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Geopolitics of Border Hardening: Protecting Statehood through Re-territorialisation
Mičko, Branislav ; Romancov, Michael (advisor) ; Doboš, Bohumil (referee) ; Lepič, Martin (referee)
The presented dissertation seeks to answer why states construct barriers on their borders. In order to provide an answer, a new theoretical approach is proposed based on re-reading the works of Carl Schmitt. The offered theory builds upon existing scholarship and is centred around the concept of nomos, defined as a political order consisting of a performative way of life and land division that is underlying the political existence of states. The basic argument advanced here is that border barriers are constructed against hard-to-identify strangers to this order. Seven case studies are offered where the process of barrier construction is tracked back- to-back with various developments pertaining to the identified nomos. The results confirm the existence of hard-to-identify strangers challenging the respective nomos in different ways and their role in the process leading to the barrier construction. For the study of border barriers, this implies the importance of the issue of strangeness and identification in predicting barrier construction. The work also demonstrates nomos' potential usefulness as an analytic prism for geopolitical research.
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Border Barriers in the Modern World: Factors Contributing to Barrier-building Practices in the post-1945 World
Mičko, Branislav ; Riegl, Martin (advisor) ; Bahenský, Vojtěch (referee)
The number of border barriers has increased rapidly in the last decades. These barriers appeared between the wealthy and the poor, between the stable and those ridden by civil wars, between traditional military rivals and even between partners in the integration process. This suggests that a complex theory is necessary to explain the phenomenon of border barrier building. The presented work aims to provide an answer to the question of why states build border barriers by the use of Schmitt's theory of state based on nomos, sovereignty and political unity in interaction with globalization. This theory served as a framework for establishing the independent variables, namely challenges to land-appropriation, challenges to sovereignty from military threat, challenges to sovereignty from cross-border ethnic group, challenges to political unity from irregular mass migration and finally challenges to political unity from terrorism. These were then tested using regression analysis with number of border barriers constructed by a state serving as a dependent variable. The results suggest that states that often face challenges to land-appropriation, to sovereignty coming from politicised cross-border ethnic groups and to political unity from irregular mass migration build more border barriers than those that...
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