A Companion to Border Studies

Thomas M. Wilson, Hastings Donnan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118255254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to Border Studies

"Taking into consideration all aspects this book has a very important role in the professional literature of border studies."
Cross-Border Review Yearbook of the European Institute

"Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."
Choice

"This book, with its interdisciplinary team of authors from many world regions, shows the state of the art in this research field admirably."
Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm University

"This volume will be the definitive work on borders and border-related processes for years into the future. The editors have done an outstanding job of identifying key themes, and of assembling influential scholars to address these themes.
David Nugent, Emory University

"This urgently needed Companion, edited by two leading figures of border studies, reflects past insights and showcases new directions: a must read for understanding territory, power and the state."
Dr. Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick

"This impressive collection will have a broad appeal beyond specialist border studies. Anyone with an interest in the nation-state, nationalism, ethnicity, political geography or, indeed, the whole historical project of the modern world system will want to have access to a copy. The substantive scope is global and the intellectual reach deep and wide. Simply indispensable. "
Richard Jenkins, University of Sheffield

Dramatic growth in the number of international borders has coincided in recent years with greater mobility than ever before – of goods, people and ideas. As a result, interest in borders as a focus of academic study has developed into a dynamic, multi-disciplinary field, embracing perspectives from anthropology, development studies, geography, history, political science and sociology. Authors provide a comprehensive examination of key characteristics of borders and frontiers, including cross-border cooperation, security and controls, migration and population displacements, hybridity, and transnationalism.

A Companion to Border Studies brings together these disciplines and viewpoints, through the writing of an international collection of preeminent border scholars. Drawing on research from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, the contributors argue that the future of Border Studies lies within such diverse collaborations, which approach comparatively the features of borders worldwide.

CHAPTER 1

Borders and Border Studies

Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan

There are more international borders in the world today than ever there were before. This is a significant fact when one considers the impact of these many borders on the ways in which the billions of people encompassed by them live, work and travel. As important a development as this multiplication in international borders is, however, it alone is not the guiding imperative behind the origin and evolution of comparative border studies in scholarship worldwide. The proliferation of borders, and the many forces that have created and fostered their development, together have drawn scholars from all the humanities and social sciences to a mutual interest in what happens at, across and because of the borders to nations and states, and in extension to other geopolitical borders and boundaries, such as those of cities, regions and supranational polities. Their interest has been as much in what happens at specific borders, frontiers and borderlands as it has been in what borders help us to understand of major forces of change that seem to be sweeping the globe, forces often included as aspects of globalization, but which may also be seen as neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, late modern capitalism, and supranationalism. Within these interests and perspectives, border studies scholars enter into dialogue with all those who wish to understand new liberties, new movements, new mobilities, new identities, new citizenships and new forms of capital, labor and consumption. Border studies have become significant themselves because scholars and policy-makers alike have recognized that most things that are important to the changing conditions of national and international political economy take place in borderlands – as they do in like measure almost everywhere else in each of our national states – but some of these things, for instance those related to migration, commerce, smuggling and security, may be found in borderlands in sharper relief. And some things of national importance can be most often and best found in borderlands.

This book, a collection of essays that represent views both of where border studies have come from and where they are going, reflects the current state of border studies, or perhaps this might be better expressed as the current states of border studies. In particular, it shows how scholarly attention to political and social borders has grown apace with the growth in numbers of borders, states and the peoples who live in and cross borders, borderlands, frontiers and boundaries. Once principally the focus of geography, the study of territorial, geophysical, political and cultural borders today has become a primary, abiding and growing interest across the scholarly disciplines, and is related to changing scholarly approaches to such key research subjects and objects as the state, nation, sovereignty, citizenship, migration and the overarching forces and practices of globalization. All of these approaches to borders and frontiers have been complicated by various attempts to understand and express identities, an effort often related to the investigation of hybridity, creolization, multiculturalism, postcolonialism and many other central concerns of social theory today.

Scholarly and political interests are not alone in the recognition of the increasing prominence of borders in the lives of many people in all parts of the world. Borders have become a master narrative and hegemonic symbol in popular, commercial, youth and liberation cultures. Borders have captured the fancy of the peoples of the world and they function as a grand motif in everyday life, everywhere. This is true of some people all of the time, others just some of the time, and perhaps seldom for still others. It is difficult in today’s world to avoid public debates over borders, or to ignore the many ways in which borders figure in a great deal of popular discourse. This is not just the result of a borders numbers game. While more borders than in years past frame our collective lives today as a consequence of the removal and strengthening of various state and other political borders, it has also been the mix of populations and the agencies of the state and others where countries and their peoples meet, and the metaphorical borderlands of hegemonic and minority identities, that spark so much popular interest. There is every indication that the scholarly fascination with this intersection of the metaphorical negotiations of borderlands of personal and group identity (in what has come to be known as “border theory”) with the geopolitical realization of international, state and other borders of polity, power, territory and sovereignty (“border studies”) has mushroomed of late and continues to grow.

