Debating and Defining Borders

Philosophical and Theoretical Perspectives

Anthony Cooper, Søren Tinning, Anthony Cooper, Søren Tinning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351124867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia sociale

This book brings together insights from border scholars and philosophers to ask how we are to define and understand concepts of borders today. Borders have a defining role in contemporary societies. Take, for example, the 2016 US election and the UK Brexit referendum, and subsequent debate, where the rhetoric and symbolism of border controls proved fundamental to the outcomes. However, borders are also becoming ever more multifaceted and complex, representing intersections of political, economical, social, and cultural interests.

For some, borders are tangible, situated in time and place; for others, the nature of borders can be abstracted and discussed in general terms. By discussing borders philosophically and theoretically, this edited collection tackles head on the most defi ning and challenging questions within the fi eld of border studies regarding the defi nition of its very object of study. Part 1 of the book consists of theoretical contributions from border scholars, Part 2 takes a philosophical approach, and Part 3 brings together chapters where philosophy and border studies are directly related.

Borders intersect with the key issues of our time, from migration, climate change vulnerability, terror, globalization, inequality, and nationalism, to intertwining questions of culture, identity, ideology, and religion. This book will be of interest to those studying in these fields, and most especially to researchers of border studies and philosophy.

Part 1
Border studies

1 How do we theorise borders, and why should we do it?

Some theoretical and methodological challenges

Anthony Cooper

Contemporary borders are popular but complex objects of research (see Paasi, 2011, 13). As a conceptual tool of analysis, the border has become central to the ‘politics of mobility, identity and economy’ (Bauder, 2011, 1126), but it remains a messy concept that is tricky to pin down, particularly in these ‘global cybertimes’ (van Houtum, Kramsch and Zierhofer, 2005, 1). There are some obvious overlapping reasons for this, not least contained within the concept of the border itself. While some believed that the transnational flow of goods, services and capital would diminish the function of political borders between states, in doing so valorising borders as idle ‘barrier-lines’, contemporary research has come to favour process (van Houtum and van Naerssen, 2002; van Houtum, Kramsch and Zierhofer, 2005). This ‘processual shift’ in border research (Brambilla, 2015) was important because bordering was able to be observed across a multiplicity of sites, especially in the immediate and familiar spaces of everyday life and encompassing a multiplicity of often contradictory functions, forms and effects (Sohn, 2015a, 2). Put simply, this ‘bordering turn’ in border studies recast borders as dynamic and reflexive spaces in their own right rather than as simply pre-given ‘lines in the sand’. To this end, a cursory look over of the literature on borders tells us that they are not lines but institutions, containing self-perpetuating rules, which govern inclusion and exclusion and regulate the degree of permeability and so on (Anderson, 1996; Newman, 2003). It tells us that borders are everywhere (Balibar, 2002, 2004) – both in terms of the narrative reproduction of national borders throughout society (Paasi, 1996) and/or in the idea of the ‘virtual’ security border projecting the (e)border well beyond the physical space of a polity. It becomes apparent that borders mean different things to different people and act differently on different groups (Balibar, 2002, 2004; Sohn, 2015a), often appearing in different forms; and there is clear focus on how bordering involves an array of different actors, of which the state is only one (Rumford, 2012), whereby a good deal of emphasis is placed on the way in which borders are the outcome or effects of the performances and practices through which they were made (Andersen, Klatt and Sandberg, 2012). A key theme to emerge in the critical literature that runs through all of this, but is by no means endorsed by all researchers, is the need to identify new meanings of the border not tied to the state (Bauder, 2011; Rumford, 2012), as is its corollary, the inadequacy of (traditional) conceptualisations of the border (Rovisco, 2010).

