Barriers of (In)Security: The Causes and Consequences of Border Securitization in the Modern World.

My three-paper dissertation, “Barriers of Insecurity: The Causes and Consequences of Border Securitization in the Modern World” follows the lifespan of border barriers, from why they are constructed to the political security consequences of them years later. The contributions of this project are threefold. The first empirical chapter constructs an original theory for how shared international organizations mitigate the causes of border securitization, namely, wealth disparities between two states and migration flows. This diverges from existing literature by investigating how states can avoid border securitization and its associated costs. 

The second chapter offers a novel theory for how border barriers are connected to international conflict, as existing literature has found little association between the two, despite expectations otherwise. I find that rather than conflict leading to border wall construction, it is the costs imposed by barriers, such as reduced trade and security concerns, on target states that make conflict more likely in the following years. This means border barriers create inadvertent security concerns between states, as they become contentious issues they are willing to fight over. Thus, this chapter reincorporates the conflict and border wall literature and demonstrates that border barriers are not always a tool of defense and security.

My last chapter expands upon the second by using web scraping to collect news reports on target state responses to border barriers, as states have many ways of signaling discontent to a neighbor that builds a wall. I categorize these responses into different groups and find that states have many ways to respond when a neighboring theory builds a wall, ranging from conflictual to cooperative. The University of Iowa Post-Comprehensive Exam Fellowship has funded this data collection. Currently, my second chapter is under review for publication, and my other two are soon to follow. 

Beyond my dissertation, my research focuses on geography, conflict, and security at many different levels of analysis. At the environmental level, I have a co-authored paper on natural disaster response, which finds that governments respond to natural disasters with more securitized responses when they occur near a historically contested international border. This paper is currently under its second round of revision at International Studies Quarterly. At the individual level, I have a co-authored paper undergoing the revision process at Political Research Quarterly, which investigates how border security influences individual-level opinions of migration policy. I am also expanding upon my dissertation research with a paper tracing leader level statements about border security over time to see how it contirbutes to tangible border securitization. 

I employ many methods and tools for this research, such as original data collection, large n quantitative analysis, Arc GIS, text analysis, and web scraping. I particularly focus on using text-based methods to help build new datasets for modern security issues.