Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I dedicate this essay to Jasmin Leila, who twice walked across the India-Pakistan border holding hands with me, at the same point that her maternal grandparents fled as refugees fifty-eight years before: <http://www.rgs.org/jasminleilaaward>. 2. See O. Kramsch and B. Hooper, (eds.), Cross-Border Governance in the European Union (London and New York: Routledge 2004), and R. Zaiotti, Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the Evolution of European Frontiers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2011). 3. James C. Scott, The Art of not being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2009). 4. A. C. Diener and J. Hagen, 'Theorizing Borders in a 'Borderless World': Globalization, Territory and Identity', Geography Compass 3/3 (2009) pp. 1196–1216; See also Part I of D. Wastl-Walter (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2011). 5. J. O'Loughlin, P. Raento, J. D. Sidaway, and P. E. Steinberg, 'Editorial. Academic Re-Territorializations: Gate-Keeping, Power, and Responsibility', Political Geography 30 (2011) p. 1. 6. R. Suermondt, 'Bulgarian Mosaic/Mozaïek van Bulgarije', in V. Nikolaeva (ed.), Simply a Line: No Man's Land between Bulgaria and Turkey/ Het niemandsland tussen Bulgarije en Turkije (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers 2009) p. 136. 7. F. Gierstberg, 'Preserving the Evidence/Spurensicherung', in V. Nikolaeva (ed.), Simply a Line: No Man's Land between Bulgaria and Turkey/ Het niemandsland tussen Bulgarije en Turkije (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers 2009) p. 12. 8. See M. Glenny, McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime (London: Vintage 2009). 9. I. William Zartman, 'Introduction: Identity, Movement, and Response', in I. William Zartman (ed.), Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press 2010) p. 9. 10. I. William Zartman, 'Borderland Policy: Keeping Up with Change', in I. William Zartman (ed.), Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press 2010) p. 255. 11. See J. J. Fall, 'Artificial States? On The Enduring Geographical Myth of Natural Borders', Political Geography 29 (2010) 140–147. 12. These literatures are too expansive to cite in detail here. However a particularly valuable example is the work of Ananya Jahanara Kabir, in particular: Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2009; Delhi: Permanent Black 2009); and 'Cartographic Irresolution and the Line of Control,' Social Text 110 (2009) pp. 45–66. It is worth pointing to a valuable book on gender order in the case of another partition: C. Cockburn, The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus (London and New York: Zed 2004). 13. See I. Braverman, 'Civilized Borders: A Study of Israel's New Crossing Administration', Antipode (2010) pp. 1–32. 14. H. Van Houtum, 'Human Blacklisting: The Global Apartheid of the EU's External Border Regime', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010) pp. 957–976. On the Moroccan-Spanish border see too: X. Ferrer-Gallardo, 'The Spanish-Moroccan Border Complex: Processes Of Geopolitical, Functional and Symbolic Rebordering', Political Geography 27 (2008) pp. 301–321. On the Bangladesh-India border as a complex site of exclusion and resistance, see R. Jones, 'Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border', Annals of the Association of American Geographers (in press), doi: 10.1080/00045608.2011.600193; and on the ecology of violence and transgression at the Mexico-USA border, see J. Sundberg, 'Diabolic Caminos in the Desert and Cat Fights on the Rio: A Posthumanist Political Ecology of Boundary Enforcement in the United States-Mexico Borderlands', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101/2 (2011) pp. 318–336. 15. See L. Amoore, 'Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror', Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 336–351. 16. N. Vaughn-Williams, 'The UK Border Security Continuum: Virtual Biopolitics and the Simulation of the Sovereign Ban', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010) pp. 1071–1083. 17. N. Megoran, 'For Ethnography in Political Geography: Experiencing and Re-Imagining Ferghana Valley Boundary Closures', Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 622–640. 18. J. S. Migdal (ed.), Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Identities and Local Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) . 19. L. O'Dowd, 'From a 'Borderless World' to a 'World Of Borders': 'Bringing History Back In', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010) pp. 1031–1050. 20. J. W. Donaldson, A. J. Williams, 'Delimitation and Demarcation: Analysing the Legacy of Stephen B. Jones's Boundary-Making', Geopolitics 13 (2008) pp. 676–700. 21. D. Dalakoglou, 'The Road: An Ethnography of the Albanian-Greek Cross-Border Motorway',American Ethnologist 37 (2010) pp. 132–149. 22. L. Amoore, A. Hall, 'Border Theatre: On the Arts of Security and Resistance',Cultural Geographies 17 (2010) pp. 299–319. See too the account of border museums dedicated to the history of contraband in Maria De Fátima Amante, 'Local Discursive Strategies for the Cultural Construction of the Border: The Case of the Portuguese–Spanish Border', Journal of Borderlands Studies 25 (2010) pp. 99–116. For a wider account of life and literatures on the same (Portuguese-Spanish border), see J. D. Sidaway, 'Signifying Boundaries: Detours around the Portuguese-Spanish (Algarve/Alentejo-Andalucía) Borderlands', Geopolitics 7 (2002) pp. 139–164; and J. D. Sidaway, 'Rebuilding Bridges: A Critical Geopolitics of Iberian Transfrontier Cooperation in a European Context', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001) pp. 743–778. See also Nick Megoran's advocacy of 'border biographies' in his 'Rethinking the Study of International Boundaries: A Biography of the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary', Annals of the Association of American Geographers (in press), doi: 10.1080/00045608.2011.595969, and the lively work of 'border poetics' group at the University of Tromsø: www.borderpoetics.wikidot.com 23. N. Parker, N. Vaughn-Williams, et al., 'Postscript: Ongoing Research. Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies', Geopolitics 14 (2009) p. 586. 24. P. Jukarainen, 'Border Research in Practice and Theory', Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association 41 (2006) p. 473. 25. S. Michaelsen and D. E. Johnson (eds.), Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997). 26. W. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books 2010). 27. J. D. Sidaway, 'Enclave Space: A New Metageography of Development?', Area 39 (2007) pp. 331–339. 28. V. F-Y. Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press 2007).

