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Borders and security

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Borders & security

Many states frame their border politics as a question of security from threats like trafficking, arms trade and terrorism to the arrival of “illegal immigrants”. Also, due to technological developments like drones, biometrics, virtual databases and automated systems, border control has become a lucrative emerging market for the arms and security industry. Both of these developments have implications for the humanitarian responses towards people in need, as they may link up with nationalistic actors´ calls for strengthened border controls. Concurrent with the militarization of many of the world´s borders, the number of people losing their lives trying to cross them has also increased manifold over the last decades. Security at the border is a part of larger developments around security and state formation in relation to policing a host of global, regional and local conflicts like for instance wars on drugs, crime and terror on the horn of Africa, in Latin America and Asia as well as in the Global North.

Researchers on

Borders & security

Marlene Spanger works on mobility and governmentality from below and above. Researching sexual commerce, labour market and anti-trafficking she focuses on how subjects are governed through gender, sexual and racial formations, and how various actors condition the mobility of the migrants.  

Anja Kublitz has for a decade studied security from the perspective of the securitized themselves; namely second generation immigrants from the Middle East who by the Danish state are targeted as radicals, gang members and/or foreign fighters. In her AAU talent program “Affective Events: An Anthropological Study of the Social formation of Danish Foreign Fighters” she studies the becoming of Danish jihadists. 

See all publications by Marlene Spanger