Theorizing Borders in the Shadow of Imperial Violence

Abstract

This chapter examines some of the key contributions from the field of border studies over the last 25 years, noting that while many of the critics expand and complicate this theoretical landscape, extending it to questions beyond territorial geopolitical matters, they often shy away from an analysis grounded in the materiality of political economy, resorting instead to postmodernist explanatory categories such as “scapes” and “edges.” Such explanations of and reactions to border rules, this chapter argues, limit the scope and possibilities of these critical contributions, as they fail to shed sufficient light on the specific ways in which key factors operate in the construction of borders: both the historical traces of settler colonialism and imperialism and the contemporary spatial politics of neoliberalism and capital accumulation. The movement of wealth, the circulation of commodities, and the regulation of labor are vital nodes in understanding why borders exist, why they persist, and why they take the forms they do, even as the work they do shifts and changes over time.