Border Negotiations Research Articles

Re-Thinking Border Politics at the Sarajevo Film Festival: Alternative Imaginaries of Conflict Transformation and Cross-Border Encounters

ABSTRACTEU peacebuilding efforts in Bosnia-Herzegovina have largely contributed to further cement stark geopolitical imaginaries that, on the one hand, crystallise belonging along exclusionary and fixed notions of ethnonational identity and, on the other, reify civilisational differences between the EU and the post-Yugoslav space. The kaleidoscopic lens of the borderscape opens opportunities to move beyond this impasse by highlighting alternative narratives and sites of border politics that are often overlooked in institutionalised approaches. At the interface between aesthetics, cultural politics and post-conflict transformations, the Sarajevo Film Festival provides a privileged vantage point to explore border negotiations and harness opportunities for conflict transformation through the medium of cinema.

Polysemic provocations of border negotiation

Considerando a Etnomatemática "como um caminho para uma educação renovada" e em conjunto com outras ideias curriculares, discutimos e exploramos o conhecimento matemático em diferentes contextos e a comunicação/tradução entre eles. Fronteiras permeáveis da educação matemática forçam a tradução que raramente é visível para os envolvidos: jovens alunos que passam da escola para casa e para várias comunidades; professores que tentam traduzir o discurso matemático em culturas escolares para que possam acomodar as múltiplas linguagens de vida e de aprendizagem. Por um lado, podemos dizer que o currículo é a tradução cultural (MOON, 2012). Por outro lado, podemos provocar a tradução como uma oportunidade por meio da concepção de Hannah Arendt de que a tradução é uma ruptura que cria um momento de aprendizagem potencial (APPELBAUM, 2013). Para apoiar a nossa perspectiva, utilizamos exemplos provenientes da pesquisa etnomatemática: estudos etnográficos da prática tradicional de Xysta (Ilha de Quíos, Grécia) e de jovens Roma, aprendizes de matemática, na Grécia (STATHOPOOULOU, 2005). Através destes exemplos, exploramos as possibilidades de tornar explícitas as relações de poder, de autoridade e de conflitos culturais da vida e da matemática escolar para as crianças que são convidadas a realizar as traduções. Fazemos isso como uma provocação para a ação: Em vez de um currículo de matemática escolar que tenta facilitar os processos de tradução para os alunos, buscamos um currículo que reconheça os fundos de conhecimento que as crianças trazem para a compreensão da tradução cultural. A tradução é tanto a ruptura que torna o aprendizado possível como uma pedagogia da fronteira e como o lugar do carnaval em um vale estranho que ressoa com possibilidade.

“Cette fermeture du sens sur quoi, migrant, je bute”: Crossing Cultures in Mohammed Dib

ABSTRACTL'Arbre à dires, part essay, part travel diary, part cultural reflection, and the novel Si Diable veut were both published by Mohammed Dib in 1998. While they both focus on the negotiation of cultural borders and the themes of exile, language, and identity, the works generate sharply different atmospheres and can be read as contrasting panels in a diptych. They reflect, moreover, their author's pursuit of writing as interrogation and struggle.

Performing a Negotiation of the Borders between the Academia, Industry and Community

Performing a Negotiation of the Borders between the Academia, Industry and Community

CONFLICT AND COOPERATION IN PUBLIC SPACE. SYMBOLIC (RE)NEGOTIATION OF HISTORIC AND CONTEMPORARY SCANDINAVIAN-RUSSIAN BORDER

