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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Harder Borders in a New Security Climate
Faced with the exigencies of globalization, states walk a tightrope when balancing security fears against economic incentives. Globalization promises economic gains from factor mobility. Economic interdependence also reshapes the way that states formulate grand strategy. Unilateral policies can have pitfalls, resulting in short-term and long-term repercussions. Given interconnected policies, states must anticipate other states’ policy shifts. At the same time, globalization imposes formidable exigencies. The processes that facilitate factor mobility also embolden and empower violent non-state threats, making undetected entry across borders more feasible. Globalization also has an underbelly: “every sector of the licit economy has its illicit counterpart” (Andreas 2004, 644). Naim (2005) contends that “the dark trades, driven by the same globalizing forces responsible for the surge in international commerce over the last two decades, now threaten the smooth functioning of the legitimate world.” What renders illicit flows particularly challenging is their clandestine nature: by evading the state’s gaze, smuggling and trafficking networks stand to weaken state authority. Clandestine actors foment anxiety over the retreat of state power (Sassen 1996; Strange 1996). Although these anxieties may be exaggerated, clandestine transnational actors impede the state’s bid to exclusive territorial control.1 Economically open states prioritize effective border management insofar as border instability detracts from economic exchange (Simmons 2005) and stable borders require effective control over transboundary movement (Newman 2000). Far from erasing borders, globalization has served to bolster the importance of border control (Naim 2005; Newman 2006).
In this security climate, it should come as no surprise that policymakers propose harder borders as a panacea against transnational threats. The new security climate also focuses on individuals as threats, even if origin governments are not hostile. As a consequence of this shift in focus, controlling human mobility is essential to maintaining security. Uncontrolled borders are vulnerable to different types of transnational threats, and interlinkages among organized crime and terrorist groups make border management all the more demanding (Shelley 2006). In this context, borders emerge as ramparts of defense against non-state threats (Biersteker 2002). Countries retool existing border management systems to adapt to the new focus on counterterrorism (Andreas and Nadelman 2006). For instance, while pre-inspection at airports had been implemented as a check on illegal immigration in the 1990s, the United States expanded its scope within the context of the global war on terror. Similarly, terrorism made a comeback on the European continent after 2001. The Madrid and London incidents animated a flurry of measures labeled as antiterrorism directives.
Discerning borders ward off threats and, at the same time, bridge economic flows. To accomplish this, they permit benign flows while weeding out malign flows. Discerning border policies are also politically appealing as a means of handling globalized violence. Terrorists rely on secrecy and surprise, which magnifies the psychological malaise that results from terrorist violence. Bolstering interdependence sovereignty—control over transborder flows—goes some way toward managing the psychological repercussions of transnational terrorism. The new security milieu has augmented the importance of border control by showing that porous borders are likely to serve as a conduit for transnational violence. Keohane expands on this: “Geographical space, which has been seen as a natural barrier and a locus for human barriers, now must be seen as a carrier as well” (2002, 32).
The contemporary foreign policy context has thus broadened the conceptualization of security to encompass transnational threats. In traditional IR terms, security is “defined in political military terms as the protection of the boundaries and integrity of the state” (Doty 1998, 73). The new security paradigm blurs the strict distinction between the domestic and international insofar as a military logic is applied to coping with atypical threats. Writing after 9/11, Kraska elaborated on this, noting “the traditional distinctions between military/police, war/law enforcement, and internal/external security are rapidly blurring” (2001, 501). As I outline below, the militarization of borders whereby states deploy specialized and sophisticated technology fits within this trend. From a broader theoretical standpoint, this alters how sovereignty is practiced. Traditionally, states reserved policing efforts to the domestic realm and military operations to balancing against external threats (Clausewitz et al. 2006). The new focus on asymmetric trends breaks this distinction down, with the result that borders reassert the privilege of the state (Rosiere and Jones 2012).
Do security incentives make for harder borders? I answer this question by focusing on transnational terrorism to capture the contemporary security dimension. Policy tightening can take several forms. Tougher policies commence with forging a link between different types of undesirable flows. The United States accomplished this in the wake of 9/11 by rebranding law enforcement efforts as antiterrorism measures, which served to stress the link between illegal migration, organized crime, and terrorism (Andreas and Nadelman 2006; Andreas and Richard 2001). At the same time, states harness existing measures by making entry requirements tougher. Higher rates of visa denials, the requirement of in-person interviews and more extensive paperwork to apply for visas, and wider surveillance exemplify this trend. States also establish tighter controls through an extraterritorial shift of border controls whereby the state’s territorial reach expands outward (Bigo 2000). This culminates in an enlarged border zone (Bigo 2011). The recalibration of policies shifts part of the burden of control to other actors, such as other states as well as third parties such as airlines, travel agencies, and other private companies with authority to monitor travelers. The 9/11 Commission endorsed such a shift, arguing that “the US government cannot meets its obligations to the American people to prevent the entry of terrorists without a major effort to collaborate with other governments” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States 2002, 390). This shift is exemplified by prescreening checks, airline sanctions, and stricter requirements for upstream policies of control that by definition screen passengers abroad. In other words, harder borders expand the scope of who is monitored and bring more actors into the fold, thereby enlarging the scope of actors responsible for monitoring.
