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Abstract
The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by important changes in the last twenty years. After the processual shift of the 1990s (from border to bordering), in recent years there has been increasing concern about the need to critically question the current state of the debate on the concept of borders. Within this framework, this article explores the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that, though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and methodological. Such approaches show the significant potential of borderscapes for future advances of critical border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby contributing to the liberation of (geo)political imagination from the burden of the ‘territorialist imperative’ and to the understanding of new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated.
... Baud and van Schendel (1997) distinguish the historical phases of border-regional integration. Recent studies have examined more closely the conditions and expressions of border change, conceptualizing the transformative dynamics of borders, whether as a result of their multi-perspectivity (Doevenspeck 2011;Rumford 2012), the variability of local border practices (Amilhat Szary & Giraut 2015;Brambilla 2015), or changing global macro-phenomena (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) (see Ulrich et al. 2021;Brodowski et al. 2023). With regard to these studies, one can differentiate between representational and materialistic approaches. ...
... The conceptual development and theorization of border research increasingly benefit from both tendencies (the changeability of borders and the intrinsic temporality of borders). On the one hand, the characteristic of the historical changeability of borders moves to the centre of contemporary conceptual designs, in which borders are conceived as borderscapes or assemblages "in the making" (Brambilla 2015;Sohn 2016). On the other hand, sensitivities to the inherent temporality of border phenomena ground theories of borders in motion (Konrad 2015;Schiffauer et al. 2018) and a theory of the border that starts from the circularity of movements (Nail 2016). ...
... The analytical access point is borderwork, referring to an opening of border research to practice-theoretical approaches that have been taking place in recent years (Wille 2015;Connor 2021). In practice-sensitive border research, "the border" is conceptualized as, for example, "bordering" (Houtum 2011;Yuval-Davis et al. 2019), "borderwork" (Rumford 2013), "border-making" (Brambilla et al. 2015), or "doing borders" (Hess 2018). The shared focal point of praxeological border analyses is a focus on the knowledge-based and bodily enactment of the activities of the involved border actors. ...
Even though questions about the future have played a central role in recent times of polycrisis, border studies have long been relatively silent about the future. Our article develops a research perspective through which the sensitization of border research for the temporal dimension of the future can be achieved. To this end, social and cultural studies’ perspectives on the future are mobilized to approach the interplay of borderwork and/as futurework. We develop a foundation for an analysis of what we call “border future imaginations”. In this way, this study expands our understanding of border temporalities with reference to the future orientation of contemporary societies. Keywords: border temporalities; future; borderwork; futurework; sociology of time.
... The concept of borderscapes, similarly, posits that borders are dynamic, de-territorialised, and dispersed in society (Brambilla 2015). Brambilla (2015) presents the concept as a valuable tool for studying bordering processes in specific historical, political, geographical, and social contexts as experienced, lived, and interpreted by people in their everyday lives. ...
... The concept of borderscapes, similarly, posits that borders are dynamic, de-territorialised, and dispersed in society (Brambilla 2015). Brambilla (2015) presents the concept as a valuable tool for studying bordering processes in specific historical, political, geographical, and social contexts as experienced, lived, and interpreted by people in their everyday lives. Borderscapes, rather than fixed areas, are "multilocal socio-political arenas that emerge around border(ing) contexts and are thus diffused beyond the physical border" (Scott 2020, 10). ...
... Borderscapes, rather than fixed areas, are "multilocal socio-political arenas that emerge around border(ing) contexts and are thus diffused beyond the physical border" (Scott 2020, 10). The concept bridges high politics with communities and individuals by examining border representations and practices of border making (Brambilla 2015;Scott 2020). ...
Among world’s borders, the EU, Schengen and NATO external Finnish–
Russian boundary represents a hard, separating border. This study delves
into everyday life in the Finnish–Russian borderland between 2013 and 2018,
a period market by relatively free movement across the border. The aim of
this study is to examine how local residents and visitors perceived, engaged in
practices in, and experienced the Finnish–Russian borderland in their everyday
lives during this period. At that time, both the Finnish and Russian sides of
the border in the southern region of the boundary became interconnected
with each other, turning the border into an important asset for the economic
development of the border cities and regions. Theoretically the study builds
on the idea that borderlands, as areas close to state boundaries, are socially
produced and lived spaces. They are material environments practiced and
experienced by people in their everyday lives through meanings associated
with the space. This approach enabled the study to address a foundational
aspect in human geography that is somewhat overlooked in borderland
research: the spatiality of human life and the ways in which humans perceive,
experience, and interact with their environment.
The study found that local inhabitants and visitors associated the Finnish–
Russian borderland with various meanings, influencing their practices and experiences as well as their ways of identifying with their living space. The
research identifies characteristics unique to borderlands as lived spaces: It
emphasises the significant role played by the state boundary and its nature
in the processes through which individuals assign meanings, practice,
experience, and form relationships with their living space. Consequently, the
study demonstrates that the social and political context, which facilitated and
encouraged mobility across the Finnish–Russian boundary during the study
period, profoundly influenced the participants’ lived experiences.
The four research articles, which compile the empirical part of the study,
shed light on the perceptions and territorial identifications of young people
in Finland and in the Finnish–Russian borderland. They also examine local
residents’ relationships with the “twin city” concept in Imatra and Svetogorsk,
as well as how local residents and visitors live the Finnish–Russian borderland
by attributing meaning to their material and social environment.
... Moreover, as analysed in recent years by several scholars, although since the end of the Cold War globalisation has fostered the mobility of people, goods and money, on the other hand, barriers and borders have continued to proliferate, within the EU too (Stoffelen, 2022). This occurs not only through militarisation and the development of security infrastructures mainly aimed at controlling migration flows (Glouftsios, 2021;Jones & Johnson, 2016), but also-since borders are no longer understood as fixed entities-through multiscalar social and cultural practices of bordering that affect every-day life (Brambilla, 2015;Cassidy et al., 2018). As shown above, the political initiatives promoted by the Hungarian, populist government in terms of citizenship have pushed for new bordering processes (Pogonyi, 2018). ...
... Building on critical geography literature (Blazek et al., 2019;Laurie et al., 2015Laurie et al., , 2016Laurie and Richardson, 2020;McGrath and Watson, 2018;Yea, 2020), critical anti-trafficking literature (Kempadoo et al., 2012;O'Connell Davidson, 2015;Quirk, 2011), critical border studies (Brambilla, 2014;Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2012;Salter, 2012), and empirical insights from participatory action research in Nepal (see Bhagat, 2024), Bhagat (2022) conceptualised trafficking borders as 'spaces of restriction and negotiation contingently produced, encountered, and escaped along mobility routes' (Bhagat, 2022: 8). Using a case study of emigration bans in Nepal as an antitrafficking measure (Bhagat, 2023), he offered a conceptualisation of borders that reflects the failure of trafficking discourse to fully manage, control, and contain the mobility, agency and desires of people on the move. ...
This article introduces a special issue on Contested Geographies of Trafficking Borders. This collection broadens the understanding of trafficking borders by examining their materialisation, impacts, and contestation across different spaces and times. Expanding this notion of Trafficking Borders, the articles in this issue explore key questions: Where are trafficking borders found, and how do they manifest? Who creates these borders, and what are their motivations? How do those targeted by trafficking discourse resist them? How can researchers effectively study trafficking borders? Together, these contributions establish a critical agenda for contesting the geographies of trafficking borders.
... However, these principles sharply contrast with the multiple "worlds as emergent from complex and multi-scalar mobile relations, flows, circulations, and their temporary moorings" (Sheller 2018, 20). To dismantle both the material and normative borderscapes (Brambilla 2015) that result in violence and death today, we must start cultivating radically different visions of the future that take multiple realities into account. Recognizing this to be a challenging task, this principle calls for a sustained reflection about new visions that can redirect datafication against abstraction and dehumanization, and towards notions of enhanced responsibility, accountability, and mobility justice. ...
