Border Space Research Articles

Border Residents and Cross border Crimes in Ghana: An Empirical Study of Aflao

Border residents have been noted for their involvement in goods smuggling and other illegal cross border exchanges as coping mechanisms for poverty and unemployment. This study assesses the veracity of this claim through a field survey of the eastern border town of Aflao. The result of the study shows that challenges of poverty and unemployment have forced border residents to exploit their location in the border space as coping strategy by engaging in officially proscribed activities. These activities involve crimes such as goods smuggling, smuggling facilitation, armed robbery and petty stealing, drug trafficking, human trafficking and arms trafficking. While border residents are likely to see some of these activities (armed robbery and petty stealing, drug trafficking, human trafficking and arms trafficking) as crimes, they would normally accept that goods smuggling and aiding smuggling are not crimes because they serve as livelihood options, which contribute to reducing unemployment and poverty in border areas. To be effective, border management has to be comprehensive and incorporate the livelihood needs of Borderlanders.

Glocal Pacification by Vertical Means: The Case of Droneland Policing

ABSTRACT The article investigates drones’ attribution to securitise, surveil and pacify border regimes within a threefold, even though contradictory, development: Firstly, borders as demarcation lines or check-points are redefined into border spaces. Secondly, the failing of an out-bound targeted and state-led border security system turns into the claimed necessity for new inner security measures. Within a framework of a technologised migration management, thirdly, a militarisation of internal security occurs within which different capital fractions compete for market shares in policing migration and managing minorities. The drone—a peripheral device just a couple of years ago—turns into the centrepiece of pacification endeavours and the device to draw all battle lines. The (for some) faraway Afgh-Pak combat drone turns into the peripheral border drone finally approaching us as a homeland drone.

A ‘Great Deal of Discrimination is Necessary in Administering the Law’: Frontier Guards and Migration Control in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

This article provides a corrective to recent scholarship surrounding modern migration control, which has emphasised the shared origins of the legal systems created to control migration in the us, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The article demonstrates that the implementation of migration controls in British colonies was arbitrary. It uses the personal papers of Clarence Wilfred Cousins, the Chief Immigration Officer in the Cape, then South Africa (1905–1922), to demonstrate the role of frontier guards in shaping migration experiences. The article highlights the uses and limitations of using ‘ritual’ to understand migration control and how border spaces are experienced.

Indígenas en ciudades “pares” en la Amazonia, entre la invisibilidad y la territorialidad urbana: Una mirada retrospectiva

Baseado numa revisão retrospectiva e focalizando um amplo diálogo com a antropologia, este artigo apresenta o processo de invisibilização e posterior revitalização étnica, sociocultural e política dos povos indígenas que têm habitado, e habitam, espaços urbanos tidos como cidades ou assentamentos “pares” em áreas fronteiriças e transfronteiriças da Amazônia. Examina especialmente o caso dos indígenas das cidades de Letícia e Tabatinga na tríplice fronteira do Brasil, Colômbia e Peru no contexto da dissolução dos estabelecimentos imperiais, a reconstituição desses assentamentos no século XX até hoje, com ênfase nos processos de recuperação étnica, da luta pelo reconhecimento dos direitos territoriais em espaço urbanos e fronteiriços, além da organização social e política expressa na constituição de cabildos indígenas urbanos.

Fields of Progress: The Mechanization of Agriculture in Days of Heaven

Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) functions less as a traditional narrative in this article than as a postmodern filmic essay on the meanings and legacies of early-twentieth-century modernization in the agricultural districts of the southwestern Great Plains. Representing the border spaces of the Texas Panhandle in 1916, the film imagines a migrant space that hosts an uneven melange of machines, bodies, and terrains—one that highlights the social and ecological consequences of industrial modernity's appearance on the rural landscape. As it imagines flows of people and products between rural margins and metropolitan centers, Days of Heaven both anticipates and elaborates more recent historiographies, such as William Cronon's, that trouble common conceptions of urban core and country periphery. The film also illuminates questions about the overlap of the modern and the postmodern through a meticulously crafted pastiche of iconic twentieth-century American images. With an eye on these qualities, this article uses Malick's depictions of mechanization and his self-consciously referential aesthetic sensibilities to examine the objects that comprise late-70s postmodernism in the American grain, a version that is not so much a departure from the techniques, ethics, and spaces of modernism as it is their extension, amplification, and reproduction.

