and Johnson 2016). Not surprisingly, as a consequence of increased sophistication, border control requires an expanded budget. Bigo (2014) defines the European Union’s approach to border control as one of policing and monitoring, in contrast to the militarized approach of the United States. The past decade and a half has seen the European Union move closer to the U.S. model. As a result of this trend, Frontex, the European Union’s border-monitoring agency, saw its budget rise fifteenfold (Frontex 2014).
To recap, highly visible border policies can simultaneously demonstrate military strength and fulfill symbolic roles. Rather than debordering, globalization has resulted in a rebordering, a process that rearticulates sovereign power.2 In addition, “the old model of security at discrete crossing points and dispersed monitoring of spaces in-between has been replaced with a model that strives for ‘total awareness’ and ‘effective control’ over the entire border zone” (Jones and Johnson 2016, 194). As extraterritorial policies have been gaining currency, the state has witnessed a shift in not just how but where it exerts territorial sovereignty.
At first blush, we might expect a perfect correlation and an automatic connection between the threat of terrorism and harder borders. In fact, this expectation seemingly bears fruit after significant transnational terrorist attacks, with commentators predicting tighter border controls and expressing fears that the events harken back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11. After a terrorist attack in Ottawa in October 2014, Canada’s former deputy prime minister John Manley forecasted a clampdown on border controls, stating: “If it is in fact related to religious extremism, then I think we will see an increased ramping up of U.S. paranoia about the border and Canada being a source of potential risk for the United States” (“Ottawa Shooting” 2014). After the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France drew up proposals for more rigorous security checks, calling for “immediate, reinforced, systematic and coordinated controls” on the external borders of the Schengen Area. Pundits became alarmed that EU citizens would endure significantly higher logistical travel costs, including longer wait times, and systematic checks on identification documents. The United Kingdom, an EU member not part of the Schengen Area, criticized the proposals on the grounds that its citizens would bear the brunt of the burden.
Moreover, states that border volatile regions encounter pressure from the international community to shore up border controls. After the ISIS staged the Paris attacks, the United States and EU countries called for Turkey to crack down on its perforated border with Syria. Then U.S. defense secretary Ashton B. Carter stated about Turkey, “The single most important contribution that their geography makes necessary is the control of their own border” (Arango 2015). Thus the connection between terrorist events and harder borders is not unfounded. Nevertheless, such an automatic linkage misses the fact that policy instruments serve different functions. In other words, border strategies differ in how they allow states to express territorial sovereignty. Consequently, it would be misleading to expect uniform policy change.
Border management strategies vary according to the nature of the terrorist threat. More precisely, restrictive policies are more likely if terrorist events are salient. Violence that hits closer to home and is easily observable by the public is more likely to spur policy tightening because such events are more likely to push policymakers to take action. In other words, events that directly imperil state interests more acutely galvanize public anxieties, stoking fears over loss of control. Direct threats inflate the emblematic role that border control can play in tamping public anxiety. Previous scholarship has not shed much light on these distinct pathways insofar as it assumes an unqualified linkage between terrorism and border closure. By distinguishing terrorist events by venue of attack and nationality of victims, I argue that the impact of terrorism on border management is contingent upon whether threats are direct or global.
We might also expect material incentives to counter policy tightening. September 11’s deleterious effects on economic exchange within the NAFTA area left a lasting impression. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the United States introduced harsher border measures (Andreas 2003b). As a result, traffic across the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico slowed to a trickle. As Andreas and Nadelman (2006) stress, this was not the first time that a crackdown by the United States halted cross-border traffic in North America; Operation Intercept, an anti–drug trafficking endeavor, three decades earlier had virtually shut down the border with Mexico. What was more significant about the post-9/11 case, however, was that it occurred in the context of economic interdependence, institutionalized and propelled through NAFTA. There are more recent examples where policymakers voiced alarm that terrorist attacks and their aftermath would throttle trade. The aforementioned Ottawa shooting, for example, triggered fears that border checks and red tape would stymie U.S.-Canada trade. Likewise, these fears surfaced in the wake of the June 2015 attacks in Tunisia as well as after the November 2015 Paris assaults (Bensemra 2016). The fears were not unwarranted: Tunisia witnessed a significant decrease in tourism inflows during the rest of 2015 (Kim 2015).
Economic interdependence and openness raise the costs of draconian border policies. Their effects on state behavior, however, are not uniform. The costs are expected to be lopsided insofar as states are asymmetrically interdependent (Gelpi and Grieco 2008). Consider the disproportionate effects of 9/11 within NAFTA, for example (Andreas 2009, 164). The economic costs of border delays for Canada were much higher than for the United States. Bilateral trade for Canada comprises 87 percent of its total trade. By comparison, for the United States, the figure stands at 25 percent. The asymmetric commercial relationship can be expressed in terms of trade to GDP ratio. Forty percent of Canada’s GDP comes from (is tied to) its U.S.-bound exports. In sharp contrast, only 2.5 percent of U.S. GDP comes from its exports to Canada.
States strive for a balance between borders that remain open to economic exchange but yet are impregnable to penetration by undesirables. The balance also hinges on whether threats are diffuse or targeted. Before delving into the interplay between security and objectives, we need to spell out why transnational terrorism should predict tighter controls and hardened borders.
Transnational Terrorism
Terrorism is the “anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby … the direct targets of violence are not the main targets” (Schmid and Jongman 1988, 28). The audience of terrorist violence is broader than the immediate targets of attacks. In other words, the victims are not always the intended targets of the terrorist actors but individuals who are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time (Sanchez-Cuenca and Calle 2009).3 The latter aspect is why the repercussions of terrorist events transcend the physical damage and carnage caused by the incidents. By intimidating an audience greater than the victims of attacks, and by promising further violence to come, terrorist actors aim to intimidate and force policy change from target governments (Pape 2006).
In terms of military capabilities, terrorism is the strategy of the weak (Hoffman 1998). Terrorist groups, even when they solidify territorial control and draw on a global pool of recruits, cannot amass military capabilities that match those of state actors. They make use of transnational organizations to leverage borders to their advantage. They foment uncertainty over when and where attacks might occur through the stealth element. They explicitly seek to catch states unaware in order to cast doubt on their ability to protect. They do so by making use of individuals to transport violence across states. The degree of damage inflicted can be on par with that of state actors (Salehyan 2008b). By doing so, they highlight states’ strategic vulnerability in the face of non-state threats. Gearson writes that the September 11 militants “utilized the long-established terrorist approach of careful planning, simple tactics, and operational surprise, to effect the most stunning terrorist ‘spectacular’ in history” (2002, 7).
Transnational terrorism takes advantage of the processes of globalization. It also shares the stealth element in common with other types of non-state threats—or clandestine transnational actors (CTAs). CTAs include relatively harmless actors such as undocumented immigrants or refugees, more harmful
