The conditions for non-EU migrant workers to gain legal entry to Britain, France, and Germany are at the same time similar and quite different. To explain this variation this book compares the fine-grained legal categories for migrant workers in each country, and examines the interaction of economic, social, and cultural rationales in determining migrant legality. Rather than investigating the failure of borders to keep unauthorized migrants out, the author highlights the different policies of each country as “border-drawing” actions. Policymakers draw lines between different migrant groups, and between migrants and citizens, through considerations of both their economic utility and skills, but also their places of origin and prospects for social integration. Overall, migrant worker legality is arranged against the backdrop of the specific vision each country has of itself in an economically competitive, globalized world with rapidly changing welfare and citizenship models.

The conditions for non-EU migrant workers to gain legal entry to Britain, France, and Germany are at the same time similar and quite different. To explain this variation this book compares the fine-grained legal categories for migrant workers in each country, and examines the interaction of economic, social, and cultural rationales in determining migrant legality. Rather than investigating the failure of borders to keep unauthorized migrants out, the author highlights the different policies of each country as "border-drawing" actions. Policymakers draw lines between different migrant groups, and between migrants and citizens, through considerations of both their economic utility and skills, but also their places of origin and prospects for social integration. Overall, migrant worker legality is arranged against the backdrop of the specific vision each country has of itself in an economically competitive, globalized world with rapidly changing welfare and citizenship models.

For whom and why are borders drawn? What are the symbolic projections of these physical realities? And what are the symbolic projections of these physical realities? Constituted by experience and memory, borders shape a "border image" in the minds and social memory of people beyond the lines of the state. In the case of the Turkey-Georgia border, the image of the border has often been constructed as an economic reality that creates "conditional permeabilities" rather than political emphases. This book puts forward the argument that participation in this economic life reshapes the relationship between the ethnic groups who live in the borderland as well as gender relations. By drawing on detailed ethnographic research at the Turkey-Georgia border, life at the border is explored in terms of family relations, work life, and intra- and inter-ethnic group relations. Using an intersectional approach, the book charts the perceptions and representations of how different ethnic and gendered groups experience interactions among themselves, with each other, and with the changing economic context. This book offers a rich, empirically based account of the intersectional and multidimensional forms of economic activity in border regions. It will be of interest to students, researchers, and policy makers alike working in geography, economics, ethnic studies, gender studies, international relations, and political studies.

'Borders' have attracted considerable attention in public and academic debates in light of the impact of globalisation and, in Europe, the end of the divisions of the Cold War era. Instead, being inside or outside of the EU has become a major paradigmatic divide between claimed 'spheres of influence' by 'Brussels' and 'Moscow' respectively. In the aftermath of the end of communism, established certainties no longer seemed to apply. And this included many of the borders within the former eastern Bloc, with some losing their relevance, while others re-assert themselves. As its particular contribution, this book adopts a symbiotic approach to the analysis of borders, drawing on a political-economy perspective, while also recognising the importance of the socio-cultural dimension as found in 'border studies'. This seeks to do greater justice to the complex, composite nature of borders as geo-political, state-legal and cultural-historic constructs in both theory and practice. In addition, the book's approach stretches across spatial scales to capture the multi-level nature of borders. The first part of the book presents the conceptual framework as it sets out to embrace this multi-faceted, multi-layered nature of borders. In the second part, case studies from north-central Europe, including the Baltic Sea Region, exemplify the complexity of borders in the context of post-socialist transformation and continuing EU-isation.

Winner of the Gold Award, 2011 Past Presidents' Book Competition, Association of Borderlands Studies. This book, newly available in paperback, presents a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of borders in the study of global politics. It turns from current debates about the presence or absence of borders between states to consider the possibility that the concept of the border of the state is being reconfigured in contemporary political life.The author uses critical resources found in poststructuralist thought to think in new ways about the relationship between borders, security and sovereign power, drawing on a range of thinkers including Agamben, Derrida and Foucault. He highlights the necessity of a more pluralized and radicalised view of what borders are and where they might be found and uses the problem of borders to critically explore the innovations and limits of poststructuralist scholarship.

Initially, research in border studies relied mainly on generalizations from cases in the US-Mexico borderlands before subsequently burgeoning in Europe. Border Politics in a Global Era seeks to expand the study further to include the post-colonial South in response to the major challenge of interdisciplinary border studies: to explore borderlands in many contexts, with and across a variety of states, including the so-called developing, post-colonial states. Culled from decades of firsthand observations of borders from around the world and written with a critical and gender lens, the text is framed with attention to history, geography, and the power of films and travelogues to represent people as “others.” Professor Kathleen Staudt advances border concepts, categories, and theories to focus on trade, migration, and security highlighting the importance of states, their length of time since independence, and border bureaucrats’ discretionary practices. Drawing on her Border Inequalities Database for a global perspective, Staudt calls for reducing inequalities and building institutions in the common grounds of borderlands. The book features maps and other visuals with lists of links at the close of most chapters. Broadly comparative in nature, Border Politics in a Global Era will appeal not only to students of border studies; it will also stimulate attention in comparative politics, international studies, and political geography.

Rachel Buff's innovative study of festivals in two American communities launches a substantive inquiry into the nature of citizenship, race, and social power. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, Buff compares American Indian powwows in Minneapolis with the West Indian American Day Carnival in New York. She demonstrates the historical, theoretical, and cultural links between two groups who are rarely thought of together and in so doing illuminates our understanding of the meaning of home and citizenship in the post-World War II period. The book also follows the history of federal Indian and immigration policy in this period, tracing the ways that migrant and immigrant identities are created by both national boundaries and transnational cultural memory. In addition to offering fascinating discussions of these lively and colorful festivals, Buff shows that their importance is not just as a form of performance or entertainment, but also as crucial sites for making and remaking meanings about group history and survival. Cultural performances for both groups contain a history of resistance to colonial oppression, but they also change and creatively respond to the experiences of migration and the forces of the global mass-culture industry. Accessible and engaging, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home addresses crucial contemporary issues. Powwow culture and carnival culture emerge as vital, dynamic sites that are central not only to the formation of American Indian and West Indian identities, but also to the understanding modern America itself: the history of its institution of citizenship, its postwar cities, and the nature of metropolitan culture.

Over the last fifteen years, the analytical field of punishment and society has witnessed an increase of research developing the connection between economic processes and the evolution of penality from different standpoints, focusing particularly on the increase of rates of incarceration in relation to the transformations of neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together leading researchers from diverse geographical contexts, this book reframes the theoretical field of the political economy of punishment, analysing penality within the current economic situation and connecting contemporary penal changes with political and cultural processes. It challenges the traditional and common sense understanding of imprisonment as 'exclusion' and posits a more promising concept of imprisonment as a 'differential' or 'subordinate' form of 'inclusion'. This groundbreaking book will be a key text for scholars who are working in the field of punishment and society as well as reaching a broader audience within law, sociology, economics, criminology and criminal justice studies.