Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies
Section snippets
Corey Johnson and Reece Jones
The expansive understanding of borders and boundaries in recent scholarship has enriched border studies, but it has also obscured what a border is. This set of interventions is motivated by a need for a more sophisticated conceptualization of borders in light of the recent trajectories of border scholarship. In contrast to the much-feted “borderless world” of the early 1990s, the trend during the past decade has been to consider the exercise of state sovereignty at great distances from the
Anssi Paasi
Rather than neutral lines, borders are often pools of emotions, fears and memories that can be mobilized apace for both progressive and regressive purposes. This became evident once again after the collapse of the socialist block. Events of the early 1990s gave a strong boost to border studies. This renewed interest was related to the removal of old states and borders, the rise of new ones, the moving (and the “ethnicization”) of conflicts from state borders inside states, and the related
Louise Amoore
It is March 2010 and 250 newly appointed “match analysts” begin their work at the UK’s National Border Targeting Centre (NBTC). Attending to the screened data on border crossings in and out of the UK, they “judge the strength of computer generated alerts” and pass risk-flagged data on to border control, law enforcement or intelligence agencies. In a world in which the events of 9/11 have been rendered a problem of border security for which the solution is a “joining of the dots” of data, it is
Alison Mountz
While often understood and policed as static, permanent lines, as in the case of the militarized built form separating Mexico and the United States (see Burridge, 2009, Nevins, 2010), borders are increasingly characterized by movement rather than stasis. Borders are more diffuse and proliferating more rapidly than at any time, and they are reproduced as digital entities in cyberspace where authorities share data, and as legal and bureaucratic entities where migrants and advocates struggle over
Mark Salter
The border is a primary institution of the contemporary state, the construction of a geopolitical world of multiple states, and the primary ethico-political division between the possibility of politics inside the state and the necessity of anarchy outside the state. As with all institutions, the inscription of the border and indeed the state requires constant deployment of resources: the writing of the border, the state, and the world again and again (Walker, 2010). In this sense, governments,
Chris Rumford
In a world of security alerts, enhanced personal mobility (for many, but not all), and transnational flows of goods, finances, and services we encounter not a borderless world but a plethora of borders which are not only found “at the border”. They “now occupy ‘a multiplicity of sites’ and ‘seep into the city and the neighborhood’ in addition to existing at the edges of a polity” (Amoore, Marmura, & Salter, 2008). Ordinary spaces are saturated with “borders, walls, fences, thresholds,
References (94)
Biometric borders: governing mobilities in the war on terror
Political Geography
(2006)The conflicting logics of cross-border reterritorialization: geopolitics of euroregions in eastern Europe
Political Geography
(2008)- et al.
Reflections on EU territoriality and the ‘bordering’ of Europe
Political Geography
(2009) A neoliberal nexus: economy, security and the biopolitics of citizenship on the border
Political Geography
(2006)Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life
(1998)The territorial trap: the geographical assumptions of international relations theory
Review of International Political Economy
(1994)Three spaces of power: territory, networks, plus a topological twist in the tale of domination and authority
Journal of Power
(2009)Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place
Geografiska Annaler – Series B: Human Geography
(2004)Vigilant visualities: the watchful politics of the war on terror
Security Dialogue
(2007)Lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures
Citizenship Studies
(2009)