Critical Border Studies

Broadening and Deepening the 'Lines in the Sand' Agenda

Noel Parker, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Noel Parker, Nick Vaughan-Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134930609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This edited collection formalises Critical Border Studies (CBS) as a distinctive approach within the interdisciplinary border studies literature. Although CBS represents a heterogeneous assemblage of thought, the hallmark of the approach is a basic dissatisfaction with the 'Line in the Sand' metaphor as an unexamined starting point for the study of borders. A headline feature of each contribution gathered here is a concerted effort to decentre the border. By 'decentring' we mean an effort to problematise the border not as taken-for-granted entity, but precisely as a site of investigation. On this view, the border is not something that straightforwardly presents itself in an unmediated way. It is never simply 'present', nor fully established, nor obviously accessible. Rather, it is manifold and in a constant state of becoming. Empirically, contributors examine the changing nature of the border in a range of cases, including: the Arctic Circle; German-Dutch borderlands; the India-Pakistan region; and the Mediterranean Sea. Theoretically, chapters draw on a range of critical thinkers in support of a new paradigm for border research. The volume will be of particular interest to border studies scholars in anthropology, human geography, international relations, and political science.

Critical Border Studies was published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

INTRODUCTION

Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the Sand’ Agenda

NOEL PARKER

Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

NICK VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

The ambition of this special section is to formalise Critical Border Studies (CBS) as a distinctive approach within the interdisciplinary border studies literature. We say ‘formalise’ rather than ‘introduce’ because we recognise that there is of course already a strong tradition of applying critical-theoretical insights within that literature. What the field continues to lack, however, is a substantive reference point for scholars working with such approaches to refer to and develop further, and so our hope is to provide such a marker and reinvigorate ongoing debates.

Our initial attempt to set out the motivating concerns and establish avenues of enquiry for CBS was published in the pages of Geopolitics in the unusual form of a collectively authored ‘Agenda’. This document, the outcome of two workshops in Cornwall and Copenhagen funded by The British Academy, gathered together a range of political theorists, historians, human geographers, anthropologists, and international relations scholars. It reflected common complaints among the group about the growing disparity between the diversity and complexity of contemporary bordering practices on the one hand, and the perception that more theoretical and conceptual work needed to be done in order to keep pace with these developments in academic border studies on the other hand.

THE HARVEST FROM ALTERNATIVE BORDER IMAGINARIES

At only seven pages long, however, the ‘Agenda’ was necessarily brief and speculative rather than a substantive contribution to the literature. The aim of this special section, therefore, is to speak directly to the ‘Agenda’, but also to broaden and deepen it. By broadening, we refer to the need, as noted in some of the articles presented here, to put the rather more abstract Political-Theoretical suggestions of the ‘Agenda’ in conversation with already-existing currents of scholarship in other disciplinary contexts – most notably Geography, Sociology and Anthropology. With regards to deepening, we mean the task of progressing the insights of the ‘Agenda’ by ‘applying’ them against the backdrop of specific theoretical debates and empirical border sites, and then reflexively feeding those results back into our initial formulations in order to push and further refine the main tenets of a CBS perspective.

Although CBS represents a heterogeneous assemblage of thought, the galvanising force running throughout the ‘Agenda’, the articles gathered here, and what we consider to be the hallmark of the approach more generally, is a basic dissatisfaction with the ‘Line in the Sand’ metaphor as an unexamined starting point for the study of borders. In general terms this is the research problem that the ‘Line in the Sand?’ programme attempted to tackle and all the articles offer a series of innovative – and sometimes provocative – proposals apposite to the task of developing new border imaginaries, theories, and methodologies.

A headline feature of each of the pieces is a concerted effort to decentre the border. By ‘decentring’ we mean an effort to problematise the border not as taken-for-granted entity, but precisely as a site of investigation. On this view, the border is not something that straightforwardly presents itself in an unmediated way. It is never simply ‘present’, nor fully established, nor obviously accessible. Rather, it is manifold and in a constant state of becoming. For that reason, we are committed to exploring alternative border imaginaries.

