Book Review: On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place, by Paulina Ochoa Espejo

• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Date: 01 February 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211020772
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(1) 177 –186

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place, by Paulina Ochoa Espejo.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 344 pp.

Reviewed by: Catherine Lu, Department of Political Science, McGill University,

Montreal, Canada

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211020772

Crossing an international political border is an occasion when many of us are

reminded of the limits and exclusions of political membership and belonging.

Borders have also taken on new and paradoxical significance in the times of

COVID-19. On the one hand, the virus spread rapidly to become a pandemic

because of the porousness of borders in a globalized world. On the other

hand, the pandemic has mobilized the strictest exercises of border controls by

states in their attempts to halt the spread of the virus through restricting inter-

national, and even regional intrastate, travel. But are such borders justified?

Where should they be drawn? Who has a right to control borders? And how

should they be controlled?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo’s On Borders offers an exciting and refreshing take

on how we should think about borders. Written in a vivacious manner, and

drawing on insights from multiple disciplines beyond political philosophy—

including history, law, and geography—her book makes two important con-

tributions. First, the book aims to dethrone a common view of borders as

walls that act as the physical territorial dividers and definers of autonomous

or self-determining collective agents or peoples. Such a view is descriptively

distorting and a dangerous ideal that drives contemporary dysfunctional bor-

der politics.

Second, the book provides an alternative way of thinking of borders as

places that give rise to place-specific political and moral duties. Instead of

viewing borders as markers of separate identities, the book conceptualizes

borders as geographical and ecological places, understood as “the web of

practices and concrete material forces that connect humans to animals, plants,

and things” (14). Borders are “jurisdictional lines, which in practice create

physical boundaries that cut across natural regions . . . but also are a point of

1020772PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211020772Political TheoryBook Reviews

book-review2021