Liberal Regionalism, Illiberal Borders

South America has developed an intra-regional migration regime that has received much scholarly attention for its liberal and open policies and narratives. However, at the same time, literature has highlighted the “gap” between this liberal approach and more restrictive implementation measures, which include increased border militarization and restrictions on movement. This dichotomy between liberal narratives and securitizing border practices constitutes the focus of this study.

Theoretically, we use ontological security to highlight the importance of narratives and routines to establish trust and a sense of security within a population. We illustrate how ontological security theory can help scholars understand the contradictions within South American migration governance. We analyze bordering practices across the region in the ecuritization narratives and practices in liberal contexts in a more global and comparative perspective.

To answer these questions, this chapter analyses discursive bordering practices across the region in the post-COVID period (2021-present), which have been characterized by several “waves” of militarization of borders (Frenkel & Dasso-Martorell, 2021). We argue that the liberal migration narrative is an intrinsic part of the ontological security of the South American region. Recent rebordering events in several South American countries have put this narrative in jeopardy. However, through carefully coordinated discursive and narrative practices, state actors have been able to securitize the policies adopted at the national level, while minimizing disruption to the liberal migration narrative at the regional level.

This is a process which we are able to tease out and analyse with the help of ontological security theory. The methodology followed in the study is based on a content analysis with a discursive approach (Hardy, Phillips, and Harley, 2004). Principally, we focus our analysis on newspaper reporting1 and political speeches made in response to border securitization during the post-covid period, specifically, between 2022 and 2024. Building from a corpus of an initial 65 newspaper articles that were collected between 2022 and 2024, which dealt with restrictive migration policies in South America, we pre-selected 25 articles that specifically focused on border restrictions, and we finally used 11 of these articles to illustrate our findings. Inductively, we sought to identify emerging categories and themes in the data on bordering, to construct the national-level (meso) narrative in the case study regions. In a deductive manner, we contrast these findings to the liberal macro-narrative of migration governance in South America.

This approach allows us to explore how decision makers narratively construct the nation as in a unique state of crisis, without contesting or attempting to change the larger regional liberal narrative. Theoretically, our approach draws on ontological security theory to dissect the narratives that are used to justify increased border securitization in so-called crisis moments. The theory is particularly useful for illustrating how political actors attempt to provide security, while drawing on the insecurities of the general population, including outside threats such as post-COVID period, characterized by several “waves” of militarization of borders. Through a critical discourse analysis of media and political speeches, we show how elites uphold the liberal narrative while implementing increasingly securitized border restrictions.