We present the Manifesto on the Datafication of Mobility Across Borders. Datafication is expanding the potential to produce and circulate information about people at unprecedented speed and scope. This is particularly revealed when people are "on the move" through territories of which they are not citizens. In this Manifesto, we are interested in the datafication practices and infrastructures that produce people as radical others. Practices of datafication and data infrastructures make people on the move knowable, but they do not represent them neutrally. They often enact them as "alterity," as inherently alien others against whom an "us" can be identified. Allegedly implemented for security purposes, not always well designed, often sloppily applied, practices and infrastructures of datafication of people on the move as others run the risk of subjecting vulnerable people to a perpetual state of precarity and securitization, and polities to long-term policies of expulsion. As sociologists of technology, ethnographers, political scholars, and software developers, we have witnessed with growing concern the recurrent instrumentalization of datafication for assessing identities of people on the move. The ten principles of this Manifesto are drawn from research conducted over seven years by the Processing Citizenship research team and discussed with the international scientific community involved in social studies of science and technology, migration, border and mobility studies, and security studies. We offer these principles based on best practices and empirical observation so that policymakers can hold to account national and European agencies tasked with home security functions, and IT developers can hold to account the infrastructures they design and implement.
... El foco está puesto en el caminar como práctica social común a muchos espacios fronterizos latinoamericanos, que permite interrogar la relación entre los sujetos y el paisaje, poniendo en diálogo la corporalidad, la experiencia, la movilidad, la representación, la materialidad y la subjetividad (Lorimer, 2011). Se anclará en el concepto de paisaje fronterizo -del inglés borderscape- (Brambilla, 2015), el cual contribuye a considerar simultáneamente las experiencias y las representaciones, evidenciando el modo en que los procesos fronterizos son corporizados, vividos e interpretados por las personas que allí habitan, y visibilizando los cuestionamientos a los regímenes de ordenamiento social y político predeterminados. El concepto de paisaje cotidiano transfronterizo busca, entonces, condensar estas diferentes concepciones para dar cuenta de Se muestra que los caminos turísticos participan en la producción de un paisaje cotidiano transfronterizo que revaloriza las formas históricas de caminar y resignifica los vínculos materiales y simbólicos de la población local con el volcán. ...
En este artículo se busca analizar cómo los recientes usos turísticos de los caminos hacia el volcán Tacaná —ubicado en el límite entre México y Guatemala— participan en la producción de una geopolítica cotidiana que transforma las experiencias y representaciones del caminar entre países. A través de una estrategia cualitativa, se observó que los caminos turísticos reconfiguran el paisaje cotidiano transfronterizo en el que, por un lado, se revalorizan las formas históricas de caminar, se refuerzan las redes socioespaciales y se producen lugares de encuentro y hermanamiento, pero, por otro, también se reorganizan y reproducen las divisiones nacionales y se crean nuevas fragmentaciones en la disputa por el control de la movilidad.
... McCann's oeuvre is mainly about communication, empathy, and redemption (Flannery 2011): debordering themes further explored and propagated for in Apeirogon. His novel engages in a process which conforms to the global one of eradicating borders and barriers which started back in the late 1980s (Brambilla 2015). ...
This paper argues that the debordering process represented in McCann’s Apeirogon (2020) is predominantly Zionist, resulting in enticing violent practices against the Palestinians. The de facto colonial state of Israel invites multilayered conceptualizations of borders, some of which are depicted in McCann’s novel. Apeirogon reimagines porous and permeable Palestinian/Israeli symbolic and physical borders instead of the commonly perceived rigid ones. By envisioning porous Palestinian/Israeli borders, Apeirogon advocates for an interstitial state transcending different religious, political, and ideological schisms between both parties; however, does it suit the contextuality of colonized Palestine? Reading the novel through the lens of Border Theory, with its interrelated politics of in/visibility and in/exclusion, my premise is to analyze the extent to which Apeirogon renders a violent debordering process mandatory for the security of Israelis.
... These scholars have gone to great lengths to convince the border scholar community to move beyond the more traditional Western notion of borders as "lines in the sand" (Parker & Vaughan-Williams 2009). As a result of this, they rarely focus directly on temporal aspects of bordering dynamics, instead asking questions about how borders matter in the here and now for a variety of actors so as to avoid appropriating a purely state-centred perspective as the point of departure for their empirical investigations (van Houtum et al. 2005;Rumford 2008;Andersen & Sandberg 2012;Brambilla 2015). In its immediacy, the practice-oriented approach is not designed to capture more complex temporal processes, and one often finds an emphasis on "new" and "postmodern" forms of bordering among critical border scholars (Balibar 2002;Rumford 2012;Green 2016). ...
In dialogue with Sarah Green’s concepts of “traces” and “tidemarks”, as well as a notion of “storytelling”, and Michel de Certeau’s allusion to “ghosts”, I revisit the Irish borderlands more than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement. I show how everyday life in these borderlands (still) locates in border temporalities articulated as the continual drawing of lines, deeply embedding what I call “the time of the state”. The lines of division and belonging narrate in relation to two periods of time: the Troubles and the island’s British imperial past, appearing materially in the landscape and cityscapes with an ever-present rearticulation of physical divisions by walls and fences and related symbolism, informing and ordering everyday practice. In these borderlands it is not just the popular storytelling about the conflicts that survives, but also a multiplicity of practices associated with them, dividing the population and turning the landscape ghostlike as supposedly past conflicts continue to haunt the everyday lives of people living there. Keywords: Northern Ireland; traces of lines; tidemarks; ghostly traces; practice-oriented approach.
... 189-191;DellʼAgnese & Amilhat Szary, 2015, pp. 4-5;Brambilla, 2015). Taking into consideration the objective of this paper, it is sufficient to mention that these processes are also broadly discussed from literary representation (Nyman, 2021) and from sonic (Nyman, 2019) stances, as well as from the viewpoint of the visual representations of borderscapes in the EU heritage narratives (Turunen, 2021), or when exploring "heritage as bordering" (Andersen & Prokkola, 2021), just to mention a few examples. ...
This article explores borderscapes as multilayered or displaced geopolitical and cultural borders through a/r/tography as living inquiry. Art making (via cartoons), arts-related research, a/r/tography, and border studies constitute a broad interdisciplinary framework for the study. The starting point is that a/r/tography as living inquiry provides an approach where interdisciplinarity can be seen more in terms of a “rupture where in absence, new courses of action unfold”, than as “a patchwork of different disciplines” (Springgay et al., 2005, p. 898). Hence, the main research question asked is: What kinds of new actions and understandings develop with ruptures involving visual arts-related research and the borderscape notion featured in this project? The focus is on the cartoons that address borders from different perspectives. The a/r/tographic viewpoints of metaphor and metonymy, openings, and embodiment are used to analyze these cartoons, their making processes, and ruptures that are linked to them. Moreover, I use general vantage points such as playfulness and temporality (memory) in my analysis. What was learned from a/r/tography in this study is how an a/r/tographic viewpoint could help to specify the symbolic ruptures within the visual and theoretical understandings of borders. In addition, the idea of playful openings was developed here to overcome not only the visual ruptures in the cartoons, but also those ruptures that are caused by the limitations of memory. Consequently, four ruptures – symbolic, visual, internal, and temporal – were approached as new actions and understandings that help to reconsider the border theory. For instance, it became clearer how the idea of borderscape touches on shifts of perspectives (identities) besides border spaces and other border processes. Thus, the observations in this paper can be used in the future for developing the study of the diversity of the border studies conceptualizations. Furthermore, the article provides insights through which to rethink connections between arts, scholarly disciplines, learning, and living inquiry; inward and outwards, as well as back and forth in time. Comic strip: Kari Korolainen
... Collaborative methods have gained traction in research, policy, and practice, as relevant and ethical strategies for addressing complex social problems, leading to calls for applied research-practice collaborations that include multiple perspectives (Pink and Fors 2017;Campomori, Casula and Kazepov 2023). Recent changes in the Danish immigration policies have created a borderscape (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007;Brambilla 2015) of temporary protection, confronting refugees with the paradoxical expectation of integration and of return. This reorientation of a quarter-century's political focus, away from integration towards repatriation (Vedsted-Hansen 2022), reflects a global trend of nation states implementing migration deterrence measures that add to the complexities of refugee protection and inclusion. ...
