Mobilizing Discord on the United States’ Many Borders: Critical Social Science and Geopolitical Complexity
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Attention to the political landscape connecting the United States, Mexico, and Central America has returned with glaring intensity, highlighting the visibly geostrategic elements of bordering practice. Scholars have focused on how state power materializes at multiple scales while at the same time being attentive to the contestable and mutable nature of myriad agentic forces. This talk operates similarly by considering prospects for a frictional and at times ambiguous spatial politics. I extend the notion of discord as a productive lens through which to consider securitization, mobility, and migration. I use two short examples—the border-industrial complex and migrant caravans—to illustrate my theoretical concept. Discordance—replete with disagreement, cacophony, and complementarity—disrupts conformist tendencies to analyze mobilities as mere effects of larger systems that unfold coherently, asking us to instead hold possibility and peril together. Dwelling in the frictions of discord directs attention to sites and processes not previously legible as political.
Source: Midwest Social Sciences Journal
Author: Margath Walker
Institution: University of Louisville
Language: English
Topic: Migration and Exile Studies
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4409944766