Pushing the boundary: state restructuring, state theory, and the case of U.S.–Mexico border enforcement in the 1990s

This paper is a sympathetic critique of the current view of the state and state restructuring in the literature on geographical political economy. We contend that although this literature has developed a view of the state that is far more complex than a crudely determinist or economistic reading, it nevertheless remains limited. The literature analyzes the imperatives that shape state restructuring in a way that ultimately always refers back to the need to preserve capitalist accumulation and maintain the legitimacy of capitalist social relations. We suggest that an effective strategy for moving beyond these limits is a more explicit methodological focus on imperatives beyond capitalist accumulation. To illustrate this strategy, we focus on one such imperative: the need to reproduce a relationship of political legitimacy between state and citizens. We present a case study that examines the significant build-up of U.S.–Mexico boundary enforcement in the 1990s. The case highlights the importance of the political–geographical relation between state and citizen for shaping state policy choices. We find that a critical impetus for the boundary build-up in the 1990s was a complex set of concerns about security that grew dialectically out of interactions between particular state actors and particular groups of citizens. While the build-up could be analyzed insofar as it helped reproduce the relations of capital, such an approach cannot capture the whole story. We conclude the paper by calling for an analysis of the state and state restructuring that extends the current focus on accumulation and capitalist social relations to include a much wider range of imperatives.