendt formulated in a determined way, about the new figure to come from a last resort, a sovereignty (let us better say, and more simply, because that name, “sovereignty”, is still very equivocal, too theological-political: a force or power, a -cracy), of a -cracy allied to, or even forming a unity with, not only the law but also justice. (Borradori, 2003, p. 175).

The boundary delimitation of the nation state represents an essential transformation for the future of Western democracies in the 21st century. Its political, legal and jurisdictional system is based on an indispensable Kantian premise, to understand the need to draw, secure territorial borders, and attest to sovereignty (no longer of the sovereign): “if it were an infinite plane [the Earth], the men could spread in such a way that they would not reach any community among themselves” (Kant, 2008, p. 78).

Via this Kantian premise, an important part of the system of international law unfolds, based on the proposal of cosmopolitan law found in both On perpetual peace (Kant, 2009) and the Metaphysics of customs (Kant, 2008). In these texts, one observes the transition from a matter of fact to one of law: in a given territory (call it Earth), people from different communities and cultures coexist, but it is due to the finiteness of that territory that legal norms must be established to regulate the relationships among individuals, people and states. These norms must be subject to the consolidation of perpetual peace (right of a State, right of nations) and above all to the consolidation of a cosmopolitan State (right of all nations).

The ideality and, in turn, falsehood, but not impossibility, of the consolidation of a cosmopolitan state is located in the conceptualization of the analytical category of the border of securitization, as this is essential for deconstructing Kant’s perpetual peace. This proposal for perpetual peace is a euphemism for the global state, as a categorical imperative, which emphasizes the need to, on the one hand, reterritorialize geopolitical borders and, on the other, reinforce territorial borders.

The geography of borders is only one aspect of political geography, which is understood in various senses. According to the German school [of geography], political geography is exclusively the geography of political groups or, more exactly, the geography of States. For the German school, which emerged from the teaching of [Friedrich] Ratzel, the essential role that states determine is attributed to the soil. There is no need to recall here the two capital conceptions of Ratzel: “position” (Lage) and “extension” (Raum). This results in a particular notion of border as the cartographic form of the State: it is its movements that mark the greatness or decline of a State. (Ancel, 2016, p. 132)

In the Metaphysics of Customs, Kant raises the “right of hospitality” and affirms that “the faculty of newly arrived foreigners does not extend beyond the conditions of possibility to attempt a traffic with the old inhabitants” (2009, p. 64), as the relations between foreigner and other (the citizen) can only occur on three levels, peaceful relations, legal relations or public relations, with the intention of forming a cosmopolitan state. These three Kantian relations unfortunately find their limits in the formulation, application and exceptionality of what each nation-state establishes as a law of (free) transit:

Now, sovereignty is, first of all, one of the features by which reason defines its own power and its own element, namely, a certain unconditionality. It is also in a single point of indivisible singularity (God, the monarch, the people, the State or the nation-state), the concentration of absolute force and exception. It was not necessary to wait for Schmitt to know that the sovereign is the one who decides exceptionally and performatively about the exception, the one who preserves or is granted the right to suspend the right; nor to know that this political-legal concept, like all the others, secularizes a theological heritage. (Derrida, 2005, pp. 183-184)

The exceptionality of national sovereignty and market freedom (the teleological controversy between deontology and ontology referred to in the introduction) are found in the conditional mandate of the global state. Exceptionalism is the deontological and ultraright discourse that prevails in the present century; it consists of protecting the territorial borders from the foreigner, since the other person (not the other thing) is what marks the limit of cosmopolitan law, where “citizenship is also a limit, that of the nation-state” (Borradori, 2003, p. 180).

In terms of the epistemic validity of the securitization of borders, we agree with Derrida when he affirms that “it would be necessary to see, beyond the old Greco-Christian cosmopolitan ideal (Stoic, gradual, Kantian)”. As stated at the beginning of this section, the securitization of borders Groups a series of phenomena, ontological, political and ethical events that extend “beyond the intentionality (of the nation states) and therefore of the citizenship” thereof (Borradori, 2003, p. 180). However, analysis of this is not possible without deconstructing the violence inherent in the drawing of borders: ecocides, epistemicides, femicides. As Benjamin affirms, “All violence as a means is either taxable by law or conservative by law” (Benjamin, 2022, p. 673).