Harder borders also manifest through visible, on-site policies that we would typically associate with border closure: physical barricades, cameras installed at border ports, and deployment of paramilitary personnel, or at the more aggressive extreme, minefields. Part and parcel of this process is a movement away from policing to a militarized approach to border control (Donaldson 2005). This transition transforms borders from sites of law enforcement and policing to sites of military operations aiming to prevent violent non-state actors from obtaining access to the state’s territory (Lutterbeck 2004). Such high-profile border instruments are more amenable to serving ceremonial functions. Insofar as these instruments affirm the state’s ability to protect, high-profile, highly visible policies mollify trepidation over non-state violence. On one level, high-profile policies have a demonstrative purpose (Andreas 2009). These policies are rooted in political motives; rather than deterring access, these measures communicate moral resolve and display authority.
On another level, however, technological development and sophistication have advanced high-profile policies. Some examples of more sophisticated technology include unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to detect underground tunnels, and new motion and heat sensors as part of a virtual fence (Elden 2013). These instruments also permit a smart borders approach to border control, which increasingly obviates the need for human personnel while also expanding the breadth and depth of the security zone. This pattern goes hand in hand with the militarization of borders insofar as the newer and more advanced technologies deployed are purchased from military suppliers and the tactics of monitoring cross over from the military realm (Jones and Johnson 2016). Not surprisingly, as a consequence of increased sophistication, border control requires an expanded budget. Bigo (2014) defines the European Union’s approach to border control as one of policing and monitoring, in contrast to the militarized approach of the United States. The past decade and a half has seen the European Union move closer to the U.S. model. As a result of this trend, Frontex, the European Union’s border-monitoring agency, saw its budget rise fifteenfold (Frontex 2014).
To recap, highly visible border policies can simultaneously demonstrate military strength and fulfill symbolic roles. Rather than debordering, globalization has resulted in a rebordering, a process that rearticulates sovereign power.2 In addition, “the old model of security at discrete crossing points and dispersed monitoring of spaces in-between has been replaced with a model that strives for ‘total awareness’ and ‘effective control’ over the entire border zone” (Jones and Johnson 2016, 194). As extraterritorial policies have been gaining currency, the state has witnessed a shift in not just how but where it exerts territorial sovereignty.
At first blush, we might expect a perfect correlation and an automatic connection between the threat of terrorism and harder borders. In fact, this expectation seemingly bears fruit after significant transnational terrorist attacks, with commentators predicting tighter border controls and expressing fears that the events harken back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11. After a terrorist attack in Ottawa in October 2014, Canada’s former deputy prime minister John Manley forecasted a clampdown on border controls, stating: “If it is in fact related to religious extremism, then I think we will see an increased ramping up of U.S. paranoia about the border and Canada being a source of potential risk for the United States” (“Ottawa Shooting” 2014). After the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France drew up proposals for more rigorous security checks, calling for “immediate, reinforced, systematic and coordinated controls” on the external borders of the Schengen Area. Pundits became alarmed that EU citizens would endure significantly higher logistical travel costs, including longer wait times, and systematic checks on identification documents. The United Kingdom, an EU member not part of the Schengen Area, criticized the proposals on the grounds that its citizens would bear the brunt of the burden.
Moreover, states that border volatile regions encounter pressure from the international community to shore up border controls. After the ISIS staged the Paris attacks, the United States and EU countries called for Turkey to crack down on its perforated border with Syria. Then U.S. defense secretary Ashton B. Carter stated about Turkey, “The single most important contribution that their geography makes necessary is the control of their own border” (Arango 2015). Thus the connection between terrorist events and harder borders is not unfounded. Nevertheless, such an automatic linkage misses the fact that policy instruments serve different functions. In other words, border strategies differ in how they allow states to express territorial sovereignty. Consequently, it would be misleading to expect uniform policy change.
Border management strategies vary according to the nature of the terrorist threat. More precisely, restrictive policies are more likely if terrorist events are salient. Violence that hits closer to home and is easily observable by the public is more likely to spur policy tightening because such events are more likely to push policymakers to take action. In other words, events that directly imperil state interests more acutely galvanize public anxieties, stoking fears over loss of control. Direct threats inflate the emblematic role that border control can play in tamping public anxiety. Previous scholarship has not shed much light on these distinct pathways insofar as it assumes an unqualified linkage between terrorism and border closure. By distinguishing terrorist events by venue of attack and nationality of victims, I argue that the impact of terrorism on border management is contingent upon whether threats are direct or global.
