States and Security: Border Orientation in the Modern World

Border security is one of the most significant policy issues of our time. How do states benefit from globalization, while at the same time protecting a national space from unwanted influences, people, goods and activities? Answering these questions requires a firm understanding of a state's border orientation, or the state's commitment to the public, authoritative, and spatial display of its capacities to control the terms of penetration of its national borders, often in response to perceived vulnerabilities to external 'threats.' To better understand this concept, this project collects global data on state presence along international borders, locating border fences and walls, and identifying the location, and extent, of state presence at international border crossings. This project will yield significant broader impact through several policy-relevant insights central to understanding the causes and consequences of international border security policies. By developing the concept of border orientation, the PIs are better able to evaluate which factors lead to and emanate from societal concerns over security and why these are expressed as physical barriers at the border. The data generated will allow for comprehensive analyses of the comparative utility of different kinds of border security infrastructure. The granularity of the location data produced here will contribute to scientific knowledge about (sometimes localized) positive and negative externalities associated with various kinds of border control.

This project will develop data and conceptual tools necessary to evaluate whether and how physical border investments impact a variety of political and economic activities. This research endeavor is guided by an innovative spatial concept of state governance, which the PIs call border orientation: a latent concept tapping a state's commitment to the public, authoritative, and spatial display of its capacities to control the terms of penetration of its national borders, often in response to perceived vulnerabilities to external threats. Empirically, the study builds on this concept by collecting original information on state presence along the border. The intellectual merit of this project centers around its primary deliverables: two data collection efforts aimed at better understanding and measuring border orientation. The first is a database documenting the exact location of every border crossing in the world for the years 1990-2018. At each location, satellite imagery will be collected to infer the extent to which states attempt to filter the movement of goods and people at these border crossings. The second effort will tap existing data on international border walls to locate wall and fence segments geospatially and temporally through 2018 as precisely as possible. Such data are essential for understanding changing patterns of traffic, transactions, and settlement and will therefore provide a means of accumulating knowledge on border politics across a variety of social science disciplines.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.