Much of this shift in thinking was influenced by the changing global landscape and, in turn, better reflected the bordering practices taking place. Notable examples include the demise of rigid Cold War geopolitics accompanied by new territorial claims-making and the onset of contemporary globalisation – often expressed in terms of flows, mobilities and networks – which facilitated the rise of new and arguably more ambiguous and ubiquitous forms of re-bordering, securitisation, mobility management and social closure/exclusion (Rumford, 2010, 951; Cooper and Perkins, 2014). Researchers have also found analytical purchase in European integration, particularly in terms of networks and regionalisation, but more recently in forms of securitisation and re-bordering (the re-emergence of ‘fortress Europe’, the ‘Schengen wall’, Brexit, etc.). Not surprisingly, the study of borders has become increasingly interdisciplinary, creating a rich and productive interdisciplinary borderland, but one brimming with different perspectives, approaches and questions. The boundaries of the sub-discipline of border studies are ambiguous at best, and even more so given that borders are often studied solely to theoretically illuminate other social, political and cultural phenomena. It is clear, therefore, that the theoretical scope and horizon of the border has greatly expanded over the last two decades, and border research, broadly put, is much richer because of this. Yet, at the same time, theoretically capturing empirical bordering that coheres around generalisable and testable (disciplinary specific) concepts remains problematic and, for many researchers, impossible and/or even undesirable.

This chapter revisits some discussions, debates and inferences that have taken place across the broad interdisciplinary field of contemporary ‘border studies’, namely the ability/difficulty/desirability/value and so on of studying borders from an abstract or universal analytical vantage point. What does it mean, for example, to actually theorise borders? What are we specifically referring to when we talk about the border or, more accurately, bordering? Does theorising borders at a general level reduce them to simplified abstract phenomena? Or, put differently, does abstracting borders by definition reduce or neglect altogether the lived experience that has correctly become integral to the study of borders, particularly in terms of understanding their geographically and historically rooted meaning-making and meaning-framing capacities (and ultimately, their transformations)? In (re)visiting these debates and accompanying questions, the broad aim is to examine the role and motivation of theory building and conceptual development within the loose sub-field of border studies. A more specific aim is to show that, while generating theories and concepts of bordering does for the most part advance our understanding of borders wherever they are geographically located, useful theories of bordering must be fluid, malleable and continuously produced in the same way that borders are continuously made and remade. On this logic, the inherent messiness of the border concept, it is argued, becomes its theoretical strength. Thinking theoretically about borders must be continuously open to empirical reconceptualisation, but in doing so, theory building can illuminate new concepts, locations, functions and meanings and so on to be ‘tested’ anew. In this regard, as an example to be considered, the chapter will theoretically posit the border not as an object of study, but rather as a placeholder in which bordering is a flexible analytical framework within which different elements and constitutive background assumptions are positioned and continuously drawn upon by people to create, maintain and contest different borders (Cooper and Perkins, 2012, 2014). Such approaches utilise ‘thin’ working understandings of bordering processes that can be ‘thickened out’ in particular cases but in a heuristic way, avoiding the totalising tendencies of grand theory making and avoiding the danger of producing border theory that is otiose, serving no useful or practical purpose.

The chapter is organised as follows. The next section will highlight and discuss why theory generation has been deemed necessary, difficult and/or inadequate in border studies, with particular emphasis given to the fascination of building a general border theory. The chapter will then discuss various attempts to theorise and conceptualise borders in order to highlight the multitude of different approaches, namely model building and conceptual development. The final section will briefly detail two vignettes of open concepts and frameworks that can be thickened out to explain more specific cases while at the same time being informed by them. Open concepts and frameworks, it is argued, acknowledge that the way we theorise – and, for that matter, how we are often embedded within theoretical and ideological traditions – can influence what we see (Beauregard, 2012, 475), which can be a danger of rigid theorising. Before proceeding, it is important to acknowledge that many researchers either are not interested in theorising borders (in and of themselves) or are satisfied with current theoretical approaches.¹ However, it must be noted from the outset that this chapter – like this volume – adheres to Rumford’s (2012) call for multiperspectival border studies (to be discussed in this chapter). That is, to privilege the study of borders in and of themselves, placing the border centrally and theorising it as a subject of study in its own right rather than rendering it secondary to the analysis state sovereignty or security and so on. Another point to make at this stage is that it is not the intention of this chapter to infer that borders are in any way under-theorised, or that the study of borders lacks theoretical insight; far from it. Border studies has a rich and productive history of theorising and, as will be highlighted and discussed in this chapter, there are many nuanced and mature approaches that attempt to make theoretical sense of the multiplicity of different elements and practices that make up contemporary bordering. In this way, the ‘why’ questions that form the title of this chapter are rhetorical and not intended to put forward or propose (impose) some form of border theory or privilege one specific way of doing things over another. Rather, the aim is to bring to the fore the importance of border theorising and set the scene for the rest of the volume. In that regard, this chapter serves as an overview chapter of sorts.

