Border Studies Research Articles

Challenging ungrievability for people missing at sea. Search infrastructures, spaces of public mourning, and claims for justice

ABSTRACT Since the so-called refugee crisis, the central Mediterranean Sea has been identified as the deadliest border in the world. As the border studies debate has shown, these deaths reflect the structural violence of border regimes and demand due forms of political accountability and responsibility. However, dominant power structures differentially shape the visibility and grievability of those who are missing and dead at the border. Keeping this complexity as a background, and drawing on examples from Lampedusa and Tunisia, we investigate the politics of challenging Butler’s “ungrievability” – the lack of access to preconditions, spaces and times of private and public mourning and commemoration. We critically discuss the interplay between three components of this political arena: the search infrastructures of the missing and dead at sea; the creation of “spaces of commemoration” through place-making, time-marking and collective actions; the claims for justice and political accountability for those deaths.

In different states of indifference: movement, friction, and resistance

In different states of indifference: movement, friction, and resistance

Mind the border: housing development at the transboundary interface surrounding Beijing

This study reveals a distinct pattern of extensive residential development in China’s minor towns and counties that are close to some of the country’s largest cities. We stress that understanding the housing development and its dynamics at the transboundary interface requires a border viewpoint. By mobilising conceptualisations from the field of border studies, we unpack the meanings and functions of sub-national borders in the Chinese setting. According to the border theory, sub-national borders in China take on a range of functions beyond serving as simple demarcation lines that separate administrative territories, including points of interaction, indicators of difference, and signs of affirmation. Further, borders might have varying and opposing impacts, such as positive/negative and diminished/persistent roles. Consequently, the combined influences result in the dynamic development of the cross-border area. Drawing evidence from a case study of housing development in the border region surrounding Beijing, the paper sheds light on the role of borders as well as its implications on the dynamics of cross-border housing development in the Chinese context.

Entangled by Borders: Bodies, Citizenship, and Gender in Assam

This paper will scrutinize the politics of border construction in Assam through the lens of Border Studies and Memory Studies. The unique geo-political location of Assam vis-à-vis its crisis of identity and belonging as a result of the 1947 Partition, makes it a complex site of study. My scrutiny of the literary and cultural memory of this region will be based on a comparative reading of a selection of short fiction entitled Barbed Wire Fence: Stories Of Displacement From The Barak Valley Of Assam (2012) by Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das, and Debendranath Acharya’s Assamese novel Jangam on the 1942 Indo-Burmese exodus (Sahitya Akademi award, 1984). My intervention is driven by the persistent need to deconstruct the 1947 Partition as a monolithic history of violence and disruption, and to draw attention to the many instances where multiple borders and multiple forms of disenfranchisement took place. The texts that I am close-reading, focus on such similar histories of disjuncture that shaped the history of Assam vis-à-vis issues of bodies, citizenship, and gender. Using news articles and commentaries from 2019 to 2022, I will subsequently connect the traumatic events surrounding the 1942 exodus and the 1947 Partition to the current state apparatuses that are using biomarkers to discriminate against perceived others and eliminate them from the protection of the nation-state. I will connect the past trauma with the insecurities and (im)possibilities that have cropped up surrounding the implementation of a Citizenship Amendment Bill, and creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Critical Feminist Approaches to Migration and Mobility Justice in Canada: Guest Editors' Introduction

<p>This themed section examines how inequality constrain and enable contemporary human movement at state border crossings. It responds directly to questions, practices, and knowledge gaps that arise from critical migration/refugee studies, critical tourism studies, border studies, and/or mobility justice research by denaturalizing assumptions about the rights of some to choose to move across borders freely and others who are forced to leave, denied access, or detained. In so doing, we highlight research on human mobilities and borders in Canada to advance understandings on the dynamics of territorial control and access to state borders. What links the articles is the commitment to examining the reproduction of power through the following three shared understandings and starting points: (1) a critique of the Canadian nation state’s global reputation as exceptionally humanitarian (Nguyen and Phu 2021); (2) a consideration of the global entanglements of racial capitalism and colonialism that structures human movement (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018); and (3) an understanding that the mobilities of some and the immobilities of others coexist and are in fact co-produced (Ahmed et al. 2020; Bauman 1998; Sheller 2018).</p><p> </p>

Africa and the New Imperialism: European Borders on the African Continent, 1870‐1914

