In Brief History of the Triple Border, historian Micael Alvino da Silva explains the formation of the Argentina–Brazil–Paraguay border, based on two key processes: the construction of the then largest hydroelectric power plant in the world (Itaipu Binacional) and the creation of the most important city in Paraguay, after the capital Asunción (Ciudad del Este). As a result, the region has become the main frontier of South America in terms of population and the movement of people and goods.

US Agencies at the Mexican Border were overwhelmed in 2014 as tens of thousands of unaccompanied children arrived from Central America. Unprepared to receive migrants of this particular kind, the US government deployed troops to carry out a new border mission: the feeding, care, and housing-of this wave of children. This event highlights the complex social, economic, and political issues that arise along international borders. In American Crossings, nine scholars consider the complicated modern history of borders in the Western Hemisphere, examining them as geopolitical boundaries, key locations for internal security, spaces for international-trade, and areas where national and community identities are defined.

"A transnational approach to the history of a key Latin American border region"--Provided by publisher.

This highly original work of anthropology combines extensive ethnographic fieldwork and investigative journalism to explain how security is understood, experienced, and constructed along the Triple Frontera, the border region shared by Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. One of the major "hot borders" in the Western Hemisphere, the Triple Frontera is associated with drug and human trafficking, contraband, money laundering, and terrorism. It's also a place where residents, particularly on the Argentine side, are subjected to increased governmental control and surveillance. How does a scholar tell a story about a place characterized by illicit international trading, rampant violence, and governmental militarization? Jusionyte inventively centered her ethnographic fieldwork on a community of journalists who investigate and report on crime and violence in the region. Through them she learned that a fair amount of petty, small-scale illicit trading goes unreported—a consequence of a community invested in promoting the idea that the border is a secure place that does not warrant militarized attention. The author's work demonstrates that while media is often seen as a powerful tool for spreading a sense of danger and uncertainty, sensationalizing crime and violence, and creating moral panics, journalists can actually do the opposite. Those who selectively report on illegal activities use the news to tell particular types of stories in an attempt to make their communities look and ultimately be more secure.

An insightful look at how Brazil and Argentina employed national parks to develop and settle frontier areas.

“Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Undoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights movements within a transnational analysis of capitalism, labor exploitation, settler colonialism, state building, and racialized empire, it provides the alternative conceptual frameworks of border imperialism and decolonization. Drawing on the author’s experiences in No One Is Illegal, this work offers relevant insights for all social movement organizers on effective strategies to overcome the barriers and borders within movements in order to cultivate fierce, loving, and sustainable communities of resistance striving toward liberation. The author grounds the book in collective vision, with short contributions from over twenty organizers and writers from across North America. Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and popular educator rooted in emancipatory movements and communities for over a decade. Praise for Undoing Border Imperialism: “Border imperialism is an apt conceptualization for capturing the politics of massive displacement due to capitalist neoglobalization. Within the wealthy countries, Canada’s No One Is Illegal is one of the most effective organizations of migrants and allies. Walia is an outstanding organizer who has done a lot of thinking and can write—not a common combination. Besides being brilliantly conceived and presented, this book is the first extended work on immigration that refuses to make First Nations sovereignty invisible.”—Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author of Indians of the Americas and Blood on the Border “Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism demonstrates that geography has certainly not ended, and nor has the urge for people to stretch out our arms across borders to create our communities. One of the most rewarding things about this book is its capaciousness—astute insights that emerge out of careful organizing linked to the voices of a generation of strugglers, trying to find their own analysis to build their own movements to make this world our own. This is both a manual and a memoir, a guide to the world and a guide to the organizer's heart.”—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World “This book belongs in every wannabe revolutionary’s war backpack. I addictively jumped all over its contents: a radical mixtape of ancestral wisdoms to present-day grounded organizers theorizing about their own experiences. A must for me is Walia’s decision to infuse this volume’s fight against border imperialism, white supremacy, and empire with the vulnerability of her own personal narrative. This book is a breath of fresh air and offers an urgently needed movement-based praxis. Undoing Border Imperialism is too hot to be sitting on bookshelves; it will help make the revolution.”—Ashanti Alston, Black Panther elder and former political prisoner

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off. Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.