ABSTRACT This article looks at ABS's evolution thus far with a women and gender lens. We ask: where do women appear in the evolution of the field, and to what extent have border scholars engaged with gender through conference participation and research paper titles that address women and men in the borderlands? We also examine whether the early invisibility of women during the founding period eventually led to the integration of women as leaders and researchers and to the mainstreaming of gender-focused scholarship on the gendered consequences of state policies. In addition, we explore how the ABS faced various crises over time and was sustained by the preparation and skill sets that a cross-section of its presidents brought to the organization.

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of aliens in Neill Blomkamp’s social science fiction film District 9 (2009) in relation to broader notions of otherness. It draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy of becoming, along with studies on borders and migration, to explore the process of becoming alien or “becoming minoritarian.” It discusses how “becoming minoritarian” in this film relates to the broader implications of border policies and the politicization of biometric measurements. It investigates how characters play the role of Deleuze and Guattari’s “exceptional individual” to take an “anomalous” or borderline position. This “anomalous” position places the character’s body as the bearer of the border and the smallest scale of bordering. This paper investigates how the minoritized alien is perceived as a threat to human society, and necessitates control and surveillance. Ultimately, he acquires an in-between status that remains his permanent position regarding both human and alien societies.

ABSTRACT This paper examines forced migration in the villages of the Kargil borderland, situating the experiences of its residents within broader global patterns of war-induced displacement. Kargil has seen multiple conflicts and wars between India and Pakistan, and continues to remain a sensitive border dividing the two nations. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in border villages in Kargil, the paper examines how repeated wars, cross-border shelling, and geopolitical tensions have contributed to migration. While existing scholarship on the region has largely focused on territorial conflict, this paper shifts attention to abandoned villages and their relationship to forced migration. In doing so, the paper highlights how the multiple wars and conflicts in the Kargil borderland compelled people to abandon their ancestral homes and relocate to safer areas away from the border. There remains border anxiety among its residents and those who have fled, due to the uncertainty of life and the difficulty of making a living in the region.

ABSTRACT Economics is a major social science, but not a major discipline in border studies. Over the last ten years, approximately 6 percent of the articles published in the Journal of Borderlands Studies can be considered economics papers. The share of economics books reviewed in the journal was an even smaller 1.1 percent. Political science, anthropology, geography sociology, and their subfields all have a much greater presence in border studies. There are three hypothesized explanations for the relative absence of economics from border studies. One, economics and its subfields assume a unit of analysis that is a nation-state, or a subnational region, and thereby unintentionally limit the questions to be asked. Two, economists are relatively reluctant to engage in interdisciplinary research. Three, borders introduce a number of conditions that undermine some key assumptions of economic theory, such as international public goods, market failures, coordination problems, incomplete information, and the absence of risk and capital markets. Border regions contradict many of the assumptions of mainstream economic theory and leave market-based economic outcomes as sub-optimal. Economic analysis of borders and border regions requires greater openness to interdisciplinary research and a willingness to address issues of power, identity, and institutional heterogeneity.

ABSTRACT Borderlands are haunted – not only by literal tales of spectres, but by the haunted histories, phantom sovereignty, invisible populations, and ghostly violence that shape everyday life at the frontier. This paper advances a border hauntology for Borneo’s borderlands by reading two films distributed via Netflix, Borderless Fog (2024) and Conquer: Lahad Datu (2024) alongside six ethnographic studies (Eilenberg 2012; Mee 2014; Carson 2016; Solmiah 2022; Zulkipli & Askandar 2021; Cheong et al., 2025). Methodologically, it treats film as an interlocutor that makes tangible the affective textures of poverty and mobility that statistics and policy reports obscure. Analytically, it shows how cinematic “ghosts” represent (1) the lingering legacies of militarization, counter-insurgency and territorial claims, (2) contested sovereignty intertwined with ethnic tensions, (3) embodied vulnerabilities produced by structural marginalization of women, youth, and children, and (4) persistent human insecurity rooted in weak protection mechanisms. The paper concludes that a hauntological lens helps reveal how these spectres continue to shape everyday life in borderlands, enriching borderland studies by highlighting the affective dimensions of insecurity and the experiences of marginalized communities.