We might also expect material incentives to counter policy tightening. September 11’s deleterious effects on economic exchange within the NAFTA area left a lasting impression. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the United States introduced harsher border measures (Andreas 2003b). As a result, traffic across the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico slowed to a trickle. As Andreas and Nadelman (2006) stress, this was not the first time that a crackdown by the United States halted cross-border traffic in North America; Operation Intercept, an anti–drug trafficking endeavor, three decades earlier had virtually shut down the border with Mexico. What was more significant about the post-9/11 case, however, was that it occurred in the context of economic interdependence, institutionalized and propelled through NAFTA. There are more recent examples where policymakers voiced alarm that terrorist attacks and their aftermath would throttle trade. The aforementioned Ottawa shooting, for example, triggered fears that border checks and red tape would stymie U.S.-Canada trade. Likewise, these fears surfaced in the wake of the June 2015 attacks in Tunisia as well as after the November 2015 Paris assaults (Bensemra 2016). The fears were not unwarranted: Tunisia witnessed a significant decrease in tourism inflows during the rest of 2015 (Kim 2015).
Economic interdependence and openness raise the costs of draconian border policies. Their effects on state behavior, however, are not uniform. The costs are expected to be lopsided insofar as states are asymmetrically interdependent (Gelpi and Grieco 2008). Consider the disproportionate effects of 9/11 within NAFTA, for example (Andreas 2009, 164). The economic costs of border delays for Canada were much higher than for the United States. Bilateral trade for Canada comprises 87 percent of its total trade. By comparison, for the United States, the figure stands at 25 percent. The asymmetric commercial relationship can be expressed in terms of trade to GDP ratio. Forty percent of Canada’s GDP comes from (is tied to) its U.S.-bound exports. In sharp contrast, only 2.5 percent of U.S. GDP comes from its exports to Canada.
States strive for a balance between borders that remain open to economic exchange but yet are impregnable to penetration by undesirables. The balance also hinges on whether threats are diffuse or targeted. Before delving into the interplay between security and objectives, we need to spell out why transnational terrorism should predict tighter controls and hardened borders.
Transnational Terrorism
Terrorism is the “anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby … the direct targets of violence are not the main targets” (Schmid and Jongman 1988, 28). The audience of terrorist violence is broader than the immediate targets of attacks. In other words, the victims are not always the intended targets of the terrorist actors but individuals who are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time (Sanchez-Cuenca and Calle 2009).3 The latter aspect is why the repercussions of terrorist events transcend the physical damage and carnage caused by the incidents. By intimidating an audience greater than the victims of attacks, and by promising further violence to come, terrorist actors aim to intimidate and force policy change from target governments (Pape 2006).
In terms of military capabilities, terrorism is the strategy of the weak (Hoffman 1998). Terrorist groups, even when they solidify territorial control and draw on a global pool of recruits, cannot amass military capabilities that match those of state actors. They make use of transnational organizations to leverage borders to their advantage. They foment uncertainty over when and where attacks might occur through the stealth element. They explicitly seek to catch states unaware in order to cast doubt on their ability to protect. They do so by making use of individuals to transport violence across states. The degree of damage inflicted can be on par with that of state actors (Salehyan 2008b). By doing so, they highlight states’ strategic vulnerability in the face of non-state threats. Gearson writes that the September 11 militants “utilized the long-established terrorist approach of careful planning, simple tactics, and operational surprise, to effect the most stunning terrorist ‘spectacular’ in history” (2002, 7).
Transnational terrorism takes advantage of the processes of globalization. It also shares the stealth element in common with other types of non-state threats—or clandestine transnational actors (CTAs). CTAs include relatively harmless actors such as undocumented immigrants or refugees, more harmful actors such as smugglers and human traffickers, and more imminent security threats such as insurgents and terrorists. Border strategies are increasingly geared toward inhibiting access to such actors. As such, the theoretical connection between transnational terrorism and border control leverages insights about borders as preventive barriers against atypical threats (Andreas 2003a; Jones and Johnson 2016). Harder borders impede the movement of CTAs across borders by raising the costs of entry and increasing the likelihood of apprehension by state agents (Hassner and Wittenberg 2015). These policies aim to deny such actors access to territory. Terrorism, however, is on the dangerous end of the continuum of CTAs. Organized crime, for instance, may prey upon and detract from the legal economy, but terrorism is distinct in that it can cost lives, damage property and infrastructure, and even degrade the health of the country’s economy (Enders and Sandler 2006b).
I contend that three interrelated features of transnational terrorism are important for understanding why transnational terrorist events prompt tighter border policies: (1) nonhierarchical spread, (2) stealth, and (3) psychological import. I flesh out each component in the sections that follow and then discuss why directed and global terrorist events have distinctive effects on the state’s responses to violence.
Nonhierarchical Spread
Transnational terrorism, by definition, involves crossing borders. As the preceding discussion illustrated, when a transnational terrorist event transpires, either the perpetrators or victims cross frontiers (Li 2005). In addition, transnational terrorist groups are nonhierarchically networked across multiple states and sometimes multiple regions (Enders and Su 2007). Groups can mobilize, recruit, and train in bases spread across several countries. Even if a terrorist group is initially limited to a specific region, it can evolve over time to develop offshoots or branches elsewhere. A noteworthy example is ISIS, which the international community initially hoped would remain confined to the Levant. After the Paris attacks, attention turned to the group’s external operations branch in Europe (Callimachi, Rubin, and Fourquet 2016).