The use of the concept of border security elides evidence that border control is a conditional mandate that underwrites international law; when referring to border securitization to denounce the abuse of power,⁴ a tautology is incurred. As revealed thus far, capitalism needs an economic-political space without a State (or a global State) to function, paradoxically making exceptions in the name of sovereignty, e.g., control the border: “Every sovereign state is, moreover, virtually and a priori in a situation to abuse its power and transgress, like a rogue state, international law” (Derrida, 2005, p. 186). Violence and power, force and law, law and justice are the variables that must be brought to the forefront in this discussion in order not to incur the tautology of border security: “Is not tautology the phenomenological structure of a certain violence of the law that establishes itself by decreeing that it is violent, this time in the sense of outside the law, everything that does not recognize it?” (Derrida, 2010, p. 86).

It is on this other deontological-ontological border, even the teleological border of international law, where exceptionality becomes a practice of global governance to favor the borderization of security in different regions, for instance, at the United States-Mexico border (borderization) and across the external borders of the Schengen area (schengenization).

Reterritorialize public space

For Deleuze and Guattari, reterritorialization consists of the operation of the “assemblages of reterritorialization carried out by an abstract machine”, defined via a certain axiom. In these operations, it is the State apparatus itself that identifies itself with the abstract machine that it carries out (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 227). With this loop of flows that Deleuze and Guattari propose, it is possible to recover these assemblages, the mechanisms of the borderization of security, to show how the process of reterritorializing public space occurs on geopolitical borders.

Across their five centuries of expansion, annexation and occupation, border movements in world geopolitics have clearly not been exclusive to the prevailing world order; they can also be abstracted from different moments before and after the installation of the nation state (e.g., between the absolutist state and the nation state and between the nation state and the global space state).⁵

The global borderization of security has resulted in the expansion, annexation, and occupation of territories since the sixteenth century. The European colonies expanded to the rest of the world in the fifteenth century; the U.S. government annexed Mexican soil in the 19th century; the Israeli government continues to occupy Palestinian territories; and the Russian government continues to occupy Ukrainian territories in the 21st century. As already mentioned in other texts,

Saskia Sassen, a Dutch sociologist, defends global thinking, and her position is interesting to refer to what was previously referred to as the category of the global border [of the epistemological model of the border] that includes the economic border, the border of law, and the geopolitical border and the supranational border. While it is true that globalization has detonated new ways of thinking about borders, it is also true that many times these have been misinterpreted and reduced to fallacious propositions such as the idea of porous borders or a world without borders. Sassen is critical of these positions─a situation that makes evident a lack of knowledge of how the global is understood in different areas of knowledge─and exposes a methodology that starts from the “denationalization” of what was historically constructed as national, affirming that “denationalization can coexist with traditional borders and with the performance of the State in the new global regimes” (Sassen, 2009, p. 569, in Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014, p. 29).

Two neologisms illustrate the securitization of borders constitutes destatification (Derrida) and denationalization (Sassen), borderization and schengenization. Each term Groups a series of phenomena that allow us to demonstrate the borderization of security on the Mexico-United States border and across the external borders of the European Union. These two regions are not the only ones in which the author has carried out field research, but, for the purposes this article, they are the most complex to analyze because their border coexistence areas cover more than 3 000 km when an imaginary horizontal line is drawn from one extreme to another, either on the United States-Mexico territorial border or on the coast of the focal North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt), simulating a horizontal metaborder whereby they both become regions, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Horizontal border

Source: (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2016, 2020).
Note: According to the geolocator, 35 d 11 hr indicates the time in days and hours that it takes someone to walk from one end to the other of the African border.