As Mark B. Salter notes in the opening contribution to this special section, ‘the line’ in this context has long been the ‘dominant thinking tool’ of border studies, understood in simplest terms as the razor-edge of the nation-state where mutually recognised sovereignties meet and yet do not overlap. While, as Henk van Houtum and Ruben Gielis note in their article, the ‘container-box’ model of the nation-state was always an idealisation whose empirical accuracy had to be called into question, there is a growing sense among critical scholars of border studies that this ‘territorial trap’ is now even more inadequate for conceptualising the spatial and temporal coordinates of everyday life. As Parker and Adler-Nissen (this issue) put it, there is an increasing ‘disaggregation’ between the territory and function of state borders.

A wealth of evidence presented in these pages and elsewhere supports the view that the thinness of the ‘Lines in the Sand’ metaphor belies the thickness of the border in its contemporary multiform complexity. Although the traditional image of the border as a line in the sand is under considerable theoretical and empirical pressure this does not mean that borders are straightforwardly a ‘thing of the past’. Parker and Adler-Nissen refer to the ‘puzzling persistence of (state) borders’, albeit in guises – some visible, some invisible – that already confound the line metaphor and challenge us to rethink the nature and location of the border. If, then, as Salter suggests, the forward slash between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ can no longer be read in terms of a line in the sand, what resources do we have for developing alternative border imaginaries, and what are the implications of these imaginaries for critical border research?

One of the pressing tasks confronting the CBS scholar, therefore, is to develop tools for identifying and interrogating what and where borders are and how they function in different settings, with what consequences, and for whose benefit. In this context, CBS urges two twinned moves: a shift from the concept of the border to the notion of bordering practice; and the adoption of the lens of performance through which bordering practices are produced and reproduced.

First, as outlined by Parker and Adler-Nissen (this issue), the notion of bordering practices refers to ‘the activities which have the effect … of constituting, sustaining, or modifying borders’. Such practices can be both intentional and unintentional; carried out by state actors and non-state actors including citizens, private security companies, and others engaged in the conduct of what Chris Rumford has called ‘borderwork’ (Rumford, this issue); and, further, with greater and lesser degrees of “success” depending from whose perspective that issue is evaluated. A focus on practice entails a sociological line of enquiry, which might emphasise attention to ‘the everyday’ – the processes through which controls over mobility are attempted and enacted – and the effects of those controls in people’s lives and in social relations more widely.

Second, the shift in focus in CBS towards bordering practices draws on the language and the imaginary of performance for an alternative paradigm for (re)thinking border politics. Borders do not simply ‘exist’ as lines on maps, but are continually performed into being through rituals such as the showing of passports, the confessionary matrix at the airport, and the removal of clothing. Reconceptualising borders as a set of performances injects movement, dynamism, and fluidity into the study of what are otherwise often taken to be static entities: ‘The uniform and straight lines in the sand, that borders were once thought to be, are now better understood as a complex choreography of border lines in multiple lived spaces’ (Gielis and van Houtum, this issue). Moreover, practices of bordering and de-bordering are not just performed as theatrical spectacles, but are also shown to be performative of particular socio-economic and political realities and subject-positions. Borders are intimately bound up with the identity-making activities of the nation-state and other forms of political community. The modern political subject is ‘bordered’ in the same way as the state of which s/he is a citizen and this marker is performed through identity cards, national insurance numbers and so on. In this way, as Parker and Adler-Nissen note, there is an important and inescapable access by states bordering practices into individual bodies – a connection that is intensifying in the light of new, increasingly invasive, biometric technologies.