Collaborative methods have gained traction in migration studies, policy, and practice, in turn, engendering calls for new collaborations between research and practice. Bringing multiple perspectives to the production of knowledge in refugee research is particularly pertinent in Denmark, where incongru-ent policy aims of integration and of return creates a paradoxical borderscape that refugees, volunteers, and municipal caseworkers must navigate. This article draws on a practice-research project, co-developed by two large civil society organizations and university researchers that included collaborative ethnography among refugees, volunteers, and caseworkers in and around a social innovation initiative. It investigates how the conflicting expectations of integration and return shape efforts to change social relationships and strengthen the agency of refugees. We approach collaborative efforts from the perspective of boundary work and coin the concept of 'boundary obstacles' to describe core challenges to advancing social innovation initiatives with refugees. Building on a thematic analysis of qualitative data comprising fieldnotes and interview transcripts, we identify three boundary obstacles: positionalities, emotionalities, and politicizations. Finally, the article reflects on the prospects and challenges of social innovation and recommends ways to approach those challenges as boundary obstacles that can help set new directions for collaborative research with refugees.
... Drawing from critical migration studies and the Autonomy of Migration approach (Mezzadra 2013;Brambilla 2015;Stierl et al. 2021), this book explores the changes that occurred in the aftermath of the long summer of migration, examining the societal dynamics, emerging phenomena, and their implications. Of course, this work does not overlook the people in transit. ...
... The interplay between formal and informal boundaries is also highly dynamic, shaping the fragmentation of political space across different scales, shifts in territorial identity and approaches to public governance [8]. One of the most widely known and studied cases is the discrepancy between fixed administrative bound-aries and the expanding boundaries of a city or agglomeration, prompting the system of local administration to adapt to this circumstance. ...
This study draws on the concept of isomorphism of formal borders (those established by legislative acts), which postulates similarity in their functions performed in different combinations by borders of various statuses. The article aims to explore the isomorphism of formal borders and their impact on the economy and the quotidian practices of the population. The study employs expert interviews and personal observations from several Russian regions while analysing regional and municipal socioeconomic development strategies. On the one hand, the barrier and constitutive functions of borders help to level the socioeconomic gradient within such boundaries. On the other hand, these same functions accentuate the contrasts between neighbouring territories. The general characteristics of borders also encompass their capacity to either attract or deter specific activities and create or exacerbate the peripherality of adjacent areas. The tension between the continuity of physical and social space and the barrier function of borders shapes the population’s ‘cross-border’ practices, generating commodity flows and other interactions between neighbouring territories. This interaction, in turn, necessitates cooperation between border territories to address a range of cross-border issues. However, such collaborations exist almost exclusively at the interstate level. At the regional and municipal level, this need is either unaddressed or absent, even when acknowledged in strategic planning documents.
... Despite these positive aspects, it is also crucial to acknowledge the institutional control and strong repression that have occurred in the square and its surroundings, especially since the Greek government's authoritarian shift in 2019. This space has also represented a 'borderscape' (Brambilla 2015), where the border is embodied by a complex system of control and discipline. In recent years, a violent process of securitization and militarization has affected Athens, with continuous evictions of squats and a constant military presence in central city neighbourhoods. ...
Greece, a key European migration crossroads, has witnessed significant societal shifts due to successive waves of incoming and outgoing migrations. By using the concept of ‘migratory stratification’, this paper analyses the reality of a specific urban space, located in Athens, namely Victoria Square. Over the
years this square and the surrounding neighbourhood have seen numerous transformations, transits, and settlements and over the years it has become a hub for migrants, their shops, their informal networks, and their interactions. Starting from ethnographic research, in this paper I analyse this particular context, by highlighting the interactions and interweaving triggered in such
plural, layered and heterogeneous situations. As it emerges from the analysis, such spaces can be viewed as generative, as a fertile foundation for creating alternative senses of belonging, fostering practices of solidarity, and strengthening diverse networks and relations.
... Rather than focusing on the intermediation of spatial, cross-border mobility, we focus on internal border-crossings (Bonizzoni, 2020), that is -how migrants' mobility from one (il)legal status to another is achieved, organized, and made possible by different intermediaries acting in the recruitment and/or the documentation, status-producing process (Lindquist, Xiang and Yeoh, 2012: 9). Bordering processes (Pallister-Wilkins, 2018;Yuval-Davis, et al., 2019) are forms of ordering and classification (Collyer and de Haas, 2012;Crawley and Skleparis, 2018) that, in the governance of migration and mobility (Brambilla 2015;De Haas et al., 2018;Jones, 2009;Kolossov and Scott, 2013;Van Houtum and Van Naerssen, 2002) select (aspiring) migrants, keeping certain categories of people out, while facilitating the entry, circulation, and settlement of others (Mau, 2012;Paul, 2015). Beyond granting or denying physical access to the territory, borders also operate by allocating migrants a plethora of statuses (such as legal and illegal, denizen and citizen, temporary and settled, humanitarian and economic migrant), fragmenting access to social rights and resources, and making (social) citizenship uneven and internally stratified (Ataç and Rosenberger, 2019;Bendixsen, 2018;El-Kayed and Hamann, 2018;Guentner et al., 2016;Könönen, 2018;Misje, 2020;Morris, 2002;Schweitzer, 2022). ...
The bureaucratic management of the legal and administrative statuses of mi-grants is a pervasive yet scarcely researched aspect of the migratory experi-ence. This article describes the field of intermediation services for migrants, with a particular focus on legal and bureaucratic support. Using the 2020 regu-larization of irregular migrant workers in Italy as a case study, it shows that actors related to this emerging segment of the ‘migration industry' are not only concerned with facilitating migrants' physical border crossings but also that intermediation services increasingly involve the crossing of internal borders, particularly between different (il)legal migration statuses. The article describes the field of legal-administrative status-intermediation, highlighting the different actors involved, who differ widely in their legal competency and the degree to which they marketize their services. The article argues that the com-bination of legal uncertainty and the specific features of the institutional and regulatory framework concerning intermediation services in Italy creates space for the emergence and expansion of for-profit actors. These actors oper-ate on a sliding scale between legal and illegal, formal and informal service-provision, ranging from commercial intermediation to illicit practices and fraud. Additionally, the article shows increasing forms of competition and ten-sion between non-profit and for-profit actors in the field. The analysis is based on 45 interviews with different actors of civil society, employers and migrants involved in the amnesty. The article looks at the migration industry as a field of intermediation in a context marked by the pandemic and on the forms of embeddedness of irregular migrants in local society.
... This inconsistency forms a starting point that leads one to explore how the border is done and upheld in the mundane practices of diverse professional groups, and how migrants are part of this doing, understood broadly as 'borderwork' (Rumford, 2006;Vukov and Sheller, 2013). Mol's idea of multiplicity enables us to explore how the border is distributed and coordinated (Brambilla, 2015;Sohn, 2016). ...
This article analyses border practices that are enacted through an array of migrants’ residence registration procedures in Finland. These practices extend to the country of departure and also take place upon arrival and settlement within a municipality, and they are intimately tied with the person’s access to social rights in the country. Building on critical border studies and Annemarie Mol’s idea of multiple ontologies we examine migrant stories, collected via multi-sited ethnography, that simultaneously testify to being targeted by diverse border practices and of being compelled to take part in doing the border. We address regulatory practices that modify and, indeed, reinforce inequalities between migrants. We argue that residence registration as a scattered border practice not only enacts different statuses for migrants but orders them hierarchically depending, for example, on the person’s migration status and nationality (EU/TCN). Furthermore, multiple regimes of knowledge production such as statistics on migrant population draw on the data recorded in the population register during the municipal registration process, which further extends the impact of this data. We show how the welfare state system, claimed to be universal, is highly conjunctural depending on the information the person receives from different interlocutors, and on the presumably apolitical “policy on the fly” enacted at the registration desk.
... Since then, critical border studies has emerged as a distinctive approach within border research that examines borders beyond their territorial location. This new direction of border research pays attention to how borders shift over time, the representations that govern their construction, and highlights ethical considerations of bordering processes and border regimes (see Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009;Brambilla 2015;Cooper 2020). 2 Similarly, considerations of environmental factors in bordering processes have gained more attention along several axes of analyses, including the effects of borders on animal migration (Tautz and Rothhaar 2012;Oppermann 2017;Ullrich and Middelhoff 2021), the need to rethink borders in the context of climate change (Casey 2020), and to reconceptualize 'natural borders' in relation to environmental conservation (Fall 2002(Fall , 2011. At the same time, anthropocentric distinctions between nature and culture are so deeply ingrained in scholarly practice that they frequently prove hard to overcome. ...