These two images refer to the focal border coexistence zones with a horizontal line linking the jurisdictions of the nation states, either binationally, as between the United States and Mexico, or multinationally and intercontinentally, as across the external borders of the Schengen area (corresponding to the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea). In other words, horizontal borders circumscribe the political space for which there is interest in delimiting via the proposal of the securitization of borders:

For Balibar, the political space maintains a relationship with the public space, but they are not synonymous, but a political space becomes a public space (or sphere) when external factors such as international law, the globalization of economies, and globalization of markets or what Sassen calls a global network intervene. In this sense, Balibar states that “every public space is by definition a political space, but not every political space is (already) a public space”. (Balibar, 2004, p. 3, in Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014, pp. 32-33)

The dotted line drawn up by the geolocator reveals an artificial logic, observed between the political space and the public space, of being able to move “freely” from one point to another without recognizing the existence of territorial borders. As Derrida affirms, “this border designates the spacing edge that, in history, and in a way that is not natural, but artificial and conventional, nomic, separates two national, state-controlled, linguistic, and cultural spaces” (Derrida, 1998, p. 72). These two conditions, the artificiality of borders and the horizontal border in particular, refer to the process of reterritorializing the borders of the nation state through the borderization of security in these two regions.

United States-Mexico borderization

In 2020, during the global pandemic confinement, the project of European regionalization and the rise of the extreme right were consolidated in different countries. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, as president of the United States, applied Title 42, taking advantage of the situation to close the land borders (not the air borders) with Mexico, a public health measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This measure conditioned any type of procedure related to asylum or refugee requests, which, in turn, enabled the U.S. immigration system to carry out deportations in situ in collaboration with the Mexican government. What began as a health policy in 2020 thereby became the immigration policy of Trump’s successor, Joe Biden; this policy of great scope favored, as observed in late 2022 in Texas, the militarization of the U.S. border.

The Mexican government, unlike other countries on the American continent, acted against the current, deciding not to close its land borders (neither to nationals nor to foreigners with papers) during the global confinement. This position on the one hand favored the current austerity migration policy, violating the social rights of people in transit through the country and on the other favored borderization via the deployment of armed forces on the northern and southern borders, based on the intention to “preserve” national security⁶ (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2020).

Borderization is a category that Mbembe (2011) has developed via Foucault’s category of biopower. Mbembe refers to borderization as the control of bodies through the use of technology (military hardware) at border crossings. This borderization recovers two moments of biopower, the “irruption of the naturalness of the species within the artificiality of a power relationship” (Foucault, 2008, p. 36) and “liberalism as a global framework of biopolitics” (Foucault, 2012, p. 35). Both meanings are closely linked to the securitization of borders. On the one hand, they refer to a political technique for controlling the territory; on the other hand, they refer to the rationalization of the exercise of government to control the population (migrants and human rights defenders, not organized crime).

Borderization, in this article, constitutes the abstraction of the binational-regional dynamics of border control, immigration and national security (avoiding the contagion or entry of drugs, weapons and terrorists) between the United States and Mexico to favor political space at the cost of the disappearance of public space. To illustrate this borderization, it is necessary to draw other borders; the horizontal border is not enough to understand the scope of the securitization of borders in this region (reterritorializing the public space and destatizing the nation-state), as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Borderization in the United States-Mexico region, 2023

Source: Authors’ conceptualization and design.

Figure 2 is composed of three screen captures from a cell phone. Two of them depict a route established by the geolocator whose instruction consists of going from one extreme to another, from Tijuana to Matamoros, in the upper right image and from Tapachula to Tijuana in the image on the left. The third image, on the lower right, refers to the region known as the northern triangle comprising certain states in southern Mexico─Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Quintana Roo─and Central American countries─Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Migrant caravans trying to reach the United States cross this region. These three images visualize three of the categories proposed as part of the epistemological model of the border and account for borderization, a practice in the securitization of borders: the horizontal border, the vertical border and the interregional border (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014, 2020). Via the tracing of border cartography, borderization, border securitization strategies can be abstracted between both countries, strategies that serve, on the one hand, to reterritorialize public space and destatize the nation-state, as in the interregional border (which corresponds to the region of the northern triangle) and, on the other hand, to the exceptionality of the sovereignty of the Mexican state amid the conditional mandates of the United States government.

The controversy of the conditional mandate on the borderization between these two countries with such a large horizontal border is more evident. For example, in some circumstances, both governments favor the entry-exit of goods but not of people (migrants and refugee claimants). At certain times, the Mexican government uses the phenomenon of human mobility as a condition for the United States to invest in migration control projects beyond its borders (disguised as megaprojects, such as the construction of the Mayan Train). In other contexts, the U.S. government conditions the Mexican government to stop the illegal traffic of fentanyl in exchange for not intervening in Mexican national security by classifying organized crime as terrorist cells.