This chapter presents Ohmae's economistic visions and claims that borders should be open for migrants in the name of freedom of movement, human rights, and economic competitiveness. It explores various perspectives on a ‘world without borders’ starting from Ohmae’s economistic thinking and cosmopolitan idealism and then moving onto radical alternatives. The 1990s witnessed a major renaissance in border studies, which had remained rather static since World War II. The 1990s also witnessed the rise of the ‘borderless world’ thesis that reverberated with the intensifying flows of finance capital, goods, and cultural influences. The chapter outlines the relations between territory, borders and moral concerns, and looks at the arguments behind the ‘borderless world’ thesis as well as its current significance. ‘Borderless world’ was also a conceptual novelty, echoing the collapse of the Cold War geopolitical order and the search for a new one.

The roles and future of bounded territories have become important themes in research. Scholars have in particular theorized new forms of spatialities that have emerged along with the geopolitical and geo‐economic upheavals that followed the Cold War. Many scholars, dazzled by the supposed power of globalization and the related rise of a world characterized by ‘flows’ and networks, have suggested that we are moving towards a ‘borderless world’ and a retreat of the nation‐state. At the same time, partly as a reaction to globalization and partly as a response to emerging regionalism and ethno‐regionalist movements, a number of states have set in motion a process of re‐scaling in which they have devolved part of their power in governance to supra‐state and sub‐state regions. Concomitantly, new, increasingly technical forms of governance have been taken into use to control state territories. This paper will first scrutinize how academic scholars have by tradition interpreted and theorized the roles of ‘boundedness’, borders and territoriality. Some new conceptual perspectives will then be developed in order to understand the persistence of bounded territorial spaces. It will suggest that, in spite of the increasing interactions and networks, the state is still a crucial organizer of territorial spaces and creator of meaning for them, even though these spaces are becoming increasingly porous. The paper looks at how such meaning‐making occurs in spatial socialization and in the governmental practices that perpetually aim at making territory calculable. It suggests that, instead of being mere neutral lines, borders are important institutions and ideological symbols that are used by various bodies and institutions in the perpetual process of reproducing territorial power.

