Borders and walls

Abstract

This chapter considers how the dominant performance of borders and bordering is being reworked through Brexit and the Trump presidency. The impact of Brexit has brought renewed attention and anxiety to the 310-mile land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, while also unsettling the norms around the EU's external borders. In the United States, President Trump campaigned on the promise to ‘build a wall’ between Mexico and the United States and, not incidentally, to ‘make Mexico pay for it’. Since his election, the US–Mexico border has been intensely politicised and racialised. In contrast, there is a relative lack of anxiety regarding the US–Canada border. The chapter considers the ways in which borders are discursively invoked and materially reconfigured such that particular types of migrants are constructed as a threat and specific borders in need of securitisation.