Hence, borderization is undoubtedly related to border security, but not exclusively in terms of human mobility; it is therefore necessary to consider the category of the securitization borders based on its different scopes and lines (Figure 2); it contains in itself other border epistemologies⁷ indispensable for considering global governance. Exemplifying the borderization in which the Mexican government is immersed, some border securitization programs that have been carried out in the country since the beginning of the 21st century include 1) Operation Centinela (2000-2006), which began shortly after the attacks in 2001 in the United States and consisted of the protection of the northern border and other areas of the country from possible terrorists; 2) Plan-Sur (2001-2003), which consisted of the protection of the southern border; 3) the Mérida Initiative (2006-2012), which consisted of combating organized crime across the United States, Mexico and Central America; and, 4) the Comprehensive Attention Program for the Southern Border (2014), drawn up in the National Development Plan 2013-2018 (Plan Nacional de Desarrollo [PND] 2013-2018, 2013), in which the need to create a “border management and ordering model” was made explicit (without showing how):

Due to its geographical position, approximately 140 000 foreigners enter Mexico undocumented a year, mainly from Central America, with the aim of crossing into the United States. Various factors, ranging from marginalization, lack of information, and the absence of a culture of legality to the proliferation of criminal organizations on the northern border of Mexico, have sometimes led to violations of the fundamental rights of migrants. For this reason, a new model of border management and ordering is essential, as well as the protection of the rights of migrants and their families [emphasis added]. (PND 2013-2018, 2013, p. 57)⁸

With the Southern Border Plan, the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto ended, and the six-year term with the thus far greatest deployment of military forces in border securitization of Andrés Manuel López Obrador began (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014, 2020). As of 2018, with the arrival of the Central American migrant caravans that crossed Mexico from south to north, the administrative limbo experienced during the transition between one administration and another informed the signing of the Global Migration Pact, which underpinned (worldwide) orderly, regular and secure migration based on an assurance of the borders by the National Guard that persists to date:

By January 2022, the Mexican government had deployed 28 thousand 397 elements for the execution of the Migration and Development Plan in the North and South Borders, of which 13 thousand 663 correspond to the Army, 906 to the Navy and 13 thousand 828 to the National Guard, which corresponds to 48.7% of the total number of deployed elements. (Fundación para la Justicia y el Estado Democrático de Derecho, 2022, p. 38)

In 2021, during López Obrador’s six-year term, the Bicentennial Framework was also signed. This action plan replaced the Merida Initiative, although its objective was the same, to protect the border with the intention of “reducing addictions and homicides, trafficking in arms, people and drugs, among other priority and common objectives” (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores [SRE], 2021).

In 2001, a narrative that pervaded the media and made reference to international terrorism caused the closure of borders to others. For Derrida, terrorism became the triple suicide of the nation state whose “true ‘terror’ consisted (and effectively began) in exposing, exploiting, having exposed and exploited its image by the very objective of terror” (Borradori, 2003, p. 160). This semantics of terror spread throughout the world for two decades. Significant for this research, in the government of López Obrador, this metaphor of terror was recover in the National Development Plan 2019-2024 (PND 2019-2024, 2019) to deploy a security strategy in the hands of the Mexican army:

The world faces severe global and cross-border challenges whose attention requires a prompt collective and coordinated response. Some of these challenges are climate change and water scarcity; the risk of the emergence of pandemics and the spread of HIV; international terrorism and global organized crime networks; religious, ethnic and racial conflicts; the massive migratory movements of people due to humanitarian crises, criminal and ethnic violence or poverty that have led them to leave their countries in search of peace, security and better life opportunities; and the growing inequalities in the standard of living of societies [emphasis added]. (PND 2019-2024, 2019, p. 15)

Moreover, a novel hypothesis suggests using the figure of the terrorist (no longer international or state) to represent the Mexican cartels:

“It is very likely that the new Republican (Lower) House will emphasize the lack of cooperation (against the cartels) and the pressure to designate the cartels as terrorist groups”, as mentioned by Vanda Felbab-Brown, researcher at Brookings and one of the main experts on drug trafficking in Washington. (Díaz Briseño, 2023)