Bringing together concerns in border studies, the environmental humanities and Scottish literary studies, this open access book examines the relationship between borders and the environment in Scottish literature from the nineteenth-century to the present.
Developing an innovative methodology that approaches Scotland from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book puts key debates in Scottish studies, literary theory, critical border studies and the environmental humanities into dialogue to highlight the critical intervention that Scottish literature can make in current theoretical discussions about borders and the environment.
Examining a range of literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present day, Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination proposes that the creative possibilities of literature allow Scottish literary works to unpack key issues relating to borders and environmental concerns. It includes analyses of works by Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Nan Shepherd, Willa Muir, John Buchan, Alasdair Gray, Sarah Moss and offers a combination of theoretical discussions and in-depth case studies to show how writers reconfigure borders in connection with the Scottish environment.
The article delves into the current history, space, and landscape of Highway 90, Israel's longest highway. Spanning the entire country, the highway aligns with Israel's eastern border, while traversing the contested territories of the West Bank. The inquiry addresses Highway 90 as a borderoad , exploring its biography in the geopolitical historical context through five conceptual forms of segmentation that highlight temporal-spatial intricacies and key aspects of the route: regional segmentation, geopolitical segmentation, elusive northwest Dead Sea segmentation, historical-synchronic segmentation, and a synthesis introduced as the borderoad landscape segmentation. The analysis reveals that segmentation operates not only as a methodological tool, but also emerges as the road's main characteristic, introducing the borderoad as a segmented whole that serves to enhance the nexus of nation, territory, and border. The discussion pertains to historical–geopolitical conflicts, highlighting the route's hybrid military–civilian characteristics. It addresses the border as a meta-narrative, while reflecting the conjunction of time-space within the geopolitical context.
Highways, considered the main protagonist of urbanization and accessibility, inadvertently create unique ecological niches along their edges. This contribution explores the “Highway Natural Borderscape” concept as dynamic landscapes that foster mitigation, compensation, and biodiversity-sensitive approaches along mobility infrastructures. Unlike traditional approaches to landscape design, which prioritize planned ecosystems, mobility border territories often emerge as unintentional reservoirs of flora and fauna, generated from a normative and safety imposition and later adapted to the challenging conditions imposed by the adjacent transportation infrastructure.
Through an interdisciplinary lens, this research investigates the ecological dynamics of such borderscape, considering the dichotomy between spontaneous and designed planning of such landscapes, focusing on the territories crossed by the Milanese Ring Roads system. The study also addresses the implications for landscape architecture and urban planning, suggesting innovative approaches to integrate them into broader urban green infrastructure intervention / projects, particularly on the spaces of the reliquati (a term from Italian regulation that refers to a residual space along mobility infrastructures, owned by the road concessionaire but not used for mobility or other functions) and the urban voids of mobility infrastructures. By acknowledging and enhancing biodiversity within these overlooked and underused spaces, planners can contribute to the resilience and sustainability of urban environments.
The proposal advocates for a paradigm shift in perceiving highways as linear infrastructure and dynamic corridors that, when properly managed, can support broader green infrastructures by enhancing the value of such neglected residual spaces. Recognizing their ecological potential opens new avenues for sustainable urban development, emphasizing the importance of embracing and optimizing the unintended environmental consequences of human infrastructure.
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 common ones. In this paper we aim to contribute to this processual turn in border studies by offering a philosophical critique of the typical appropration logic - the claim to own our ‘Us’ again - in nationalist b/ordering and othering processes. Specifically, we theorise about the critical potential of the concepts of community and immunity in understanding these appropriative nationalist bordering processes. To that end, we notably draw on the works of philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito. Both agree that community – human coexistence – is not an object and therefore cannot be appropriated. Esposito takes this further by elaborating on the logic immunity, through which the order deemed to be ‘Ours’ is meant to be protected from the disorder represented by an Other. He explains that immunisation is an attempt to appropriate an inappropriable identity. Ultimately, drawing on both thinkers, we argue that bordering efforts are self-defeating. B/ordering attempts to enclose a supposed identity to protect ‘us’, but in so doing the ‘us’ becomes owned by this supposed identity rather than vice versa. Immunity, Esposito specifies, eliminates community, and therefore ultimately so does b/ordering.
This chapter analyzes European Union (EU) actorness through a security perspective, seeking to unpack the processes that are leading to the reconceptualization of European security and the redesigning of the EU in this newly transformed context. The shift from the normative actor, very much enshrining the constitutive values of the EU, to highlighting the more geopolitical approach currently pursued by the so-called “geopolitical Commission,” needs to be addressed. This shift brings with it concepts such as those of principled pragmatism and resilience, along with bordering and debordering dynamics with clear security implications for what these dynamics mean, whom they are targeting, and how change is envisioned. The EU’s self-definition as a security actor and norms promoter in the contested international order is therefore topical. This chapter conceptualizes the EU’s security actorness, looking at how the war in Ukraine since 2014 and the Russian full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, have been contributing to the reconceptualization of security in the EU and the wider European context and at which have been its implications for both EU’s normative and strategic positioning, and the process of redefinition of European security.
This article explores a photographic practice that takes place in Jordan and Palestine. The practice consists of photographing sites on the other side of the borders. These photographs are shared through social media, and most of the pictures share a message either informative of the landscape and/or carries within it political and decolonial claims in its caption. This article seeks to understand how the borders and boundaries are conceived, represented, contested, and re-configured through this specific practice. I argue that this practice is produced by the borders but is committed at de-bordering, re-ordering, and de-othering a territory divided due to the colonial intervention and the Israeli occupation.
This visual essay makes use of sketches and watercolour drawings in order to present an observational study of a hunger strike conducted by undocumented immigrants in a Brussels church in 2021. The study aimed to explore the lived experience of the hunger strikers, focusing on the physical consequences, emotional states and process of the strike. The essay highlights the importance of visibility in gaining public support for a hunger strike. The study adds to existing scholarship on the use of visual methods in social research and highlights the potential of observational drawings as a tool for understanding the experiential aspects of social movements.
Using the case study of a family in Matsu, this study illustrates how emotions become the centre of social cohesion when confronting border islands. Emotions enable the Matsu people to explore the future of self-identity between a sense of fairness and justice after martial law was lifted and a sense of power-lessness while under the rule of Martial Law. First, this study explains how emotions evoked from memory reflect different personal life experiences that shape different local family oral history narratives, and, amid calls for land justice and open exchanges, how the memory of intellectuals evokes a sense of justice to optimistically redefine the Matsu people. Second, drawing from the sense of powerlessness in recalling family history and the continuous risk for fishers on the sea, this study explores how the fishers' memory demonstrates a sense of helplessness towards the strict border control exercised during Martial Law, and the weak enforcement of maritime law after it was lifted. Finally, from a discussion on family oral history in the borderland, and by examining how people in the border islands define their self-identity in the post-Martial Law era, this paper suggests border consciousness is relational, rather than processual, while still facing challenges under the changing geopolitical situation.
borders, bounderies, border studies, borderning, othering, ordering, populism, Bulgaria
The article uses the concept of border temporalities to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of an old letter containing a request from a cross-border female migrant from Luxembourg to access French welfare benefits. In doing so, it systematically unravels the way in which time was lived and experienced differently by borderland residents as opposed to French lawmakers. The alternative temporality characterizing the third space of the Luxembourgian–German–French borderlands clashed with the spatio-temporal hierarchy imposed by France in the period after the First World War to exclude the majority of people living abroad from access to social provision. The article concludes its hermeneutic circle with a reflection on how historical research on borders and borderlands is conditioned by the temporality of archives and the temporality of research funding. Keywords: Luxembourg; France; Germany; hermeneutics; welfare; veterans; First World War.
