Concept Of Border Research Articles

Towards a more plural political theory of pluralism

In the last two decades, an ever-increasing number of scholars have challenged the conceptual borders of political philosophy and the supposed universalism of its normative pre-commitments. Surprisingly enough, the normative underpinnings of this debate have had very little impact on contemporary disputes about pluralism. This article asks how contemporary disputes about the conceptual borders of political theory can help in constructing a more plural theory of pluralism. It shows that such contributions inspire three ways of constructing a more plural political theory of pluralism: a self-transformative approach, a dialogical approach and a pre-relational approach. While all three approaches progress towards less exclusionary theories of pluralism, I argue that a pre-relational approach can lead to a normative theory that is more plural than the alternatives.

The Shadow Lines: Interrogating the Great Divide

The article The Shadow Lines: Interrogating the Great Divide questions the concept of border and Partition- a solution to the problems of social unrest on religious grounds or political motivation. During the British Raj feeling of suspicion and hatred were planted in the heart and mind of millions of Indian people. The gulf of communal disharmony widened with time and this resulted in the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The ulterior motives of British Empire, the Congress Party and the Muslim League caused the partition of India. The then political leaders failed to resolve their difference over power-sharing. The ever widening gulf between the Hindus and the Muslims on communal issues was said to be the main cause of partition, though both the communities had a long history of peaceful co-existence for more than a thousand years. The Partition divided friends, families, lovers and neighbours. It led to the disintegration of human values, rootlessness and alienation

Memory of Water: Boundaries of Political Geography and World Literature

The fact that dystopian literature has a great potential for envisioning alternative futures is elaborated in this article in relation to the Finnish/British author Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2013). Itäranta’s gloomy low-fi novel is read alongside contemporary ecocritical theory with a focus on issues of vernacular cultures and knowledges versus ideas of cosmopolitan planetary citizenship. Reflections are made about the profound nature of the concept of borders: cultural, temporal, informational, geographical, political, in the event of massive catastrophes. The article investigates how Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ are played out in a novel, and how the novel in turn poses important questions for ecocritical theory. Thus, the interplay between ecocritical literary theory, on the one hand, and literature, on the other, is highlighted. What can dystopia make visible in contemporary theory?

Border Walls: On the Contemporary Transformation of State Borders

It is today commonplace to claim that state borders are undergoing change. In the age of globalisation borders have acquired new characteristics that do not fit in with the traditional understanding of them. Many believe that this signifies a break away from the modern conception of state borders, which saw them as institutional lines that set the spatial extension of state sovereignty. This viewpoint can be challenged, however. On the one hand, the importance of state borders in international politics has been increasing over the last few years. On the other hand, the idea that globalisation is changing the very nature of state borders needs closer scrutiny. As a matter of fact, legal scholarship has paid little attention to the concept of border in the last few decades, and this is one of the reasons for the lack of clarity regarding the contemporary transformation of state borders. This paper tries to contribute to fill this gap by looking at the phenomenon of border walls, i.e. the construction of impenetrable barriers to safeguard state territory. Does the proliferation of border walls around the world simply indicate a revival of the territorial sovereignty of the states, or is it a phenomenon with quite different characteristics? To answer this question I proceed as follows. I first consider the debate on the transformation of state borders in the literature on globalisation. I then looks at the distinctive features of modern borders from a historical and theoretical point of view. This helps clarify whether the features of border walls make it necessary to update the traditional concept of public border. The paper shows that it is not possible to provide an univocal answer to this question and distinguishes four kinds of border walls having different institutional characteristics.

Nuestra Gloria The Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Celebrates the 30th Anniversary of the Publication of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

2017 was a significant year in Chicanx, queer, feminist, and American literary history, as it marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. One of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Borderlands brings forth nuanced concepts of borders and the importance of the identities shaped by them—physical, cultural, or otherwise. The book has paved the way for exploration and healing for many Chicanxs, people of color, individuals of all gender identities and sexual preferences, and everyone who has proximity to any type of border. Recognizing how Borderlands grounds a wide range of people, the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) saw it fitting to celebrate the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa in a special way. Annually, CMAS holds a celebration of Anzaldúa, El Retorno, organized by Professor of Creative Writing and Associate Director of CMAS Emmy Pérez. However, CMAS dedicated the entire academic school year of 2017-2018 to Anzaldúa—specifically to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, for the campus and larger Rio Grande Valley community—with a series we titled “Nuestra Gloria: CMAS Celebrates the 30th Anniversary of the Publication of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.”

Digitalization of Payment Systems in Ukraine

The world is changing due to technological innovations that are reflected in both the customers’ needs and the payment systems themselves. Payment systems that operate on the territory of Ukraine have certain properties, which the potential client draws attention to when choosing one of them. Let's conduct complex research and we will propose solutions of a relevant scientific task which consists of the development of theoretical and methodological foundations, methodological approaches and practical recommendations on the implementation and improvement of the functioning of payment systems in Ukraine in the light of world experience. Modern payment systems are one of most the important and fundamental parts of Ukraine`s financial infrastructure. The article offers a theoretical understanding of the payment system and considers the peculiarities of the payment systems functioning in Ukraine at the present stage. The payment systems market and its structure are presented in details. Payments and transfers number are highlighted. The statistics on illegal payment card transactions are reviewed. The payment systems of the leading European countries are characterized. The prospects of the National Bank of Ukraine with the largest European payment systems are described. On a basis expansion of the structure of criteria of the importance of payment service providers and accounting of the presence of crucial participants in payment service providers is developed a methodical approach to the assessment of the priority of payment service providers. The practical value of the received results consists in their use for the development of normative legal acts of the National Bank of Ukraine, the safety of payment service provider of Ukraine regulating an order. Measures to increase payment system`s security level in Ukraine are outlined. For the banking system of Ukraine, European experience in the field of payment systems is very important, as today the concept of borders is quite conventional when it comes to payment services. In this regard, determining the priority of payment systems that operate in Ukraine is of particular importance, which determines the relevance of the chosen topic.

De-Sign as a Destiny of Negation

Boundaries and borders are undefined and ambiguous paradoxical phenomena, but there is a prevalent repudiation of their ephemerality and transitoriness. Crossing unaccustomed boundaries and traversing untried borders can be achieved by understanding the boundless scope of design and semiotics. Since the idea of design and the doctrine of signs are not restricted by either the humanities or sciences, De-sign (fusion of design and signs) is a boundaryless and transdisciplinary perspective that cannot tolerate cultural enclaves, social dogmas, and an insistence on absolute reality. Engaging in the de-sign process is a journey of negation through which human beings can traverse unfamiliar borders while maintaining their familiar boundaries. In negation, we experience paradoxical thinking and cognitive dissonance, which are associated with all antinomies intrinsic to De-sign. These antinomies can be endured by recognizing the audacity of design and the resilient role of signs. Negation goes beyond the perception of rigid borders and the acceptance of absolute boundaries, which frequently incite ethnocentrism and trigger xenophobia. The destiny of negation depends on a sense of wonder, awareness of epistemological fallibilism, and uncommon sense in order to persevere through contradictions between distinctiveness and sameness. Axiologically, where establishing boundaries can maintain identities, traversing borders can never diminish distinctiveness. Paradoxically, by delving into unfamiliar boundaries and crossing over untried borders, we discover ways to transform our own boundaries and reframe our conception of borders. Boundaries are more than barriers; the distances between them are bridges of invisible relations for thrivability and breakthrough insights.

Inmigración, Derechos Humanos y Modelos Europeo de fronteras Propuestas conceptuales sobre "extraterritorialidad", "desterritorialidad" y "externalización" de controles y flujos migratorios

The migratory flows and the refugee crisis in Europe since 2015 have motivated a growing concern about the respect of human rights and European values ​​in the actions of the EU and the Member States when confronting controls of access to European territory in the external borders. This work analyzes how borders are problematic places for the defense, application and protection of human rights of foreigners, causing what we call the ‘fragility’ of human rights in the EU's external air, land and maritime borders. We are witnessing a change in the very concept of border in this post-globalization era, in which certain functions are offshored and systematically placed outside a state’s territory and checkpoints. However, territorial and extraterritorial actions must be differentiated from those occurring as part of external actions in or with third states for the purposes of migration policy and the control of migration flows. The reality is that a new border space south and east of the Mediterranean has been configured for migratory flows, which needs a new policy of external borders for these areas. Therefore, we must reflect on new frontier spaces, with new concepts and approaches to the border that provide other parameters of action towards migratory flows and external controls. On the other hand, the protection of human rights by European States beyond the external borders is treated to determine to what extent the control functions that are deployed outside the territory affect the human rights of migrants. For this, we differentiate between situations of Outsourcing or Externalisation, where those that act are third States; and situations with Extraterritorial action of migration controls where agents of European States intervene. Both pose problems of protection of human rights in migration controls outside the terrestrial or the maritime territory of the Member States of the EU; we conceive them as deterritorialized functions of border control. And both situations must have in our opinion differentiated mechanisms for monitoring, control and supervision of respect for human rights in the functions of migration control. Respect of human rights of foreigners in border controls is a vital issue of the identity, values ​​and even the survival of the European integration.