To be sure, transnational networking does not diminish the inhibitory impact of distance (Gelpi and Avdan 2015). Although transnational terrorism calls to mind the September 11 attacks, in actuality, terrorism is a relatively short-gun phenomenon. Terrorist groups tend to cluster in specific hot spots of high-volume activity (Braithwaite and Li 2007). Nonetheless, even if terrorist operatives are not mobile across borders, and even if organizations do not possess bases of operation in multiple countries, there are other ways in which terrorism can traverse borders. In general, terrorist violence features spatial dependency (Sageman 2004). Even when the tangible assets behind violence (arms, personnel, funds) do not travel across countries, the intangibles that support violence—tactics, ideas, and knowledge—can diffuse across borders. The form that violence takes can spread to other countries as homegrown groups mimic and adopt foreign groups’ tactics (Midlarsky, Crenshaw, and Yoshida 1980). For example, Hamas borrowed the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (Horowitz 2010). The decision to go transnational—rather than remain tied to a specific piece of territory—can signal group resolve and capabilities. To the extent that transnational spread permits more interlinkages among groups, transnationalization can also raise group lethality. Not surprisingly, then, ISIS’s ostensible decision to go global by waging a campaign in the West compounded anxiety over the group’s growing reach. Pundits speculated as to whether the attacks on the European continent signaled a tactical shift in the ISIS’s operations, in part to counterbalance its territorial losses in Iraq and Syria (Hegghammer and Nesser 2015). Furthermore, loyalties may also traverse borders, facilitating transnational recruitment (Piazza 2006). Finally, funding and weapons are also smuggled across borders, a dynamic that gains speed and currency with the emerging organized crime-terrorism nexus (Dishman 2005). In sum, transnational terrorism defies and circumvents state borders in a number of ways, most starkly because groups establish bases across frontiers but also through transnational financing, emulation of foreign groups’ tactics, and transnational mobilization and recruitment.
In contrast, the state’s power is hierarchically organized within its own territory. Scholarship maintains that borders are more constraining on states’ armed forces than on transnational actors (Naim 2005; Salehyan 2006; Staniland 2006). Salehyan (2006) places the state’s agents at the far end of a continuum of global mobility. The moral opprobrium on territorial conquest, buttressed by the normative consensus on territorial sanctity, means that in theory at least states cannot easily move troops across neighboring territories (Zacher 2001). International borders constrain different types of flows unequally: capital and then goods occupy the relatively mobile end of the spectrum, whereas the state’s security forces are at the other end. “In sum, the state is limited by its boundaries—the capacity to wield force…. is largely constrained by sovereign borders” (Salehyan 2006, 31). This limitation partly stems from the transaction costs involved in efficient collaboration among states. States confront hurdles when cooperating against atypical threats. To begin with, states cannot agree on a common list of designated terrorist groups (Sandler, Arce, and Enders 2009). They also are not effective at coordinating antiterrorism efforts. In contrast, terrorist organizations sometimes strategically pool their resources together to offset their relative military weakness (Hoffman 1998). They are effective at networking: forming alliances with each other, learning new techniques and modes of attack, and even going so far as to train together even in the absence of ideological commonalities. Terrorist groups excel at developing cross-border connections and are in fact found to be, on average, more centrally connected than criminal networks (Helfstein and Solomon 2014).4
Transnational actors are able to capitalize on the disproportionate constraining effect of borders (Shelley 2006). Smugglers, for example, take advantage of price differentials across borders (Carter and Poast 2015), in addition to being able to relocate operations to skirt state monitoring. Transnational terrorists can similarly reap the benefits of mobility across borders by relocating and regrouping if dislodged from state territories. Terrorists’ ability to network across countries makes it difficult to detect and identify them, which in turn facilitates clandestine entry into states’ territories. To surmount the asymmetrical limitations on state power projection capabilities, states may turn to defensive measures focused on preventing access to territory. Fortifying borders may emerge as a more attractive and feasible strategy when compared to risky endeavors such as air campaigns or ground incursions into neighboring territories (Staniland 2006).5 Arguably, however, technological innovations make a state’s power projection across borders more feasible.6 Drones, for example, can augment monitoring and surveillance regimes. Newer technologies overcome the normative constraint to some extent by permitting states to project power without actual boots on the ground. These technologies, however, are certainly not impervious to criticism.7 In addition, territorial integrity is closely linked to border fixity: as territorial conquest has become uncommon as a form of power maximization, states’ borders have become more and more fixed (Atzili 2006).
