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Acknowledgments:
The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada; research and presentation was part of the grant, Standing Guard: The New Canadian Border. This paper was presented at the 2009 Canadian Political Science Association meeting in Ottawa; the authors wish to thank the participants, including David Long, who made some very useful suggestions. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers and editors of CJPS.
Introduction
Over 80 per cent of the Canadian population lives within 100 kilometers of the US-Canada border, and cross-border power dynamics have long structured political, social, and economic policy in Canada. For the majority of the twentieth century, the bilateral relationship was characterized by "the longest undefended border in the world." This has fundamentally changed from undefended border to a smart border--and from a focus on facilitation to one of defense in depth. In this article we examine how the representation of the US-Canada border changed in official and bureaucratic discourse. We apply the Copenhagen School theory of securitization to the discourse of border security, which is the model in which the elite names an emergency and, with audience acceptance, the political sector becomes a matter for security policy, reducing possibilities for democratic debate. Securitization theory alone however cannot account for the complex changes we observe. Consequently, we use insights from the Paris School, based on analysis centred on notions of field and habitus borrowed from Bourdieu, to make two points: the process of securitization is not only a linguistic act but takes place within a social context; also, the process of securitization is not a single coup de grace but an iterative process within a particular field. We demonstrate this through discursive analysis of American policy statements between 2004 and 2005 and a participant observation of an American expert consultation on border security technologies in 2009.
Two empirical findings demonstrate our key theoretical insights. First, ideas, narratives, tropes and language used in the securitization of the US-Canada border have their own internal momentum that does not necessarily correspond to historical realities; in this example, the case of Ahmed Ressam (the Millennium bomber) is almost entirely absent from the discourse after 2001. Second, the trope of terrorism...