{"id":37573,"date":"2020-07-27T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T15:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=37573"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:18:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:18:00","slug":"bunkers-buffers-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/bunkers-buffers-borders\/","title":{"rendered":"Bunkers, Buffers, Borders"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past fall, I started a new job at the University of California, San Diego, just a few miles away from Tijuana, Mexico, which has been my research site for many years. The onerously long wait times to cross the border, however, have kept me from visiting Mexico as often as I\u2019d like, so I have been planning to apply for Global Entry, the US\u2019s main program for preapproved, expedited border crossing.<\/p>\n

Global Entry is a pinnacle of mobility I may well aspire to as a US citizen, but only a couple months before moving to San Diego, I was stuck in a very different place. I was living in southern Mexico as an \u201cillegal alien,\u201d having lost my legal status after seven years of residency. I was the victim of a glitch in one of Mexico\u2019s new technological toys designed to beef up its border-management apparatus: a database of entries and exits, ostensibly for statistical purposes only, but regularly trawled for irregularities by the Instituto Nacional de Migraci\u00f3n (the National Institute of Migration, Mexico\u2019s immigration control agency). The database converted a mistaken mouse click by an officer, of which I was unaware at the time, into an immutable illegal act on my part: entering the country as a tourist when in fact I was a legal resident, and thus holding two immigration statuses at once. Flagged for deportation, I was hurtled into my own little farcical nightmare, a kind of absurdist take on all the immigration tragedies raging across the world today.<\/p>\n

This episode was the personal context within which I read anthropologist Ruben Andersson\u2019s new book, No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics<\/em>. Vividly and convincingly, No Go World<\/em> describes a global shift toward cordoning off more and more zones labeled violent and high-risk, making them inaccessible to outsiders. The book resonated for me: my immigration woes, after all, stemmed from processes of securitization attributable to Mexico\u2019s emerging role as a massive \u201cbuffer\u201d (to use Andersson\u2019s term) between the US and Central America.<\/p>\n

But while Andersson moves firmly away from our current obsession with borders to place them within a larger picture, my experience in Mexico has me convinced that borders should not be downplayed so quickly. My case speaks to the global spread of border policing; it speaks to the rise of new logics and techniques for picking subjects out, making them vulnerable, and restricting their mobility. These logics and techniques respond less and less to old questions of rights and belonging; instead, they permit or constrain mobility according to more individualized criteria. My movements, for example, were significantly constrained despite the privilege of my US citizenship. Globalized borders are the prime mechanism of this individualization\u2014it was an entry through the border that got me\u2014and this power demands to be added back in to Andersson\u2019s broad-strokes picture of the world today.
\n<\/p>\n

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For the risk industry, which promises to calculate and stave off danger, fear works as an endless source of profit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nNo Go World<\/em> shows how the \u201ceconomics of risk<\/em>\u201d and the \u201cpolitics of fear<\/em>\u201d have combined into a destructive and self-perpetuating machine that is remaking the map of the world with startling speed. Social and cultural divides have long been a feature of the globalized world, but those divides have become veritable chasms. The no go zones are truly no go, and they are eating up larger and larger portions of the globe.<\/p>\n

Driving this change is what Andersson calls the \u201crisk economy.\u201d It includes military interventions and aid missions, with all the salaries and contracts they entail, as well as the swarm of NGOs that take shape around them: a complex of institutions and actors devoted to mitigating risk and cordoning it off from the sanctum of the world\u2019s powerful, a.k.a. the West.1<\/a><\/sup> Perversely, the risk industry does an excellent job generating its own conditions for growth. Instead of triggering some collective prise de conscience<\/em> on the part of the West, every intervention gone wrong brews greater fear; every nightmare fiasco flips into an opportunity for a new mission and thus new investments. And as the chasms dividing the world deepen, things can only go more and more wrong.<\/p>\n

