Empire Of Borders

The United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the process The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and those whose movements are restricted. But that is only part of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of US borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of US territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing the division between Global South and North. The highly publicized focus on a wall between the United States and Mexico misses the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world. Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of “extreme vetting,” which raise the possibility of “ideological” tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America’s security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations. In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren’t making the world safe—they are the frontline in a global war against the poor.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and those whose movements are restricted. but that is only part of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of U.S. borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of U.S. territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington's interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing the division between the Global South and North. The highly publicized focus on a wall between the United States and Mexico misses the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world. Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of "extreme vetting," which raise the possibility of "ideological" tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America's security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations. In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren't making the world safe-especially not in the midst of an ever-worsening climate crisis. They are, undoubtedly, the frontline in a global war against the poor.

The United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the process The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and those whose movements are restricted. But that is only part of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of US borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of US territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing the division between Global South and North. The highly publicized focus on a wall between the United States and Mexico misses the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world. Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of “extreme vetting,” which raise the possibility of “ideological” tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America’s security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations. In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren’t making the world safe—they are the frontline in a global war against the poor.

In Islands of Sovereignty, anthropologist and legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn offers a new interpretation of the transformation of US borders during the late twentieth century and its implications for our understanding of the nation-state as a legal and political form. Kahn takes us on a voyage into the immigration tribunals of South Florida, the Coast Guard vessels patrolling the northern Caribbean, and the camps of Guantánamo Bay—once the world’s largest US-operated migrant detention facility—to explore how litigation concerning the fate of Haitian asylum seekers gave birth to a novel paradigm of offshore oceanic migration policing. Combining ethnography—in Haiti, at Guantánamo, and alongside US migration patrols in the Caribbean—with in-depth archival research, Kahn expounds a nuanced theory of liberal empire’s dynamic tensions and its racialized geographies of securitization. An innovative historical anthropology of the modern legal imagination, Islands of Sovereignty forces us to reconsider the significance of the rise of the current US immigration border and its relation to broader shifts in the legal infrastructure of contemporary nation-states across the globe.

From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home. In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance—and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A “smoking gun” book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, “law and order” politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.

The Beloved Border is a potent and timely report on the U.S.-Mexico border. Though this book tells of the unjust death and suffering that occurs in the borderlands, Davidson gives us hope that the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable sitefor studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe-conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The study shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters ofpassage, or to criminalize the use of "forbidden" roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations - from emperors to peasants - defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newlydesigned maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers.Luca Scholz unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers' right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire's political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered inmore than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regimeEurope.

RECIPIENT OF THE 2018 IZZY AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM "Every so often a book comes along that can dramatically change, or elevate, one's thinking about a global problem. Much like Naomi Klein's books, Todd Miller’s Storming the Wall is such a book and deserves far more attention and discussion."—Izzy Award Judges, Ithaca College *** "A galvanizing forecast of global warming's endgame and a powerful indictment of America's current stance."—Kirkus Reviews As global warming accelerates, droughts last longer, floods rise higher, and super-storms become more frequent. With increasing numbers of people on the move as a result, the business of containing them—border fortification—is booming. In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, the corporations cashing in on border militarization, and emerging movements for environmental justice and sustainability. Reporting from the flashpoints of climate clashes, and from likely sites of futures battles, Miller chronicles a growing system of militarized divisions between the rich and the poor, the environmentally secure and the environmentally exposed. Stories of crisis, greed and violence are juxtaposed with powerful examples of solidarity and hope in this urgent and timely message from the frontlines of the post-Paris Agreement era. Todd Miller's writings about the border have appeared in the New York Times, Tom Dispatch, and many other places. Praise for Storming the Wall "Nothing will test human institutions like climate change in this century—as this book makes crystal clear, people on the move from rising waters, spreading deserts, and endless storms could profoundly destabilize our civilizations unless we seize the chance to re-imagine our relationships to each other. This is no drill, but it is a test, and it will be graded pass-fail"—Bill McKibben, author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet "As Todd Miller shows in this important and harrowing book, climate-driven migration is set to become one of the defining issues of our time.... This is a must-read book."—Christian Parenti, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence "Todd Miller reports from the cracks in the walls of the global climate security state—militarized zones designed to keep powerful elites safe from poor and uprooted peoples.... Miller finds hope—hope that may not survive in Trumpworld."—Molly Molloy, Research librarian for Latin America and the border at New Mexico State University and creator of "Frontera List" "Miller delivers a prescient and sober view of our increasingly dystopian planet as the impacts of human-caused climate disruption continue to intensify."—Dahr Jamail, award-winning independent journalist, author of The End of Ice "Todd Miller's important book chronicles how existing disparities in wealth and power, combined with the dramatic changes we are causing in this planet's ecosystems, mean either we come together around our common humanity or forfeit the right to call ourselves fully human."—Robert Jensen, author of The End of Patriarchy, Plain Radical, and Arguing for Our Lives

D. R. Howland explores China’s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan—the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of “brushtalk,” in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the communication of their language and its dominant modes—history and poetry—as the textual and cultural basis of a shared civilization between the two societies. With Japan’s decision in the 1870s to modernize and westernize, China’s relationship with Japan underwent a crucial change—one that resulted in its decisive separation from Chinese civilization and, according to Howland, a destabilization of China’s worldview. His examination of the ways in which Chinese perceptions of Japan altered in the 1880s reveals the crucial choice faced by the Chinese of whether to interact with Japan as “kin,” based on geographical proximity and the existence of common cultural threads, or as a “barbarian,” an alien force molded by European influence. By probing China’s poetic and expository modes of portraying Japan, Borders of Chinese Civilization exposes the changing world of the nineteenth century and China’s comprehension of it. This broadly appealing work will engage scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Chinese literature, history, and geography, as well as those interested in theoretical reflections on travel or modernism.

Borders are changing in response to terrorism and immigration. This book shows why this matters, especially for sovereignty, individual liberty, and citizenship.