Migration, Borders, Justice, Human Rights

The key objective of this research group is to explore the multidimensional changes of border regimes in the Americas in the context of transnational movements of people, money, goods, institutions, ideas, and ideologies. As a result of international economic, legal, and policy agreements, as well as collaborations among military and police forces in various countries, traditional national borders are undergoing a radical change of function in the Americas, becoming less reliable lines of separation. Such processes of “debordering” are increasingly accompanied by simultaneous processes of “rebordering” on a subnational level in the form of newly proliferating internal borders, often shaped along ethnic, political, or economic lines (e.g., migrant workers’ camps, narco towns, indigenous communities, or gated communities). Major changes in economic developments (e.g., international or regional trade agreements), demographics (e.g., transnational labor migration from Central America to Mexico, the U.S. and Canada), the post-9/11 political and military integration of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., problems of narco-violence and national security, and the strengthening of collective and regional political identities in Latin America and Canada (e.g., indigenous movements) are set to dominate the social and political agendas of the nations in the Americas for the coming decades. These developments will challenge the traditional notion and function of borders as demarcations of political and legal sovereignty while demonstrating the importance of re-conceptionalizing and re-semanticizing them as multidimensional sites of political, social, legal, and economic interdependence, cooperation and exchange, but also violence and human rights violations.