Bordering, ordering, and othering

Geografiska Annaler B, 2022

Regions and territories become institutionalized as part of wider geohistorical processes and practices in which these spatial entities accomplish their borders, institutions, symbolisms, and normally contested identity narratives. The borders of bounded spaces are ever more topical today because of the mobilities of human beings (tourists, migrants, refugees), the rise of (ethno-)nationalism and regionalism, anti-immigration discourses and racism, features that expose the ideological significance of territory and the forms of physical and symbolic violence that are often embedded in borders/bordering. This essay explores the tenacity of bounded spaces in academic research and in social practices, and the meanings attached to such spaces. It will analyze how geographers and other social scientists have understood and conceptualized regional and territorial borders. Borders are material and ideological constructs, institutions, processes, and symbols that are critical in the production and reproduction of regions/territories, identities, and ideologies. The article leans on author’s idea of spatial socialization and Shields’ notion of social spatialization in making sense of how the obstinate power of borders is embedded in the production and reproduction of bounded spaces and in the process of subjectification.

2015

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The growing interdisciplinarity of border studies has moved discussion away from an exclusive concern with geographical, physical and tangible borders. Instead, contemporary research appears to privilege cultural, social, economic, religious and other borders that, while often invisible, have major impacts on the way in which human society is (re)ordered and compartmentalized. Similarly, the traditional dividing lines between the domestic and the international and between what it is “inside” and “outside” specific socio-spatial realms have been blurred. This has given way to understandings of borders embedded in new spatialities that challenge dichotomies typical to the territorial world of nation-states. Contemporary borders are mobile: they can be created, shifted, and deconstructed by a range of actors. With this essay the authors engage a central question that characterises contemporary debate, namely: how are formal (e.g. state) and informal (social) processes of border-making related to each other? Borders are constantly reproduced as a part of shifting space-society relationships and the bordering processes they entail. Two aspects of these will be dealt with here: 1) the evolving process of reconfiguring state borders in terms of territorial control, security and sovereignty and 2) the nexus between everyday life-worlds, power relations and constructions of social borders. Both of these processes reflect change and continuity in thinking about borders and they also raise a number of ethical questions that will be briefly discussed as well.

Social Anthropology, 2012

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2020

Since the publication of the paper 'Bordering, Ordering and Othering' by Henk van Houtum and Ton van Naerssen (2002), there has been an increase of complexity and diversification of borders and border-making practices while at the same time one can observe an unprecedented development of research on these phenomena from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives. By revisiting the text, I will discuss three main comments referring to bordering categories, bordering practices and bordering self in the wider field of migration. The growing ambiguity of borders is once more underlined, but more importantly, these comments flesh out some of the far-reaching profundities as well as political powers and new relevance which borders and practices of bordering have gained.

Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication, 2017