In her response to Ayelet Shachar's lead essay, Noora Lori commends Shachar for providing the conceptual language to critique the contemporary migration-enforcement practices of liberal states while developing a framework for countering the illiberal effects of these policies. Lori notes, however, that while Shachar explains that the shifting border contracts and expands into time as well as space, most of her empirical examples focus on spatial mobility. Dividing her response into two parts, Lori begins by elaborating on the temporal aspects of Shachar’s argument, notably legal maneuvers that deploy time to police the boundaries of the national body politic. These separate the chronological advancement of the clock from the counting of time under the mantle of the law: what matters is not how much time a person has resided in a territory but rather how that time is counted by the state. By pegging rights to a specific legal status, and counting the time of different statuses differently, states can suspend, slow down, or speed up chronological time in order to exclude, delay, or hasten the inclusion of particular non-citizens. The second part of Lori's response takes a step back to assess the larger implications of Shachar’s findings for our understanding of the political continuum between liberal democracies and authoritarian or autocratic states. Lori observes that, like the enterprises of colonialism and imperialism during previous periods, the practices associated with contemporary migration enforcement highlight the contradictions between democratic ideals and the actual practices of liberal states.

In her lead essay for the volume, Ayelet Shachar introduces the concept of the "shifting border." Whereas borders are traditionally understood to exist at a country's territorial edge, prosperous countries are increasingly utilizing sophisticated legal tools to selectively restrict mobility and access by detaching the border and its migration-control functions from a fixed territorial marker. The shifting border extends the long arm of the state to regulate mobility half the world away, while also stretching deeply into the interior, creating what have been referred to as “constitution free” zones or “waiting zones” where ordinary constitutional rights are partially suspended. To understand this development, Shachar proposes a change in perspective from studying the movement of people across borders to critically investigating the movement of borders to regulate the mobility of people. Looking at cases in the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia, she reveals a paradigmatic and paradoxical shift in the political imagination and implementation of the sovereign authority to screen and manage global migration flows in a world filled with multiple sources of law. When it comes to controlling migration, states are abandoning traditional notions of fixed territoriality, but when it comes to granting rights and protections, the same states snap back to a narrow and strict interpretation of spatiality which limits their responsibility and liability. Shachar concludes her essay by exploring whether there are limits on such authority, and if so, how to activate them and who should do so.

This chapter will demonstrate why Babès’ contributions are significant, in that they go well beyond the almost obsessive nature of French public debates regarding so-called ‘Islamic dress’ – the ‘external’ face of Islam, with the associated anxieties about women’s bodies and their outward appearances – to contemplate the ‘interiority’ and lived experience of Islam, a narrative which runs counter to political constructions or dominant discursive frameworks of Islam as a monolithic entity in contemporary France. Her work seeks to articulate a nuanced knowledge of Islam with an approach that examines the spiritual lives of Muslims, particularly in contemporary France. One finds throughout her work (in the form of monographs, essays, media interviews and blogs) a consistent interest in three aspects of Islam: what Babès refers to as la foi, le rite and la loi, that is, faith, rituals (practices) and religious law.

Steffen Mau, in his response to Ayelet Shachar's lead essay, begins by recapping the historical development of border control. Before the twentieth century, it was possible to cross many national borders in continental Europe without travel documents or controls. Comprehensive systems for suppressing “informal” and non-authorized mobility are a relatively recent invention. Moving on to Shachar's essay itself, Mau acknowledges the value of her approach, which introduces a functional definition of borders. He identifies four key developments: increased selectivity and visa policies, internationalization of border regimes, macroterritorialization, and digitization and new border technologies. While Shachar includes these in her analysis, Mau argues that they can only be partially subsumed under the concept of the shifting border, and may in fact have a different momentum. In the final part of his response, Mau addresses Shachar's suggestions for developing an institutional-legal design that can match the change in border controls, offering a number of criticisms. While agreeing with her about expanding legal obligations in the area of humanitarian migration, he notes that the discussion should be extended to cover labor migration and tourism too. He also points out the mounting problems posed by the establishment of “smart borders." His final objection relates to the question of political feasibility. As necessary and normatively convincing as Shachar’s call for corresponding legal responsibility and shifting border control might be, it seems highly improbable that this will actually come to pass.

This chapter discusses the British relationship with the Continent through the usage of the term Iron Curtain, both in broader popular discourses and with a particular focus on three travel narratives (by David Shears, Anthony Bailey and Tim Moore) that span almost fifty years of British and European history – from the pre-détente Cold War years to the Brexit era. The narratives reflect the evolution of British views of borders and geopolitical orientations, engaging with the Iron Curtain as the hardest European border to date as well as Britain’s position towards/within Europe. Significantly, the travel narratives represent the Iron Curtain not only as a (changing) material structure, but also as a lasting trope of exclusion and isolation. The analysis is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as well as border studies and cultural explorations of nostalgia.