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Abstracts Globalization has consistently challenged the authority of territorial states, with the internet serving as a prominent site of this disruption. We use a bordering lens to understand how states have attempted to manage global information interdependence. States have used cyberborders—content removal, website blocking, and routing infrastructure—to create distinctions between foreign and domestic information environments. We show that efforts to control digital information are robustly correlated with the concept of “border orientation”—or the degree of a state’s efforts to filter the movement of people and goods into and out of their jurisdiction. Cyberborders are correlated with terrestrial, suggesting a common underlying preference for assertively managing globalization more generally. This research supplements existing analyses of digital censorship that highlight vertical state–society relationships with a focus on horizontal inside–outside bordering relationships. The evidence suggests that digital policies are deeply tied to broader preferences for managing globalization that do not correspond exclusively with regime type. 

Abstract Pandemics are imbued with the politics of bordering. For centuries, border closures and restrictions on foreign travelers have been the most persistent and pervasive means by which states have responded to global health crises. The ubiquity of these policies is not driven by any clear scientific consensus about their utility in the face of myriad pandemic threats. Instead, we show they are influenced by public opinion and preexisting commitments to invest in the symbols and structures of state efforts to control their borders, a concept we call border orientation . Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, border orientation was already generally on the rise worldwide. This trend has made it convenient for governments to “contain” the virus by externalizing it, rather than taking costly but ultimately more effective domestic mitigation measures. We argue that the pervasive use of external border controls in the face of the coronavirus reflects growing anxieties about border security in the modern international system. To a great extent, fears relating to border security have become a resource in domestic politics—a finding that does not bode well for designing and implementing effective public health policy.