Andersson\u2019s argument builds on the idea (based in globalization theory) that capitalism has connected the world in a profoundly systemic way, but he rejects any lingering optimism that the word connection<\/em> might still conjure. The system is built not on intimacy and closeness, he contends, but on just the opposite: distance and dis<\/em>connection, deliberately and intransigently enforced. The starting point is fear, whipped up by politicians. For the risk industry, which promises to calculate and stave off danger, fear works as an endless source of profit. Worming its way into the subjective divides between groups of people that fear sows, the risk industry makes these divides into a material reality. Perhaps the most personally felt part of No Go World<\/em> is Andersson\u2019s nostalgia for his youthful adventures in Pakistan and Mali\u2014places that, for Europeans like himself, are literally off limits now.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Borders, Guns, and Freedom<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Harel <\/a>\n \n Harel Shapira <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

Andersson traveled widely to research this book and spoke with a tremendous variety of people. Instead of focusing, as so many works do, on the societies affected by interventionism, No Go World<\/em> tells the story of the interveners. The chapters offer glimpses into UN offices and US command centers but take us far beyond as well. Andersson helps us to hear not just from the pundits of empire but also from such figures as a Malian NGO worker, a beleaguered aid worker in Kabul, the financial manager of a UN peacekeeping mission, and even an adventure-seeking journalist in Bamako. However diverse, all these individuals are caught up in the same maelstrom of fear and profit seeking responsible, as Andersson\u2019s title puts it, for \u201credrawing our maps,\u201d filling them with the unknown, out-of-control blank spaces of the no go zones.<\/p>\n

All the characters that populate the pages of No Go World<\/em>, however humble, play an active role in making the new global map that all of us, like it or not, must inhabit. In classic social-science fashion, however, none of them seems to have any control over it. They are all caught up in the risk industry\u2019s self-generating brand of capitalist accumulation. Once the machine is up and running, no one, Andersson contends, has a real interest in stopping it. Quite the opposite. Everyone, no matter how lacerated, has some kind of interest in keeping it going.<\/p>\n

Andersson spends a good deal of time, for example, on military intervention in Africa. There, the shift to outsourcing (read: distance and disconnection) has been stunningly swift and total. At this point, UN peacekeepers almost never come from European member states\u2014it\u2019s too expensive, too risky. Instead, African states throw in the human resources\u2014young men\u2019s lives\u2014while European states throw in the cash; the money that finally filters down to the soldiers is barely enough to keep them in ragtag shape. The winners in this exchange are far above the soldiers, yet insofar as they survive on the pickings, they too depend on the system to get by.<\/p>\n

Military and humanitarian interventions, Andersson shows, have morphed into remote-control operations that set loose violent, chaotic chain reactions. The current array of \u201crefugee crises\u201d around the world is a case in point\u2014people are fleeing the long- and short-term effects of intervention (Andersson discusses Somalia in detail). Instead of working to wind these chain reactions down, the Western states that are ultimately responsible merely try to keep the effects at a safe distance. On the ground, aid workers bunker up; on a larger scale, the West ensconces itself behind buffer zones. \u201cBunkers\u201d and \u201cbuffers,\u201d for Andersson, are the twin features marking the map of the globe today.<\/p>\n

\n

Andersson\u2019s argument is devastating and crucial, and without a doubt, No Go World<\/em> shines new light on my circumstances as an \u201cillegal alien\u201d in Mexico. My predicament would not have been possible without the risk industry\u2019s promotion of high-tech solutions to border security that even states like Mexico are buying into\u2014like the database and computer-entry system through which I was flagged for deportation. And Andersson\u2019s focus on how Western nations map the world into high-risk, no go zones highlights the irony of my having been stuck in Michoac\u00e1n, one of the most dangerous parts of Mexico. Although the US warns travelers not to go there, I had to stay because of the way Mexico has transformed itself into a two-thousand-mile-thick border\u2014in response, largely, to pressure the US exerts as part of its own efforts to keep risk at bay.<\/p>\n