The Mountain Is High, and the Emperor Is Far Away: States and Smuggling Networks at the Sino-Vietnamese Border

The intense and volatile relations between China and Vietnam in the dyadic world of the Cold War have drawn scholarly attention to the strategic concerns of Beijing and Hanoi. In this article I move the level of analysis down to the border space where the peoples of the two countries meet on a daily basis. I examine the tug-of-war between the states and smuggling networks on the Sino-Vietnamese border during the second half of the twentieth century and its implications for the present-day bilateral relationship. I highlight that the existence of the historically nonstate space was a security concern for modernizing states in Asia during and after the Cold War, which is an understudied aspect of China’s relations with Vietnam and with its Asian neighbors more broadly. The border issue between China and its Asian neighbors concerned not only territorial disputes and demarcation but also the establishment of state authority in marginal societies.

Transculturation in the Chicana Women Writers Prose: Gloria Anzaldúa and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of transculturation on the basis of Chicana literature created in the American Southwest. First, the historical, social and cultural context of the Chicana culture formation in the Mexican-American border space is explained. Secondly, transculturation is presented as a European and a genuine Latin American concept of local cultural hybridity, with the emphasis put on the contributions by Wolfgang Welsch and Fernando Ortiz. Thirdly, a general characteristic of Chicana literature is provided, with a special attention paid to linguistic and cultural identity issues. In the analysis of the discursive strategies used by Chicana women writers, two fundamental hybrid Chicana texts are taken into consideration: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet. The analysis reveals that code-switching and interlinguistic translations are the basic forms of character construction and explain the complex situation of the Mexican minority in the USA. Finally, both texts seem to require a hybrid bilingual reader due to their heterogeneous bilingual form and subjects treated.

The Emergence of Urban Border Spaces in Europe

ABSTRACTOver the past few decades, nation state borders throughout the world have been undergoing major transformations. These changes are perhaps particularly salient in the supranational space of the European Union, where new, diverse governance arrangements have emerged for the control of borders and migrations. This governance now involves national and supranational, state and non-state actors and territories beyond the external borders of the European states. At the same time, transformations are affecting the city and urban spaces where a plethora of new mechanisms of control are emerging. Cities are considered key sites for the inclusion of migrants, affording them substantial (urban) citizenship. Nevertheless, little attention is being paid to the role of cities in the exclusion and control of migrants. Through devolution from above, as well as through urban autonomy, both public and non-state actors in cities are increasingly engaged in matters such as migrants’ legal status, removal, and deportation. Thus, an account of the city in such control has to take issue with the notion that the urban scale is simply nested in, subordinate to, and bounded within the national state space. Rather, scales are constructed and produced, which includes the historically changing relationship of urban and national scales. Drawing on migration, border, and urban studies, this paper develops a theoretical approach that locates the city within contemporary border transformations, identifies several mechanisms of urban border control, and provides some empirical examples to illustrate these points. Against this backdrop, the paper suggests considering urban space as border space.

Comparing the development of border regions with the use of GIS (the case of Russia)

The objective of the paper is to analyze the trends and the dynamics of socio-economic development in the areas on both sides of all Russia’s land boundaries (more than 22,000 km long) using remote sensing data and GIS applications at different scales. The originality of this research is in the processing of large amounts of data (30 meters resolution images and medium-scale topographic maps) on vast areas and the construction of maps allowing analyzing the data on a new scale. The peripheral character of most border areas is a serious challenge for the development of cross-border cooperation. Depopulation and the depressed state of their economy do not stimulate contacts between neighboring territories. The authors assess the socio-economic situation on both sides of Russian borders and the contrasts between neighboring territories in the mirror of the structure and the dynamics of land use and the density of settlements and roads. The authors come to the conclusion that the border space experiences further fragmentation. The processes on the ‘new’ (post-Soviet) and ‘old’ borders differ by their speed and the character of transformations. Their asynchrony is quickly increasing the asymmetry of cross-border interactions.

Dirty pretty language: translation and the borders of English

This article analyses the politics of English, and translation into Englishness, in the film Dirty Pretty Things (Frears). With a celebrated multilingual cast, some of whom did not speak much English, the film nevertheless unfolds in English as it follows migrant characters living illegally and on the margins in London. We take up the filmic representation of migrants in the “compromised, impure and internally divided” border spaces of Britain (Gibson 694) as one of translation into the imagined nation (Anderson). Dirty Pretty Things might seem in its style to be a kind of multicultural “foreignized translation” which reflects a heteropoetics of difference (Venuti); instead, we argue that Dirty Pretty Things, through its performance of the labour of learning and speaking English, strong accents, and cultural allusions, is a kind of domesticated translation (Venuti) that homogenises cultural difference into a literary, mythological English and Englishness. Prompted by new moral panics over immigration and recent UK policies that heap further requirements on migrants to speak English in order to belong to “One Nation Britain” (Cameron), we argue that the film offers insights into how the politics of British national belonging continue to be defined by conformity to a type of deserving subject, one who labours to learn English and to translate herself into narrow, recognizably English cultural forms. By attending to the subtleties of language in the film, we trace the pressure on migrants to translate themselves into the linguistic and mythological moulds of their new host society.

Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947–1965

Border studies in South Asia privilege everyday experiences, and the constructed nature of borders and state sovereignty. This article argues that state elites in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the 1950s and 1960s actively pursued territorial sovereignty through border policy, having inherited ambiguous colonial-era frontiers. By comparing security and development activities along the Durand Line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the better-known case of India and Pakistan's ceasefire line in Kashmir, this article demonstrates that the exercise of sovereignty required a bounded space that only borders could provide and a rejection of competing border zone authorities. The local specificity of each border, however, created the historical conditions in which political elites acted. Combining an archival history methodology with conceptual insights from political geography and critical international relations, this article uses an original integration of two important Asian border spaces into one analysis to highlight tensions between sovereignty's theory and practice.

Hyenas of the Limpopo: “Illicit Labour Recruiting,” Assisted Border Crossings, and the Social Politics of Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the negotiation of undocumented cross-border movement, or assisted border crossings, at Beitbridge, South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe. By reading border practices as arising from a complex synthesis of state regulatory norms with social relations that shape everyday encounters with the Beitbridge border space, the article argues that assisted border crossings are temporally, structurally and experientially determined. The article proposes the local concept of ukutshokotsha as a way of understanding “border struggles” that shape this “morphogenesis.” Located in historical, regional, political-economic, as well as experiential contexts, assisted border crossings are analyzed as rooted in everyday encounters with a fraught border space, as opposed solely to the border’s official institutional norms. The article argues that a focus on border practices is important in as far as it privileges the complex agency of disparate border actors, of the border, and of the shifting meanings of borders that emerge from everyday practices. By describing the colonial style “illicit labour recruiting” and post-independence “assisted border crossings” as a socio-historical, phenomenological, and political process, the article emphasizes the active role of middlemen in shaping the nature and meaning of the Beitbridge border and of the political economic organization of cross-border movement in contemporary Southern Africa. The article argues that the social politics of movement across the Beitbridge border is as much a contingency of history, a material, social and existential aspect of contemporary border practices, and a characteristic of everyday forms of Southern African state formation in a general context of socio-economic crisis.

Habitar as fronteiras

Este artigo apresenta uma reflexão sobre a escrita poética em duas línguas, no caso, o português e o italiano, e sobre dinâmicas e questões ligadas à posição da autora, que optou por habitar espaços de fronteiras linguísticas, geográficas e existenciais.

A look at ‘fishy drag’ and androgynous fashion: Exploring the border spaces beyond gender-normative deviance for the straight, cisgendered woman

Abstract This article seeks to re-explore and critique the current trend of androgyny in fashion and popular culture and the potential it may hold for gender-deviant dress and politics. In order to do this, it will discuss the way in which a popular version of male drag has monopolized a vision of gender subversion that has marginalized ‘straight’ cisgendered women’s transgressive challenge to gender norms. Although not misogynistic in itself, RuPaul’s Drag Race (Logo 2009–2017) brings to the surface the misogyny inherent in femininity – the performance underscores deeper asymmetrical power imbalances which are embedded in women’s daily lives. Recent unisex fashion collections with their subsequent campaigns have sought to address this imbalance; however, this is not a problem with an easy fix. This article looks at the way in which particular performers such as Grace Jones and Harnaam Kaur have ad(dressed) their gender resistance without camouflaging and thus losing sight of a feminist history of gender inequality which still strongly resonates.

Construcción sociocultural de San Salvador de Jujuy, frontera simbólica de Argentina con Bolivia

Se analiza la ciudad de San Salvador de Jujuy como espacio fronterizo y espacio de ciudad. Mediante la sistematización de estudios locales se busca considerar los elementos históricos, políticos, socioeconómicos, migratorios y simbólicos que crean la experiencia urbana de frontera. Este aporte se acota a reconstruir a la ciudad como una red de sentidos. Se profundiza en los flujos migratorios, la situación política reciente, la impresión en la urbanidad de las desigualdades económicas y, la relevancia de lo mediático y lo ritual en la configuración de los sentidos de ciudad dominantes; se consignan los factores que territorializan la diferencia y la desigualdad local y el proceso de periferización y pauperización del suelo. Por otro lado, se determinan los conflictos políticos recientes que inciden en la desarticulación regional y las disputas simbólicas que tensionan la pertenencia nacional frente a la alta incidencia andina.

