The Borders and Boundaries Project

The Borders and Boundaries Project at Perry World House is researching how political life both affects and is affected by international borders and border security policies. This interdisciplinary, multi-method effort is directed by Professor Beth Simmons and is composed of research teams studying border politics across a variety of different research areas. These include: a geo-spatial analysis of whether, where, and why some states choose to project their presence at international border crossings; a textual analysis of the discourse surrounding international borders; and an investigation of how public opinion is both shaping and shaped by border policies around the world. 

Research Projects

Cyber Borders: Mechanisms that Establish National Boundaries in Cyberspace

Can borders exist in cyberspace? 

The Internet was constituted as a global network designed to be immune to traditional concepts of territoriality and statehood, suggesting the futility of applying the concept of national borders online. 

Yet, governance challenges that motivate states to control their “borders” endure in the digital age. We identify how and when national governments control information flows and illustrate our argument with new state-level data on virtual walls that attempt to do what traditional walls do: control exit, filter entry and enforce sovereign differences, roughly along jurisdictional lines. This project is split into two parts:

Identifying mechanisms of state control

President Clinton once remarked that regulating the Internet would be “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”. Our project is an academic effort to identify mechanisms that block, filter, and localize the flow of information according to national preferences.

Predicting departures from the notion of an open Internet

Although early visions predicted Internet openness, we identify rising domestic efforts to disrupt the free flow of information and the conditions driving such bordering strategies. “The Internet allows tens of millions of people to communicate with one another and to access vast amounts of information from around the world. [It] is a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication.” Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997)