The nuances of the exceptionality between Mexico and the United States involve a forwarding of fear, terror of the other, in the name of international terrorism, which is sometimes confused with State terrorism, a specter, a threat that continues to wander in the collective imagination as the semantics of the worst is yet to come:

If we refer to the current or explicitly legal definitions of terrorism, what do we find? There, the reference to a crime against human life committed in violation of laws (national or international) always implies both the distinction between civilian and military (it is assumed that the victims of terrorism are civilians) and a political purpose (to influence or change the policy of a country by terrorizing its civilian population). These definitions, therefore, do not exclude “state terrorism”. All terrorists in the world pretend to respond in self-defense to a previous state terrorism that does not say its name and is covered with all kinds of more or less credible justifications. You are aware of the accusations that have been levelled, for example, and above all against the United States for the suspicion of practicing or encouraging State terrorism [emphasis added]. (Borradori, 2003, p. 153)

This situation only fosters more violence, more fear of the other, more terror, as observed during the López Obrador administration, where public space has not only been reterritorialized in the name of megaprojects but a very unfortunate destatification has enabled organized crime to restrict political space, leaving little room for the rule of law. This is in addition to the conditions that the U.S. government exerts on the Mexican government, to be in charge of controlling its borders and prevent the irregular passage of people in transit.

Schengenization

For more than two decades, the changes that the European Union has undergone as a result of the entry into force of the Schengen Agreement (1995) have been closely monitored, including the implementation of a single currency, the euro (2002);⁹ the accession of an important block of countries, especially in Eastern Europe, in the 21st century (2004, 2007 and 2013);¹⁰ the misnamed Syrian refugee crisis (2015-2016);¹¹ and Brexit (2016).¹² This monitoring has been conducted in person since 1993 (the year in which the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union¹³) as recurrent tourist, student and migrant, settling, most of the time, in Barcelona, Spain─a situation that has made it possible to cross the external and internal borders of the Schengen area at different times.

Schengenization is a category developed by Xavier Ferrer Gallardo to refer to the impact of the “Europeanization” of borders outside the European Union.¹⁴ Referring specifically to the case of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish enclaves,

(…) The year 1986 is unquestionably a major turning point in the history of the Spanish-Moroccan border. The (EU)ropeanization of the border in 1986 was followed by its “Schengenization” in 1991. The next notable point occurs in 1995, when the fencing of the enclave’s perimeters started, and when, concurrently and paradoxically, the paving of a path towards Euro-Mediterranean commercial liberalization, and hence a process of economic debordering, began (…). (Ferrer-Gallardo, 2008)

In this text, schengenization is used as a mere abstraction of the bureaucratic apparatus implicit in the Schengen Borders Code, which establishes “the rules on the crossing of external borders and the conditions governing the temporary reestablishment of controls at internal borders”,¹⁵ depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Schengenization

Source: own conceptualization and design

In the lower part of the image, the trace of Figure 1 is recovered, the horizontal border into which the African countries turn; in the upper part of the image, a similar mirrored trace is made on the north coast of the Mediterranean Sea, corresponding to the countries in the EU that have functioned as a territorial border (Spain, Italy, Greece), particularly following the approval by the European Parliament of the Dublin III regulation in 2013.¹⁶

In the center of the second image rests the Mediterranean Sea. This sea has become, thus far in this century, the largest global cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of people have drowned and through which tourist cruises also circulate freely (an industry that not only pollutes the water but has also caused gentrification at different points on European coasts). The great controversy of what happens in the Mediterranean Sea, the great maritime border of the Schengen area, is the aporia between favoring, enriching and beautifying European coasts to attract more tourism and restricting the presence of humanitarian aid ships (and criminalizing human rights defenders) that rescue people who sink from their rubber rafts when departing the African coasts, as their weight yields to the density of the water.

The image of the Mediterranean Sea, as a great maritime border between two continents, the ambiguity of an internal-external border of the EU, is the most obvious example of schengenization: reterritorializing public space in the name of the exceptionality of the sovereignty of state members of the European Union, the power-violence of the practices that eradicate irregular migration and the categorical imperative, the conditional mandate, in the current legislation of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) whose tasks consist of 1) managing migration more effectively, 2) increasing the internal security of the EU, and 3) preserving the principle of free movement of people.

