The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility

The border is one of the most important issues of our times. It is also one of the least understood. We think of a border as a static line, but recent bordering techniques have broken away from the map, as governments have developed legal tools to limit the rights of migrants before and after they enter a country's territory. The detachment of state power from any fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border, an adjustable legal construct untethered in space. This development upsets our assumptions about waning sovereignty, while also revealing the limits of the push for border-fortification. But while the accelerating mobility of borders cuts against the rights of those who cross them, it also presents a tremendous opportunity to rethink states' responsibilities to migrants. In this book, Ayelet Shachar, one of the world's leading authorities on borders and citizenship, proposes a new approach to human mobility in a world where borders, like people, have the capacity to move. Her ground-breaking lead essay is taken up by an international group of scholars, including Leti Volpp (Berkeley), Steffen Mau (Humboldt) and Chimène Keitner (UC Hastings), who provide alternative perspectives and elaborations. The book concludes with Shachar's reply to her critics.