ABSTRACT
Security and Borders approaches the theme of Urban Space and Politics through theories of sovereign border creation, border control and securitization, highlighting recent research on the geopolitical salience of Henri Lefevre’s work. It also addresses issues of urban governance in localities impacted by neoliberal economic policy changes, where the idea of the border is implicit. The five contributing chapters revisit theories and concepts arising from an earlier emphasis of sovereign inclusion and exclusion which pandemic-provoked intimate and embodied economic and social border effects have cast in a different light. Conceptualising the dialectical character of border conditions as fixed legal boundaries of sovereign states and expansionist imperial or pioneering ventures and highlighting the mobility of capital and the relative immobility of migrant labor within the global capitalist system, this introduction reflects on the pandemic’s exposition of persistent structural inequities within the celebrated neoliberal schema of borderless globalization.
