ABSTRACT
This conclusion chapter presents some closing thoughts of key concepts covered in preceding chapters of this book. The book explained new thinking about border control that expands and complements the insights produced through the peace at the border thought experiment. Rainer Baubock has chosen to assess promising developments towards a 'realistic utopia' within the existing international state system. Globalization theorist Saskia Sassen detects glimpses in the present of a radically transformed future in which the authority to create and enforce borders cuts across the state. She argues that the current multiplication of bordering regimes under globalizing conditions is calling into question many of the accepted norms associated with state sovereignty, such as the taken-for-granted assumption that states must control their borders. Over time, the dynamic between states, citizens and non-citizens could be transformed more radically by structural changes that bypass and supersede state sovereignty, creating new forms of governance for a digital age.