Introduction Sunaina Maira (bio) This forum features scholars and activists engaged in a transnational discussion about border violence and border protests in North America, South Asia, Palestine/Israel, Europe/Mediterranean Sea, and North/South Korea. It originated in a roundtable, "Border Protests and Transnational Solidarities," hosted by the Mellon Research Initiative in Comparative Border Studies at UC Davis in February 2018.1 This event brought together activists and scholars from around the world to explore the role played by borders, and the work they do, in different sites of struggle against militarization, nuclearization, nativism, displacement, partition, and colonization. As a response to border tensions and violence, protest cultures have produced new political imaginaries and transborder communities that have helped rethink borders and transnational solidarity. However, these cross-border and "No Borders" movements coexist with a retrenchment and fortification of ethnic and national boundaries. This forum addresses how migrant rights, antiwar, feminist, anticolonial, and indigenous movements in different sites have used cross-border affiliations, cultural production, and digital technologies to mobilize against and across borders, but have also faced repression, criminalization, and nativist backlash. The essays here explore the impact of border conflicts and enforcement on ordinary people, and the epistemologies of borders produced in daily life as well as in artistic and activist projects. Comparative Border Studies While border tensions have been subject to scholarly inquiry for years, contemporary global dynamics as well as the transnationalizing of American studies call for a renewed and comparative focus on the making, unmaking, and fortification of borders. Borders—whether national, colonial, regional, continental—are by definition a global and transregional issue. Yet American studies scholars have pointed to the ways in which the internationalizing currents in the field have sometimes recentered a US perspective and privileged the concerns of US academics.2 In the last several years, border studies scholars [End Page 1021] have called for more cross-regional, comparative, and inter-American studies research that decenters the US.3 It was this need for a critical transnational perspective that inspired the Mellon-funded initiative in comparative border studies from 2015 to 2018, co-directed by myself and Robert Irwin, a scholar of Mexican and Mexican American history. We conceived of this program as an intervention into urgent scholarly and political debates about borders that would bridge American studies, ethnic studies, and area studies and rethink paradigms in critical border studies through direct engagement with grassroots activists.4 The initiative focused on not only the Mexico/US border but also those adjoining Palestine/Israel, Europe/Mediterranean Sea, and Afghanistan/Pakistan. In American studies, border studies and border thinking have often focused on the US–Mexico borderlands, with the seminal critiques of Chicanx and feminist scholars who have engaged with issues of migration, hybridity, citizenship, (il)legality, gender, and resistance. Work on the southern border helped remap American studies in the 1990s by using the "field-imaginary" of the "borderlands" drawing on Chicana subaltern studies,5 analyzing the border as a space of transformation, hybridity, and resistance to US imperialism but also as a "shock culture, … a third country, a closed country" and a "war zone."6 However, the traditional critical tools of border studies do not adequately address the current moment, when xenophobic calls to close the borders are on the rise in the European Union as well as the US. Recent work, including by anthropologists, has challenged the "methodological nationalism" of US-based border studies that naturalized the notion of borders as territorial lines associated with national sovereignty7 and shifted attention to reconstitutions of and threats to national sovereignty and simultaneous processes of rebordering and debordering. The US has externalized its borders (as has the EU), mandating immigration checks inside Canada and Mexico, and also moved the border to the interior, far from the border with Mexico, underscoring that it is a fluid, racial, and not just territorial boundary.8 In their important intervention in critical border studies, Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson incisively critiqued the preoccupation with the border as wall,9 and thus a site only of exclusion. Viewing borders also as "devices of inclusion," and as temporal and not just spatial, Mezzadra and Neilson argue...

Transgression as a Rule: German-Polish Cross-border Cooperation, Border Discourse and EU Enlargement by Ulrich Best

Introduction The analysis of territory as a changing focus for political power has moved beyond the exclusive confines of the geographic discipline during the past decade. The study of territory and borders now constitutes a multidisciplinary research focus, drawing in political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal experts, as they seek to understand the role of territory in the contemporary globalized world (Coakley 1993; Diehl 1999b; Dijkink and Knippenberg 2001). The globalist position argues that we are moving into a deterritorialized and borderless world. At the same time, the existence of ethnoterritorial conflicts reminds us that many groups continue to lay claim to specific pieces of territory in what could be described as a primordial, pre-modern, fashion. This raises questions concerning the functions and role of territory as part of the changing world political map. This chapter seeks to examine this resilience of territory as a factor of major political and functional significance, focusing on such contemporary cases as Israel–Palestine and the Balkans. The territorial discourse within political geography has experienced a renaissance during the past two decades (Agnew 2000; Paasi 2002). An important framework for understanding the role of territory as a key factor in the political organization of space, and as a basis for the re-emergence of political geography as a bona fide discipline after three decades of shunning due to its “guilt by association” with the German school of Geopolitik (Newman 2002a),was provided by Edward Soja in what proved to be a seminal paper published by the Association of American Geographers in 1971 (Soja 1971).