During the two years it took me to sue the INM and get my legal status back, I was stuck inside Mexico as itself an enormous three-dimensional border, bristling with aggressive elements aimed above all at Central Americans. I could feel the securitization of the country all around me, in my own newly restricted mobility: many routes I would normally have traveled had immigration checkpoints along them. The US\u2019s exportation of border policing methods is well known; in Mexico\u2019s case, this exportation is also an outsourcing. As a top-ranking Department of Homeland Security official declared in 2012, \u201cThe Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> Such statements frame the INM as a kind of subcontractor for DHS. From this perspective, my case was but a bit of blowback, in which the US border apparatus turned upon one of its own citizens.
\n<\/p>\n

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A great deal of borders\u2019 contemporary power lies in their ability to cut through populations differentially.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nMexico is quickly transforming into just the kind of buffer zone Andersson describes\u2014but the disconnection he emphasizes is not the whole story. The country is tightly linked to the US; not just goods but also masses of people go back and forth regularly. A substantial portion of Mexicans have US visas or even US citizenship; in Tijuana, perhaps half the population has papers to enter legally. They may be Mexican citizens, but they have been rated relatively low risk. My own plunge from maximal mobility and recovery of it highlights the importance of the full rainbow of risk ratings in ordering the globe. Mobility, in today\u2019s global capitalist economy, remains a prime value in its own right.<\/p>\n

In its emphasis on bunkers and buffers, No Go World<\/em> is of a piece with the dominant scholarly trend that reacted to the globalization frenzy of the 1990s\u2014borders will simply melt away!\u2014by giving renewed attention to borders\u2019 impressive spread and hardening since. Yet securitized borders do not obstruct passage equally for all. Amid the expansion of border policing, programs to expedite passage have grown apace. They make borders as transparent as possible\u2014but only for the select.<\/p>\n

Take Global Entry (which I have not gotten around to applying for). It is advertised as a kind of club for \u201clow-risk travelers,\u201d complete with \u201cmembership privileges.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> Bunkering is in effect here, in the creation of a protected zone of privilege\u2014yet this zone is anchored to a sharply defined group, not a territory. Physical borders are not the only sites for sieving people, but their dual function\u2014letting through as much as blocking\u2014helps put the privilege of being low risk back into the story of how risk and fear are reconfiguring the world.<\/p>\n

Despite calls to \u201cbuild the wall\u201d between Mexico and the US, a great deal of borders\u2019 contemporary power lies not in their capacity to effect territorial separation (the goal that \u201cthe wall\u201d would theoretically achieve) as much as in their ability to cut through populations differentially. Within Mexico, categorizations of risk crisscross the population in ways that make bunkering and buffering unsatisfactory as overall metaphors. This crisscrossing points beyond the large-scale production of distance toward risk\u2019s enormous regulatory potentials: beyond the boundaries between the West and the rest toward the microboundaries that risk calculations throw up within<\/em> national societies.<\/p>\n

As risk\u2019s fault lines proliferate, they transform the basic relationship between people and space. Increasingly, citizenship rights are subordinated to risk status. As Andersson shows, colonial-era divisions of race and class reassert themselves with a vengeance in the modality of risk. They seem justified; they seem rational and necessary. As the industry grows, risk is quickly replacing ideologies of belonging and citizenship as the fundamental criterion for determining mobility.<\/p>\n

The expedited passage of low-risk populations, the filtering and smoothing of some flows, goes hand in hand with the obstruction of others. Through the balancing of low risk against high, the mutual creation of the two as interdependent categories, and the continuous culling of the one from the other, we can get a sharper picture of just how fear is redrawing our maps. The way risk can become a commodity within a no go zone (\u201ccough up the aid, or we\u2019ll migrate,\u201d to paraphrase Andersson\u2019s interlocutor) is but a corollary of the ultrasmoothed rails that are indeed selectively knitting the world together\u2014thanks only, however, to increasingly surgical methods of sorting risk.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"Refugees<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n No Peace for Refugees<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Emma <\/a>\n \n Emma Shaw Crane <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

