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This paper proposes a reflection on borders that considers its operability as a governance space. This reading means transcending the territorial aspect of a border - and its sense of sovereign affirmation - and looking at its functionality in terms of circulation being a matter for government, in what should be called the border's biopolitical decline. In this sense, government practices that define the border may be read in terms of the striation of space rather than the containment of a territory. The governance problem the border poses is one of reconciling porousness and selectivity. This encourages the construction of "smart borders" via innovations of a technological nature that essentially focus on the filtering capabilities of actuarial and biometric techniques. The paper addresses the transformations of this kind noted in the Schengen Area. [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]