Following the 2015-peak of asylum-seeking migrants in Europe, asylum-policies have become increasingly restrictive. As bordering has become a prioritized issue among many European national governments, including in the Nordic countries, practices of bordering have also become more decentralised, diffuse and dispersed. This special issue set focus on such bordering practices as these are manifest in the social service sector. It draws on research conducted in Norway and Sweden and consists, besides this introduction, of seven original articles.Of particular focus is how social work, in its regulations and practices, are involved in the bordering of both the nation and the welfare state. Connecting insights from border studies – and related critical research – with social work research, the articles present empirical analyses of the dynamics of bordering practices among varying practitioners and in varying organizations, including legislators, courts, municipalities, street-level social workers and civil society organizations. The special issue as a whole also raises questions about the ethical and political challenges that emerge at the nexus of bordering and social service provision. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the field of border studies and discuss how it relates to social work research. This serves as a conceptual foundation which we hope will enable critical reflections on the relationships between social service provision and bordering practices in Norway, Sweden and beyond.

The objective of this article is to analyse the conceptualisation of space in border studies. My interest in the subject arises because recent articles published on diverse outlets of border studies have advanced the notion that borders are on the move and not necessarily located where it is expected—at the line shared by two sovereign nations. Instead, scholars argued that borders have become dislocated, displaced and can be found in-between, anywhere even if they have been out-sourced or placed off-shore. This notion of borders “everywhere” gives the sensation that borders are becoming a-spatial, a-territorial, space no longer matters, and geography is dead. This paper challenges that view. Thus, the main contribution this paper makes is to bring back space into border theory by tracing and reinserting spatial concepts into the discussion of border studies. The central argument in the paper is that space and borders are closely intertwined—like the ying and yang; borders are space. I argue that we can advance the theorisation of borders from a spatial perspective by delving deeper into concrete spatialisations such as micro spaces or heterotopias (besides the camp. Prison, mental hospitals, etc.) where bordering practices take place.

This paper deals with the transdisciplinary research area of border studies, in the context of ethnological and anthropological research in Southeast Europe. Border studies have expanded in the last three decades due to paradigmatic and sociopolitical shifts, with visible transfer of focus towards the issues of ?diffusion? of border practices and discourses sometimes termed as b/ordering. Europe and the Balkans experienced contradictory processes of parallel relaxation and abolishing of certain borders, while others are being tightened and established, which is also interpreted anthropologically. Once thought of as specific, Balkans (re)bordering of the 1990s found its b/ordering descendants in the last 20 years throughout Europe and the general rise of border thinking. Besides the traditional approach focusing on liminal and borderlands communities, anthropology in Southeast Europe has also started to investigate not only local communities, but also so-called mobile communities. Anthropology also possesses methodological capacity to discern b/ordering practices and discourses stemming from spatial borders which are not solely induced by the nation-state, and to grasp not only spatial, but also temporal aspects of b/ordering. By combining the ethnographic method, local focus and by primarily researching permanent or contemporary communities defined by the borders and b/ordering, ethnology and anthropology in this part of Europe can substantially contribute to the border studies.

Bordering practices that are seemingly at odds with the modern geopolitical imaginary, such as those explored in Chapter 1, demand a stocktake of what critical resources might be available for new ways of thinking about what borders are, where they come from, and what they do in contemporary political life. A first port of call for such an enquiry is the interdisciplinary subfield of border studies, known as ‘limology’, a tradition of thought encompassing the work of anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and political scientists. Especially over the past three decades or so, paradoxically at a time when pronouncements of globalised borderlessness have been at their loudest, there has been a remarkable growth in border studies. Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson attribute this dramatic increase to defining ‘border events’ of the period, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and the trajectory of European integration. Any attempt at making generalised comments about a field or subfield of study is fragile and open to dispute. Nevertheless, many writers have commented that there has traditionally been a primarily empirical focus in border studies. Moreover, of the two to three hundred land borders between states recognised over the past century, certain sites have tended to attract most attention. These include: the British/Irish border; the United States/Mexico border; the post-World War I borders of central Europe; the borders of Africa; and more recently the borders of the European Union.

