Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2019: Matthew Longo, for The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11

Winner: Matthew Longo (Leiden University), for The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press)

The committee was unanimous in its view that The Politics of Borders is an outstanding example of how interpretive research methodologies can be combined effectively with critical political theorising. Through his detailed empirical “sociological portrait” of bordering practices on the US borders with Mexico and Canada, Longo successfully challenges notions of borders as “thin and vertical” lines between sovereign territories. Longo makes a compelling case for understanding borders as “thick, multi-faceted and binational institutions” with significantly extended spatial reach and increasingly overlapping jurisdictions between states. Building on fieldwork conducted at two distinct border locations, the book presents an innovative interrogation of how states are preferencing security over sovereignty and the normative implications of the development of co-bordering practices for citizenship. With its insistence that clarity about what is happening must precede discussion of solutions, this ambitious and innovative study offers rich insights into how practices constitute borders and raises important and timely questions about their function that will resonate far beyond the US.

Selection Committee:

Cai Wilkinson, chair (Deakin University)

Andrew Dilts (Loyola Marymount University)

Bernardo Zacka (MIT)