This scholarly turn is not simply a reflection of ivory tower musings, but is provoked and challenged by real events that have affected us all over the last 20 years. A list of these events that revolve around changing borders would include, but be far from complete with, the fall of the Iron Curtain; the expansion of the European Union (EU); the rise of new and old ethnonationalisms; the creation of many new states and regional trading blocs to rival the EU and the United States; the rise of new global forces, from neoliberal economics to New World Political Orders; the clash of civilizations; and new engagements between developed and emerging countries and hemispheres. These have all made borders and borderlands new sites of empirical investigation, of processes of localization and globalization in the face of so many forces of change. Borders and frontiers are also elements in the transforming dimensions of culture, politics, society and economics at every level of social and political complexity, experience and expression across the globe. Recent events and ongoing dilemmas brought on by 9/11, the war on terror, and the new security, environmental, health and economic problems and opportunities of world populations on the move, all indicate that the related notions of borders, boundaries and frontiers will attract more attention in future from scholars, policy-makers and other peoples of the world who must negotiate and cross the barriers and bridges that borders represent (see Donnan and Wilson 2010).

The timeliness and relevance of border studies is one theme which runs through the essays in this volume, but there are other thematic motors which have driven us collectively. In the volume our authors show repeatedly that border theory, which seeks answers to questions about how identity, territory and the state are interrelated in the formation of the self and of group identification, has much to offer scholarship on the political economies of geopolitical entities that are encapsulated and in some instances defined by their geophysical borders. But the converse is true too, as our authors also show repeatedly, where the confluence of territory, power and the state is instrumental in many issues of identity and culture, locally and also farther afield. As our authors show through their historical case studies and historical framings of contemporary issues, border studies have proliferated along with borders, and the speed with which border studies are changing and expanding is both remarkable and significant.

This Companion is thus a freezing in time of what can best be described as mercurial: who knew in the 1980s how global political and economic order would change, and so drastically, and who knew in the 1990s that so many borders, new and old, in the world would be configured as they have been in the wake of so many epochal events in the global landscape. Some case studies here are offered to illustrate forces at work in those borderlands and in those regions which we anticipate will have corollaries elsewhere and will help to inform scholarship in more distant areas of the globe. Other essays in the volume take a much more explicitly comparative and theoretical view of borders. But we realize too that as soon as a volume like this presents “state of the art” essays, that the “state” and that “art” will change. Our task here is to try to make sense of where we are and where we have been in border studies, to offer some choices for those whose interests and works will make the future changes to the state and the art of border studies. Our introduction is thus both retrospective and prospective and locates the likely future trajectories of border studies within the themes and approaches of the present and the recent past.

In the remaining sections of the introduction we review some of the key features in the border studies which we entered in the early 1990s. These earlier border studies, which were particularly influential on us, were deeply entrenched in geography, but history, political science and sociology also contained much of interest to us, which helped us to formulate our own ideas and to chart our own path. This was especially beneficial to us when we began our assessment of border and boundary studies within our parent discipline, anthropology. But earlier border studies also helped us to fashion the beginnings of what we saw as an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and perhaps even postdisciplinary approach to so much that mattered to scholars and others around us, most of which was related to the changing nature of the territorial dimensions to the state and the nation. In the final section of this introduction we examine what border studies are today. Using our authors as inspiration, we explore how contemporary border studies have in the main eschewed single case studies in favor of explicitly or implicitly comparative analyses, and have largely moved beyond the constraints of their own disciplinary borders to read widely and consider seriously the evidence and arguments offered by like-minded scholars in other disciplines and from other national traditions.

Border studies today are a “field” made up of many fields and yet no one field in particular. Border studies are akin to what we study: rooted in space and time they are also about process and fluidity. They reflect intellectual convergence as well as scholarly differentiation, and through them we can begin to see not only the interstices of nations and states, but those of a new world understanding of scholarship, where academics increasingly seek cooperation, collaboration and intellectual fellowship across those same borders we are drawn to study. But all of this, as far as we have seen since the 1990s, while quick in the making, has not been without its own variations. Before considering how border studies have changed over the last two decades, and to illustrate some of the difficulties to be faced by scholars in any discipline in their attempt to pursue scholarship at what might be seen by many to be the margins of their own discipline, we turn first to the anthropology of borders, then and now. We do so to offer an example of how border studies have evolved from individual cases seen through the lens of one scholarly discipline to a more comprehensive and comparative perspective on other borders and other intellectual traditions.