Border twin towns are locations of particular symbolic importance for governing projects aimed at the creation of national and international spaces. Local and central authorities have utilised public monuments and other symbols there as a way of «inventing tradition» [15], and narrating about conflict, cooperation and even collaboration legacies. The metaphor of «integration laboratories» [13] makes them perfect places for border (re)negotiation [5]. Referring also to Reinhart Koselleck’s [27] ideas concerning war memorials we argue that monuments represent symbols exhibited in public space: they have a specific function, in hinting something, «which does not exist as a thing or matter immediately perceptible to the senses» [38, p.40]. Moreover, a symbol «tells about some other reality and is the crystallization of a linguistic description » [38, p. 40]. In this way, «materially existing objects are often useful in embodying and presenting abstract ideas, such as unfriendly relations, international socialism or EU integration, as well as strengthening a populace in their convictions toward these ideas» [5, p. 204]. The aim of this paper is to investigate historiographicallypublic space symbolism i.e. monuments, cultural memory and politics in three border twin towns (Narva-Ivangorod, Imatra-Svetogorsk and Kirkenes-Nickel). It will, however, concentrate on the western part of the border. On the basis of these representations the paper aims to discuss broader foreign policy orientations, and in particular those after WWII: being the sites of intensive interactions they reveal a historic legacy of conflict between «Scandinavian space» and Russia. Further, they have recently employed (accordingly) three variants of historic-political (re)interpretations: new economic neighbourhood relations, EU common border and conflictive revival of Swedish historic legacy. Key words: European-Russian border; bordering; de-bordering; border symbols. КОНФЛІКТ І СПІВПРАЦЯ В ГРОМАДСЬКОМУ ПРОСТОРІ. СИМВОЛІЧНЕ ПОГОДЖЕННЯ ІСТОРИЧНОГО І СУЧАСНОГО СКАНДИНАВСЬКО-РОСІЙСЬКОГО КОРДОНУ Прикордонні міста-побратими є такими місцями, що мають неабияку символічність для ключових проектів, що мають на меті створення пам’ятних місць національного і міжнародного значення. Місцеві та центральна влада використовують пам’ятники та інші символи як спосіб «створювати традиції» [15], та розповідати про колись існуючі конфлікт, співробітництво і навіть партнерство. Метафора «Лабораторія інтеграції» [13] робить їх ідеальним місцем для транскордонного діалогу. Посилаючись також на твердження Рейнхарта Козеллека [27] стосовно військових меморіалів ми стверджуємо, що пам'ятники представляють символи виставлені в громадських місцях: вони мають певну функцію, виражаючи певні ідеї, «які не є матеріальними або які не можна одразу осягнути» [38, с. 40]. Більше того, символ «розповідає про іншу реальність і є кристалізацією лінгвістичного опису» [38, с. 40]. Таким чином «матеріальні об’єкти часто втілюють та презентують абстрактні ідеї, такі як недружні відносини, міжнародний соціалізм або євроінтеграцію, а також посилення сприйняття цих ідей населенням» [5, с. 204]. Метою цієї статті є дослідити історіографічно символіку громадських місць, саме пам'ятники, пам'ятки культури і політики в трьох прикордонних містах-побратимах (Нарва-Івангород, Іматра-Святогірськ і Кіркенес-Нікель). Основна увага буде приділена західній частині кордону. На основі цих прикладів в статті висвітлюються ширші зовнішньополітичні орієнтації, зокрема, ті, які існували після Другої світової війни: будучи місцями інтенсивних взаємодій, вони відкривають історичну спадщину конфлікту між «скандинавським простором» та Росією. Крім того, останнім часом вони використовуються (відповідно) у трьох вимірах історико-політичної інтерпретації: нові економічні добросусідські відносини, спільного кордону ЄС і конфліктного відродження шведської історичної спадщина. Ключові слова: Європейсько-російський кордон; граничити; розмежування; прикордонні символи.

Pak-China Boundary Agreement: Factors and Indian Reactions

Aim of the paper is to discuss the Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement and to analyze the factors responsible. In 1960, Pakistan put forward its offer to China for border demarcation. The Chinese Government did not respond to the Pakistani offer. China was working hard to persuade India for the border settlement. But when the hopes for the Sino-Indian rapprochement failed, China asserted for negotiations with Pakistan. China was also motivated by the concept that the Western powers might manipulate the situation between the two countries and could assert pressure on Pakistan’s decision making process which would bring hostilities between the two countries. If China would more delay its border negotiations with Pakistan, the US wishes might come true and a permanent stalemate in relations could persist in future. As long as Pakistan was dependent on the US for its military and economic needs, it seemed difficult to get closer with China and negotiate for a border demarcation. Despite the opposition of India and the US, both Pakistan and China demarcated their border and signed a boundary agreement.

Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

Since the end of the cold war order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people's lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state—privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state's concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people's expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders.

The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism

While the realities of the global city would seem to render the century-old, modernist figure of the flâneur (and the disputed flâneuse) obsolete, embodied citizens and narrators have stubbornly survived the change in urban environments and their imaginaries, continuing to populate novels and mediate creation and writing. These postcolonial, post-diasporic pedestrians, however, necessarily occupy a different place in the real and fictive worlds, and must be conceptualized and named differently, in keeping with modified urban discourses and genres. Looking at a selection of novels written by women in the early years of the twenty-first century (set in Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and London), this essay contends that contemporary urban, post-diasporic texts create embodied, located pedestrians, rather than detached flâneurs; such figures, exceeding the resistant walkers imagined by Michel de Certeau, are closer to what the visual critic Marsha Meskimmon proposed as ‘an aesthetics of pedestrianism’, a poetics involving the body as a site of learning and border negotiation, through which the stranger fetishism described by Sara Ahmed may be destabilized and contested.

Domestic politics and India’s foreign policy making in the Sino-Indian territorial dispute (1959–1962)

Foreign policy making is inherently a political process. To understand how and why domestic politics affect foreign policy making, we must analyse the deliberations and roles of domestic actors. More specifically, the relative weight of the actors’ preferences, the nature of information flow and the perceptions and tactics of political leaders will largely determine whether these entangled considerations and roles compromise the balance between domestic and international factors. Using this analytical framework, this article shows that in the territorial dispute between China and India from 1959 to 1962, domestic politics deeply influenced the Nehru Government’s border policy and negotiations with China. Fundamentally, the analytical framework deployed in this article is a useful paradigm for understanding the dynamic interactions between domestic politics and foreign policy making.

Risshō Kōseikai within Globalization

Based on several streams of globalization theory and the author’s previous work, this article proposes a multidimensional approach to the study of Risshō Kōseikai under globalization. The analysis shows that this Buddhism-based new religious movement is involved in global dynamics in various guises. Not only does Risshō Kōseikai contribute to global culture through its presence on the Internet, international cooperation, and other activities, but it also acts as a glocalizer by creating new religious hybrid forms at the local level, as is evident in the recent institutional interest in the environmental crisis. There are also indications that these processes, which per se denote a positive engagement with globalization, may be entangled with the defense of particularism. Reactions to the increasing global availability of religious communication and the relativization of religious values are also explored, which indicate the official endorsement of pluralism and an underlying tendency toward inclusivism. At the systemic level, Risshō Kōseikai (as part of the global religious subsystem) is shown to be engaged in border negotiations with dominant global subsystems such as politics and science, and in addressing residual problems left unsolved by these subsystems in an attempt to find legitimation for religion in global society.

Geopolitics Taking the Signature from the Russian-Estonian Border Treaty (2005)

Abstract Explaining the withdrawal of his signature from the Estonian- Russian Border Agreement, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov announced on June 27, 2005 that “they in the EU might have succumbed to the temptation of telling us to ratify it […] on your side also, with some interpretations attached, so that the treaty can enter into force. To stop the EU from falling into this temptation, we have withdrawn our signature. There will be no treaty”. Thus, Moscow actually punished the European Union, which seems logical as with regard to geopolitics and geostrategy, the border negotiations were held in the buffer zone between the European Union and Russia. In 2004-2005 Russia held simultaneous and also interconnected border negotiations with Japan, China, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Estonia, with agreements eventually signed only with China and Kazakhstan. Failures with Japan, Latvia and Estonia derived from Moscow’s position to keep all gains of World War II. At the same time Russia had related all its foreign affairs with the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II held in Russia, which was curiously used by the young Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili, whose quick and clear manoeuvres approved by the West turned the ordinary Rimland country Georgia into a classic geopolitical pivot. And all this was done at the expense of Russia’s influence. The highlight of the process was Saakashvili’s statement that he will come to Moscow on May 9th only if Russia agrees to withdraw its military bases from Georgia. The Kremlin considered it best to agree, however, as the European Council aside the US, uniting the problems of Estonia, Latvia and the non-EU member Georgia, also began to praise the latter for overcoming Russia, Moscow decided to punish the nearest available EU member in the given situation by withdrawing its signature from the Russian-Estonian border treaty.