No Go World<\/em> is not a traditional ethnographic monograph, but it is not exactly groundbreaking in terms of genre either. Instead, the genre conventions for just this kind of book\u2014research-based, but directed toward a broader audience\u2014bring with them some requirements with which I do not believe Andersson is entirely comfortable. One is the need to propose solutions. Another is the use of the first-person plural.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the book, Andersson takes a couple of stabs at solutions\u2014but then backs off them. Up front, he says the world needs \u201cpartnerships, not partitions,\u201d links that might stretch across the globe\u2019s newly fortified boundaries. By the book\u2019s end, however, he has treated connectivism quite mercilessly, as thoroughly naive and problematic. Similarly, he suggests that risks and responsibilities could be redistributed more equitably while remaining within a capitalist framework. But after asking, rhetorically, why the powerful should \u201caccept a new arrangement, if the first one serves them so well,\u201d he flatly states that an answer is beyond the scope of the book.<\/p>\n

Given all this, the only answers in sight are deeply liberal, both in the sense that they demand a more equal global distribution of rights and responsibilities\u2014a kind of acknowledgment of global citizenship\u2014and in the sense that they rest on the ability of (reading!) publics in the globe\u2019s dominant \u201ccore\u201d to exert regulatory pressure. Risk, however, seems to be a prime force moving the world in a postliberal direction, breaking down citizenship as an organizing framework. This tension remains unresolved in No Go World<\/em>. It goes hand in hand, I believe, with the other genre effect I mentioned: the \u201cwe\u201d to whom the book addresses itself.<\/p>\n

Andersson actually dedicates an endnote to clarifying this \u201cwe.\u201d \u201cI will use first-person plural at times,\u201d he writes, \u201cto refer to Western governments and their electorates. \u2026 Yet there is an analytical ambiguity to this \u2018we\u2019 that may be usefully exploited in looking for alternative approaches built on proximity and engagement rather than global distance and fear.\u201d That productive ambiguity is not, in the text, very evident. \u201cWe\u201d tends to feel Western, less a promise of change than a symptom of disconnection. It\u2019s hard to see how it could not. This \u201cwe\u201d rests on the old premise that the public sphere can widen to include other voices\u2014once they conform to Western notions of rational debate. Such a \u201cwe\u201d is plagued by what Andersson himself calls \u201cpaternalistic echoes from \u2026 colonial times.\u201d<\/p>\n

The public-facing genre has stuck Andersson with this \u201cwe\u201d that he knows we<\/em> need to move beyond. Writing for Public Books<\/em>, I use it too. But I would close by asking what other \u201cwe\u201ds, tied to what other genres, might provide more robust alternatives to a risk-infected world. These \u201cwe\u201ds may not be liberal, and they may not include the global North. But the ironies of the buffer zones, of the publics that take shape not just around but now within<\/em> borders, may well be a place to start looking for the \u201cwe\u201ds that can grow across the boundaries, large and small, of the world\u2019s risk regime.<\/p>\n

This article was commissioned by Matthew Engelke<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

  1. Andersson recognizes more complexity here but sticks with \u201cthe West\u201d as a convenient shorthand. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. Cited by Steve Taylor, \u201cOur Southern Border Is Now with Guatemala<\/a>,\u201d Latina Lista<\/em>, September 20, 2012. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. US Customs and Border Protection, \u201cGlobal Entry<\/a>,\u201d last modified December 13, 2019. \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u201cFlagged for deportation, I was hurtled into my own little nightmare, an absurdist take on all the immigration tragedies raging across the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":37581,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[81,1691,13,392,174,33,124,1844,128,1280],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1133,1467,1338],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-37573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-anthropology","tag-borderlands","tag-capitalism","tag-globalism","tag-migration","tag-nonfiction","tag-security","tag-sovereignty","tag-travel","tag-university-of-california-press","section-anthropology-religion","section-borderlands","section-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBunkers, Buffers, Borders - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cFlagged for deportation, I was hurtled into my own little nightmare, an absurdist take on all the immigration tragedies raging across the world.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/bunkers-buffers-borders\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bunkers, Buffers, Borders - 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