While it is no secret that politicians are employing racist anti-migrant rhetoric in political strategies, the ambiguous role of universities is much less evident. Some university activities in the UK are co-opted into violent state logics of xenophobic racism by acting as “border” controls for the UK Home Office—monitoring and reporting on international students. Other aspects of university complicities can be theorised in relation to acts of silence in the midst of injustice. Additional forms of complicity may lurk in the stereotypes and false representations of different parts of the world, which may be perpetuated in university policies and course curricula even despite the very best intentions. These problems may reside even despite the use of nuanced theories and curricula strategies that wholeheartedly seek to learn from oppressed populations. This chapter reviews some of the critical literature on different aspects of university co-optation as well as anti-colonial challenges that may be advanced against contemporary practices of racial bordering. Bringing together conversations from feminist migration and displacement studies, anti-colonial border studies and education and critical curriculum studies, we provide a preliminary account of sensibilities we sought to cultivate with students in the “Displacement and Development” course, taught at the University of Edinburgh with students from more than two dozen countries, as well as some of the dilemmas encountered. We then describe the methodology of our project, involving interviews, reflexive engagement on our classroom experiences and approaches, and consideration of alternatives (what we didn’t do and might have done). The course covered diverse topics—from the intersectional politics and implications of changes to refugee protection systems to the framing of climate-related displacement and the politics of “development-induced” displacement as well as migration responses in various parts of the planet (with a particular emphasis in African settings)—all interrelated in global systems of contestation and change. The chapter engages arguments that invite reflections merging geopolitical contexts, intellectual genealogies and situated pedagogies. It offers background to the approach to writing that we adopt, as a collective, with individual reflective components that share elements of our positionality in approaching teaching and reflection on displacement and borders.
There are increasing calls for attention to “decolonising” education curricula—as well as critiques of superficial decolonising endeavours at universities. Thinking around decolonisation, much like thinking around displacement, routinely suffers from the politics of abstraction, simplification and co-optation. Indeed, Edward Said cautioned long ago that colonial logics replicate and perpetuate because of how abstractions are used. In Said’s case, explorations in worlds of literature attended to a myriad of knowledge production problems and injustices, cultural stereotypes and forms of cultural hegemony. In this chapter, consideration is given to what it might mean to unsettle abstract narratives that lurk in educational fields, classrooms and policy discourses, through teaching activities that sought to challenge violent state power while exploring stories, visual art and maps. One set of reflections relates to the possibilities of using visual art alongside engagement with lived experiences of UK refugee policy—especially the experiences of Afghan women; navigating a realm of pedagogic possibilities, it suggests scope for experimentation and situated learning through body mapping. Another set of teaching reflections addresses border politics through attention to bordering aesthetics and maps/counter-maps in the curriculum; here the recent proliferation of mapping literatures and strategies is explored to invite attention on mapping creatively, counter-hegemonically and through acts of reflection and listening. Some final analyses then follow.
Accounting is traditionally viewed as a discipline focused on managing financial records and ensuring compliance with regulations. However, its influence extends far beyond these functions, playing a critical role in driving organizational and human growth. This paper explores how accounting, when integrated with interdisciplinary practices, serves as a catalyst for organizational development, human empowerment, and sustainable growth. The first aspect of this exploration emphasizes accounting's ability to drive organizational growth. Through accurate financial reporting, strategic planning, and resource allocation, accounting provides the insights necessary for organizations to make informed decisions that align with both short-term and long-term objectives. It enhances operational efficiency by optimizing resources and minimizing waste, which ultimately leads to increased profitability and sustainability. The second focus is on how accounting contributes to human development within organizations. By fostering financial literacy, transparent compensation structures, and strategic employee investment, accounting helps build a workforce that is engaged, knowledgeable, and aligned with organizational goals. Financial empowerment allows employees to understand the impact of their actions on the company's success, leading to increased productivity, engagement, and job satisfaction. Finally, the paper discusses how interdisciplinary integration-blending accounting with fields like human resources, marketing, and operations-enhances the overall effectiveness of organizational strategies. By aligning accounting practices with broader business goals and incorporating diverse perspectives, organizations can innovate, create value, and develop a more cohesive and adaptive environment.
Borderscape discussions have expanded border studies by emphasizing the defining aspect of borderline social relations. Thomas Nail also contributed literature by considering the immigrant’s resistance power with the concept of the figure. Nail’s theory, despite its methodological contribution, neglects the possibility that the proletariat’s everyday life experiences could not resist expansion strategies by expulsion. This article methodologically utilizes Henri Lefebvre’s works on everyday life and alienation to understand the situations in which the proletariat cannot reveal pedetic force. The article investigates the everyday life of truck drivers in Hopa Kopmuş Truck Park, one of the waiting points of the Sarp Border Gate. The article discusses the expansion strategies by expulsion that drivers are exposed to in their private life, leisure, and working life, as well as their relationship with the space in the context of alienation.
This paper explores the geographies of migrant schooling in Athens following the 2015–2016 crisis, which left thousands of migrants stranded in the country. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of everyday bordering (2017–2018), I examine the school as an ordinary bureaucratic institution and as a physical space in relation to the border. I discuss the processes that rendered the schooling of racialised children a problem to be managed and solved. These migrant schooling timescapes, I argue, were marked by contradictory state logics, and temporalities, and were shaped by context‐specific colonial and racialisation discourses. These tensions shaped the encounters between families on the move and the state throughout the academic year. The paper argues that the school became an everyday space of bordering, controlling membership and reproducing the families’ marginalisation. In this way, it contributes to the literature that highlights the role of ordinary institutions and temporal forms of governance conditioning migrant lives.
This article studies everyday bordering processes at the Finnish – Russian border during ‘times of stress’, specifically, following the COVID-19 pandemic and the onset of the war in Ukraine. The research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the summer and autumn of 2022 in four border cities (Imatra and Lappeenranta in Finland, and Svetogorsk and Vyborg in Russia). The study centres on visual and sensory observations made during the fieldwork, as well as discussions taking place in local newspapers and their social media channels. The Finnish – Russian borderland is approached as a ‘borderscape’ – a site where borders are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in everyday life by heterogeneous agents. The research illustrates that the political context shaped the Finnish – Russian borderscapes concerning the material border landscape, people’s experiences and imaginations. The study argues that visual and sensory ethnography can add deeper and more nuanced layers to the understanding of borderscapes as well as provide alternative ways of conveying research findings.
Anti‐imperial autoethnography is an important practice for critiquing and reflecting upon encounters with imperial bordering and its junctions with the neoliberal‐corporate university. In this article, we analyse our children's visa rejections to the UK, where we work and study as immigrant academics. We argue that the Home Office's policy of what constitutes a child's “welfare” produces racialised, gendered, and classist processes through which children are legally estranged from their primary carer when they immigrate for work unaccompanied by the other parent. This heteropatriarchal policy disproportionately impacts working migrant mothers. Academic carers can be further impacted by corporate university practices that eschew institutional agency and responsibility, including by individualising interpretations of visa rejections or presuming to abstain wholesale from matters concerning migrant family welfare. We reflect on how transnational feminist friendships and solidarities challenge imperial bordering and the interfaces of border enforcement with academic institutions and spaces, and acknowledge the importance of ongoing activist work to abolish borders from within the university.
Technologies are predominantly understood as ‘solutions’ for policy problems in EU border control. This has prompted increased political attention to research and development (R&D) of ‘innovative’ security technologies. The European Commission has continuously increased its spending on the development of security devices in the Security Research Programme; at the same time, border security institutions such as Frontex or eu-LISA have worked to amplify their influence on shaping security research in the EU’s Research Framework Programmes. Against this backdrop, this article develops the argument that R&D is a political practice of ‘making’ and governing the border through its entanglement with the politics of border security in the EU. By conceptualizing R&D as ‘borderwork’, the article interrogates how practices of security R&D inscribes specific logics into EU border security and control. In doing this, it also problematizes how R&D locks in exclusionary dichotomies and categorizations of mobilities through privileging security actors in the process. Based on qualitative interviews, the article provides an in-depth analysis of political processes through which R&D programmes and projects materialize at policymaking, implementing and operational levels. Through this, the article explores comprehensively how political logics of bordering are constantly shaping and simultaneously renegotiated in R&D.