European [Security] Union: Bordering and Governing a Secure Europe in a Better World?

The past 20 years, since the 1992 Treaty on European Union, have seen the gradual creation of both an “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice” and a “Common Foreign and Security Policy”. More recent is the development of a “European Neighbourhood Policy” over the past 10 years. All three of these policies involved the navigation and negotiation of security, borders and governance in and by the European Union (EU). This article analyses these practices of bordering and governance through a five-fold security framework. The article argues that a richer understanding of EU security discourses can be achieved through bringing the five dimensions to the analysis and using them to study both the interlinking and the interweaving of security, bordering and governance. Overall, the analysis presented here suggests that the five dimensions of broadening, deepening, thickening, practice and being can all contribute to a more expansive understanding of how EU security in the 2000s has been related to bordering and governance processes, and how these have been increasingly interwoven within the EU.

Assessing the inter-method reliability and correlational validity of the Body Type Dictionary

The political negotiation, erection, and fall of national and cultural borders represent an issue that frequently occupies the media. Given the historical importance of boundaries as a marker of cultural identity, as well as their function to separate and unite people, the Body Type Dictionary (BTD; Wilson, 2006) represents a suitable computerized content analysis measure to analyse vocabulary qualified to measure body boundaries and their penetrability. Out of this context, this study aimed to assess the inter-method reliability of the BTD (Wilson, 2006) in relation to Fisher and Cleveland’s (1956, 1958) manual scoring system for high and low barrier personalities. The results indicated that Fisher and Cleveland’s manually coded barrier and penetration imagery scores showed an acceptable positive correlation with the computerized frequency counts of the BTD’s coded barrier and penetration imagery scores, thereby indicating an inter-method reliability. In addition, barrier and penetration imagery correlated positively with primordial thought language in the picture response test, and narratives of everyday and dream memories, thereby indicating correlational validity.

Cosmopolitanism and the Negotiation of Borders

Cosmopolitanism is one of the most resistant debates in the history of thought and civil society. However, little attention has been focused on the meaning that borders have in the definition of this normative construct over time. Namely, cosmopolitanism is always a matter of negotiation and overcoming of delineated borders in the crisis of given political entities. This article is structured as follows: (1) a reconstruction of some philosophical debates on cosmopolitanism in antiquity in order to show the changing meaning of this dialectic concept; (2) an exploration of the meaning of cosmopolitanism in relation to the birth of the nation-state and the rise of the human rights discourse, stressing the paradigm shift in sociological terms; (3) the concept of a cosmopolitan democracy in the crisis of the nation-state and in the new geo-political scenario; (4) a cross-border idea of human dignity in the form of ‘immanent universalism’ and counter-factual cosmopolitanism, intrinsic to the context of daily life; (5) challenges to the limits of cosmopolitanism, as shown by the condition of asylum seekers and refugees nowadays, where the tension between ‘borders’, i.e. universal principles, international norms and domestic legislations, becomes evident.

Ingérence «locale» dans les négociations frontalières sino-russes : Le cas des cosaques du Primorié

“ Local” interference in Sino-Russian border negotiations : the Case of the Primoria Cossacks. This article addresses the influence of the local communities in Primoria on the territorial negotiations in the Russian Far East. The analysis focuses on the post-Soviet transition period from 1993 to 2001 when the region of Primoria experienced diverse movements that were hostile to the transfer of land to China. Based on an analysis of the press and witness accounts of stakeholders who were directly involved in these mobilisations, the author attempts to determine the nature of the interactions of these mobilised groups with the regional authorities. This examination leads us to consider the central role of the institutional stakeholders in the organisation and management of the Cossack movements at this period, with the aim of legitimising their position in relation to the Federal centre.