Los espacios de frontera: el locus de la violencia y la disgregación de identidades en Los límites de la noche de Eduardo Antonio Parra

This paper aims to review how the identity of human barbarism embodied by Eduardo Antonio Parra in the northern topography is transfor med in the border spaces, which is transfigured in the locus of violence in the nocturnal wand ering of its protagonists, who a re subjected to the most varied nuances of social violence that marginalizes, condemns and sometimes annihilates its inhabitants. A disintegration of the bodies of the protagonists is transformed into a disintegration of identities in the spaces in which they transit, a kind of liquid border in which the limits allude to a marked individual and social disintegration of northern Mexico. A territory where the inequity of society and the problems generated by violence, insecurity and injustice, lead to a deconstruction of the subject and loss of identity. Parra shows in these stories the decentering of the subject, the nonsense, the presence of the unconscious, the desire, the violence and the alienation. A postmodernity in which only the most intimate bonds become liquid and unstable; in which human contact becomes inconsistent. Three fundamental aspects will be developed in this analysis of Los limites de la noche (Era, 1996): the night as locus of violence in La noche mas oscura, the nocturnal animal in the urban barbarism in Como una diosa and the nocturnal voices that transit in the world narrated in El pozo.

In between leaving and being left behind: mediating the mobilities and immobilities of Indonesian non‐migrants

AbstractIn this article, I consider how and why some non‐migrants partially inhabit migrant subjectivities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Central Java, Indonesia, I describe the experiences of those who embarked on pre‐departure migration processes, but failed to leave the country. Men were often victims of fraud; women typically ran away from the confines of training centres. When redirected away from the border spaces of airports and recruitment centres, they typically identify themselves and are perceived by kin and neighbours as ‘former’ transnational migrants. I analyse how migration infrastructure – intersecting institutions, agents and technologies – produces such subjectivities in‐between conventional migrant and non‐migrant categories. These positions in between leaving and staying illuminate the infrastructural conditions that enable, constrain and mediate transnational mobilities. These cases of non‐departure show the expansive social and spatial effects of migration infrastructure beyond the facilitation of transnational movement. Such less considered (im)mobilities of non‐migrants point to the diverse ways in which migration institutions and agents mediate the circulation of persons between and within national borders.

Cuando la nación queda lejos: fronteras cotidianas en el paso Lago Verde (Aysén-Chile) - Aldea Las Pampas (Chubut-Argentina)

This paper looks to reflect on the colonialist processes through which the nation determines a sense of its border spaces and how, at the same time and in dialogue with this national narrative, the everyday world of these border zones develops in ways that are often very diff erent from what is projected by the nation. Through the case study of one border zone, that of Lake Verde-Las Pampas (Chile-Argentina), and the presence of a family that has occupied the entire border area from “before the nation”, we consider evidence of the experience of living, or in other words, the existential historicity of place or the structure of territorial experience that, in essence, restores and projects a reality marked by memory; by roots based on co-production or co-belonging between the subject and the landscape that is constructed at the same time as it is inhabited (i.e. the landscape as self-constructed).

Competing Para-Sovereignties in the Borderlands of Europe

ABSTRACTThis article is broadly concerned with how we conceptualise the geography of the tensions between the nominally stable orders of the modern state system against the turbulence of the past few decades in relation to that order, especially in the realm of border controls. Specifically, it considers the rescaling and relocation of border enforcement in the European Union in relation to state sovereignty. The article argues that existing “soft” conceptualisations of the EU’s relationship to sovereignty and bordering—“shared,” “joint,” “multi-level,” “consociational”—are inadequate to understand the transformations of exercises of sovereign power in European borderlands. Instead, we are witnessing the emergence of competing para-sovereignties acting within the same spaces, with both traditional states and the incipient state-like EU fulfilling particular bit roles in realms that were traditionally viewed as the exclusive responsibilities of modern, sovereign, territorial states. This dynamic is made visible in recent years in observing individual humans negotiate and subvert the fluid political geographies of European border space. Examples are taken from the activities of the EU border agency Frontex in southeastern Europe.

On the threshold: Urban exchange and intervention in Flora Lau's Bends (2013)

The metaphor at the heart of Hong Kong filmmaker Flora Lau’s debut feature film, Bends (2013), set in the border spaces of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, is that of intersection. By constructing a quietly observant view of life on both sides of the Sam Chun River, which separates Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, Lau’s film inhabits this metaphor by cutting through the public and private domains with a narrative of intimacy and connection at the nexus of wider socioeconomic concerns. Delving into Hong Kong–mainland relations, Bends inserts the real-life social issues of immigration, border control, economic privilege, and China’s one-child policy into its diegesis to capture Hong Kong at a moment in time. In considering the intertwined relationship between identity, politics, and urban space, this paper employs the trope of disappearance perpetuated in critical discourses on Hong Kong as a point of departure to explore the distinct filmic topography of Bends , which attempts to cinematically preserve the dynamics of the city under Chinese administration. In so doing, this paper also examines Lau’s interest in giving marginalized female groups narrative agency to shed light on an alternative perspective of the special administrative region and its unfolding relationship with the motherland.