XClose

Global Governance Institute

Home
Menu

Border Anxiety in a Globalizing World

08 November 2022, 6:15 pm–7:30 pm

Border Tijuana (Barbara Zandoval / Unsplash)

What explains growing anxiety about state borders? Join us on 8 November for this digital keynote lecture with Professor Beth Simmons.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Julia Kreienkamp

The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? This talk presents a rich array of physical and rhetorical evidence of growing border anxiety, on a global scale. Some anxiety is justified, but some flows from a vague sense of fear about myriad forces and threats beyond state control. When anxious border-related rhetoric seizes center stage, it can have unexpected consequences for politics and policy. Some border threats are of course real, but there should be a sober analysis of targeted approaches to deal with them.

About the Speaker

Beth A. Simmons

Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science and Business Ethics at University of Pennsylvania Law School

Beth Simmons
Beth Simmons is Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is best known for her research on international political economy during the interwar years, policy diffusion globally, and her work demonstrating the influence that international law has on human rights outcomes around the world.

Two of her books, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years (1994) and Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (2009) won the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs. The latter was also recognized by the American Society for International Law, the International Social Science Council and the International Studies Association as the best book of the year in 2010. She is currently conducting research in three areas: global performance assessments as informal governance mechanisms in international affairs; international border crossings, and especially evidence of their “thickening” in recent decades in many parts of the world; and international and transnational crime.

Simmons has spent a year working at the International Monetary Fund, directed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, is a past president of the International Studies Association, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

More about Beth A. Simmons

Other events in this series