The Civil-Military Relations of Border Politics

• In Event: Experimental Methods in Migration and Citizenship research

Abstract

How do anxieties about the perceived control of international borders shape individual perceptions of civil-military relations? The past decade has seen a marked increase in the importance that states and individuals place on the policing of international borders.  These concerns have naturally led to questions of how the border will be "secured."  Reliance on the armed forces—the traditional guardians of the state from external threats—has emerged as a plausible strategy to address this perceived problem, but the internal deployment of military organizations has long been proscribed as fundamentally contrary to normative democratic civil-military relations theory. Using experimental evidence, I intend to empirically demonstrate that anxieties about border control lead individuals to become increasingly permissive of violations of civil-military relations norms.  If these expectations hold, this analysis will identify the micro-foundations though which perceived threat at the border paves the way for the subversion of democracy from the ground up.

Author

• Michael Kenwick, Rutgers University