The Stealth Element
The spread of transnational terrorism makes it difficult for states to mount a counterresponse, and the stealth element deepens states’ disadvantage in the face of non-state threats. Terrorist groups can leverage information asymmetries to gain an edge against militarily advantaged states. As a consequence, ““an information society” such as that of the contemporary United States would be at an informational disadvantage with respect to networks of individuals whose communications seem to occur largely through handwritten messages and face-to-face contacts” (Keohane 2002, 34). Militants can defy border control, escape law enforcement, and circumvent state surveillance. Contrary to popular perception, however, clandestine territorial access does not always mean that militants slip undetected across borders. It can also transpire when terrorist groups exploit legal channels of territorial access. In fact, fears that terrorists would exploit the refugee regime were at the heart of some European states’ calls for stringency. Surreptitious entry reifies the idea of loss of control over borders and erodes sovereignty (Sassen 2006). Insofar as terrorist actors are hard to detect, conventional notions of defense do not apply to counterterrorism (Cronin 2002; Paul 2005).
Additionally, terrorist events inflict psychological costs on targets because they carry shock value. By exploiting uncertainty over the when and where of violence, terrorist actors are in effect able to gain symbolic power over state actors (Juergensmeyer 1997). This was true of several surprise attacks against democracies: Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in 2015, Ankara in 2015 and 2016, and Brussels in 2016. These events drove home the message that despite surveillance systems, the governments had failed to insulate citizens from these attacks. Even where societies were on high alert and anticipated transnational terrorist violence, the unpredictability of these events underscored the feebleness of the security establishment.8 For example, in the wake of the Brussels attack, commentators stated that while Belgium had been identified as a likely target by ISIS, and worries had been expressed over its status as a cradle of radicalization, the attacks quickly drove attention to the failures of the state’s security apparatus (Ivanovic 2016).
Thus, on one level, the stealth element exacerbates anxieties that even militarily powerful states are at the mercy of transnational militants. We imagine that militants mask their true aims at border crossings and carry out their nefarious plans once they attain territorial access. On another level, however, there is also uncertainty over whether legal travelers are prospective recruits. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism warned about terrorism’s global reach, that is, its capacity to have transnational and global appeal (United States 2011). Universalist non-secular ideologies, central to the contemporary wave of terrorism, permit groups to broadcast their message to broader, abstract, and often transnationally constructed communities, which they purport to represent and on whose behalf they commit violence (Rapoport 2001). This lends another layer of uncertainty insofar as religion can be utilized as a transnational recruitment mechanism (Juergensmeyer 2003; Lacqueur 1999). The globalization of recruitment also makes detecting and ferreting out operatives more difficult. Foreign fighters, for example, can mask their true intentions when crossing borders.
The stealth element contributes to fears over migration as a conduit for terrorism flows (Bove and Bohmelt 2015). Migration can function as an avenue for transnational terrorism to the degree that it feeds the social and kinship networks that underpin radicalization and recruitment. This possibility focuses on radicalization after migrants have already gained access. A report by the Nixon Center voices these fears: “Migration and terrorism are linked; not because all immigrants are terrorists, but because all, or nearly all, terrorists in the West have been immigrants” (Leiken 2004, 6). The Hamburg Cell, a group of expatriate students that formed around a jihadi radical who had illegally immigrated to Germany, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. Radicalization is a multistep process (Sageman 2004), whereby host-country context can interact with active recruitment machinations by terrorist groups to produce extremism on host-country soil. States also fear that operatives may hide among the general populace and activate sleeper cells within the host (Dishman 2005). The prospect of infiltration makes it possible that foreign violent actors can lodge themselves within the state, in effect allowing them to repudiate borders and gain a foothold in destination states.
Psychological Impact
The desire to instill and disseminate fear lies at the core of terrorist violence. Fear is what links the motivation to use violence to an anticipated policy outcome (Braithwaite 2013). Fear is the pivot point of terrorist violence and, consequently, public perception is the true target of terrorist assaults. Terrorists use violence to manipulate the expectations of an audience that expands beyond the immediate victims. They intimidate through the promise of future violence to come. The public has a double role as the audience of terrorist violence and the impetus for policy change (Friedland and Merari 1985). By spreading fear, terrorist actors also seek to undermine the government’s competence in the public’s eye (Bueno de Mesquita (2005).
Public fears stimulate policy change insofar as political leaders believe tougher policies will alleviate these fears. For public attitudes to have policy impact, leaders should also factor in these fears. Typically, because democratic leaders are office seeking, they are cost-sensitive and more responsive to these fears. Management of fear is especially important given empirical patterns of terrorism: terrorism is a rare event (Mueller 2006). Risk assessment becomes more inaccurate in the face of high-consequence rare events (Kunreuther 2002). Transnational terrorists embody this phenomenon: terrorist actors capitalize on unpredictability to create a sense of helplessness. Mueller stresses that “the costs of terrorism commonly come much more from hasty, ill-considered, and over-wrought reactions, or overreactions, to it than from anything the terrorists have done” (2005, 222). Precisely because these threats are hard to anticipate, ameliorating fear goes a long way toward effective counterterrorism (Friedman 2011; Khalil 2006).
