Henk van Houtum

• Professor Political Geography and Geopolitics and Head of Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR) at Radboud University Nijmegen & Professor Border Studies at University of Eastern Finland
• Professor at Radboud University

Paper on the increasingly alarming criminalisation of solidarity with undocumented migrants across the EU - and the threatening authoritarian turn it heralds for the project of European integration.

What can we learn from the Romans regarding the understanding of borders? For various contemporary populist politicians, Roman history teaches us the need for harsh and strict borders, to prevent the invasion of “barbarians” and the “fall” of the European Union. To assess their claim, we trace back the Romans’ own source of inspiration for their te...

The recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of theorising about borders. Having moved away from the positivist paradigm that views borders as static ‘lines in the sand’, a myriad of different conceptualisations of borders as continuous socio-political processes have emerged: bordering, borderscapes and borderlands are just some of the more co...

The worsening violence against refugees at EUrope's external borders is fuelling an analogous brutality against racialised minorities within EUrope's ghettoised metropoles. This autoimmune dynamic, we contend, is laying the grounds for a state of exception: a legalised civil war between police forces and border guards, on the one hand, and a crimin...

This interdisciplinary anthology addresses the criticism that previous investigations of borders often lack complexity and, therefore, fall short. Instead, the authors assess the complex interplay of elements and dimensions of borders and show how this gives rise to instances of disorder/order and how such disorder/order becomes socially and spatia...

Various measures of mobility restrictions were introduced since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This collective discussion examines them in relation to six different carceral techniques that govern movement: citizenship, nativism, colonialism, infrastructure, gender, and borders. We investigate how these spatializing techniques of carceralit...

We argue that the seemingly commonsensical notion of geographical proximity that has been persistently employed across the EU to justify the heart-warming reception of Ukrainian refugees, on the one hand, and the cold-blooded pushbacks of unfavourably racialised refugee populations, on the other, relies on a parochial misunderstanding of geography...

In this chapter, we analyze the systemic mismatch between the EU’s self-aggrandizing promise of sustainable and humane migration policies and the actual practices characterizing its border regime. The EU’s discriminatory border regime (which we dissect into a pre-border visa regime, the in-situ land and sea borders, and the post-border camps) has s...

Our chapter is a plea to investigate the possible remapping, redesigning and the taking seriously of a more creative development possibility for border landscapes

This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but...

Now, 20 years after our article “Bordering, Ordering and Othering”, the editorial team of TESG has asked me to look back on its formation, and to comment on the appraisals of its continued relevance and influence offered by Anssi Paasi, Bastian Vollmer, James Scott and Chiara Brambilla in this Forum. To this end, I will first explain what the inspi...

‘I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose’. With this powerful statement Mesut Özil resigned from Germany’s national football team. His resignation act not only highlights growing controversies and uneasiness around the representation of the football nation by players with migration backgrounds, but also marks the fragility of na...

What we critically ascertain in this essay is how the modern university is increasingly drifting away from the key ambitions of its own mission statement, and largely by its own doing. Although the typical university in its mission statement claims to aspire outstanding quality, academic freedom, and to contribute to society, in its daily organizat...

In this contribution we focus on togetherness, as one of the key notions in the current COVID‐19 crisis. Globally, it is seen as vital to stand and act together to combat the virus, and avoid a tragedy of the commons, in which actors are acting out of self‐interest and counterproductively to the general interest. In this essay we analyse the curren...

This opening essay is part of the astonishing book ‘’human territoriality’’ of Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard. In the book he zoomed in, literally, on the landscape of disappearance, the transience of borders (and conflicts), in various parts of the world. The book visually tells the story of how a border, although often built for eternity, wil...

In this article we argue that the EU suffers from autoimmunity: a self-harming protection strategy. Drawing on Derrida’s political understanding of autoimmunity, we contend that the root of this malfunction lies in the EU’s own b/ordering and othering policies, which are intended to immunise the foundational ethos of the EU. For this purpose, we di...

How is undocumented migration typically mapped in contemporary carto-graphy? To answer this question, we conduct an iconological dissection ofwhatcouldbeseenastheepitomeofthecartographyonundocumentedmigration, the map made by Frontex–the EU’s border agency. Wefind that,rather than a scientific depiction of a migratory phenomenon, its cartographyped...

With the rise of a neoliberal and neoconservative view of society, fundamental decisions about the form and future of cities are increasingly regarded as the product of inevitable inescapable processes: the laws of supply and demand, the clash of civilizations, or even the deep-seated desire for identity. The question this book poses is whether the...

Cyprus has been divided for more than four decades by a cease fire line known as “the Green Line”. This long-standing partition has made the island infamous for the seemingly unsolvable antagonism between its “Turkish” and “Greek” inhabitants. In this article, we argue that, in order to better understand why this division has remained obstinately m...

In this article we carry out a geopolitical analysis of the turbulent breeze driving the EU into uncharted extremes. To do this we zoom in on three cases that we deem both a response to political extremism and a source of political extremism in themselves: France’s state of emergency, Brexit and the pyrrhic victory over the far-right in the Dutch e...

