Mobilizing Discord on the United States’ Many Borders: Critical Social Science and Geopolitical Complexity

Attention to the political landscape connecting the United States, Mexico, and Central America has returned with glaring intensity, highlighting the visibly geostrategic elements of bordering practice. Scholars have focused on how state power materializes at multiple scales while at the same time being attentive to the contestable and mutable nature of myriad agentic forces. This talk operates similarly by considering prospects for a frictional and at times ambiguous spatial politics. I extend the notion of discord as a productive lens through which to consider securitization, mobility, and migration. I use two short examples—the border-industrial complex and migrant caravans—to illustrate my theoretical concept. Discordance—replete with disagreement, cacophony, and complementarity—disrupts conformist tendencies to analyze mobilities as mere effects of larger systems that unfold coherently, asking us to instead hold possibility and peril together. Dwelling in the frictions of discord directs attention to sites and processes not previously legible as political.