| Through a discourse analysis of the Canadian documents stemming from the Smart Border Declaration, signed between Canada and the United States on December 12, 2001, this thesis investigates the securitization of the border and its consequences. It asks: How does the constitution of a smart border between Canada and United States mobilize discourses about non-citizens, security and risk and thus contribute articulating a renewed figure of the Canadian citizen?; The work argues for a renewed conceptualization of the border as diffused into a network of controls for the management of flows. This diffusion displaces the border beyond its traditional geopolitical location, but also into the very social fabric of our society. Thus, because of its capacity to simultaneously smoothen low-risk travel and contain high risk displacement, I conceptualize the smart border as a social filter. The consequences of such filtering upon Canadian citizenship, as well as the costs of intertwinements of risk and race in the management of the border, are outlined. A study of the relationship between the constitution of a 'zone of confidence' and the smart border as zone of indistinction follows, beginning with the securitization of economic life in North America to the biopolitical consequences of arranging such zone of management of displacement. In a word, this thesis points at the emergence of a governmental regime, which, through borders, re-defines the good citizen and its enemy. |