In November 2019, the EU adopted a regulation to strengthen the role of this Agency, the Frontex Regulation, which establishes 1) integrated border management, 2) a more prominent role of the Agency in managing returns, and 3) the creation of permanent corps of 6 500 officers by 2021 and 10 000 by 2027.¹⁷

To achieve these objectives, Frontex has launched several programs, such as Eurosur (2013) and Perseus (2011-2014), via funds from the research and development programs called the 7th Framework for Research (2007-2013) and Horizon 2020. Both programs have been used to control the borders of the Schengen area.¹⁸ What is most striking about these programs is their economic, not social, impact. This economic impact makes it possible to think, on the one hand, of the EU as a global state, where what prevails is the consolidation of the Kantian cosmopolitan state through border securitization. That is, as Foucault stated, to outline “a new idea of Europe, a Europe that It is no longer at all the imperial or Carolingian Europe more or less inherited from the Roman Empire and referred to very specific political structures” but instead “a Europe of collective enrichment, a Europe as a collective economic subject that whatever the competition that occurs between the States, must advance along a path that will be that of unlimited economic progress” (Foucault, 2012, p. 62).

In this sense, if what in its beginnings (1950) was deemed a solution to the transition from a time of war to a period of peace through the signing of particular agreements (specifically, the Constitutive Treaty of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952) that could unify the Europe of the mid-twentieth century and prevent subsequent conflicts, such as those that had already plagued the region at various times in the twenty-first century, 65 years after its creation, the European Union remains an incomplete project that contravenes its own commitments vis-à-vis the European and non-European populations.

With the creation of Frontex, schengenization now not only controls or militarizes the external borders of the European Union with increasingly sophisticated technological methods and tools¹⁹ but also manifests in practices that reinforce what they supposedly seek to eradicate, causing more violence in the name of the law, more deaths in the Mediterranean, more migration controls and more agreements with third countries to externalize borders.²⁰Schengenization consists of reterritorializing public-maritime space, not only land borders amid the destatization of the nation-state. That is, in the name of international law, the conditional mandate of the borderization of security is perpetuated just as it happened during the global confinement: closing borders to the other people, not to other things.

Conclusions

The methodology proposed in this work, based on comparative studies of various geopolitical borders where salient field research has been carried out from a multivalent perspective and an ontological proposal. The proposed methodology provides guidelines for carrying out critical border studies by abstracting the contexts in which the territorial borders of the nation state have been drawn in world cartography. It helps to foresee the problems of border coexistence areas by displacing them from those that typify the migratory phenomenon. That is, this methodology represents an epistemological framework of the border based on the premise that the border is a plastic, timeless entity, multivalent, enabling encounters with the other.

In the 21st century, border assembly in different regions, viewed from its own perspective, allows reterritorializing, destatizing, and displacing border control, evident in three situations, some of which have already been widely analyzed in other texts: border outsourcing; the boom of coexistence areas in administrative limbo; and increasing border control actions in the hands of armed forces amid a considerable increase in the hiring of companies that offer private cybersecurity services (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2016, 2020).

The originality of this text consists in its establishment of the analytical, categorical border of securitization, an epistemological watershed that brings together a series of events, phenomena, institutions and policies (in general, global border governance), which are translated, differentiated, and displaced with the intention of Reversing the concept of security (border securitization) into the borderization of security. In any paradigm shift in international law and its relationship with the political economy, justice (and the different ways of understanding it: legal pluralism) cannot be conditioned, as Kant proposes, to establish a law of nations, nor can it be conditioned by the violence of international law itself.

There are other ways of considering the global space without conditioning it to the assemblages of the axioms of international law. Aporia is thus an intrinsic contradiction of the being border and the border being; hence, via political ontology, many proposals have been made to make this aporia plausible, not necessarily as a controversy of the deontological border but as the becoming of the ontological border. The present challenge entails drawing an epistemic cartography of border management that favors, in the name of international law, a conditional mandate to maintain the world order, which seems to be renewed, from time to time, on geopolitical borders.

