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Border areas have been and remain present in public discourse because of growing concern around the spaces they entail for the transfer of humans and goods. Taking this as a starting point, this paper discusses some analytical frameworks related to the notion of borders in order to locate the current discussion. On the one hand, it shows the tendency to associate borders with a limit marking the sovereignty of states and determining who is inside and who is outside. On the other, the focus on the national ignores the daily life unfolding in the border areas, whose constitution also demarcates conflict spaces. Using the Tarapacá border (Chile) as a case study, the analysis concludes that the functioning of the border acts as a heterogeneous architecture. It is also observed how it has changed in materiality and operates as a multilocal exclusion/inclusion mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The border can no longer be understood as a line demarcating a State's sovereignty. On the contrary, border production, that is, border deployment via multiple spaces that are internal and external to the State itself, brings about a recomposition of sovereign power. Taking the EU framework as a case study, this paper examines this recomposition based on its interweaving with the security ethos. The border emerges as a shifting geography of imprecise limits through which processes of capturing spaces and subjectivities are activated. This capture, which combines increasingly extensive and invasive surveillance with militarised control rationales, is one of the most notorious manifestations of a securitarian act that is legitimised in the bio-necro-political management of a migrant subjectivity that is seen, largely, in terms of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, the EU began collecting the personal data of people arriving from third countries in order to control migratory flows within the EU. However, since the 9/11 attacks function creep has led to this information, which was originally collected for EU border management, being used by police authorities. Information systems such as SIS, VIS, CIS and Eurodac have been amending their own regulations to permit access by police authorities from the member states and Europol. This paper analyses the potential conflict arising from these practises and the fundamental right to data protection in the EU. First, general and sectoral data protection rules applicable to the data processed by SIS, VIS, CIS and Eurodac will be examined. After that, this study will assess whether allowing law enforcement authorities to access such EU information systems could violate the EU principles of necessity and purpose limitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the border shared by Peru, Colombia and Brazil has become an enclave of drug production and trafficking for the international markets. It is a territory whose control is disputed by non-state actors and where state security forces suffer from severe material and transport limitations. This paper takes an ethnographic approach to explain the limitations of border security and the institutional challenges of controlling drug and wood trafficking in this context. It places the ideas of reproduction and social change at the centre of the discussion on drugs and borders, as key ways of thinking about the dynamics of growing and processing coca-derived drugs in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse theory is useful for understanding the creation of borders, whether material or imaginary. This paper addresses three situations on Mexico's southern border between 2000 and 2015 in which elements of discourse theory may be applied. The outcomes were the following: 1) correlations may be made between the elements of the discourse moving from the northern to the southern border, but not in the opposite direction; 2) the process of securitising the discourse about migrants is continuous, and new securitising elements are regularly added; 3) an "elastic borders" phenomenon exists, where borders extend or retract, thereby creating new border regions; and 4) discourses around the southern border are constructed with more pejorative elements than the northern, despite the fact that crime rates are higher in the north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]