This article conceptualises how the sea comes to matter for practicing solidarity with maritime migrants. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the article proposes that migration and border studies' critique of methodological nationalism (Anderson, 2020) and focus on mobility (Scheel and Tazzioli, 2022) can be fruitfully combined with the challenge that ocean studies makes towards modernity's “terracentric normative ideal” (Peters et al., 2018, p. 2) to advance conceptions of maritime solidarity. Consequently, the article asks what happens when you detach solidarity from the “national order of things” and conceptualise it, instead, starting from the sea's “more-than-wet ontology” (Peters & Steinberg, 2019) – a political geography that is constantly in motion. Our argument is empirically grounded in original ethnographic research conducted with civil sea rescue and migrant solidarity actors in the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea. Drawing on these case studies, we demonstrate how the sea presents migrant solidarity action with both techno-material (wind and waves) and socio-legal (maritime zones and port state control) challenges which solidarity actors navigate through the application of seafaring knowledges and common seafaring practice. We argue that in prioritising seafaring over sedentary logics, the practices of seafaring activists open up new paths to conceptualising solidarity in and beyond maritime geographies.
This article focuses on Lampedusa as an exemplary case study of economic transformation brought about by migration, as well as the creation of a ‘migration industry’. On the basis of interviews with key informants and a reconstruction of the secondary literature, it shows how migration has given international visibility to the island, starting from the first arrivals of emigrants in the 1990s, through the increase in landings during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, and up to the present. This has fed various processes of conversion from an economy based on fishing towards an economy built around relatively recent tourism. Furthermore, it highlights how the national, European and international policies of migration governance have contributed to creating an industry based on consumption by the military, police, volunteers, health and humanitarian personnel present on the island and the impact this has had on the local service sector.
EU relations with its eastern neighbours have been pursued with the goal of building a ‘ring of friends’ contributing towards security and stability-building, through reforms’ implementation and the development of closer relations. This transformative agenda met, however, some criticism and resistance from Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries. Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022 changed profoundly the setting for these relations, including the accession requests coming from Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, along with the cut off of relations with Russia and Belarus. The implied debordering and rebordering dynamics taking place show the complexity of material and symbolic bordering practices. Through a critical border studies approach, this paper seeks to unpack these bordering dynamics and how they are reconfiguring the European space, arguing the EU has become locus of resistance for countries such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia assuring their European identity.
This study delves into the intricate mechanisms by which states employ a complex network of competing and intersecting borders—both real and imagined—to delineate and perpetuate the image of Syrian refugees as security risks. Drawing upon insights from border studies, securitization theory, and framing analysis, we explore the nuanced processes of mental mapping and bordering within the context of the Syrian crisis. By scrutinizing the construction of these borders and mental maps, we highlight the deliberate state‐driven narrative that portrays Syrians as threats, emphasizing that such perceptions are not inherent but rather intentionally crafted. Our investigation sheds light on the state's agency in framing Syrians as threats, a narrative rarely challenged despite the multifaceted nature of the refugee crisis. Through an expanded discussion on historical, geopolitical, and socio‐cultural dimensions, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the intricate dynamics underlying the portrayal of Syrian refugees as perennial security concerns.
The harsh beauty of the Antarctic continent has always fascinated explorers, scientists, policymakers, and global audiences alike. From the 18th century onwards, national expeditions competed to discover and claim Terra Australis Incognita, the fantastical Great Southern Land believed to be located in the southern Asia-Pacific. This article investigates the worldmaking potential of Antarctica as an uncanny borderscape where humans confront the familiar yet otherworldly ice. I argue this encounter produces a double-sided imaginary of Antarctica as a geography of exception – both as a utopian world elevated above the everyday politics that dominates international relations elsewhere and as a dystopian world where monsters and madness lurk just beneath the icy surface. This double-sided imaginary enabled diplomatic agreement at the 1959 Washington Conference that froze competing sovereignty claims and preserved Antarctica as a frozen laboratory for collaborative science. At the same time, it inspires fears of a potentially thawed Antarctica as a place of horror where alien forces threaten to overwhelm human rationality. Drawing on primary accounts of exploration, archival material, and science and speculative fiction, my intertextual analysis demonstrates how this imaginary was created, represented, and reproduced to create utopian and dystopian visions of our collective planetary future.
1. Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the 'Lines in the Sand' Agenda 2. Theory of the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies 3. Carl Schmitt and the Concept of the Border 4. Picking and Choosing the 'Sovereign' Border: A Theory of Changing State Bordering Practices 5. Sloterdijk in the House! Dwelling in the Borderscape of Germany and The Netherlands 6. Cartopolitics, Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic 7. Off-shoring and Out-sourcing the Borders of EUrope: Libya and EU Border Work in the Mediterranean 8. Mixed Legacies in Contested Borderlands: Skardu and the Kashmir Dispute 9. Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders
This detour through art aims at demonstrating the performative function of contemporary walls and barriers, designed to impose a geopolitical vision through landscape changes. The text assesses the link between art and borders by formulating the hypothesis that a “border art” (art on the border, art born from the border, art against the border, etc.) is emerging. It tries to understand how the closing up of a border not only reactivates cultural production on an international border, but also transforms the latter's meaning. On the US–Mexico border, for instance, the building of the security fence since 2006 seems to have been accompanied by a strong artistic upsurge. This can be nuanced by analyzing the changes in the nature of artistic production, with more mobile works, marked by a strong presence of videos and performances, as if the fixity imposed by the line requires a fluid creative answer.
State boundaries have constituted a major topic in the tradition of political geography. Boundary analysis has focused on the international scale, since international boundaries provide perhaps the most explicit manifestation of the large-scale connection between politics and geography. The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in boundaries, both within geography and from the wider field of social theory. Geographers have sought to place the notions of boundary within other social theoretical constructs, while other social scientists have attempted to understand the role of space and, in some cases, territory in their understanding of personal, group, and national boundaries and identities. Recent studies include analyses of the postmodern ideas of territoriality and the ‘disappearance’ of borders, the construction of sociospatial identities, socialization narratives in which boundaries are responsible for creating the ‘us’ and the ‘Other’, and the different scale dimensions of boundary research. These can be brought together within a multidimensional, multidisciplinary framework for the future study of boundary phenomena.
The renaissance of border studies during the past decade has been characterized by a crossing of disciplinary borders, bringing together geographers, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, legal experts, along with border practitioners engaged in the practical aspects of boundary demarcation, delimitation and management. This growth in border studies runs contrary to much of the globalization discourse which was prevalent during the late 1980s and early 1990s, positing a new ‘borderless’ world, in which the barrier impact of borders became insignificant. The article points to the common use of terminology which can create a shared border discourse among a diverse group of scholars, such as boundary demarcation, the nature of frontiers, borderlands and transition zones, and the ways in which borders are crossed. The article also discusses the reclosing of borders which is taking place as a result of 9/11 as part of the stated war against global terror.
The current renewed interest in the study of borders and borderlands is paralleled by a growing concern and debate on the possibility of a border model, or models, and of a border theory, or theories. Certainly, there is a new attention to theoretical consideration and discussion that could help sharpen our understanding of borders. In this essay, I argue that a model or general framework is helpful for understanding borders, and I suggest a theory of borders. The seeds of my arguments are grounded in a variety of discussions and in the works of border scholars from a variety of social science disciplines. My contention is that the literature on borders, boundaries, frontiers, and borderland regions suggests four equally important analytical lenses: (1) market forces and trade flows, (2) policy activities of multiple levels of governments on adjacent borders, (3) the particular political clout of borderland communities, and (4) the specific culture of borderland communities. A model of border studies is presented in the second part of this essay, and I argue that these lenses provide a way of developing a model that delineates a constellation of variables along four dimensions.
While concepts of a postinternational politics properly highlight the constant variance of entities in play in international relations, the approach lacks an ontology that shows how such an unstable variety of types of players can coexist in a common field in the first place. This article draws upon Deleuze's philosophy to set out an ontology in which the continual reformulation of entities in play in “postinternational” society can be grasped. This entails a strategic shift from speaking about the “borders” between sovereign states to referring instead to the “margins” between a plethora of entities that are ever open to modifications of identity. The concept of the margin possesses a much wider reach than borders, and focuses continual attention on the meetings and interactions between a range of indeterminate entities whose interactions may determine both themselves and the types of entity that are in play.