Scholarship from psychology is insightful in terms of understanding how the public responds to terrorist violence. Persistent terrorism generates a range of ill effects. Moreover, these effects are enduring: terrorism not only dampens public morale but negatively (and perhaps irrevocably) alters the psychosocial fabric of democratic societies (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015). We also know that terrorism evokes fear and anger and that these emotional responses are tied to different types of policy demands (Huddy et al. 2005). Fear demands caution whereas anger demands retribution. Attitudes toward terrorism have implications for a range of policy outcomes. Policy change is more likely in the face of terrorism because the political milieu shifts to the right, whereby the public gravitates increasingly toward illiberal and authoritarian attitudes. Chronic terrorism leads to limitations on minority rights (Merolla and Zechmeister 2009). Terrorism rewrites public attitudes by sapping forbearance in societies, thus posing a danger to democratic governance (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015). The literature thus conveys that terrorism has direct and indirect effects on policies. More directly, violence can animate specific antiterrorism measures. Indirectly, it shapes public attitudes toward policies and thereby enlarges the scope for policymaking. The public becomes more intolerant of minorities and more willing to support hard-line policies such as increased surveillance, enhanced interrogation tactics, and restricted civil liberties and minority rights (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015; Piazza 2015).
So far, scholarship has sidestepped the question of how public attitudes toward violence affect migration and border control. The political attitudes that inspire toughness in antiterrorism may do the same for migration and border control. Widespread authoritarianism and illiberalism should generate a political environment supportive of migration restrictions and border crackdowns. If heightened fears bring in strongman leaders and right-wing governments, this should also bolster policy stringency. Chronic terrorism also foments generalized feelings of insecurity, which are linked not to particular incidents or perpetrators but to beliefs that the state and society are vulnerable (Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2007). Even when threats do not emanate from outside the state or are unrelated to terrorism, leaders can animate latent feelings of insecurity in order to push forward hard-line agendas. The death of a border agent in Texas in November 2017 reanimated the Trump administration’s calls for the border wall (Bever, Hawkins, and Miroff 2017). The incident is unrelated to terrorism, but it can still be leveraged to push the wall forward because of extant fears of outside threats.
There are two insights from previous research about public attitudes toward terrorism that I argue connect fears to policy change. The first concerns the distinction between selfish and communal fears, which mirrors the well-known distinction economists draw between pocketbook concerns and macroconcerns over the national economy. Joslyn and Haider-Markel (2007) show that sociotropic fears rather than personal fears connect more closely to policy demands. Perceptions that the community and the way of life are endangered are more powerful drivers of policy change than personal fears that one’s life is in danger. The second insight is that terrorist threats are prone to othering and, at the extreme, scapegoating those outside of the community (Piazza 2015). Violence stirs resentment, creates demand for punitive measures, and exacerbates ethnocentrism (Feldman and Stenner 1997). The perception that threats emanate from outside the community justifies stringency in migration and border control. Moreover, the link between terrorism and border policies relies on the perception that threats arise from outside the state. Threat perception functions through the prism of nationhood, which turns on a hard distinction between the nation as a community and foreigners as others.
Taken together, the psychological effects of terrorist violence link terrorist events to harder borders insofar as border policies serve a reassurance function. They are symbolic because they permit the state to demonstrate its commitment to protecting the citizenry. Public anxiety can prompt tighter policies through a corollary mechanism: widespread anxieties furnish policymakers with greater latitude in pushing forward more draconian policies. Part of this process hinges on the exploitation of fear (Altheide 2006; Mueller 2006). Fears can instigate novel policies or, alternatively, rekindle stalled policy endeavors that favor more rigorous border control. For example, in the case of India and Israel, border security projects that had stagnated as a result of domestic opposition gained renewed steam as a direct consequence of a series of terrorist incidents: after the Second Intifada in the case of Israel and after a series of bombings following the 2008 Mumbai attacks in India’s case.
Nevertheless, hypervigilance is not always about manipulating fear. Given uncertainty about the timing and location of terrorist events, it pays to be overly cautious (Friedman 2011). Policymakers would rather be overcautious than communicate optimism and be proven wrong. As Gelpi and Avdan note, “Policy makers are willing to tolerate large numbers of false-positive predictions of a terrorist threat in order to avoid a single instance of a false-negative prediction that results in a terrorist attack” (2015, 18). After all, it is far more costly for states—and for the political careers of decision makers—to be over-prepared for terrorist events that do not come to pass (false positives) than to fail to be prepared for incidents that do occur. After the attacks in Brussels in March 2016, the Belgian government was denounced for precisely this type of error in judgment.
