On Borders

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn?Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities--but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions--not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo's On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, & the Rights of Place offers an indirect response and critique of the limitations of cosmopolitan frameworks as they relate to place-based politics via an analysis of borders and bordered thinking., Even for those who still believe that traditional territorial borders are very real because they matter in multiple ways, the book certainly comes recommended., Richly textured and deeply insightful ... Ochoa Espejo's book is a splendid read, and in my view should be required reading for scholars of borders from all disciplines., Explores borders, territories, and inclusion in terms of place, examining the practices and physical structures that constitute the localized, concrete character of people's experiences., Banging on about 'broken borders' is the major leitmotif of contemporary populism in Europe and the United States. This subtle and engaging exploration of borders as a theme in political philosophy shows how much about them is obscured when questions of immigration policy and territorial sovereignty are bundled together with the 'border question.' In placing borders at the center of analysis, this book effectively demolishes and replaces the very basis to the current debate about their meaning

Paulina Ochoa Espejo is Associate Professor of Political Science at Haverford College. She is the author of The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Populism.