Acknowledgments

I thank the reviewer for reading this work and acknowledge the recommendations of Tony Payan, whom I also thank for the suggested modifications, which allowed me to rethink the category of securitization of the border that I proposed in the version originally presented. I acknowledge with great satisfaction that the editorial work of the coordinators of the dossier is impeccable, as well as generous. I also appreciate the reading by and dialog with Yolanda Alfaro, which enabled me to draw up this proposal for the borderization of security.

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Notes

¹ The horizontal border is an analytical category in the epistemological model of borders, a theoretical-methodological proposal that consists of demonstrating the following: the interdisciplinary analysis of the border (as a category) that differentiates the focal limit (geopolitical and territorial) to enunciate the experience of nonpassing, of the border as aporia; the hyper and intertextual analysis of the ontological articulation (being the border) with the metaphor of the political event; and the deconstruction of narratives that circumscribe the impossibility of crossing borders, a conditional mandate of international law (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014, 2016, 2020).

²Specific reference is made to Sandro Mezzandra’s notion of border securitization, which consists of evidencing the proliferation of increasingly high, longer and wider walls/fences to delimit the territory between countries; the deployment of more policing agents; and the implementation of bio and cybersecurity devices at border crossings, with the intention of preventing the crossing of migrants or asylum seekers (Mezzandra, 2019, p. 3). The most recent case of border securitization is that of the Finland-Russia border (2023).

³In the English version of this interview, conducted by Giovanna Borradori, of Jaques Derrida, after the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, the Algerian-French philosopher refers to destatification as “This absolutely new and unprecedented form of de-state-ification” (Borradori, 2003, p. 120).

⁴Power in the double sense of the German word Gewalt: violence and power; force and right; law and justice. A category cryptically developed by Walter Benjamin in Critique of Violence (1920/1921) adopted to perform different exegeses of this unfinished text by the Berlin philosopher: “The task of a critique of violence can be limited to the exposition of its relationship with law and justice” (Benjamin, 2022, p. 661).

⁵The displacement or formation of States that respond to different dynamics at different times in the world political configuration has been observed; the most analyzed example is the displacement from the absolutist State to the modern State. Reference to this type of displacement is recurrent in border epistemologies (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014). Lineages of the Absolutist State, a book by Marxist historian Perry Anderson (1987), can be consulted to review the transition from one State to another, proposed in this text to complete the transfer from border security to the borderization of security.

⁶A determining phenomenon of the ideology of Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his administration was to hand to the army not only control of borders and migration but also control of national security and welfare in general. This situation was very different from that in the other six-year periods of the nineteenth century that at different times also entailed the border securitization and militarizing of the country to attack organized crime, with disastrous results for the population. From this perspective, despite the fact that militarization has been installed in the country since the beginning of the current century, in this particular six-year term, there has been greater control and influence of the military forces in areas that contravene even their own regulations of action.

⁷The border is defined as an analytical category based on the following different epistemic approaches: 1) borders are not fixed or static, they are plastic and artificial; 2) borders are not inert entities, they make possible the existence of border coexistence zones (many of them in administrative limbo); 3) not all borders are external, e.g., internal borders (Schengen area in the European Union or those imposed by the Israeli government on the Palestinian population); 4) borders not only account for human mobility but also foster the exchange, interpretation, or translation of modes of existence; 5) borders are a laboratory for technocapitalism; and, 6) borders manifest the possibility of encounter and dialogue with the other (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014, 2016, 2020).

⁸The border management and ordering model that was deduced as public policy of the 2013-2018 PND was linked to four particular situations: 1) the securitization of the border; 2) integration processes with Latin America; 3) regional economic development and productivity factors; and, 4) prevention and safety of migrants in transit. These situations could be observed in the strategies and lines of action of national goal 1, Mexico at peace, and national goal 5, Mexico with global responsibility; as well as in the transversal approaches of the PND (democratizing productivity; close and modern government) (PND 2013-2018, 2013, p. 57, in Rodríguez Ortiz, 2014).

⁹Consult:

Three countries (Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom) decided, for political and technical reasons, not to adopt the euro when it was launched. Slovenia joined the euro area in 2007, followed by Cyprus and Malta in 2008, Slovakia in 2009, Estonia in 2011 and Latvia in 2014. The euro area therefore covers eighteen EU countries, and the new Member States will join once they have fulfilled the necessary conditions. (Fontaine, 2014, p. 2)

¹⁰EU Member States include Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Malta, Poland, Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia.