Although declarations or predictions of a borderless world have become somewhat ubiquitous over the last twenty years, state borders remain one of the most basic and visible features of the international system. While it is true that a range of issues, like environmental change, migration, or international trade, highlight the growing interaction and interdependence between different places around the world, borders continue to play a central role in shaping, dividing, and uniting the world's societies, economies, and ecosystems. Reflecting their significance for scholars across the social sciences, a growing body of multidisciplinary research has investigated the continuing power of borders in our supposedly borderless world. This article examines some of the main lines of inquiry, research, and theory in this emerging field of border studies.

In late modernity, it is not unusual to encounter the discourse of the ‘borderless world’, and scholars in the social sciences, history, politics, human geography, and other disciplines have been engaged in discussions surrounding this imminent upheaval in international relations.1 This borderless world has not yet come to pass and even within the European Union (characterized by the free internal movement of humans, labour, and goods), States continue to acknowledge the formal borders that separate countries, such as the one between France and Italy. Although the title of this chapter references the Ligurian Sea, in fact we investigate the land border zone between France and Italy and thereby explore the potential for the LL to contribute to border studies. We are encouraged in this work by, inter alia, Watt and Llamas (2014, p. 2) who contend that, in terms of language, borderlands are remarkable places, ripe for analysis along several vectors, including the relationship between language and identity (which we also address in Chapter 3). As is the convention in LL studies, we privilege here the cities that fall within the border zone, examining on the western side of the border Nice (20 miles or 32 km from the border) and Monaco (8 miles or 13km), and on the eastern side Genoa (106 miles or 170 km). From the outset, we acknowledge that Nice and Monaco sit much closer to the national border than does Genoa, but we contend that the comparison is significant, given the history of the coast that flanks the Ligurian Sea.

In this study, the author develops practice orientation in border studies and shows how borders can be understood and researched as a form of social practice. Using a praxeological approach at the intersection of sociology and border studies, the author paves the way for complex border practices in cross-border coop-eration. Her ethnography of cross-border mapping provides a dense description of the daily office work of administrators and allows us to understand how border regions are formed. This book makes a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the young field of praxeological border research. Ulla Connor explores border regions from a sociological perspective.

The inherently interdisciplinary and comparative nature of studies of borders of modern states, which are offshoots of the Westphalian system, has led to their broad categorization into ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ border studies. Raimondo Strassoldo, a leading scholar and pioneer of border studies in Europe, would appear to have appropriately captured this distinction when he described the latter vis-a-vis the former in terms of ‘a new emphasis on the socio-economic aspects; focused on the integrative rather than conflictual processes; and on problems of border people instead of the nation-states; ... instigated by local authorities and European organisations rather than national governments... [and] more than the traditional ones ... policy-oriented’...

ABSTRACTBorders facilitate interactions of various kinds. The nature of these interactions can be friendly or outright hostile. The adjacent states employ bordering practices commensurate to the relationship they have. In a scenario where the relationship happens to be benign, the borders and bordering practices may hardly exist and where there is hostility, the borders are very heavily guarded and the bordering practices severe. In both the scenarios however, the impact of the sheer presence of two different spheres of sovereignty impacts the lives of the people inhabiting the border zone. The line demarcates, if not cultures, traditions and economies, but the conscious of the people and leaves a deep imprint. The paper explores narratives from the border and the prevalent bordering practices at the Indo-Pak border. In the exercise, the paper evokes Chris Rumford’s formulation of Seeing like a State vs. Seeing like a Border (Rumford, Chris. 2011. “Seeing like a Border,” in “Interventions on rethinking the ‘border' in border studies” by Johnson et al. Political Geography 30: 61–9) to evaluate both perspectives from the State and the Border. The methodology is discursive wherein the narratives and stories from inhabitants of the border villages are juxtaposed with the perspective of the state and its apparatus at the border. The Case Study is located in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan, a province at India’s border with Pakistan on its western expanse.