ABSTRACT In this article, we analyze the processes of multiple bordering experienced by families of irregularized Venezuelans in South America. We distinguish three interwoven bordering processes: social boundaries, international geopolitical borders, and interior frontiers. We adopted an ethnographic approach, with six months of fieldwork with Venezuelan families living in tomas – informal settlements – in northern Chile. We show that Venezuelan migration, particularly after 2017, constitutes a survival migration involving social groups suffering hunger and health problems and even death, resulting from lack of access to food and medical care. Material and symbolic resources that shape this social displacement condition the degree of friction migrants experience with borders across South America. In the tomas, although conditions of precariousness vary, urban segregation and rejecting affects toward migrants impact them in a widespread manner. We conclude that the category of “irregularised migrant” is only one stage within a broader process of social selection that produces bordered subjects.

ABSTRACT This article examines the extent to which the Jayapura–Vanimo twin-city partnership reframes the border from a site of control into a space of everyday cooperation. It argues that although the partnership facilitates de-securitization by normalizing cross-border interactions, its effectiveness is largely constrained by structural asymmetries stemming from divergent historical state formation, alongside social and political dynamics and unequal development support. The fieldwork findings corroborate this dynamic by revealing participants’ differing views on the city partnership: while some view it as a vehicle for de-securitization along the border, others highlight the persistence of structural obstacles and asymmetries. The coexistence of optimism and scepticism among participants exemplifies how the twin-city framework mediates between the theoretical promise of de-securitization and practical constraint. This paper contributes to border-security scholarship by extending the concept of de-securitization beyond top-down state narratives to include the bottom-up practices of local actors within twin-city settings.

ABSTRACT This article explores how ontological insecurity: fear of disruption to predictable existence, drives spatial reordering in the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan borderlands. What does this mean for those who live there? States respond by hardening territory, building infrastructure, and building bypass roads. Yet these anxiety-management techniques produce deeply uneven effects: some actors gain security; others are rendered more vulnerable. Drawing on borderland ethnography, the article reveals a central tension. On one hand, existential continuity is pursued through state-led control and demarcation. On the other hand, it is sustained through Ata-Jer (ancestral land relations) and everyday memories of cross-border coexistence – attachments that quietly subvert the very boundaries official practices seek to fix. These two logics do not simply oppose one another; they are co-constituted, shaping a political field where security for some rests on insecurity for others. By foregrounding this friction, the article advances a material and spatial account of ontological (in)security, showing that border-making does not resolve existential anxiety but redistributes it, highlighting the asymmetry of power.

ABSTRACT Cross-border exchange is commonly examined through regulation, compliance, and institutional alignment, with uncertainty treated as a temporary disruption to be resolved. This article addresses a different condition in which uncertainty persists and circulation continues without settlement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2024 at the Lao Cai–Hekou crossing along the Vietnam–China border, the study examines how small-scale traders, intermediaries, and logistical actors sustain interaction where formal law remains present yet unevenly activated. Rather than stabilizing through alignment, exchange proceeds through sequences in which articulation is withheld to avoid binding commitment, temporal intervals are extended without shared endpoints, and material pressures accumulate unevenly across positions. Within these sequences, intercultural communication operates not as a means of achieving mutual understanding but as a practical mechanism that modulates when and how interaction becomes consequential, allowing actors to remain engaged without forcing resolution. The analysis shows that coordination does not emerge from convergence but persists as a temporally bounded capacity to sustain interaction under conditions of non-decision. This capacity depends on the ability to defer closure while redistributing exposure to risk, and it ceases when delay can no longer be absorbed and continuation becomes more costly than termination.