Coda

Abstract

Border studies have addressed the phenomenon of borders primarily with reference to analytical categories of governance, state or globalisation (Donzelli, 2013) — taking the border as something that demarcates sovereign states. In this vein, it is commonly assumed that citizenship issues come across as a stratified access to all kinds of rights as soon as a person enters a state territory. This volume, in contrast, was conceptualised to explore the intertwined relations between borders and citizenship at a local, national and international level. The common argument of the authors rests on the premise that the mechanisms of bordering can only be fully grasped by revealing their relation to the ambivalent and shifting construction of citizenship. A glance at contemporary politics reveals the political character of this construction. The heated debate on immigration reform in the US during the second term of the Obama presidency, for example, is glaring evidence of the bargaining processes that link border and citizenship construction: by introducing a probationary status, the bill approved by the US Senate in June 2013 (US Senate, 2013) has paved the way for 11 million undocumented migrants in the US to acquire citizenship (O’Keefe, 2013). Senate approval was based on the compromise that the legalisation of irregular migrants would come into operation parallel to a ‘border surge’ involving a dramatic increase in the militarisation of the US-Mexico border.