A Comparative Political Sociology of Contemporary National Border Barriers

The London School of Economics and Political Science Nomos: A Comparative Political Sociology of Contemporary National Border Barriers Olivia Mena A thesis submitted to the Department of Sociology of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, September 2015 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorization does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 79,997 words. Statement of use of third party for editorial help I can confirm that my thesis was copyedited for conventions of language, spelling, and grammar by Abby Webber. 2 Abstract Since 2001, there are more than 50 national border barriers around the globe — proposed, under construction, or finished. My dissertation considers this new infrastructure inside larger questions of sovereignty, governance, immigration, and security in the “borderless” age of globalization. To approach this work I used an epistemological framework of border thinking, a “third space” hermeneutics that locates the border as a central place to theorize the complex geopolitical and postcolonial relationships. I conducted two case studies of this fortress infrastructure, one along the U.S.-Mexico border and another along the Costa Rican border with Nicaragua, considering how new border walls are material manifestations of inchoate sovereignty, occupying claims in the borderlands — one of the latest frontier zones of global capital. Broadly, this project calls for us to consider the global proliferation of national border walls and fences in a way that invokes collective action against the persisting operative logic of race/culture thinking that underpins securitization as both a form of governance and an ideology. It situates the urgency of this intellectual work inside the expanding sovereign jurisdictions of capital and opens up new sets of questions about how national border barriers are integral structures inside the changing ideo-political frameworks of war, sovereignty, and governance in the age of the drone. 3 Contents Acknowledgements.………………………………………………………………..……5 Prelude………………………………………………………………………...…..……..6 Chapter 1: Border Methodology…………………………………………………....…..19 Chapter 2: Hedges and Barbed Wire: An Archeology of State Walling….……...…….43 Chapter 3: The New Nomos of the Earth…………………………….………………...78 Chapter 4: Inchoate Sovereignty and the Symbolism of the Wall……….....….……..101 Chapter 5: Absurdity of the Wall……………………...………………………..…….143 Chapter 6: Special-Interest Security Zones…………………………………………...163 Chapter 7: Conclusion: Our Backs Against the Wall………………………………....194 Coda: Writing from the Shadow of the Wall………………………………...……….225 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………...227 References………………………………………………………………………..…...229 Internet References………………………………………………………………..…..243 4 Acknowledgements Undertaking a PhD is a solitary journey, but filled with people who help you as you find your way. My deepest thanks is to my supervisor, Professor Paul Gilroy, FBA, and his commitment to me as his student. Thank you for teaching me through your example what it means to be a public intellectual. At the London School of Economics, I want to acknowledge the faculty and students who were part of the Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies concentration at the LSE Sociology Department, and thank them for their commitment to doing political and critical intellectual work that is engaged and in conversation with social inequalities and injustices. This project would not have been possible without the generous support of the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and Benson Library at the University of Texas at Austin and the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad de Costa Rica. I am especially grateful to Dr. Charles Hale and Dr. Carlos Sandoval García for their help in making my visiting research position at their respective institutions such a positive experience. The academic communities I encountered in both places enriched my experience as a researcher. There are many other people I encountered during my research — more than I can name here — who generously shared their stories and expertise, and showed me forms of border hospitality and care. I am also grateful to the University of Texas–Pan American Border Studies Archives and to the University of Texas at El Paso Center for Inter- American and Border Studies for giving me visiting privileges and access to border archives. I would like to thank Professor Chetan Bhatt and Professor Judy Wajcman for their constructive comments on an early version of this work. This project was partially supported by research and travel grants from the London School of Economics. I am grateful to Dr. Ellen Riojas Clark, Dr. Josie Méndez Negrete, Sandra Cisneros, and Dr. Ruth Behar for their friendship and support over the years, and who first helped me start this journey. Finally, I would like to thank Angel Mena, my partner who has accompanied me on this journey close to home and most often from afar. Donde hay amor, no hay fronteras. 5 Prelude May we dedicate ourselves to hastening the day when all God’s children live in a world without walls. That would be the greatest empire of all. — Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan at the installation of “Breakthrough,” an art piece made from a fragment of the Berlin Wall at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on Nov. 19, 1990 Warehouses of Steel and the Bounded Present In the Río Grande Valley in South Texas, 27,000 tons of unused steel worth US$44 million sit in a storage facility (Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Inspector General 2011). This surplus of fencing supply, which contains more steel than the Statue of Liberty, has already been stored for five years, and eventually it will be used to complete additional miles of the U.S. fence on the border with Mexico. The future fencing will go up in several border towns along the delicate ecosystem of the Río Grande near the Gulf of Mexico, even though previous U.S. government studies have shown that this type of fencing compounds and exacerbates flooding (Nicol 2013). A group of borderland residents-turned-activists who organized under the banner “No Border Wall” to protest the initial waves of government land seizures and the fence construction outlined in the U.S. Secure Fence Act have continued to show up to almost every public meeting for years, requesting through the Freedom of Information Act documents outlining the government’s plans, and to sound the regional and international alarm that more border walls are coming. Since the early 2000s, there has been a new, intensive proliferation of national border walls and fences around the world. There are 55 new national border barriers around the globe — proposed, under construction, or finished — since 2001.1 This 1 See Appendix for a table of contemporary border barrier projects. 6 border buildup is indicative of a shift in the way the world is being divided and organized that goes beyond reified cartographies of the “global North” and “global South,” but instead is more in line with Bauman’s millennial forecast of “planetary frontier-lands” (2002). Nation-states now have the countenance of frontier-lands — ad hoc, provisional spaces of perpetual acquisition where “fences and stockades announce intentions rather than mark realities,” and for many people “entrench the new extraterritoriality of the human condition” and test the limits of human submissiveness inside these new arrangements (Bauman 2002: 90–114). Terrestrial national borders are one of the places where the closing routes of human mobilities and increasing mobility of capital converge in the same space. More and more often these border spaces are vertically organized with walls or fences built at key human crossing corridors in order to create a wider horizon for surveillance and entrapment of certain groups of people unauthorized for entry. Simultaneously, new roads and bridges are built nearby to facilitate authorized flows of increased commerce and goods, and new immigrant detention centers also go up in the borderlands and beyond to incarcerate captured human crossers. The closure and controls in the borderlands, the traditional laboratories for new forms of nation-state policing and surveillance, are a particular place to think about our bounded present — a contemporary reality where we experience the growing ontologies of walling that range from gated residential communities (Blakely and Snyder 1999; Low 2003) to portable protest walls deployed in metropolitan squares (Hancox 2011) to national border fences. This project asks what walls might tell us about the shifting social organization of state power through infrastructure of policing and surveillance. It documents a particular moment, situating what contemporary border walls mark out inside the rapid buildup of a new aerial order of the power of drones. It studies how walls are a mutant 7 form of colonial management, a

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