Mobility, Mediation and Territoriality on a Haitian-Dominican Border Crossing

Abstract

xGovernance of mobility is a key feature of state-making, which produces and is produced by a dynamic relation between territory (i.e., the spatial limits of the state and the extent of its coercive power, typically marked as a line on a map) and territoriality (i.e., the cross-cutting legal jurisdictions, instruments, codes, and mediations of territory). This article considers mobility regimes at a specific border crossing between the Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic as a material and performative site of mobility, bordering and debordering through which territoriality is practiced, mediated, and contested. Employing both an autoethnography of the border crossing and a deeper macro-history of colonial and post-independence mobility regimes that have formed and transformed the island of Hispaniola, this article extends relational and processual approaches to mobility, bordering and territoriality. It builds on Claude Raffestin’s relational concept of territoriality [Raffestin 1977; 1980; 1984; 1986] especially as interpreted via recent Anglophone socio-spatial theory [Klauser 2012], while also drawing on multi-scalar sociological approaches to territory and debordering [Sassen 2013], critical border studies [Paasi 2012; Geopolitics 2012], and mobilities research [Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Adey et al. 2013]. The relation between mobility, space and power is an important theme in critical mobilities research [Sheller and Urry 2006; Jensen 2011; Baerenholdt 2013],