I Miracoli di Buzzati tra scrittura e pittura

The analysis of double work I Miracoli di Valmorel by Dino Buzzati, understood as the best outcome of his pictorial and literary production, allowed a reflection on the expressive and combinatory possibilities of visual and verbal texts and on the negotiation of borders between the two media.

Borderlands and border narratives: a longitudinal study of challenges and opportunities for local traders shaped by the Sino-Vietnamese border

AbstractIn this article I examine the relevance of utilizing a ‘Zomia-like’ approach to interpreting upland livelihoods in the China–Vietnam borderlands, rather than the more commonly employed nation-state lens. I explore the challenges and opportunities presented by the international borderline between the provinces of Yúnnán, southwest China, and Lào Cai, northern Vietnam, for local populations, namely ethnic minorities Kinh (lowland Vietnamese) and Han Chinese. Investigating the creation and solidification of this borderline and border space, I undertake a historical and contemporary analysis of cross-border trade networks. This focuses on two time periods in which global–local linkages have been especially important in directly shaping border negotiations: the French colonial period and the contemporary economic reform era. Present-day border narratives collected in both countries during ethnographic fieldwork with local traders managing important highland commodities shed light on the means by which the borderline and borderland spaces are continuing to shape both prospects and constraints.

Cultural production and negotiation of borders: Introduction to the Dossier

The cultural production of borders can be as read as referring to part of the economy, as an aesthetic site of creativity and border negotiation, and a cultural factor in the bordering process. The need to understand these cultural dimensions of borders and borderlands has lead to interdisciplinary interest in narratives, aesthetic forms, and cultural memory. Border poetics and related forms of spatial poetics can provide fruitful approaches to specific literary texts, films and other artworks, as well as to bordering in general. This special dossier for the Journal of Borderlands Studies presents papers from the 2008 ABS European conference in Kirkenes, which had “Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders” as its theme and which brought together a wide range of researchers from both the social sciences and the humanities, raising questions about the role of culture in borderlands and also focusing on borders in Sub‐Arctic Europe. The following selection of papers addresses films, poetry, novels and cultural heritage connected to specific topographical borderlands.

Challenging the border as barrier: Liminality in Terrence Malick's the thin red line

This paper is about the cultural production and negotiation of borders and boundaries in and through contemporary Hollywood war and action movies. It works on the assumption that the way borders are represented in artifacts of popular culture has an impact on political discourse and, therefore, on border practices. War and action movies are read through the concept of the border, i.e. the way in which conventions of representing self and other, friend and foe, give rise to epistemological and topographical barriers limiting the subject positions available within a particular movie discourse are sketched out. After having assessed these border effects in Aliens, Black Hawk Down, and 300, the article turns to The Thin Red Line. The concept of liminality is introduced in order to describe the techniques through which Malick's movie challenges and disrupts the notion of borders as barriers interlocking self and other in relations of mutually exclusive hostility. In reconfiguring the border as a zone of contact and negotiation, liminality enables a subversion of the subject positions implied by these barriers and enables a reconstitution of both the divided entities, effectively turning dogs‐of‐war back into human beings.

The Kurillian Knot: A History of Japanese-Russian Border Negotiations. By Hiroshi Kimura. Translated by Mark Ealey. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. xxix, 260 pp. $55.00 (cloth). - Northern Territories, Asia-Pacific Regional Conflicts and the Åland Experience: Untying the Kurillian Knot. Edited by Kimie Hara and Geoffrey Jukes. London: Routledge, 2009. xv, 145 pp. $130.00 (cloth)

The Kurillian Knot: A History of Japanese-Russian Border Negotiations. By Hiroshi Kimura. Translated by Mark Ealey. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. xxix, 260 pp. 130.00 (cloth) - Volume 69 Issue 1