Reece Jones

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa | UH Manoa · Department of Geography and Environment

In the modern state system, territories and borders give meaning to each other in the sense that borders delimit territorialized sovereign power. Conventional political-geographic perspectives hold that territoriality — the management and control of space — is a state strategy that can be turned on and off. There is no denying that territorial prin...

"White Borders is a searing indictment of the US immigration restrictions from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump presidency. This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that while immigration crackdowns are justified as protecting jobs and workers, they’ve always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.” —Ibram...

This article advances the understanding of borders with respect to their epistemological, ontological, and empirical intersections with violence and conflict, which remain understudied within critical border studies. Specifically, the article explores the potential of recent interdisciplinary research on the border–migration nexus to find critical...

The volume brings together essays by theorists in anthropology, geography, international relations, and other fields who argue for open borders with writings by activists who are working to make safe passage a reality on the ground. It puts forward a clear, concise, and convincing case for a world without movement restrictions at borders.

The world is experiencing one of the largest movements of people in history with 65 million people displaced by conflict in 2015, the majority of which were from Asia. This book brings a deep engagement with individuals whose lives are shaped by encounters with borders by telling the stories of a poor Bangladeshi women who regularly crosses the Ind...

The world is experiencing one of the largest movements of people in history with 65 million people displaced by conflict in 2015, the majority of which were from Asia. This book brings a deep engagement with individuals whose lives are shaped by encounters with borders by telling the stories of a poor Bangladeshi women who regularly crosses the Ind...

The world is experiencing one of the largest movements of people in history with 65 million people displaced by conflict in 2015, the majority of which were from Asia. This book brings a deep engagement with individuals whose lives are shaped by encounters with borders by telling the stories of a poor Bangladeshi women who regularly crosses the Ind...

The world is experiencing one of the largest movements of people in history with 65 million people displaced by conflict in 2015, the majority of which were from Asia. This book brings a deep engagement with individuals whose lives are shaped by encounters with borders by telling the stories of a poor Bangladeshi women who regularly crosses the Ind...

After a complex and protracted negotiation for almost 70 years, Bangladesh and India decided to exchange their border enclaves in 2015. Almost 55,000 people were living in these enclaves at the time of exchange and they were given the option to choose their state of citizenship. Drawing on this exchange, this chapter sheds light on how people choos...

The biopolitics and geopolitics of border enforcement in Melilla. Territory, Politics, Governance. This article uses the multiple and contradictory realities of Melilla, a pene-enclave and -exclave of Spain in North Africa, to draw out the contemporary practice of Spanish, European Union, and Moroccan immigration enforcement policies. The city is m...

This article examines the history of border fortifications around the world, discusses the evolution of the meaning and purpose of borders, and assesses the extent to which such walls have been effective in achieving their goals.

This introduction to the special issue sets out to bring some clarity and organization to the diverse bodies of literature on the construction, lived experience, and consequences of the West Bank Wall. We review the literature on the Wall and identify three broad themes: the significance of the Wall in the context of political negotiations, its dis...

This paper identifies a global trend towards hardened, militarised borders through the use of military technologies, hardware and personnel. In contrast to claims of waning state sovereignty, drawing on detailed case studies from the United States and European Union, we argue the militarisation of borders represents a re-articulation and expansion...

Partitions are based on two fundamental assumptions: identity groups exist that can be located, named and categorized, and these categories are attached to distinct territories. Drawing on the Partition of British India, this paper analyses how the differences between the categories “Hindu” and “Muslim” were developed through narratives and events...

Bordering no longer happens only at the borderline separating two sovereign states, but rather through a wide range of practices and decisions that occur in multiple locations within and beyond the state's territory. Nevertheless, it is too simplistic to suggest that borders are everywhere, since this view fails to acknowledge that particular sites...

This article is a critical geopolitical analysis of Chinese media representations of the 5 July 2009 riots in Xinjiang, China. Significant events often define the geopolitical climate by creating a space for the construction of boundaries between identity categories and the appropriate norms for behaviour towards the Other. The post-riot reports fr...

This article investigates local actions that transgress, subvert, and ignore the imposition of sovereign authority at the borders of sovereign states. It describes the creation and gradual securitization of the 4,096-km border between India and Bangladesh, which has culminated with the construction of roads, floodlights, and fences on the majority...

This article considers the trend in many countries towards securitised immigration policies and “hardening” of borders through the construction of walls or fences. In contrast the borderless world of globalisation, it identifies these attempts to strengthen control of borders as teichopolitics: the politics of building barriers. This article analys...

This article analyses five different representations of the homeland category “Bengal”. The region of Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century and imagined in a multitude of forms at different historical moments. The article describes the conditions that allowed different territories and peoples to crystallise as “Bengal” and “the Beng...

This article describes the impact of the events of 11 September 2001 on the practice of border security in the United States, India and Israel. It argues that the discourse of the global war on terror shifted the perception of border fencing from the anachronistic imagery of the Berlin Wall to that of a modern and essential way to secure the future...

The narratives of fear and uncertainty from the discourse of the 'global war on terror' have been used by many governments to expand securitization processes. As more aggressive security tactics have been deployed, scholars have sought to understand the changing relationship between individual rights and the authority of sovereign states by drawing...

This article investigates the 198 political enclaves along the northern section of the border between India and Bangladesh. The enclaves are a remnant of the partition of British India in 1947 and are effectively stateless spaces because most are small and located several kilometers within their host country, which has prevented any administrative...

This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the ‘global war on terror’ by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the ‘enemy other’ in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from pre...

In recent years, categories have been a topic of substantial research in the social sciences and humanities. Although many problematic categories such as culture, gender and scale have been criticized, moving beyond them has proved to be surprisingly difficult. This paper attributes this difficulty to what is termed the paradox of categories and ar...

Drawing on debates generated by the BBC Bengali Language Service's naming of the greatest Bengali of all time, this article investigates the shifting boundaries between group identity categories in our ‘globalising’ world. First, the controversy over the meaning of the term ‘Bengali’, which emerged in contemporary Bangladesh and India in response t...

Theories that explain the origins of communal violence in South Asia often point to the discursive creation of the perception of distinct and adversarial Hindu and Muslim identity categories at the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper argues that these theories overemphasize imagined social differences without adequately considering how t...

Scholarly inquiries into communalism in South Asia have often exclusively focused on politically constructed religious and ethnic identity categories. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that territoriality and the designation of homelands played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in developing social and political bounda...

Typescript. Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-80).