Adam Matthew Digital’s Africa and the New Imperialism: European Borders on the African Continent, 1870‐1914, contains more than 1,700 individual archival materials sourced from some of the most renowned academic institutions across the globe. There are materials that go beyond the typical government documents and correspondence to highlight nontraditional voices like women, rulers of Africa, and various representations of African culture; however, all of them are sourced from non-African institutions. Contextualizing secondary materials like in-depth scholarly essays, a region guide, and an interactive map will provide pedagogical opportunities, while facilitating student learning, and would prove useful for disciplines related to history, political science, border studies, ethnic and gender studies, and African studies. Highlights of the collection include the Joseph Chamberlain collection, papers of journalist and colonial commentator Flora Shaw, the papers of Henry Shelton Sanford, correspondence from Roger Casement and his Casement Report, and letters from African chiefs and emirs that are included in their original format as well as with translations.

Languaging as refusal

How are we refusing to be the bridge in ‘diversity’ responses in academia? What processes open up when we refuse the word and the singular language of ‘borders’ circulating in border studies and gender studies in the Netherlands? Where are we refusing from? Who is the subject-object of refusal? What is the language of refusal? How to speak from our burning guts that refuse to refuse in a language that doesn’t speak to our daily lives and struggles? How are we refusing the violence of research processes promoting the individual ‘trophy’ academic/artist in academic and cultural institutions while holding one’s own and each other’s bodies and power asymmetries shaping our writing processes for healing? How does one listen to the silences in histories of slavery, war, patriarchy, colonial trauma, and gender violence passing through our bodies while writing? In this essay we reflect on these questions by interspersing pieces of texts, experiences, excerpts (from thesis/thesis-related events), visuals, and poetry, by entangling biographies, traumas and memories situated in our everyday contexts and processes of teaching, writing for healing and for a living. Languaging becomes a location where we speak from, inspired and yet in tension with Anzaldúa (Hamzah 2020). Languaging (Kramsch et al. 2015) is our practice of refusal to refuse in one dominant language. We language a call for a poetics of refusal. We intentionally make the fleeting process known to each other and open it up to the reader, in holding each other’s bodies as they are collapsing and healing. In doing so we invite the reader to struggle with us in the process of naming our struggles that emerge from refusing to refuse singularly in English, refusing to write by partitioning our guts and everyday battles with patriarchy, refusing the writing subject as fully knowing what one is refusing.

Linkages between Livelihood Assets, Healthcare Facilities and Health Well-being: A Study of Indo-Bangladesh Border

This paper is devoted to exploring the linkages between livelihood assets, healthcare facilities and health well-being in Indo-Bangladesh international border adjacent location. To establish the linkages, Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA) has been adopted here. The study assumes that adjacency to the international border makes the location vulnerable. The study evaluates that lesser access to healthcare facilities in Border Adjacent Zone (BAZ) makes the people unable to cope with their poor health conditions. Even the livelihood asset is not at a satisfactory level by which the worse condition are to be overcome. Better health conditions and greater access to healthcare facilities make the households in Border Distant Zone (BDZ) enjoy sustainable health well-being that too with higher scores of livelihood assets.

Exploring Cross-Border Labor Commuting as a Practice of Tactical Mobility

Within the last few years there has been an increased interest in the interplay of structure and agency in border studies. Following the strategic-relational approach, these studies generally focus on territorial actors, particularly subnational institutions and how they use their capacities, to establish transnational cooperation and networks, to overcome the obstacles resulting from national and / or multi-governmental policies. Like subnational organizations and institutions on border regions, cross-border commuters develop and use tactics to overcome the socio-economic and legal risks and crises. Based on the thematic analysis of the semi-structured interviews with commuters from Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Poland, it is demonstrated that by being mobile across the borders, commuters aim at gaining flexibility and a relatively advantageous position in housing and labor markets of different countries. This paper, by referring to the strategic-relational approach, argues that cross-border mobility is practiced as a form of tactical mobility in which commuters constantly revise their mobility practices, depending on new, emerging socio-economic conditions. Moreover, by referring to the concept of de Certeau’s (1984) tactic, three main typologies of cross-border mobility are conceptualized.

Letter of Introduction

The long-awaited and much anticipated new issue of Borders in Globalization Review is here! This outstanding collection of scholarship and artwork enriches border studies and cultural reflections on (and against) borders ...

