Securitized Borderlands

Journal of Borderlands Studies

Borders have recently attracted a lot of academic scrutiny. Two very distinct types of literature have attempted to capture the current evolution of borders. The first one, leaning more toward the field of security studies, puts the emphasis on the rampant securitization, the coercive dimension of borders, and their divisive consequences. The second, looks at the rich environment surrounding borders, where boundaries are seen as the meeting point of a variety of cultures and communities. Those social spaces, known as borderlands, are the cradle of hybrid identities and transnational networks that contest the State's claim to ultimate sovereignty over its territory. Against this backdrop, the ambition of this special issue lies in its aim to fill theoretically and empirically this gap by looking at securitized borderlands. This introductory article delineates the contours of and puts together the main findings of both security studies on borders and borderlands studies. It announces the objectives of the subsequent articles, which together look into the interaction between the securitized borders and the social spaces they both obstruct and dynamize. In spite of and within this peculiarly adverse environment of "securitized borderlands," cross border societies remain in existence, resist, comply, and adjust.

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.

Jnl of Borderland Studies, 2003

Guenay, C. & Witjes, N. (Eds). Border Politics : Defining Spaces of Governance and Forms of Transgressions. Springer International Publishing AG, 2016

In the light of mass migration, the rise of nationalism and the resurgence of global terrorism, this timely volume brings the debate on border protection, security and control to the centre stage of international relations research. Rather than analysing borders as mere lines of territorial demarcation in a geopolitical sense, it sheds new light on their changing role in defining and negotiating identity, authority, security, and social and economic differences. Bringing together innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives, the book examines the nexus of authority, society, technology and culture, while also providing in-depth analyses of current international conflicts. Regional case studies comprise the Ukraine crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh, the emergence of new territorial entities such as ISIS, and maritime disputes in the South China Sea, as well as the contestation and re-construction of borders in the context of transnational movements. Bringing together theoretical, empirical and conceptual contributions by international scholars, this Yearbook of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs offers novel perspectives on hotly debated issues in contemporary politics, and will be of interest to researchers, graduate students and political decision makers alike.

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 border line itself as "bordering". Indeed, Balibar's (1998) notion that "borders are everywhere"dthat the sovereign state's loci of bordering practices can no longer be isolated to the lines of a political map of statesdhas gained tremendous currency but it is also quite a departure from traditional border studies. Thus the broad question posed to our contributors was: Where is the border in border studies?

2006

Critical Ethnic Studies, Volume 6, Issue 2 , 2021

This special issue seeks to conceptualize connections between border regimes around the world. Taking up sites that range from US/Mexico, to the Mediterranean, to Palestine/Israel, and beyond, contributors move past superficial comparisons and think through the circulation of technologies, expertise, policing, and surveillance alongside the circulation of anti-colonial strategies via transnational social movements. By bridging conversations that are typically kept in separate academic silos—for example, critical refugee studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, Native studies, Middle East studies, European critical migration studies, comparative colonial studies—these pieces produce theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of borders outside of what is typically understood as belonging to the field of border studies. This approach emerges from an understanding that the urgent challenges of our current moment as they relate to borders, migration, and displacement require creative approaches that actively trouble disciplinary boundaries.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020

This article advances the understanding of borders with respect to their epistemological, ontological , and empirical intersections with violence and conflict, which remain understudied within critical border studies. Specifically, the article explores the potential of recent interdisciplinary research on the border-migration nexus to find critical resources that might foster a better understanding of the complex relationships between borders, violence, and conflict. From this viewpoint, the border is not only a site of the founding violence of the sovereign power, but borders-reconceived as borderscapes-can also be regarded as a site of generative struggles where alternative subjectivities and agencies could be shaped. The article concludes with a call for an applied, committed, and engaged research capable of recovering its inherently political dimension moving towards a 'politics of hope' and beyond the simplistic yet dominant interpretations of the border-violence-conflict intersections, which are trapped in the 'politics of fear'.

Critical Ethnic Studies, 2020

This special issue seeks to conceptualize connections between border regimes around the world. Taking up sites that range from US/Mexico, to the Mediterranean, to Palestine/Israel, and beyond, contributors move past superficial comparisons and think through the circulation of technologies, expertise, policing, and surveillance alongside the circulation of anti-colonial strategies via transnational social movements. By bridging conversations that are typically kept in separate academic silos—for example, critical refugee studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, Native studies, Middle East studies, European critical migration studies, comparative colonial studies—these pieces produce theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of borders outside of what is typically understood as belonging to the field of border studies. This approach emerges from an understanding that the urgent challenges of our current moment as they relate to borders, migration, and displacement require creative approaches that actively trouble disciplinary boundaries.

The current renewed interest in the study of borders and border-lands 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 border-land 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.