This review is being written close to a once militarized international border. The reviewer is so close to the border that his phone is picking up the signal from the other side of the border. After the review is finished, the author might load the dogs into the car and pop over the border for a forest walk. There is free movement, the only sign of a border being a slight change in the road surface and slightly different traffic signage. This border, between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland was once heavily militarized with checkpoints, cratered roads, and multiple securitized means of controlling movement. Frankly, the border was an unpleasant place to be. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the border has faded in political, economic, and cultural significance. This change is a story of how a peace accord leads to an opening of a border and multiple dividends. Crucially, it is a story of how the opportunities produced by macro-level political and security changes are then seized by people and communities who make the most of them.
This experience contrasts with many of the borders discussed in The Unintended Consequences of Peace: Peaceful Borders and Illicit Transnational Flows. In this work the case is made that peaceful borders can facilitate illicit flows of people and goods. This stands to reason. Securitized borders in which movement is tightly controlled make it difficult to move goods—licit or illicit. With the opening of borders and possibly the lessening of security checks, then cross-border traffic—licit or illicit—should be able to flow more easily. Arie Marcelo Kacowicz, Exequiel Lacovsky, Keren Sasson, and Daniel F. Wajner construct their argument clearly with case study chapters that look at selected borders in the regions of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Southern Africa, and ASEAN countries and Southeast Asia. These chapters are packed with details, from the essential context of bilateral trade deals and labor laws to accounts of the ungoverned borderlands seen in some regions.
The picture that emerges is often a dystopian version of the democratic peace in which interstate accord facilitates illegal flows that, in turn, destabilize or continue the destabilization of a region. The comparative integrity of the book is achieved in that each of the case study chapters works through three hypotheses, or possible explanations, for the combination of settled borders and illicit transnational flows: the degree of physical and institutional openness of the borders; the degree of governance, institutional strength, and political willingness; and the prevailing socioeconomic conditions of the neighboring states. The common hypotheses allow the chapters in a multiauthored and globally comparative book to speak to one another. The hypotheses provide a structuring and analytical device that allows a “mapping” between very varied cases. In very broad-brush terms, bad environments produce the factors that facilitate illicit cross-border flows.
Briefly, the book shows that international peace provides a permissive environment that enables illicit transnational flows across peaceful borders. An exception to this is the US-Canadian border, a well-policed border with good economic conditions prevailing on either side. The picture from the securitized borders examined in the book is more mixed. As the case of the US-Mexico border shows, there are limits to the effectiveness of fortified borders if the political commitment to dealing with the political economies that drive illicit transnational trade is also lacking.
The work is perceptive in its concentration on unintentional consequences of peace. Attempts to forge peace, like any social experiment, are likely to produce processes and outcomes that confound expectations. The gap between de jure and de facto uses of boundaries can be substantial, and individuals, communities, and businesses often need few invitations to be ingenious and entrepreneurial. The book provides a good reminder that political leaders who embark on major political or constitutional projects are unlikely to reap the harvest they expect. It is also a good example of the need to see borders, economies, and polities as interlocking systems without simple levers of control.
The book ends with policy recommendations based on the need for balance between the policing of borders and the rights of those living in the borderlands. The authors note, for example, the scale of criminal violence in a number of Latin and Central American countries and observe the “need to escape the trap of traditional interstate securitization, and to enhance the tenets of human security” (p. 245). A second policy recommendation emphasizes the importance of cooperation and effective governance, reminding us that “perhaps the most effective way of combatting illicit transnational flows might not take place at the border proper” (p. 246). It may involve innovations such as remote policing, pooling sovereignties, and a recognition that transnational problems very probably involve some transnational remedies. The third policy recommendation, “Promote and prefer peace rather than war, but be aware of its potential unintended consequences” (p. 248), raises the intriguing question of what constitutes peace.
Although the work concentrates—entirely legitimately—on the negative side of border openings, I am tempted to take a different perspective and indeed a different starting point. The authors of this work take peace as international peace, or elite-level peace agreed between governments. Thus the Americas are described as “a continent of peace” (p. x) or the Israel-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian borders are termed “the triangle of peace”’ (p. 156). They are “peaceful” in the sense that the states involved have formalized relations. But as the authors realize, this is a “cold” peace (p. 156). I would go further. It is a peace so cold that it is not peace at all; try crossing those borders for a stroll after work. The essential point is that these borders are a reflection of wider dysfunctions within and between these states. That there might be illicit flows across these borders is also a reflection of wider political economies and the failure of states to meet basic needs. The book is certainly alive to this and recognizes the many nuances and types of peace. It could, however, have benefited from a fuller discussion of what might be called peace and what might be rejected as residing far beyond the realms of peace. Many of the licit flows across these “peaceful” borders do much more harm to citizenry than the illicit flows. The Myanmar regime, for example, has legally imported most of the weapons and surveillance tools it has used to persecute those who ask for basic rights. Illicit flows probably pale in terms of social harm, and state agents have a large hand in many of those illicit flows anyway (for example, timber and narcotics).
The book illustrates well the oddity of international boundaries. Humans are, by nature and need, social, communicative, innovative, mobile, and interdependent. It is the conceit of states to believe that borders, even hard borders, will deter the social and entrepreneurial nature of humans. One of the gratifying elements of the recent literature on peace and conflict is that it reflects the multiscalar nature of humans and institutions. Thus, complementing the top-down perspective of this book under review, we have more sociological and anthropological studies that look at how people and societies interact with systems and structures. Indeed, not only do people and societies interact with systems and structures but they also co-constitute them through their everyday actions. They illustrate the need to see peace and conflict (and everything in between) as verbs as well as nouns. Over the coming years, it is to be hoped that we will see more work that combines the top-down and the bottom-up, the institutional and the sociological, so that we can better understand peace and conflict.
This multiscalar perspective reminds us of the many borders within and across societies and polities. One can think of micro-territorial borders within a divided city like Mostar or Belfast or the social boundaries that largely proscribe intergroup marriage in many societies such as Lebanon or India. The multiscalar perspective also encourages us to ask questions about why so many institutions, communities, individuals, and narratives place an emphasis on “bordering” or the desire to erect and maintain boundaries.
Overall, the book is to be recommended. It is a very good example of an attempt to place categorization order on a set of cases that defy neatness. Each border has its anomalous factors and tells us something about the nonstatic nature of the social world. As a result, the ambitions of this book are due much respect. The book also reminds us that borders are sites of knowledge generation; for example, official data on cross-border passenger traffic. Yet, they are also sites of unseen traffic. Thus, piecing together a cogent picture of borders—and their social and economic life—is no mean feat. Peace studies would benefit from much greater thinking of the unintentional consequences of pro-peace interventions, and this book will contribute to this.
But the review is now written, and perhaps the author will go for that walk across the border, mindful that many borders are reasonably functional and sit somewhere near the positive peace formulation, and that many others are dysfunctional, violent, and securitized.