In this paper we argue that cartography is profitably conceived as a processual, rather than representational, science. Building on recent analysis concerning the philosophical underpinnings of cartography we question the ontological security of maps, contending that it is productive to rethink cartography as ontogenetic in nature; that is maps emerge through practices and have no secure ontological status. Drawing on the concepts of transduction and technicity we contend that maps are of-the-moment, brought into being through practices (embodied, social, technical); that mapping is a process of constant reterritorialization. Maps are never fully formed and their work is never complete. Maps are transitory and fleeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent; they are always mappings; spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems (eg, how best to create a spatial representation, how to understand a spatial distribution, how to get between A and B, and so on). Such a rethinking, we contend, provides a fresh perspective on cartographic epistemology, and could work to provide a common framework for those who undertake mapping as applied knowledge (asking technical questions) and those that seek to critique such mapping as a form of power/knowledge (asking ideological questions). We illustrate our argument through an analysis of mapping practices.
Even when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modern territorial state attribute to it. However, when the territoriality of the state is debated by international relations theorists the discussion is overwhelmingly in terms of the persistence or obsolescence of the territorial state as an unchanging entity rather than in terms of its significance and meaning in different historical‐geographical circumstances. Contemporary events call this approach into question. The end of the Cold War, the increased velocity and volatility of the world economy, and the emergence of political movements outside the framework of territorial states, suggest the need to consider the territoriality of states in historical context. Conventional thinking relies on three geographical assumptions ‐ states as fixed units of sovereign space, the domestic/foreign polarity, and states as ‘containers’ of societies ‐ that have led into the ‘territorial trap’.
This paper discusses the changing meanings of territoriality and state boundaries in a situation where the processes of globalisation are said to be increasing all forms of economic, political and cultural links and reducing the role of boundaries and state sovereignty (de-territorialisation), but where nationalism and ethno-regionalism seem concomitantly to be establishing new boundaries and giving rise to conflicts between social groups (re-territorialisation). Instead of perceiving boundaries merely as fixed products of the modernist project, this article aims at conceptualising them as social processes. This means that instead of analysing how boundaries distinguish social entities, we should concentrate on how social action and discourse produce diverging, continually changing meanings for boundaries and how these are then used as instruments or mediums of social distinction. The changing meanings of the Finnish-Russian border are used as empirical illustrations of this approach. The history of this border suggests that instead of understanding the idea of territoriality as one form of control used in strictly bounded territorial units, several forms of territoriality exist concomitantly in diverging social practices and discourses.
Since the early 1970s, debates have raged throughout the social sciences concerning the process of ‘‘globalization’’ ^ an essentially contested term whose meaning is as much a source of controversy today as it was over two decades ago, when systematic research ¢rst began on the topic. Contemporary globalization research encompasses an immensely broad range of themes, from the new international division of labor, changing forms of industrial organization, and processes of urbanregional restructuring to transformations in the nature of state power, civil society, citizenship, democracy, public spheres, nationalism, politico-cultural identities, localities, and architectural forms, among many others. 2 Yet despite this proliferation of globalization research, little theoretical consensus has been established in the social sciences concerning the interpretation of even the most rudimentary elements of the globalization process ^ e.g., its historical periodization, its causal determinants, and its socio-political implications. 3 Nevertheless, within this whirlwind of opposing perspectives, a remarkably broad range of studies of globalization have devoted detailed attention to the problematic of space, its social production, and its historical transformation. Major strands of contemporary globalization research have been permeated by geographical concepts ^ e.g., ‘‘space-time compression,’’ ‘‘space of £ows,’’ ‘‘space of places,’’ ‘‘deterritorialization,’’ ‘‘glocalization,’’ the ‘‘global-local nexus,’’ ‘‘supra
Political geographers have produced extensive and valuable bodies of knowledge on both international boundaries and geopolitics. However, an emphasis on discourse study means that these literatures are in danger of becoming both repetitious and lopsided, relegating or even erasing people's experiences and everyday understandings of the phenomena under question. This article suggests that ethnographic participant observation, a method largely neglected by political geographers, could be used to address these imbalances and open new research directions. This argument is demonstrated by a study of the impact of the partial closure in 1999–2000 of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary. Post-Soviet time was hyper-accelerated by the belated imposition of the logic of nation–states onto the existing social geographies of kinship practice. The legal–constitutional division of the Valley in 1991 only ‘caught up’ with the lived experiences of borderland dwellers in 1999. The sudden collapse of this ‘political geographical time-lag’ forced upon them the traumatic realisation that Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan really were two separate countries. In this context, using ethnography to highlight discrepancies between elite and everyday political geographical imaginations informs a critique of state violence that is parallel to, but not a replacement of, textual analyses informed by critical social theory.
By adopting the borderscape as "method", the paper inquires into the Euro/African border nexus by assuming a multi-sited approach, able to combine not only different places where borderscapes could be observed - both in borderlands and wherever specific borderscaping processes have impacts, are negotiated or displaced - but also different socio-cultural, political, economic, and historical settings. From this viewpoint, the paper proposes a shift from exclusively national borders between EU member states and African countries to the multiplying material as well as epistemological borderlands at the interface of their dis-location and re-location, which are producing new forms of borderland in Africa originated by the externalization of European borders.
A Companion to Border Studies introduces an exciting and expanding field of interdisciplinary research, through the writing of an international array of scholars, from diverse perspectives that include anthropology, development studies, geography, history, political science and sociology. Explores how nations and cultural identities are being transformed by their dynamic, shifting borders where mobility is sometimes facilitated, other times impeded or prevented Offers an array of international views which together form an authoritative guide for students, instructors and researchers Reflects recent significant growth in the importance of understanding the distinctive characteristics of borders and frontiers, including cross-border cooperation, security and controls, migration and population displacements, hybridity, and transnationalism.
Geography's relation to thinking is much closer than we sometimes would believe. What we traditionally call ‘thinking’ is based on a spatial metaphoric that visualizes thoughts as solid identities related in absolute space, forming regions or fields. Different traditions of thought differ in the way they conceive the line that surrounds them, for example, as a limit, a boundary or a ditch. In the paper the author tries to find out if thinking has to be limited by such lines. In order to do this, the author balances on the boundary, that is, stays in the paradox. If such a meaningless statement can succeed in becoming meaningful movement, thinking could show that, even though it depends on topo-logic, it can in fact exceed it. This may lead in the direction of a different conception of ‘knowledge’ and ‘communication’, a questioning of the idea of an ontology/epistemology, or of politics. They are not fully developed here, but it is presumed that to do this one would need a twofold move: Question the spatial metaphors in which binary oppositions take place to show what is underneath, and, at the same time, trust poetry.
The paper develops a non-state centric approach to the study of borders, building upon Balibar's ‘borders are everywhere’ thesis. It offers a critique of the assumption of consensus (mutual recognition of borders) in border studies. It is argued that borders do not have to be visible to all in order to be effective. The case for a multiperspectival border studies is then outlined: borders cannot be properly understood from a single privileged vantage point and bordering processes can be interpreted differently from different perspectives. A key dimension of a multiperspectival approach to border studies is examined in detail: borderwork, societal bordering activity undertaken by citizens. This is explored at several UK sites in order to demonstrate the ways in which borders are not always the project of the state, that they can exist for some (but not all), and can link people to the world beyond the ‘local’ border.
The research hypothesis that we call border as method offers a fertile ground upon which to test the potentiality and the limits of the topological approach. In this article we present our hypothesis and address three questions relevant for topology. First, we ask how the topological approach can be applied within the heterogeneous space of globalization, which we argue does not obey the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. Second, we address the claim of neutrality that is often linked to the topological approach. Our point is that in mapping a space of flows and porous borders, the topological approach must be grasped in its ambivalence; it can become a tool for control as well as a tool for the expansion of freedom and equality. Finally, we argue that it is useful, perhaps even necessary, to locate the topological approach on the border, investigating concrete practices of border crossing that challenge the very possibility of a neutral mapping.
This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant "illegality" and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant "illegality" as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the "illegality" of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of "illegalization" themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production of migrant "illegality.".
The author considers the stages of development and the progress in theory of border studies from the early twentieth century to the present. He characterises the content of each stage, new ideas, the main achievements and practical applications. The essay is particularly focused on postmodern approaches that have emerged during the last 15 years.