Targeted and Global Threats
The policy response to terrorist events is determined by how close to home the assaults occur. Incidents that directly target the state’s interests tie into tighter policies in a more straightforward manner. Direct experience can take two forms: transnational terrorist incidents conducted within the state’s borders and events that transpire abroad but victimize the state’s own nationals.9 To illustrate, on March 19, 2016, a suicide attack took place in Istanbul, killing four foreigners and injuring thirty-six more. Among the victims were nationals of the United States and Israel. From the perspective of the United States and Israel, the attack occurred abroad but involved direct experience with terrorism in the sense that these states’ own citizens were maimed or killed. From Turkey’s perspective, however, despite not leading to any Turkish fatalities, this incident would still be classified as direct experience with terrorism because it occurred on Turkish territory (Mickolus et al. 2007).10 To provide a contrasting example, on October 10, 2015, Turkey suffered an attack on its own soil, in the capital city of Ankara, of an unprecedented nature. The victims were Turkish nationals. From Turkey’s perspective, the Ankara incident fits under both forms of direct experience: on its own territory and involving its own citizens. In practice, these two types of incidents overlap to a great extent: thus the majority of assaults that occur within the state’s borders also involve its own nationals.11 While these incidents may overlap in practice, it is possible to differentiate between two types of avenues of impact: targeted incidents that I dub the territorial effect and compatriots’ effect.12
I propose two complementary mechanisms to support this expectation. First, targeted terrorism plays into the hands of policymakers that champion policy stringency. In effect, targeted terrorism sets in motion the process of securitization, whereby a particular issue area is redefined and repackaged as an existential threat (Buzan, Ole, and Wilde 1998). Through this process, policymakers emphasize the external roots of terrorism and the dangers of permeable borders. Securitization repackages international terrorism as a grave and pressing danger, on an equal footing with military threats (Huysmans 2006). Direct threats expand the scope of policy options that are politically palatable. As a consequence, controversial policies that might have been a hard sell are easier to justify. To illustrate, in response to 9/11, liberal democracies adopted tough legislation dealing with immigrants and foreigners and expanded the rights of the executive to survey and assemble information (Epifanio 2011). Some of these measures might have been politically unpopular, without the threat of transnational terrorism, because they cut into the procedural and privacy rights of not just foreigners but also citizens. However, the sense of urgency generated by attacks on these countries’ own territories—9/11, 4/11 (Madrid), and 7/7 (London)—downplayed the influence of liberal reservations.
Second, targeted events have a more pronounced impact on public fears and anxieties. To the extent that border control aims to quell these fears, we should expect incidents that trigger alarm to connect more closely to harder borders. Psychologists connect fear to a demand for caution and defense (Huddy et al. 2005). Tighter controls align with a defensive perspective and borders are viewed as a protective shield against external threats (Staniland 2006). Researchers also document a significant shift in public attitudes as a consequence of terrorism, such that people are more willing to tolerate painful measures, including restrictions on civil liberties (Davis and Silver 2004). Accordingly, the public will be more likely to welcome and even embrace draconian policies that run counter to liberal norms. Harder borders depart from liberal principles of freedom of movement. Absent direct attacks, the public may not support them. An ancillary line of research finds that transnational terrorism realigns the political environment by making the public more likely to elect right-wing, hawkish political leaders (Huddy et al. 2005; Lahav 2004). It is plausible that hard-line leaders are more likely to trumpet tougher border controls.
Territorial Effect
Transnational terrorist incidents that transpire on the state’s own territory are likely to heighten negative attitudes toward terrorist violence more than terrorist events that transpire abroad. Physically proximate events are more salient. An extensive line of research shows that those proximate to areas suffering from prolific levels of terrorism exhibit higher levels of anxiety and fear and that these emotions endure (Allouche and Lind 2010). Analogously, proximate violence is more vivid in memory (Lowenstein et al. 2001). Empirical studies of public attitudes show that Americans exhibited symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in response to 9/11 and, further, that these symptoms were more acute among those who lived in New York’s metropolitan areas (Schuster et al. 2001). Violence that takes place on one’s own soil will also be more jarring and therefore enduring in collective memory. Numerous studies, conducted in countries that bore witness to major terrorist events—Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—corroborate this insight (Allouche and Lind 2010; Braithwaite 2013; Romanov, Zussman, and Zussman 2010).
Compatriots’ Effect
Incidents that victimize the state’s citizens are a form of direct experience with terrorism. I contend that even when assaults occur in other countries, the involvement of the state’s own nationals will generate a stronger policy response. Such events are simply publicly more visible; the death of a country’s citizens invites longer and more expansive media coverage. People are more likely to be cognizant of these events. Such attacks may be physically distant but are personally proximate. Personal proximity centers on shared communal traits, in this instance defined by citizenship. People come to believe they may be next in line. Such events also pose a danger to citizens’ broader community and way of life (Huddy et al. 2002). Assaults that victimize the state’s own citizens are likely to elicit a stronger outcry because the public can readily empathize with fellow citizens. Parallel to attacks on the country’s soil, these events create room for tougher policies and play into the hands of hard-line policymakers who espouse a tougher approach to border control.
Trading Security for Economic Gain
Smart borders demand that states pursue selective policies instead of a blanket clampdown. Border closure targets specific source states and takes into account the past history of attacks. In contrast to global threats that are diffuse, incidents that are traceable to source countries permit selective border closure. A selective strategy is more appealing to economically open states that cannot afford wholesale border closure. Naim (2005) argues that selective border policies are necessary for coping with the exigencies of globalization. He maintains that such policies are necessary for “a government that is mandated to control an increasing number of cross-border activities, on all borders” (Naim 2006). Precisely because states are limited in their ability to identify and track down clandestine transnational actors, we expect them to craft policies that minimize territorial breach by potential threats. However, smart borders do not simply screen undesirables. They also sustain borders open to benign flows. Therefore, permeable borders necessitate that, to some degree, states must trade security for economic gain.
