Julie Mostov

Drexel University | DU · Department of History and Politics

The paper I am proposing draws on my earlier analysis of hard borders, violence, fluid identities and political space. Given our contemporary landscapes of mobility and immobility, failing sovereigns and competing ethnocrats, new global actors, and modes interaction, we need to be rethinking our notions of political association beyond container sta...

This essay explores the ways in which traditional gender roles and patriarchal culture play a part in the violent map-making of ethnonationalism. With special reference to the former Yugoslavia, it looks at how boundaries designed to protect can, at the same time, be barriers to peace and security and tools of exclusion and aggression as women's bo...

In the preceding chapter, I suggested that thick notions of bonding (common national myths, memories, and long-shared past) are not likely to be effective building blocks of democratic cooperation today. Such bonds provide a potential mechanism for fixing and naturalizing differences, facilitating relationships of domination, and promoting notions...

Although I have talked about the notion of soft borders as an ideal, the fact is that borders are fluid, porous, and regularly renegotiated in practice. Not only are they constructed and reconstructed in historical imaginations and through warfare and diplomacy, but they are also regularly traversed, reconfigured, and deployed as part of the everyd...

In this chapter, I focus on the notion of sovereignty, both its explanatory value (the extent to which it accurately describes the relationships of power in the contemporary world) and its effect as a symbolic, political, and legal principle in the conduct of political affairs. Toward a reconception of the notion of sovereignty, I explore the disti...

The hard border politics of ethnocrats directs us toward a soft border approach to political association and social cooperation that rejects thick bonds of ethno-national belonging as criteria for enjoyment of the resources, rights, and obligations of citizenship. Accordingly, this chapter is both a study of a politics of national identity that nat...

Karl Marx had relatively little to say about democratic political institutions, a fact which, this article argues, has obscured an understanding of him as a democratic theorist. Still, his writings, the author insists, rest on a notion of democracy in which individuals cooperate freely and equally in the activity of governing. This process oriented...

The paper I am proposing will develop my argument for soft borders and transnational citizenship exercised within and across multiple, fluid polities of different scales: negotiable, flexible, and overlapping spaces of political association. Given our contemporary landscapes of mobility and dismobility, failing sovereigns and competing ethnocrats,...