The State, Transborder Movements, and Deterritorialised Identity in South Asia

Abstract

The state, border and people’s mobility have an intimate but a complex relation in globalised world because the states’ roles become catalysts in making people mobile across borders. The states produce borders as much as borders reproduce the states in terms of territoriality, while “deterritorialisation” features the contemporary globalised world. Therefore, transborder movement, that denotes mobility of people across borders, has become an inescapable part of modern state system as “the notion of intensification of globalization,” as borders both separate and connect states. Borders are dynamic and dyadic in the interface of state and non-state actors involved in border making and in its operations. The transborder movement becomes a complex web when the states deal with the mobility as an issue of national/regional security, legal/illegal trades, growing militancy, terrorisation of regions and the questions of citizenship. The chapter discusses growing trends of transborder mobility in this region since South Asian states could be ideal cases to understand such dynamic and dialectical relations between transborder movements and the states. It unfolds that transborder movement is also deeply entangled with the retaining, regaining and transforming identity in deterritorialised global landscape. Therefore, the nexus between transborder movements and deterritorialised identity demands serious academic attentions and the deep analysis with empirically grounded and contextually rooted cases.