Economic interdependence scholarship helps illustrate how states balance economic goals with security objectives. A rich body of knowledge in international relations maintains that trade and capital ties shape states’ conflict behavior (Doyle 1997; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2000; Mansfield and Pollins 2003; Polachek 1980; Viner 1951). Extrapolating from this, I argue that commercial ties influence states’ security-seeking behavior vis-à-vis transnational threats. Economic and security interests intersect when it comes to control ling borders. The argument builds on the work of liberal scholars who argue that trading states are more reluctant to use militarized force (Domke 1988; Rosecrance 1996; Rosecrance 1986). Mirroring this contention is the idea that commerce and territorial conquest accomplish the same objectives, so that material incentives eclipse security interests in state grand strategy. A more nuanced argument is rooted in the logic of opportunity costs whereby bilateral economic ties are central to the pacifying effect of trade (Oneal and Russett 1997; Oneal and Russett 1999; Russett and Oneal 2001). Specifically, states shy away from engaging in militarized disputes against commercial partners. Opportunity costs are an important reason why states are reluctant to take up arms against economic partners. States anticipate backlash from partners; the prospect of economic loss from disruption or diminution of trade in turn restrains the use of force.
Neoclassical economics would tell us that economic openness predicts open borders. Empirical patterns, however, fail to sustain this expectation. To stress an earlier point, migration scholars argue that trading states continue to pursue relatively closed migration and border policies (Cornelius et al. 2004; Hollifield 2000). The neoclassical argument may miss the mark insofar as it ties economic openness to liberal migration policies without heeding how bilateral ties affect states’ policies. In order to overcome this theoretical shortcoming, I contend that general openness to economic flows may not necessarily entail open borders; instead, economic interdependence with a commercial partner will predict more liberal policies toward the partner. Specifically, asymmetric dependence on commercial partners will inhibit draconian policies against their citizens. Two distinct lines of argumentation support this proposition. Hardened borders and restrictive policies are hostile signals. States view visa restrictions, for example, as punitive sanctions, and the imposition of visa requirements may trigger retaliation from dyadic counterparts. A more extreme example is border barricades: these impediments aggravate neighbors even in the absence of territorial disputes (Donaldson 2005). To the extent that neighbor states perceive barriers to be adversarial signals, tighter policies bear opportunity costs. If these costs restrain states’ conflict involvement, we can expect similar restraints to act upon states’ border-control policies.
A somewhat less well-known strain of economic interdependence scholarship is grounded in sociological liberalism (Viner 1951). Scholars writing in this tradition argue that economic exchange hinges on communication and contact between states, which in turn enhance trust (Fordham and Kleinberg 2010). Through commerce, states gain knowledge about each other’s customs and practices. Harder borders are antithetical to liberal precepts and collide with the norms of a free market society (Flynn 2003). As such, economically integrated states should be guided by shared liberal tenets. At the same time, greater trust entails that states downplay security fears from economic partners.
The state-level arguments can only take us so far. After all, there are highly interdependent states, such as U.S.-China and U.S.-Mexico, that do not have liberal migration and border policies with regard to each other. In other words, state-level arguments are limited because migration control is not high politics and is thus on a different footing compared to the decision to use militarized force. There is, in addition, a societal layer to how interdependence connects with more open borders. Economic ties create vested interests in maintaining open borders. Tighter policies hinder personal contact and interaction, which are crucial to international economic exchange. Stakeholders are thus likely to oppose policy tightening due to the costs on face-to-face contact with business partners. Fervent proponents of trade and capital liberalization have historically trumpeted open migration policies (Hollifield 1992; Hollifield and Zuk 1998). Insofar as trade and migration are complementary, we expect pro-trade lobbies to champion looser migration policies (Rudolph 2008).
Looking Ahead
To recapitulate, border control fulfills two functions. The first one is demonstrative and premised on showing the state’s territorial authority. The second one centers on effectiveness and necessitates screening out and denying access to threats. Border instruments are differentiated according to how well they can perform these functions. The theory of border control makes three overarching claims with empirical implications. First, fears over security lead to policy restrictiveness. The book concentrates on terrorism as a crucial manifestation of security concerns in the contemporary policy climate. The second claim adds nuance to the first by arguing that threat perception varies according to whether violence is directed toward state interests. The third claim is grounded in economic interdependence theory and suggests that trade and capital ties make for more open borders. They do so, directly, through the opportunity costs generated by harder borders. They also do so by modulating the impact of concerns over terrorism. While the theory developed in this chapter applies broadly to border control, the empirical chapters develop hypotheses on specific instruments of control and test the implications of the theory separately on these instruments. Looking ahead, Chapter 2 formulates hypotheses on visa restrictions. Chapter 3 focuses on visa requirements and visa rejection rates. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to border barriers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
