Populism seeks to intensify border security while neoliberalism advances a borderless world. Yet the reality is more complex.
How has neoliberalism understood borders as sites for the regulation of populations, the imagining of freedom, or the mechanism through which states must exert territorial power and property rights that are critical to markets? How does neoliberal border-making relate to that of neopopulists? How are those dispossessed and displaced in neopopulist contexts affected by these border makings and their related securitization practices, and how are community organizations in border zones responding?
Border zones arguably serve as one of the key sites of encounter between neoliberalism and the new populist politics. While neoliberalism’s overarching drive toward economic globalization tended to proliferate free trade agreements, multilateral forms of governance and migrant labor populations, the new right populisms instead draw their political energies through a nostalgic rhetoric of declining cultural wholeness that presents the opening of borders as a national crisis.