The frontier is one of the most fascinating concepts in geography. It is a border, yet not a well-demarcated line but a fuzzy zone of transition, not a finished world but a world in sketch and a gate to the future. Because of its conceptual openness and relation to exploration, the frontier has been in partnership with imperialism and evokes the an...

Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a post-Cold War World (EUBORDERSCAPES), financed though the EU's 7 th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, was a four-year research project that tracked and interpreted conceptual change in the study of borders. As...

Ever since the 15th century, empires have invented Europe as a meaningful political space to legitimize territorial ambitions and establish hierarchies between Europeans and professedly lesser geocultural entities. Maps have played a crucial role in naturalizing the geopolitical arbitrariness—what we term cartopolitics—that has underlain such Europ...

The internal borders in the European Union were opened more than twenty years ago. However, a comprehensive and coordinated spatial vision for the border landscape is yet to be composed. Bureaucratic cooperation procedures in combination with new nationalistic sentiments in the EU only seem to block further effective cross-border cooperation. In th...

This contribution focuses on the borderscape of a flat area situated at the southernmost tip of Gibraltar, at the edge of the European Continent, which is illustratively and interestingly named Europa Point. We will argue that, as an evoking geographical belvedere of cultural and continental interrelationships, Europa Point directs attention to the...

Reflection and Debate Reflection and Debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

It is almost a truism to say that people increasingly dwell in a transnational context, that is, in-between societal systems and together with multiple nationalities. Increasingly, people are living in a different nation in which they were born. The nation-states people dwell in cannot be equated with territorial container-boxes anymore, if this ev...

The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was presented as the EU's strategic response in order to deal with the new situation following the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. According to the EU, these changing circumstances have led to new rationales: 1) coping with its new external borders and neighbours and 2), finding a solution for a fu...

Over the last few years, the global face of the EU has been changing. The EU is spinning a global border web with regard to the battle against irregular migration. At the borders of the EU, a powerful and security-obsessed distinction between travellers is increasingly being constructed between the travellers who 'belong to' the EU and those who do...

In Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’ the man from the country waits his entire life before the border, represented as the Law. In this article, the act of waiting before the Law is analysed in the context of a geopolitical border. More particularly, the question of why we b/order ourselves is investigated. And when do we dare to enter/ open the gate...

In this introductory contribution to this special issue of "TESG", we want to question the usual way of conceptualising places and borders in the debate about transnationalism. We argue, that in studies of transnationalism, on the one hand the idea of nation-states as spatial containers is overcome, but on the other hand also reproduces the same sp...

We start with some figures. About 2 million people live on the Canary Islands. On average, the islands handle about 9.5 million tourists per year. This substantial tourist industry contributes over 32% of the Islands’ GNP. The entire accomodation sector consists of roughly 172,000 hotel beds and roughly 242,000 overnight places other than hotels. T...

This introductory chapter discusses the relationship between state governance and specific forms of policy making in the light of three major kind of changes, in governmentality, territoriality and governance itself. Our basic assertion is that policy-specific developments are not just derivative but co-constitutive of broader discourses and practi...

Part I: Introduction.- Shifts in Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance: An Introduction.- Part II: States, Territories, Governance.- 2. Neoliberalization and Place: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Borders.- 3. Urban Governance and the Production of New State Spaces in Western Europe, 1960-2000.- 4. From Governance to Governance Failure a...

Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World (Longman, Harlow, 1932/1991) portrayed a post-human world, a world where human beings were mass-produced like clones and kept in complete happiness through an endless variation of seductions and pleasures. This essay explores parallels in contemporary urban society by analysing why and how we consume—goods, pla...

This article claims that the development of a European super-state is undesirable and unreal. Europe has never presented itself as a single bordered entity supported by a constitution and a clear definition of Europe and non-Europe. The contemporary forceful abduction by the European Union re-creates Europe as a bounded political entity institution...

The Mediterranean Sea has long been a Mare Nostrum but since the decolonisation in the twentieth century it has become a sharp divide between Europe and Africa. In the past decade, the closure of that border has become symbolized by the desperate attempts of migrants from the global South, mainly Sub-Saharan Africa, to cross the Mediterranean on bo...

In May 2004, only Greek Cyprus joined the European Union. The EU did not negotiate with Northern Cyprus as the Greek Cypriot government is acknowledged as sole representative of Cyprus. Despite this, after more than two years of EU membership, the Republic of Cyprus is seen in a positive light by the people of Northern Cyprus. Through the grey zone...

  Within the European Union, an internal liberalisation of cross-border labour mobility for EU citizens is currently being combined with the tightening of control and management efforts at the external borders. At the same time, attempts are being made to strategically select immigrants from new member states as well as from outside the EU who will...

Along the Dutch-Belgian and Dutch-German border a new and interesting kind of transmigration is developing, that is migration over only a few kilometres across the border. The main characteristic of these Dutch short-distance transmigrants is that they have their houses in Belgium/Germany, but their social and working life still takes place in the...

A number of authors have recently suggested that cities are becoming increasingly important as sites for the negotiation of ethnic diversity. While multiculturalism has been declared 'dead' in many countries, cities are now experimenting with new ways to accommodate ethnic diversity. This article reports on research conducted in Amsterdam. In this...