The current financial and fiscal crisis within the Eurozone is the latest in a series of events to have occurred in recent decades that have been altering the meaning, purpose, and form of European borders. These events include the multiple border-altering experiments of the European Union (EU), the end of the Cold War, and the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. Cumulatively, the position of Europe, as a place and as an idea, has been undergoing considerable relocation as a result. This large-scale political reorganization of spatial location has led to a shift in focus within European border studies: The way the ground underneath people's feet can be shifted turns out to be as important as the way people themselves move from one place to another, or the way people form politically inflected identities in relation to territories.
Over the past century there have been a number of distinct attempts by geographers to generalize about the nature of international boundaries. The most influential contemporary movement is that which considers them as examples of more general processes of "bordering" or "bounding." This approach is insightful but not without limitations, and can be advanced through writing what are termed "boundary biographies" that explore how specific boundaries materialize, rematerialize, and dematerialize in different ways, in different contexts, at different scales, and at different times. A biography of the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan boundary traces its materialization as a result of the 1924 through 1927 process of national territorial delimitation and its multiple and varied re and dematerializations throughout the Soviet and particularly the post-Soviet periods. This biography illustrates the importance of geography for understanding processes of nation-state formation and political contestation in Central Asia.
This report examines the ways in which mapping is performative, participatory and political. Performativity has received increasing attention from scholars, and cartography is no exception. Interest has shifted from the map as object to mapping as practice. Performativity is a cultural, social and political activity; maps as protest and commentary. The internet both facilitates and shapes popular political activism, but scholars have been slow to grasp amateur political mappings, although analysis of political deployments of mapping in state, territorial and imperial projects remains rich. Finally, some authors suggest that cartography be understood as existence (becoming) rather than essence (fi xed ontology).
This introduction to a themed section of Society and Space explores some of the implications that boundaries are enacted rather than given.
The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004) 297-310
As we know, the question raised by my title took on a new cogency during the last ten years of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or Human Rights had just been rejuvenated in the seventies and eighties by the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—a rejuvenation that was all the more significant as the "formalism" of those rights had been one of the first targets of the young Marx, so that the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear as their revenge. After this collapse, they would appear as the charter of the irresistible movement leading to a peaceful posthistorical world where global democracy would match the global market of liberal economy.
As is well known, things did not exactly go that way. In the following years, the new landscape of humanity, freed from utopian totalitarianism, became the stage of new outbursts of ethnic conflicts and slaughters, religious fundamentalisms, or racial and xenophobic movements. The territory of "posthistorical" and peaceful humanity proved to be the territory of new figures of the Inhuman. And the Rights of Man turned out to be the rights of the rightless, of the populations hunted out of their homes and land and threatened by ethnic slaughter. They appeared more and more as the rights of the victims, the rights of those who were unable to enact any rights or even any claim in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others, at the cost of shattering the edifice of International Rights, in the name of a new right to "humanitarian interference"—which ultimately boiled down to the right to invasion.
A new suspicion thus arose: What lies behind this strange shift from Man to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian? The actual subject of these Rights of Man became Human Rights. Is there not a bias in the statement of such rights? It was obviously impossible to revive the Marxist critique. But another form of suspicion could be revived: the suspicion that the "man" of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the only real rights were the rights of citizens, the rights attached to a national community as such.
That polemical statement had first been made by Edmund Burke against the French Revolution. And it had been revived in a significant way by Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism included a chapter devoted to the "Perplexities of the Rights of Man." In that chapter, Arendt equated the "abstractedness" of "Men's Rights" with the concrete situation of those populations of refugees that had flown all over Europe after the First World War. These populations have been deprived of their rights by the very fact that they were only "men," that they had no national community to ensure those rights. Arendt found there the "body" fitting the abstractedness of the rights and she stated the paradox as follows: the Rights of Man are the rights of those who are only human beings, who have no more property left than the property of being human. Put another way, they are the rights of those who have no rights, the mere derision of right.
The equation itself was made possible by Arendt's view of the political sphere as a specific sphere, separated from the realm of necessity. Abstract life meant "deprived life." It meant "private life," a life entrapped in its "idiocy," as opposed to the life of public action, speech, and appearance. This critique of "abstract" rights actually was a critique of democracy. It rested on the assumption that modern democracy had been wasted from the very beginning by the "pity" of the revolutionaries for the poor people, by the confusion of two freedoms: political freedom, opposed to domination, and social freedom, opposed to necessity. In her view, the Rights of Man were not an ideal fantasy of revolutionary dreamers, as Burke had put it. They were the paradoxical rights of the private, poor, unpoliticized individual.
This analysis, articulated more than fifty years ago, seems tailor-made, fifty years later, to fit the new "perplexities" of the...
The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy
- K Ohmae
K. Ohmae, The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York:
HarperCollins 1990).
Euroregions, Governance and Transborder Co-Operation within the EU
- J Scott
J. Scott, 'Euroregions, Governance and Transborder Co-Operation within the EU', European
Research in Regional Science 10 (2000) pp. 104-115.
see among others A. PaasiBoundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows 69-88; H. van Houtum and T. van Naerssen, 'Bordering, Ordering and OtheringBorders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue
- D Newman
On the processual shift from borders to bordering, see among others A. Paasi, 'Boundaries as
Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows', Geopolitics 3/1 (1998) pp. 69-88; H. van Houtum and
T. van Naerssen, 'Bordering, Ordering and Othering', Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
93/2 (2002) pp. 125-136; D. Newman, 'Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue',
European Journal of Social Theory 9/2 (2006) pp. 171-186.
Introduction: Identities, Borders, Orders: Nudging International Relations Theory in a New Direction
- Y See
- Lapid
See Y. Lapid, 'Introduction: Identities, Borders, Orders: Nudging International Relations Theory
in a New Direction', in M. Albert, D. Jacobson, and Y. Lapid (eds.), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking
International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001) pp. 1-21.
Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge
- Borderscapes
Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press 2007) pp. ix-xl.
Security, Sovereignty, and Stories of the Pacific Borderscape Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge
- See S Perera
- Vaughan-Williams Parker
See S. Perera, 'A Pacific Zone? (In)Security, Sovereignty, and Stories of the Pacific Borderscape',
in P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's
Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2007) pp. 201-227.
33. Parker and Vaughan-Williams et al. (note 11) p. 586.
34. Brenner (note 18) p. 40.
35. This approach is close to the use of the term borderscapes given by the cultural geographer
- P See
- C Guichonnet
- Raffestin
See P. Guichonnet and C. Raffestin, Géographie des Frontières (Paris: PUF 1974) pp. 147-218.
The Art of Being a 'Grenzgänger' in the Borderscapes of Berlin
- C See
- H Brambilla
- Van Houtum
See C. Brambilla and H. van Houtum, 'The Art of Being a 'Grenzgänger' in the Borderscapes of
Berlin', Agora 4 (2012) pp. 28-31.
Borders Still Exist! What Are Borders?
- C Brambilla
C. Brambilla, 'Borders Still Exist! What Are Borders?', in B. Riccio and C. Brambilla (eds.),
Transnational Migration, Cosmopolitanism and Dis-Located Borders (Rimini: Guaraldi 2010) pp. 73-85.
Transient Spaces. The Tourist Syndrome
- See Rajaram
- Grundy-Warr
See Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 31) p. xxx; C. Brambilla, ''Pluriversal' Citizenship and
Borderscapes', in M. Sorbello and A. Weitzel (eds.), Transient Spaces. The Tourist Syndrome (Berlin:
argobooks 2010) pp. 61-65; C. Brambilla, 'Shifting Italy/Libya Borderscapes at the Interface of EU/Africa
Borderland: A 'Genealogical' Outlook from the Colonial Era to Post-Colonial Scenarios', ACME-An
International E-journal for Critical Geographies (forthcoming, 2014).
Continuum International Publishing Group 2010) p. 149. 57. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 31) pp. xi-xii. 58. Philosophy has traditionally distinguished between the study of being and the study of becoming since the time of Plato's dialog the Timaeus
- J Rancière
J. Rancière, Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by S. Corcoran (London:
Continuum International Publishing Group 2010) p. 149.
57. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 31) pp. xi-xii.
58. Philosophy has traditionally distinguished between the study of being and the study of becoming
since the time of Plato's dialog the Timaeus: Plato, Timaeus and Critias (London: Penguin Books 1977).