How did Canadian border officers come to think of themselves as a
"police of the border"? This book tells the story of the shift to law
enforcement in Canadian border control. From the 1990s onward, it traces
the transformation of a customs organization into a border-policing
agency.
Border Frictions investigates how considerable political efforts and
state resources have made bordering a matter of security and trade
facilitation best managed with surveillance technologies. Based on
interviews with border officers, ethnographic work carried out in the
vicinity of land border ports of entry and policy analysis, this book
illuminates features seldom reviewed by critical border scholars. These
include the fraught circulation of data, the role of unions in shaping
the border policy agenda, the significance of professional socialization
in the making of distinct generations of security workers and evidence
of the masculinization of bordering. In a time when surveillance
technologies track the mobilities of goods and people and push their
control beyond and inside geopolitical borderlines, Côté-Boucher unpacks
how we came to accept the idea that it is vital to deploy coercive
bordering tactics at the land border.
Written in a clear and engaging style, this book will appeal to students
and scholars in criminology, sociology, social theory, politics, and
geography and appeal to those interested in learning about the everyday
reality of policing the border.