However, as Salter insists, the permeation of bordering practices throughout society does not mean that the border is necessarily everywhere – or more accurately, ‘the border is not everywhere for everyone’ (Salter, this issue). Thus, for example, in the case of the EU’s borderwork, Bialasiewicz shows that despite the technocratic and depoliticised language of “efficiency” and “customer experience”, the human cost of allowing “trusted travellers” to glide freely into and across EUrope has its corollary in that ‘the Mediterranean has … become Europe’s graveyard’ (Bialasiewicz, this issue). Yet, at the same time, both Gielis and van Houtum in the context of the German-Dutch borderlands (this issue) and Bouzas in the case of Kashmir (this issue) show how ‘border-dwellers’ can also radically problematise the idealised homogenous nation-state form, and offer the basis for rethinking political community beyond the old coordinates of the modern state/state system.

Borders are increasingly ‘off-shored’ beyond the physical territory of the state and ‘out-sourced’ to other state and non-state actors (Bialasiewicz, this issue); and on this basis a core hypothesis of CBS is that ‘borders between states are increasingly not what or where they are supposed to be according to the [modern] geopolitical imaginary’ (Minca and Vaughan-Williams, this issue). Spatially, borders – understood here minimally as a control over the movement of people, services and goods by a sovereign authority – increasingly form a continuum stretching from within states, through to the conventional ‘flashpoint’ at airports, ports, and territorial outer-edges, and beyond to ‘pre-frontier’ zones at the point of departure.

Temporally, too, borders are not as fixed as our animating metaphor otherwise implies, but ever more pre-emptive, risk-assessed, and designed to be as mobile as the subjects and objects in transit that they seek to control. The increasing technological sophistication with which controls on movement are carried out, the diversity of geographical locations where these controls take place, and the speed at which decisions about what and/or whom is considered legitimate and/or illegitimate are all factors commonly cited in support of the view that new border imaginaries are required. Contemporary bordering may be able to ‘concertina’ time.

The identification and interrogation of the aporetic and undecidable nature of contemporary bordering practices is another central feature of CBS scholarship. As one might expect, the link between bordering practices and violence is a core theme running deeply throughout many of the contributions in this special section: the border as a spatialisation of the violent underpinnings of the state (Minca and Vaughan-Williams); the violent performativity of bordering practices designed to exclude, abandon, and/or kill the ‘Other’ (Salter, Parker and Adler-Nissen, Bialasiewicz, this issue); and the colonial legacies of partition and past violence (Bouzas, this issue): all loom large in this context. Read in this light, borders are memories of past and present violences etched into social landscapes, which are often concealed by sovereign power – or ‘sutured’ to borrow Salter’s powerful metaphor.

On the other hand, bordering practices – and the various forms of con-testation and resistance they often give rise to – are not treated simply as normatively ‘bad’ phenomena. Rumford, for example, highlights the ways in which borders are also sites of ‘cultural encounter’ rather than simply a mechanism of division and exclusion. Indeed, even in some of the world’s most persistently troubled border-zones, such as the India-Pakistan region, the border can be said to act as an ‘interlinking and cooperative space’ (Bouzas, this issue). On this view, as Salter might say about Bouzas’ material, ‘borders then knit the world together’ even though the colonial ‘sutures’ remain living after-traces of past violence.

Methodologically, the empirical thrust of CBS research is conversant with anthropological approaches to the phenomenology of the border and indeed several of the pieces included here reflect extensive ethnographic fieldwork – for example Bouzas’ interviews with migrants in the border villages near Kargil, Pakistan and Gielis’s time spent with Dutch migrants in Kranenburg.

BORDER IMAGINARIES BEYOND THE LINE

The essays collected here offer a rich reservoir of alternative border metaphors and vocabularies beyond the ‘line in the sand’ motif. Pursing the two moves referred to earlier provides a space to tease out alternatives. Hence, the contributors take as their inspiration a wide range of resources of both a critical-theoretical and empirical nature as called for by the original multi-authored ‘Agenda’.

The special section opens with Salter’s critical review of Giorgio Agamben as a theorist of the inside, R. B. J. Walker as a theorist of the line between inside and outside, and Carlo Galli as a theorist of the outside. Salter notes the popularity of Agamben, particularly his border concepts of the ban, camp, and generalised state of exception, in much of the theoretical literature produced by CBS. As well as offering a tour d’horizon of the use of Agamben in CBS, Salter provides a critical and highly provocative commentary on the limitations of the Agambenian-influenced literature, and argues that ultimately it fails to adequately account for the figure of the international and its continued significance.