¹¹In 2016, the author completed a research stay in the EU, at the height of the so-called crisis of Syrian refugees, people fleeing the civil war and trying to reach as far north as possible once they crossed the Mediterranean Sea (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2016). This image was very similar to that in Mexico during the migrant caravans of 2018-2019 (Rodríguez Ortiz, 2020). Misnamed crisis refers to the fact that these asylum seekers were blamed and criminalized for the chaos caused by the unexpected wave of people who began to enter European shores, when the bottleneck, the disorganization, was caused precisely by legislation, specifically, Article 13 of the Dublin III Regulation.

¹²Brexit was the referendum held in 2016 to decide whether Ireland and the United Kingdom would remain part of the European Union. Their departure was not immediate despite the referendum’s resolution. See Art. 50 of the Treaty on the European Union:

The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State concerned from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with that State, decides unanimously to extend that period.

¹³On the creation, motives and history of the EU, there is much digital material across different websites; the key documents for its formation are the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinky, 1975), the Paris Letter for a New Europe (Paris, 1990), the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht, 1992). The latter states the following:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society characterised by pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men. (Marzocchi, 2023, emphasis added)

¹⁴Countries that make up the Schengen area include Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

¹⁵Regulation (EU) 2016/399 of the European Parliament and of the Council establishes a Union Code on the rules governing the movement of persons across borders (Schengen Borders Code). It was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 9 March 2016 (Reglamento (UE) No 604/2013 del Parlamento Europeo y del Consejo, 2013).

¹⁶On 26 June 2013, the Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council, better known as Dublin III, “establishing the criteria and mechanisms for determining the Member State responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the Member States by a third-country national or a stateless person”, was published in the Official Journal of the European Union (Reglamento (UE) No 604/2013 del Parlamento Europeo y del Consejo, 2013).

¹⁷Frontex was created in 2004 with the name European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders. In 2016, during the misnamed Syrian refugee crisis, it was renamed to its currently title “in response to the call of EU leaders, who in September 2015 called for strengthened controls at the external borders”. Frontex is the EU agency in charge of improving the management of external borders and coordinating strategic operations among member states. Information and details on both Frontex and each of these programs can be found on the following websites:
https://frontex.europa.eu/es/que-hacemos/principales-responsabilidades/ https://www.consilium.europa.eu/es/policies/strengthening-external-borders/

¹⁸These projects can be consulted on the following websites:

¹⁹In 2015, the EU's military operation in the southern central Mediterranean (Eunavformed), also known as Operation Sophia, was launched to “break the business model set up by human smuggling and trafficking networks in the Mediterranean”. Operation Sophia ended in 2020 to make way for Operation Irini, whose main objective remains to "apply the arms embargo on Libya and, secondarily, fight against migrant smuggling and trafficking networks, and train the Libyan coastguard" (Soler García, 2022, p. 48). See the following websites:

Sophia:
https://emad.defensa.gob.es/operaciones/historico-de-operaciones/41-UE-EUNAVFOR-MED-Operacion-Sophia/

Irini:
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/lop%C3%A9ration-irini-et-la-qu%C3%AAte-de-la-paix-en-libye_fr?page_lang=es

²⁰Agreements with countries that do not share the same vision of respect for human rights, except when it comes to safeguarding political spaces, such as those that have been signed since 2016, when the EU signed an agreement with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, to close its border to asylum seekers fleeing the Syrian civil war in exchange for €6 billion to finance this process and accelerate the abolition of visas for Turks to the European Union (provided Turkey met the benchmarks). Since this agreement, several more have been signed with the same intention of externalizing borders to third countries, not only with Turkey but also Libya, Tunisia and Morocco.

Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz
Mexican. PhD in literary theory and comparative literature from the la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Professor of philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México. Research lines: critical border studies, development of the epistemological model of the border to carry out comparative studies in different continents from philosophical anthropology, political philosophy and social ontology. Recent publication: Rodríguez Ortiz, R. (2023). Borderlands: ontología política en Gloria Anzaldúa [Dossier]. Andamios, 20(52), 159-176. https://doi.org/10.29092/uacm.v20i52.1002

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional.