Territorial Frontiers Research Articles

Militarized granularity: Sand’s making of men and masculinity in Singapore

ABSTRACT Land reclamation is the process of transforming mined sand from rivers, estuaries, the seabed and even islands into new land parcels. This article examines Singapore’s insatiable appetite for sand and discusses the relationality between a singular grain of sand’s capacity to militarize and gender the Southeast Asian island-state. With opaque sand supply chains, Singapore can project its sovereignty as a militarized nation-state through the neo-colonialist like extraction of sand from other countries to widen its territorial frontiers. In placing the spotlight on extensive land-reclamation works to expand Tekong Island, Singapore’s largest outlier into a military base, I explain how sand serves the role of creating a militarized boundary object. While sand’s coarseness configures military masculinity, sand’s smoothness serves the additional function of maintaining civilian support for militarism by way of ‘packaging’ masculinity. The granular cartographies of trauma arising from Singapore’s territorial expansions wrought upon Southeast Asia’s rural poor require urgent recuperation.

Demarcating the granular frontier: planetary urbanization without an inside

ABSTRACT In its age of global crisis, sand has acquired a conspicuous profile as an urban resource and undercover vector of statecraft. Amidst mounting reports of the disastrous effects of sand mining stoked by intense cycles of urbanization and territorial expansion across the world, it is critical to understand the formation of sand’s granular frontiers, and how their differentiated expression through the global sand crisis demands a reconsideration of the theoretical frontiers of urbanization, territory, and global trade. Building on conceptualisations of sand’s granular geographies and its “geologising” of urban political ecology, this paper seeks to demarcate the theoretical and empirical terrain of sand’s granular frontiers, and how they problematize contemporary debates around urbanization’s “planetary” scope and its extractive underbelly. By reconnecting the frontiers of sand extraction and urbanization, this article theorizes the enclosure of geomorphology and where sand’s satiation of urban and state development is leading. In examining how sand’s simultaneous exclusion from formal processes of valuation and regulation structures urbanization in unpredictable ways, it seeks to provide an account of planetary urbanization without an inside.

Discovering the Arizona Republican Newspaper, 1890-1900: Yellow Journalism in America’s Territorial Press

Yellow journalism is widely believed to have grown out of a circulation battle between Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst in the 1890s. Most scholarship on its inception has been confined to newspapers in large Eastern cities. To date, little study of the period’s journalism has investigated whether, and to what degree, elements of yellow journalism were practiced by newspapers in Western US states and territories. This examination of the Arizona Republican in the 1890s shows yellow journalism was not confined to the East where it was incubated; in territorial Arizona, yellow journalism flourished. Needing to attract readers in a competitive newspaper market with a growing population, the newspaper did so with large headlines, scurrilous reporting, attention-grabbing news, and illustrations. Beyond the Eastern United States, the same force which brought on yellow journalism—publishers’ needs to attract huge readerships—fueled the practice on America’s territorial frontier in the Arizona Republican.

The perils of national narratives

The perils of national narratives

Gambling in Ancient North America

Gambling in ancient North America was primarily an intergroup activity. This position as a liminal practice, taking place on territorial frontiers and at large intertribal gatherings, puts gaming on the very forefront of cultural transmission and knowledge exchange, with several implications. Intergroup gaming results in a shared fluency of games, transcending barriers of language and ethnicity. Evidence of common methods and materials allows ancient, region-spanning social networks to be identified. And subtle variations demonstrate a repeated and ongoing negotiation between groups over time as objectives and participants change, with this evolution of gaming practices continuing to the present day. The freedom to adapt to changing conditions, contrasted with notions of a static “traditional” past, is not just a matter of sovereignty relating to Indigenous games. It is a reflection of the nature of Indigenous gaming as it has always been.

After the transnational turn: Looking across borders to see the hard face of the nation‐state

AbstractThis paper leverages the repressive turn in U.S. migration policy to understand how a cross‐border perspective can illuminate the experiences of two different, but contemporaneous second‐generation populations: Those whose lives have unfurled in the United States, all the while growing up in internationalized families with ongoing homeland ties; and those whose childhoods began in the United States, but were disrupted as part of the ‘Great Expulsion’, and thus migrated to Mexico, albeit often with U.S. citizenship and almost always with cross‐border ties to family members still living in the United States. As the paper demonstrates, looking across borders highlights the importance of the territorial frontier and the continuing power of the national to undermine the forces that produce cross‐border connections.

Troubles dans les frontières: divisions genrées et divisions territoriales chez Jacques Abeille

Conceived at first as a “kind of philosophical tale”, Jacques Abeille’s Les Jardins statuaires (1982) is the beginning of a novel cycle, Le Cycle des contrees, which offers an adventurous and ethnographic journey through an imaginary territory. The ethnographic description conveys a criticism of our Western civilization, based on rationality and technics. Le Cycle des contrees, with its narrators “between two worlds”, presents repeated trespassing and merging of the fictive territorial frontiers, and that way enlightens and celebrates the margins of those societies. From that point of view, these books may appear to be promoting queer zones. But this enhancement of margins supposes, indeed, the persistence of frontiers. There is a paradoxical staging of territorial and cultural bonds, that gender relations reveal. Gender relations in theses fictive societies are analysed and criticized, but, in the end, sex difference and heterosexuality are given as biological data. This supposed natural complementarity between sexes is, according to Jacques Abeille’s novels, the ultimate basis of alterity, as opposed to the deadly uniformity of Terrebre civilization. Furthermore, women’s alienation itself is positively described, as the way of producing and preserving their singularity. As the domination is always negatively perceived, the margins have to be maintained in their inferior position in order to preserve their positivity.

IL PRINCIPIO DI NON-REFOULEMENT: CRITICITA' APPLICATIVE

Il principio di non respingimento è uno degli strumenti più rilevanti del diritto internazionale per la protezione dei migranti. Per comprendere l'ampiezza della sua applicazione e i problemi legati al principio di non respingimento, è tuttavia opportuno analizzare le varie categorie di migranti per capire chi può ricevere questa protezione. Questo processo di analisi delle categorie, inoltre, evidenzia la presenza di altre difficoltà nell'attuazione generalizzata delle garanzie per i migranti. Infatti, non tutti i trattati si applicano a tutti i tipi di migranti. Anche la Convenzione di Ginevra sullo status di rifugiato, come dice il nome, si riferisce solo ai rifugiati. In particolare, l'articolo 1 della Convenzione definisce "rifugiato" la persona che "per fondato timore di essere perseguitata per motivi di razza, religione, nazionalità, appartenenza a un determinato gruppo sociale o opinione politica, si trova al di fuori del Paese di cui è cittadino e non può o, a causa di tale timore, non vuole avvalersi della protezione di quel Paese"; Pertanto, le sue protezioni - compresa quella data dal principio di non respingimento, stabilito dall'articolo 33 - garantiscono solo questa specifica categoria di migranti; categoria legata - come già detto - ad una lista chiusa di possibili cause di persecuzione. Altri ostacoli ad un'attuazione armonizzata del principio di non respingimento si trovano anche nelle differenze tra i trattati che lo definiscono. Nella sua prima definizione, nella Convenzione di Ginevra allo status di rifugiato del 1951, il principio vieta agli Stati membri di "espellere o rimpatriare ("refouler") un rifugiato in qualsiasi modo alle frontiere di territori in cui la sua vita o la sua libertà sarebbero minacciate a causa della razza, della religione, della nazionalità, dell'appartenenza a un determinato gruppo sociale o delle opinioni politiche" (Convenzione di Ginevra allo status di rifugiato, art. 33). L'esistenza di varie definizioni e la loro inadeguatezza a modelli migratori reali creano difficoltà nell'attuazione del principio stesso. In questo senso, uno dei maggiori problemi nello scenario attuale è quello dato dall'applicazione del principio agli afflussi massicci. Questo termine si riferisce a quelle migrazioni caratterizzate dall'arrivo su una frontiera internazionale di un gran numero di persone con un ritmo rapido e dall'incapacità dello Stato di accoglienza di rispondere adeguatamente all'arrivo dei migranti (in particolare, le procedure individuali di asilo non sono sufficienti per far fronte all'elevato numero di migranti). Diversi strumenti internazionali forniscono un'ampiezza diversa del campo di applicazione del principio; gli organi di controllo che controllano l'attuazione del principio hanno livelli di efficacia diversi. L'incertezza è ancora più ampia in considerazione dei nuovi movimenti migratori, come gli afflussi massicci; gli Stati approfittano quindi di questa situazione per non applicare il principio di non respingimento e l'altra protezione per i migranti. Detto questo, è impellente raggiungere una visione dottrinale più condivisa su questo tema, al fine di cooperare con la giurisprudenza per stimolare gli Stati verso una maggiore protezione dei migranti.

Performing the Afghanistan–Pakistan Border Through Refugee ID Cards

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relationship between surveillance, refugee ID cards, population control, and the making of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the 2000s and 2010s. The paper uncovers how, in the security-dominated Pakistani state, during the Soviet-Afghan War it was politically expedient to host a large Afghan refugee population in the country and make use of a flexible Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but in the “Global War on Terror” this no longer applies. As geopolitical circumstances change, this paper explores how ID cards for Afghan refugees are tools of surveillance that facilitate refuge and the legal/documentary, social, and physical exclusion of the non-citizen refugee. These forms of exclusion allow the Pakistani state to “perform” the Afghanistan-Pakistan border into effect. The border is not simply located at the territorial frontier but is in process and comes into being through the control over the mobility of citizen and non-citizen populations and forms of social exclusion that are enacted through surveillance and documentation.

The politics of river basin planning and state transformation processes in Nepal

Since the late 1990s, river basin planning has become a central idea in water resources management and a mainstream approach supported by international donors through their water programs globally. This article presents river basin planning as a function of power and contested arena of power struggles, where state actors create, sustain, and reproduce their bureaucratic power through the overall shaping of (imagined) bureaucratic territory. It argues that river basin planning is not an antidote to current ‘dysfunction’ in water resources management, rooted in overlapping jurisdictions, fragmented decision making, and bureaucratic competitions between various government agencies. On the contrary, it illustrates how river basin planning becomes a new ‘territorial frontier’, created and depicted by different government agencies as their envisioned operational boundary and as a means to sustain and increase their bureaucratic power and sectoral decision-making authority, amidst ongoing processes of federalism in Nepal.

Les espaces marins du Pacifique entre logiques de commun et d’accaparement

Les espaces océaniques apparaissent comme une dernière frontière territoriale à conquérir, délimiter et administrer. Cette « course à la mer » se nourrit, dans le Pacifique, d’enjeux économiques (mines sous-marines, développement insulaire), environnementaux (conservation de la bio-diversité) et politiques (souveraineté). Les interactions entre la multiplicité d’acteurs impliqués à différentes échelles et la pluralité des ordres de ressources concernés s’articulent à des temporalités elles-mêmes hétérogènes et génèrent des processus situés sur un axe opposant conceptuellement et politiquement privatisation/accaparement (grabbing) et mise en commun (commoning).

Uti possidetis juris e o papel do direito colonial na solução de controvérsias territoriais internacionais

O presente trabalho discute a condição do direito colonial nas controvérsias territoriais internacionais decididas pela Corte Internacional de Justiça. Em particular, o artigo verifica tal condição nos casos em que o princípio uti possidetis juris é invocado para auxiliar na determinação dos limites e fronteiras territoriais. Se, por um lado, a jurisprudência tradicional da Corte tende a tratar o direito interno dos Estados como sendo um “mero fato”, por outro, os particulares casos de uti possidetis requerem determinados exercícios por parte do juiz internacional que parecem afastar esse tratamento. Através de um exame da jurisprudência e dos casos em que o princípio é invocado, bem como das técnicas empregadas pela Corte para determinar e interpretar o direito colonial, o artigo demonstra que a abordagem tradicional da Corte é mitigada quando o direito colonial aparece no contexto do contencioso internacional.

Territorial Disputes and Their Resolution in the Recent Jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice

AbstractThe workload of the International Court of Justice in recent years has increasingly featured cases of disputes classified either as ‘territorial disputes’ or as ‘boundary disputes’, or otherwise involving the Court in considerations of the law relating to acquisition or transmission of territory, or to the creation, location and effect of territorial frontiers. The present survey analyzes the contributions to international law of the Court's decisions in these recent cases. Matters examined include the significance of the terms ‘boundary dispute’ or ‘territorial dispute’; the definition of what constitutes sovereign territory; titles andeffectivitésas bases for territorial claims; decolonization and theuti possidetis juris; use of natural features or of straight lines as boundaries; and relations across a frontier once established.

L’audit législatif aux frontières du pouvoir et de la politique

En étudiant le mandat de Sheila Fraser comme Vérificatrice générale (VG) du Canada de 2001 à 2011, cet article analyse la façon dont l’exercice de son pouvoir a permis de briser la structure de complicité qui tend généralement à lier l’action des Auditeurs législatifs aux intérêts du champ politique. Notre étude s’articule en particulier autour du scandale du programme des commandites dévoilé par la VG en 2004 et des événements qui ont suivi. Nos résultats mettent en évidence l’exercice d’un pouvoir multidimensionnel impliquant : 1) La mobilisation des armes réglementaires et législatives permettant de provoquer des conflits ouverts avec le champ politique ; 2) La défense du territoire réglementaire du VG et une pratique des missions d’audit de performance échappant au cadre restrictif d’une approche purement « technicienne » ; 3) La production d’un discours installant dans l’imaginaire collectif une représentation de l’action du VG comme un « justicier » indépendant des jeux politiques et au service de la population. Notre étude contribue ainsi à la littérature sur l’audit législatif en mettant en évidence la complexité de la dynamique de pouvoir exercé par le Vérificateur général et la porosité des frontières des territoires réglementaires et politiques.

Frame analysis of the politics of identity and conflict at territorial frontiers: the case of Jarso-Girhi in Eastern Ethiopia

This paper examines the public framing of the politics of identity and conflict in Chinaksen and Tulli-Guled districts where the Jarso and the Girhi have lived together as sedentary farmers. These are the districts wherein the two groups now experience socio-political and resource-based conflicts with identity underpinnings. The paper is based on qualitative data generated through intensive one-on-one interviews and focus group discussions. For analytical leverage, the paper draws on various mutually reinforcing sociological and social-psychological theories. The paper attempts to address the place of social framing in the conflict environment and the implication of frame-based positional and cognitive orientations on intergroup relations and interactions. The central argument of the paper is that in a context where identity groups are embroiled in competitive discourses, conflict framing serves as a vehicle through which members communicate their constrained and contested perceptions and understandings. Based on the analysis, the paper addressed the implication that the effectiveness of conflict management and resolution efforts and the efforts to reconstruct social integration in this context rests in a grassroots embrace and promotion of the values of transformative justice and interrelationships.

Sana que sana. Ciudadanía dominicana. El proyecto multimedia de Rita Indiana.

En este artículo propongo una lectura de los diferentes componentes audio-visuales y textuales de la obra de la artista dominicana Rita Indiana Hernández, enfatizando su intervención en los debates sobre ciudadanía y frontera entre la República Dominicana y Haití. Propongo que a partir del uso de la yuxtaposición y la (re) mediación –pasar de un medio audiovisual a otro– el proyecto multimedia de Rita Indiana puede entenderse como una exploración de las posibilidades discursivas y críticas tanto dentro de los confines de la nación, como en respuesta a las redes de producción y circulación artísticas globales. Esta posibilidad de intervenir en lo nacional y lo transnacional se da de la mano con una crítica a la naturaleza racializada del discurso nacional dominicano, así como también de las formas de producción neoliberales. El llamado “problema haitiano” cobra centralidad en la obra de Rita como epicentro de imaginarios, prácticas e identidades que permiten entender la construcción de la ciudadanía de manera retro-activa, es decir, como un contrapunteo conflictivo entre los legados del pasado histórico y las demandas de la actualidad.

Postcolonial Borderland Legacies of Anglo–French Partition in West Africa

Abstract:More than five decades after independence, Africa still struggles with the legacies of colonial partition. On the territorial frontiers between the postcolonial inheritors of the two major colonial powers, Great Britain and France, the continuing impact of European colonialism remains most acute. On the one hand, the splitting of erstwhile homogeneous ethnic groups into British and French camps gave rise to new national identities; on the other hand, it circumvented any possibility of sovereignty via ethnic solidarity. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the ethnic groups that were divided between English- and French-speaking states in West Africa, let alone the African continent writ large. This article joins postcolonial ethnography to the emerging field of comparative borderland studies. It argues that, although norms of state-based identity have been internalized in the Anglophone–Francophone borderlands, indigenous bases of association and behavior continue to define life along the West African frontier in ways that undermine state sovereignty. Although social scientists tend to focus on national- and sub-national-level analyses, and increasingly on the effects of globalization on institutional change, study of the African borderlands highlights the continuing importance of colonial legacies and grassroots-derived research.

The Transnational Formation of Imperial Rule on the Margins of Europe:1 British Cyprus and the Italian Dodecanese in the Interwar Period

This article records and offers to interpret a parallel hardening of British and Italian colonial governances in the Eastern Mediterranean in the interwar period. It focuses on the cases of the Dodecanese, an Italian ‘Possedimento’ since 1912, and Cyprus, a British dependency since 1878, lying on the geographical and cultural margins of, and the border between, these two colonial empires. Building on the recurrent cross-references between British and Italian colonial systems in British, Italian and Greek archives, official and unofficial, this article highlights the circulation of administrative ideas and practices across imperial boundaries. It suggests that British and Italian authorities saw in enosis, or the union with Greece advocated by the Orthodox majorities under their rule, an opportunity to implement an authoritarian form of governance potentially transposable to other Mediterranean settings. Engaging with current debates on inter-imperial transfers, this article enquires into colonial policymaking as the outcome of a mutually productive exchange across territorial frontiers and assumed ideological differences.

Le Prince Eugène de Savoie et le Sud-Est Européen (1683–1736), by Jean Nouzille (text prepared by S. Herry and D. Tollet)

Jean Nouzille’s sudden death in 2007 left the text of this substantial project incomplete. His research provides the base for a detailed overview both of the military campaigns waged by Prince Eugène against the Ottomans in South-East Europe, and subsequently the policies and initiatives of the Habsburg monarchy in the conquered territories. A former serving officer with a strong interest in the military history of Central Europe, Nouzille draws substantially on the holdings of the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna and the Foreign and War archives in Paris, but also makes use of material from Zagreb which broadens the perspective from centre to localities. The present volume has made this research available to a scholarly audience, and is focused upon the territories brought under Habsburg control by their military victories, examining the organisation of populations and defence-works to create a bastion—or, as Nouzille terms it, an ‘iron curtain’—against future Ottoman incursions. The Austro-Ottoman treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 extended the frontiers of Habsburg territory into northern Serbia and Slovenia, and confirmed their control of the Banat of Temesvár and of Lesser Wallachia. These huge additional conquests, attributed by Nouzille to the military and organisational skills of Prince Eugène and convincingly presented as the high point of his military career, enhanced Habsburg prestige but also raised problems of overstretched resources and of the establishment of cost-efficient defence in depth.

Caliphate Expansion and Sociopolitical Change in Nineteenth-Century Lower Benue Hinterlands

Abstract This article analyzes the processes of jihad, migration, and sociopolitical change in the lower Benue hinterlands of nineteenth century central Nigeria. It examines the dynamics at work in the expansion of the territorial, commercial, and symbolic frontiers of the Sokoto caliphate in this sector, as well as the impact commercial and political events spawned by caliphate expansion and consolidation in this area had on the experiences, sociopolitical organization, economies, and institutions of some non-Muslim communities. I explore the nonreligious lives that a religious movement progressively took on as it made its way through this multiethnic, politically diverse region of precolonial central Nigeria, focusing in particular on the experiences of the Agatu, a subset of the Idoma people, with the vagaries of the jihad. The article considers the proactive and reactive responses and adaptations of non-Muslim communities to the intrusions, raids, and demands of Hausa and Fulani Muslims possessing various degrees of caliphate affinities and affiliations. I argue that, although inspired by an expressed desire to construct and extend the frontiers of an ideal Islamic state, the jihad assumed a commercial character in this sector. Characterized by slave raiding and military intrusions, it left profound social and political legacies that those who encountered it had to contend with and adapt to during the tumultuous mid- to late nineteenth century.