In their contribution Minca and Vaughan-Williams explore the otherwise overlooked concept of the border in Carl Schmitt’s work. While the decision on the exception – perhaps the paradigmatic ‘line in the sand’ – has been covered extensively in secondary commentaries of Schmitt’s earlier work, engagement with his later usage of the concept of the nomos has been comparatively rare. Minca and Vaughan-Williams investigate nomos as a spatial-ontological device that refers to the relationship between order and orientation and they consider the possibility of the emergence of a new global nomos characterised precisely by the proliferation and differentiation of borders.

Parker and Adler-Nissen take a Derridean tack on the undecidability of borders and, ultimately, all identities – which indicates the presence of actors trying to make differences appear to be more definite than they are. With that perspective, the prime issue is which agents might make borders seem settled, and why it might be beneficial to them to do so. In an epistemological register rooted in Kratochwil out of Luhman, they argue that there would be benefits to any collective particular, especially states, in actively maintaining the border’s substantiality. But this has to be done on a number of distinct ‘planes of inscription’, since these planes are increasingly ‘disaggregated’. A prime instance is the ‘sovereignty games’ of states within the European Union, where sovereignty is instrumentalised to shore up nation-state distinct identities.

Gielis and van Houtum map the concept of ‘dwelling’ in the extant literature in terms of a continuum of approaches to the border from the ‘Heideggarian nest’ on one end of the spectrum (associated with concepts of ‘being’ and bordering) to the Deleuzian ‘line of flight’ at the other (marked by endless becoming and de-bordering). For Gielis and van Houtum practices associated with ‘the border’ are always already caught in abeyance between the two extremes and so here we are necessarily dealing with a constantly shifting and ultimately ephemeral ‘line in the sand’ (Gielis and van Houtum). As a bridge between the Heideggerian and Deleuzian extremes, they draw extensively on the work of Peter Sloterdijk to generate new border thinking capable of grasping the experience of dwelling in contemporary border-zones: ‘Dwelling can be seen as a place which is constantly changing from a secure bubble-like place into a multidimensional foam-like place and back again’ (Gielis and van Houtum, this issue).

Strandsbjerg draws on the work of Bruno Latour to call for a ‘cartopolitical turn’ in CBS. This could imply that the relationship between borders and space which is current among CBS scholars has to be amended. He argues that there is a greater need for CBS to problematise how particular conceptions of space are stabilised and solidified in order to better appreciate the historical and material context in which bordering practices are (re)produced. This piece is anchored in the latest developments in the Arctic which, as a consequence of Global Warming, give access to rich mineral resources.

Bialasiewicz offers a detailed analysis of EU border-work in the Mediterranean with a specific focus on the ‘off-shoring’ and ‘out-sourcing’ of EUrope’s borders in the Libyan case. She draws attention to a certain creativity in the way the European Union carries out its ‘border-work’, such as projecting border-work out to far beyond the recognised borders of the current Union. This highlights, in particular, the role of EUrope’s neighbours in new strategies of securitisation (notoriously, Libya under Gaddafi), drawing attention to some of the actors, sites and mechanisms that make the Union’s border-work possible. Her analysis draws critical attention to the creation of ‘“off-shore” black holes where European norms, standards, and regulations simply do not apply’ (Bialasiewicz, this issue). She also traces the responses of various humanitarian NGOs to the unfolding situation in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and emphasises the human cost of European border security. The EU’s border-work is still developing.

Bouzas’ case study of the India-Pakistan border brings an important post-colonial and conflictual backdrop against which the violence of past and present bordering practices are analysed. ‘Seeing like a border’ involves, as Bouzas explores the backdrop of the Kashmir conflict, engaging more directly with the problematics of ‘political space, of inclusion and exclusion’, which gives rise to a m...