Borders

This previously unpublished poem emerged after meeting a scholar of border studies at breakfast in the spring of 2023. I was amazed that so many academic careers could be defined by one word: Borders. I began to list all the borders and non-borders that came to mind and found I had written this list poem, embracing many of my own experiences.

Cultural and educational activities of the “Prosvita” society in the conditions of the border region of Galicia

The multifaceted nature of the boundary phenomenon causes difficulties in its application. Therefore, in order to study the phenomenon of the borderland, in the context of the ethno- geographical space, it is necessary to imagine the studied area as a borderland of cultures, ethnic groups, states, communities, traditions, norms and values or as a terrain in which social structures (spaces, dimensions) are superimposed on the geographical space of society, what is a goal of the article. The phenomenon of the border is that in its space of interaction new forms of solidarity of social communities arise, cross-border social networks are formed. The novelty of the study is formed in the processes of mutual attraction and mutual repulsion of cultural traditions and symbolic systems in the border zones became the arguments in favor of the study of borders as special socio-cultural phenomena with their own regional identity. As it turned out, these zones are characterized by a special system of interaction between “own” and “other”. Conclusions. The matrix of this interaction does not always coincide with territorial borders or demarcation lines. In the most general way the interpretation of the borderland as a category implies a constant stay on the border - between states, eras, cultures. One of its options is the territory of Halychyna, Bukovyna, Transcarpathia. When Ukrainians in difficult, dramatic conditions had to fight for their national self-identification through the development of Ukrainian education and culture in confrontation with foreign ruling state systems.

Hungary’s illiberal border politics and the exploitation of social, spatial and temporal distinctions

Previous research on Hungarian right-wing populism has documented how the present government has identified different groups and individuals as threats to innate national interests and values, drawing distinctions between the ‘nation’, illegal migrants, non-heteronormative persons, liberal enemies in Brussels, George Soros and others. At the same time, the Orbán government has exploited the country’s internal divisions which, for example, reflect long-standing contestations between liberal and conservative understandings of national identity and purpose. Employing a critical border studies perspective, this article explores Hungary’s illiberal practices of socio-cultural, spatial and temporal border-making. These are central to Hungary’s project of ‘illiberal democracy’ and the forging of a political environment that marginalizes alternative viewpoints and that extends into the organization of civil society and everyday life. European dimensions of the Hungarian regime’s border politics are also briefly discussed in terms of evoking liberal-conservative divides and Hungary’s claims for greater national recognition as a defender of Europe’s Christian heritage. In the concluding section, the potential significance of Hungarian illiberal politics in terms of an erosion of social cohesion both nationally and within the European Union will be considered.

Representing Past Futures: Approaches to Reading Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer Today

ABSTRACT Sleep Dealer (2008), a science-fiction feature directed by Alex Rivera, offers a dystopian view of U.S.-Mexico relations: with the border fully closed, labor is extracted from economically desperate Mexicans through “nodes” and technologically delivered to the United States. Over the past decade, the film has emerged as a cult success, screening at festivals and in classrooms, garnering favorable critical reception, and generating scholarship in film studies, cultural studies, border studies, Latinx studies, and science fiction studies. This article complements existing perspectives by offering six different, but interrelated, approaches to reading the film, followed by a brief interview with the director. The interventions read Rivera’s speculative vision of a near future not that different from our current reality through the lens of recent events. Rivera’s film appears even more prescient and insightful in light of the rise of remote work as a tool to mitigate the virus that protected certain bodies via technology while leaving “essential” ones vulnerable; the proliferation of drones and other modes of surveillance; the digital mediation of our personal lives and memories; and the emergence of a technologized border that extends geographically and virtually beyond the physical borderlands.

Border studies and International Relations Theories: an emancipatory framework

Throughout the history of International Relations, borders have been marginalised both practically and, to a greater extent, theoretically. On the one hand, conceptualizations of borders are typically subordinate to other ideas within the field, such as sovereignty, territory, security, conflict, and peace. On the other hand, it is frequently regarded as a source of conflict or simply as a geographical boundary. Thus, it is not surprising that this situation of marginalisation (conventional view of boundaries) produced a hegemonic perspective on borders until the conclusion of the Cold War. Nonetheless, the rearrangement of the international system and the expansion of regional integration resulted in a more dynamic, complex, and multidimensional outline. This work seeks to answer the following research question: in what ways would a perspective contribute to the field of border studies? It is proposed that such a theoretical framework would reassign border studies from an underlying to a fundamental premise, elevating them to a more significant level. This reinterpretation has direct and indirect effects on border politics in practice.