The Concept of Territories and Borders in Hittites’ Royal Ideology

The Concept of Territories and Borders in Hittites’ Royal Ideology

Northern Connections: Interregional Contacts in Bronze Age Northern and Middle Sweden

AbstractThis article examines northern connections in the Nordic Bronze Age, focusing on interregional contacts in middle and northern Sweden. In the article, we argue that it is important to incorporate a northern perspective in the discussions about the Scandinavian Bronze Age and its networks. We focus on the Mälaren Valley region, especially the province of Uppland, and the northern parts of Sweden, in particular the coastal areas of northern Sweden. We discuss some aspects of the archaeological material, which have been used in earlier discussions of interregional contacts in middle and northern Sweden during the Bronze Age, such as the Håga mound outside of Uppsala, and burial cairns and bronze artefacts in northern Sweden. Furthermore, we discuss eastern contacts with areas in present-day Finland and Russia, and how these have been interpreted in middle and northern Sweden. In our view, there is a need to critically examine interregional contacts and the construction of regional entities and borders in the Bronze Age. In order to better understand the relations between north and south, it is necessary to critically examine the research history behind the present-day conceptions of regions and borders, as well as the political dimensions and power relations involved.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL SECTION: BORDERS, FRONTIERS, AND BOUNDARIES IN THE MAYA WORLD: CONCEPTS AND THEORY

AbstractThe Maya area has long been characterized as a mosaic of polities large and small, with cultural connections, linguistic dialects, ethnicities, and economic networks that shifted, expanded, and contracted over time. In this paper, we examine different ways of constructing boundaries. From physical demarcations in the landscape to habitual practices of interaction and affiliation, the lines that tied and divided were both unstable and multiple. We draw on definitions and theories from anthropology, history, and geography to review the concepts of borders, frontiers, and boundaries and their implications for the Maya area over the long term.

Representations and Concepts of Borders in Digital Strategy Games and Their Potential for Political Education in Geography Teaching

In Germany, 93% of young people between the ages of 10 and 18 play video games daily. Political geography, in particular popular geopolitics, have found that video games can help to establish and develop people’s understanding of geopolitics. Consequently, this affects geography education, providing both challenges and opportunities for teaching. Geography teaching is an integral part of political education as students need to understand how boundaries and territories create spaces with regards to social power and become the object of political conflict. Reflection plays a central role in understanding and deconstructing such spatial constructions. In this article, we examine representations and concepts of borders in digital strategy games and the perception and reflection of these by the players. The results provide an outlook on the potential and the challenges of digital strategy games for political education in geography lessons in secondary schools as well as for teacher training at universities. For this reason, possible approaches for education and training will be outlined on the basis of the results.

Climate Migration and Loss: Exploring the Conceptual Borders of Citizenship, Sovereign Authority, and the Deterritorialized State

The dominant understandings of ‘citizenship’ and ‘state sovereign authority’ unduly limit the range of solutions available to policy and law makers in their efforts to mitigate the negative impacts of climate-induced migration. The article offers a deterritorialized view of these concepts, which it suggests may be better suited to meet the full range of ethical and political challenges presented by climate change to international migration.

Bordering the Future? The ‘Male Gaze’ in the Blade Runner Films and Originating Novel

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), author of numerous science fiction narratives from the 1950s-1980s, some of which Hollywood made into films, grappled with the nature of reality, the meaning of humanness, and border crossing between humans and androids (called ‘replicants’ in the films). The socially constructed female and male protagonists in these narratives have yet to be analyzed with a gender gaze that draws on border studies. This paper analyzes two Blade Runner films, compares them to the Philip K. Dick (PKD) narrative, and applies gender, feminist, and border concepts, particularly border crossings from human to sentient beings and androids. In this paper, I argue that the men who wrote and directed the films established and crossed multiple metaphoric borders, but wore gender blinders that thereby reinforced gendered borders as visualized and viewed in the U.S. and global film markets yet never addressed the profoundly radical border crossing notions from PKD.

From Axayácatl to El Chapo: Rethinking Migration and Mexico’s War on Drugs in Gabriel Garcilazo’s Dystopic Magical Codex

In this conversation between Gabriel Garcilazo and Adriana Miramontes Olivas, Garcilazo explains his interest in appropriating popular culture and historical documents such as the sixteenth-century Codex Azcatitlan. His artwork Dystopic Magical Codex (2015) examines the recent war on drugs in Mexico and its consequences through spatial and temporal elements that reconsider concepts of borders, nations, and trade. The conversation is introduced in a brief essay in which Miramontes Olivas contextualizes Garcilazo’s codex. She argues that Garcilazo criticizes state apparatus rhetoric on the war on drugs and harsh immigration policies, demanding the conceptualization of alternative solutions that could reduce both the carnage and the exodus of those living in fear. He also warns, as have other contemporary artists from Mexico, against new forms of colonization and master narratives that homogenize and hamper border-crossing and interaction among cultures.

Border aesthetics and catachresis in Ali Abbasi’s Gräns/Border (2018)

ABSTRACTGräns/Border by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi won Un Certain Regard at Cannes as it was proclaimed an ‘instant cult classic’. This paper argues that the ambivalent status of Border – seen as both an audacious genre bender and a social realist film addressing issues of migration – bespeaks its articulation of the borderscape as a catachrestic locus that challenges familiar representational modes in border aesthetics. In doing so, the film, this paper contends, de-structures our perception of alterity, forges a new sensory cognition of the world, and new aesthetic experiences of migratory transitions. Most contemporary films engage migrant and border ecologies through their thematic content, where the border emerges either as a vulnerable space in need of protection or as a hopeful place of politically exciting hybridity and moral possibility. Instead, Border rearticulates generic signifying practices to imagine the border not as spatial ‘fact’ but as an epistemological ground or ‘border effect’ that incites new modes of geopolitical attunement. At stake here is not just a different concept of borders, but the possibility of film form to restructure our sensory perception of the world to offer new figurative possibilities for migratory and border cinema.

Fronteras del mundo: un modelo para armar y desarmar

El debate sobre el concepto frontera o sobre la dimensión y significado de lo fronterizo ha recobrado actualidad a la luz de la creciente migración trasnacional y el malestar nacional derivado de los escasos resultados de la globalización comercial. El texto aborda esos tópicos en un contexto de notorias tensiones políticas y económicas tanto en Europa como en Norteamérica.

Local Ambivalence in the Arabistan-Basra Frontier, 1881-1925

ABSTRACT The historiography of Ottoman-Qajar frontiers emphasizes the European creation and promulgation of border control and ethnonationalism. This article considers the way that border dwellers in the Iran-Iraq frontier greeted border enforcement, nationalism, and racial politics. Despite the zeal with which local elites accepted these European ideas, the Arabs of southwestern Iran paid little attention to the policies emanating from Tehran. Europeans, in fact, noted their disinterest and argued that the concept of nationalism, borders, and race did not carry potency in Arabistan, Iran’s southwestern frontier. Although historians emphasize the birth of nation-states and the decline of empires in the Middle East at turn of the twentieth century, this article considers the ambivalence with which communities in an oil-rich frontier greeted the new ideological constructions of race and borders.

The European Union and the Racialization of Immigration, 1985-2006

Over the past two decades, the European Union (EU) has played an increasingly influential role in the construction of a de facto common immigration and asylum policy, providing a forum for policy-formulation beyond the scrutiny of national parliaments. The guiding principles of this policy include linking the immigration portfolio to security rather than justice; reaffirming the importance of political, conceptual and organizational borders; and attempting to transfer policing and processing functions to non-EU countries. The most important element, I argue, is the structural racialization of immigration that occurs across the various processes and which escapes the focus of much academic scrutiny. Exploring this phenomenon through the concept of the “racial state,” I examine ways to understand the operations of immigration policy-making at the inter-governmental level, giving particular attention to the ways in which asylum-seekers emerge as a newly racialized group who are both stripped of their rights in the global context and deployed as Others in the construction of national narratives.

Josef Wiesehöfer, Sabine Müller (eds.). Parthika. Greek and Roman Authors’ Views of the Arsacid Empire

The Roman and Parthian empires shared the political control of the ancient world in two spheres of influence that were separated by the river Euphrates: the Roman sphere to the west of this natural and conceptual border, the Parthian to the east. The perception of this polarization clearly emerges from what we know of the Parthian empire and Arsacid dynasty through Roman literary sources, and is perceived in modern scholarship as the reflection of the accrued importance Roman authors gave to ...