OF DISCIPLINES AND CASE STUDIES

In the 1990s when we began our collaboration in border studies, after we had each done separate ethnographic field research in borderlands, it was widely asserted in certain academic circles, associated with what has become known variously in scholarship as postmodernism, cultural studies and globalization, that the world had become smaller, time and space had been compressed, there had been a speeding up in global movement of almost everything significant, and the preeminent institutions of modernity were no longer as powerful and unassailable as they once were. Foremost among these waning institutions, so it was asserted by a host of scholars eager to chronicle and understand the seismic shifts in a globalizing world, was the national state, that is, that particular state conglomeration of government and governance dedicated to the creation and defense of its nation. The predicted withering away of the national state as the preeminent political structure of modernity also was believed to herald the end of institutions and actions dependent on the national state and the dissipation of the affective dimensions to national identities and state identifications. It was expected that the filtering down of these effects would dilute traditional political, social and cultural structures and associations within equally traditional and threatened territorial entities, such as nations and regions. These effects were expected to be devastating for some and liberating for others.

This sort of globalization and postmodernist rhetoric continues to capture the imagination of scholars and policy-makers alike. At times this rhetoric is also used to support scholarly treatments of neoliberalism, now just as pervasive a concept as globalization in the provision of oft-asserted but seldom demonstrated causes of so much that promises salvation or ruin to people (among them scholars) in the world today. Changes in individual and group loyalties, associations and identities have fueled the new politics of identity, in which the definitions of citizenship, nation and state vie with gender, sexual, ethnic, religious and racial identities for prominence if not preeminence in new national and world orders. Or at least vie with each other in the imaginations of scholars who study such things. The gist of much of this sort of approach to the nation and state as it affected the study of borders was that we were all living in a world where state borders were increasingly obsolete, where porous international borders no longer fulfilled their historical role as barriers to the movement of aliens and citizens, and as markers of the extent and power of the state.

While this sort of argument was heady and persuasive in the 1990s, and moved us in scholarly directions which have led us to this Companion, it also persists today in many areas of scholarship. This is so despite so much evidence to the contrary, namely that there are more states, more state institutions, more state intrusion into the daily lives of citizens and denizens (through the utilization of new technologies), and more state intervention into global political economy. Today there are still many scholars globally who argue that the state, as an ideal and abstraction, is weak and in decline. And while we are well aware that there are so-called failed states, the definition of that failure must be held against some standard, some test case of success. The vast majority of states, in the real rather than the ideal, are successful, and there is unlikely to be any form of political and social integration to take the place of the national state for the foreseeable future. (As we write this, the eurozone crises are putting great stress on the European Union, in what may be the only model extant of a possible supranational successor to a world order of states.)

When we began our own foray into comparative border studies, we recognized that globalization and deterritorialization were alternative interpretative slants on politics and power in the contemporary world. We argued that the growing interest in the new politics of identity and transnationalism was incomplete (Donnan and Wilson 1994, 1999; Wilson and Donnan 1998). It needed the corrective offered by modernists and traditionalists, in geography, history, political science and sociology, to renew the commitment to the concrete manifestations of government and politics, at local levels and at the level of the state. In our neomodernist view, definitions of the “political” which articulated self, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity within discussions of sign, symbol, contestation and representation risked underestimating the role the state continued to play in the everyday lives of its and other states’ citizens. We recognized that the institutions and personnel of the nation and the state had been increasingly excluded from much anthropology (and also to some extent in cognate disciplines), but we concluded as well that the nation-state had been rather more successful in weathering the storms of postsocialism, postcolonialism, and globalization than many scholars had credited. As we moved into border studies, with an interest in what the lives of borderland peoples were like at the end of the twentieth century, we wondered why there were so few scholars, in our and in other disciplines, who were equally interested in investigating how the state sustained its historically dominant role as an arbiter of control, violence, order and organization for those whose identities were being transformed by world forces. We realized we were not alone in our interests in theorizing the intersections of borders, place, power, identity and the state, and that such interests had been pioneered before us by scholars in geography, history, politics, sociology and anthropology. But we were also aware that the end of the Cold War and the new globalization scholarship seemed to distract so many more scholars away from the political economy of territory.

It was our contention then, and it remains so today, that a globalized and deterritorialized world of identity politics is a world too of many more and, in some cases, stronger states, where the new politics of identity is in large part determined by the old structures of the state. The politics of representation and resistance, whether couched in national electoral terms or those of new social movements, need the state as their principal contextual opponent. In our view it has always been the intention of political anthropology to position symbolic politics alongside all other sorts of politics, to enforce the proposition that all politics is by definition about the use of power to achieve individual or group public goals. The symbolic of culture and identity is the symbolic of power, whether that power is found in interpersonal relations or in the hands of agents of the gove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Figures and Table
• Notes on Contributors
• CHAPTER  1 Borders and Border Studies
• PART I: Sovereignty, Territory and Governance
• PART II: States, Nations and Empires
• PART III: Security, Order and Disorder
• PART IV: Displacement, Emplacement and Mobility
• PART V: Space, Performance and Practice
• Index