Sitas, the poet-sociologist of spaces for struggles and reconciliation: reconnecting postcolonial Cyprus to South Africa and the world

ABSTRACT This paper examines the intellectual and sociological contribution of Sitas as a diasporic public intellectual who bridges and navigates between continents. Sitas's creative, scientific, and critical engagement in postcolonial thinking connects Cyprus to Africa, drawing from both his country of origin, Cyprus, and South Africa, where he excelled as a dramatist, poet, sociologist and public intellectual. This ‘in-betweenness’ seems to be the basis for the vantage point from which to observe society to inspire him during his remarkable intellectual and artistic journey within and between the continents. Perhaps unknown outside Cyprus, Sitas has had a crucial impact on the development of critical social sciences and civic action in Cyprus: the study of racism, intolerance, and the potential for reconciliation and between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots and bringing to Cyprus postcolonial perspectives from the Global South, opening new readings in the study of reconciliation, borders, migration, precarity and social space.

How Bosnia and Herzegovina Was Bordered: The Supervised Making of a Border/Mobility Assemblage in the European Semiperiphery

AbstractThis article has an empirical and a conceptual aim. The first aim is to provide additional historical depth to recent analyses of the “Balkan Route” through Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with a reconstruction of the making of a border/mobility assemblage during the first two and a half decades of that state’s existence. These processes occurred under direct foreign supervision and were framed in terms of the conditionality of the “Road into Europe” specific to the European semiperiphery. The second aim concerns a prominent feature in recent studies of borders and mobility: the use of assemblage theory. I use my historical analysis to reflect on the implications of that theory’s programmatic call to foreground heterogeneity and provisionality. Specifically, in tracing patterns and tensions in the bordering of BiH I call attention to the importance of actors’ encounters with already-assembled hierarchical configurations, provisional but effective at the time of the encounter.

Security knowledges: circulation, control, and responsible research and innovation in EU border management

ABSTRACT The knowledge emerging from research funded by the European Union (EU) through its Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation and other funding streams is significantly shaped by different forms of epistemic control exerted by the EU itself. Through the promotion of industry-research-policy cooperation in EU-funded research, and in light of the growing importance attached to ‘impact,’ this knowledge will often contribute to bureaucratic decisions taken by the European Commission, Frontex, the EU Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA), and other agencies tasked with border security and control. The circular dynamics surrounding knowledge production, from the calls for proposals to the results of the research, are intrinsically political and contribute to exposing the limits of the EU-promoted principle of Responsible Research and Innovation. Additionally, and due to the centrality of EU funding in the research outlook in contemporary Europe, these processes raise wider questions about the sociology of the academic fields that this article relates to: critical border studies, critical security studies, and science and technology studies. How can we interpret the interplays between the EU’s policies fostering development and integration of border security technologies, on the one hand, and the Union’s broader principles for free and open research and innovation? Through the use of autoethnographic vignettes, and mediated by an expanded Foucauldian understanding of circulation as a technology of control with performative effects, the article sheds light on the dynamics surrounding knowledge production in the field of border technologies in an EU context.

Thickening the border: a transnational sovereign assemblage and the privatization of sovereignty

Australia, the United States, and the European Union enact bordering mechanisms to armor themselves against people who seek asylum transferring the burden of enforcement and containment to countries from the Global South. This configuration reinscribes a regime of limited mobility for certain subjects that reproduces a neocolonial order. The measures developed by these regions to keep people who seek asylum away from their territories thicken the border by effectively creating an overarching transnational sovereign zone that is not country-specific but rather an assemblage of Western countries’ buffer zones. Although the result is a fairly monolithic barrier for refugees, this assemblage is not homogeneous in structure but is instead composed of differently balanced, dyadic relations between countries, heterogeneous dehumanizing narratives prevalent among domestic publics, externalization measures, confinement practices, and other deterrence mechanisms, with different degrees of reach and success. Using a transnational feminist lens and a Critical Border Studies framework, this article shows how the border externalization measures that uphold this assembly rely on public-private partnerships that governments establish with private corporations; and agreements with third countries. The privatization of sovereignty then become the necessary conditions to exercise transnational sovereignty.

Interventions on the concept of externalisation in migration and border studies

Interventions on the concept of externalisation in migration and border studies