Introduction

The early 21st century’s resurgence of virulent nationalism in the United States, Western Europe, and Brazil, the expulsion of the Rohinga from Myanmar, and the perpetual containment of refugees off the coast of Christmas Island remind us that the study of the processes defining who belongs to a nation and who does not is more relevant than ever. Contrary to the cosmopolitan dreams of a globalization that render borders obsolete, or at least porous, borders have proliferated with the entrenchment of neoliberal globalization and its corresponding mechanisms of control.¹ Borders sequester US military personnel in state-of-the-art “green zones” in occupied Iraq;² they demarcate zones of hyperlegality in Guantanamo where prisoners are suffocated by the full force of criminal procedure;³ they map geographies of racialized risk in Black Chicago that construct Black men as perpetual threats;⁴ and they impose the settler colonial gaze on Mohawk mobility by imposing international borders across Haudenosaunee land and waterways.⁵ Borders are everywhere. Not merely differentiating between people’s experiences of law, administration, and movement; they actively differentiate between individuals, classifying and sorting people into populations.⁶