Theorising the need for border theory

Contemporary border research has always acknowledged the difficulty of theorising borders, due to the constantly changing and pervasive multiplicity of border forms, functions and characteristics. Nevertheless, the need not only to theorise but also to develop some sort of grand border theory has proved desirable, and in this section I will explore why some researchers have bemoaned the difficulty or lack of interest in producing such theories of the border relative to the more prevalent case study-oriented approaches. The influence that this pursuit has exerted on border research, even in the form of criticism, will also be examined. What is of interest here is not whether a grand theory of the border or something of the sort is possible or desirable – and I believe it is not on either count – but to examine what the pursuit of such theorising and ensuing debates can tell us about the direction of border research (and border theorising) broadly put. In this regard, Anderson and Bort (2001, 13) point out that ‘[a] general theory of frontiers has been a recurring intellectual temptation because boundary making seems to be a universal human activity’. For Anderson and Bort, writing in 2001, attempts at grand scientific theories that would explain all human attempts at border making in all places (in turn rooted in even wider theories of human ecology and territoriality) were still in their infancy and thus, at the time, unconvincing. As far as they were concerned, these grand border narratives could not be taken seriously, not because they were unattainable or undesirable, but because they failed to have ‘a significant influence over the perceptions of policy makers, educated opinion or populations at large’ (Anderson and Bort, 2001, 13). Coherent and structured theorising is deemed to be part and parcel of any social science discipline, undertaken to make sense of the world by abstracting and generalising, and border studies is no different in this regard; but building overarching formal and testable theories is particularly rooted in the need for and pursuit of so-called scientific rigor, a pre-cursor to policy-relevant research. Yet, if grand theories of bordering were too underdeveloped at the beginning of the twenty-first century to be put to good use, we are still waiting.

It has been suggested that across border studies, there has been an inherent difficulty producing empirical quantitative richness on the one hand and broad qualitative theoretical insight on the other, especially with within one body of research. Generalisable theory building across the study of borders is limited because the concept of the border seems to be simultaneously limitless in terms of its conceptual openness, but limited in terms of the importance of specific historical, geographical and cultural embeddedness. In other words, as touched upon in the Introduction, the sheer diversity of the study of borders limits the production of a single analytical framework – borders are geographically diverse and variable, with each border having its own complex political, cultural and historical story (thus, any move towards theorising borders at a general level must be alive to the pitfalls of oversimplification and de-historisation). They are diverse in terms of spatial scales, and they come in different forms and types and have different functions depending on, amongst other things, how people experience them and produce their narratives and meanings. The interdisciplinary nature of border research is necessarily key in the sense that the diversity of borders can be explored from a multitude of different disciplinary vantage points, bringing their own perspectives, approaches and questions to bear. The concept of the border is explored through the study of individual borders and/or illustrative examples and enriched and advanced through interdisciplinary communication taking place in and across edited books (such as this one), special issues, conferences and major research initiatives involving multiple and discipline-diverse research teams.

Yet a train of thought has been running though the study of borders suggesting that, for all the positive emphasis on interdisciplinarity, in practice researchers often produce theoretical insights forged through their own disciplinary training and generated from specific locations of interest and expertise (Payan, 2014). That is, researchers tend to emphasise singular findings based on the empirical study of some border somewhere, which is perhaps not too surprising given the sheer volume of borders that exist around the world. In-depth case studies abound, in other words, but often, as Payan (2014) argues, singularly presented in ways that offer little to broaden theory building (see also Kolossov, 2005). Summing this up, Payan even suggests that ‘border studies are more a gathering of individuals largely interested in a single word, borders, who come together to share their findings, most of which contribute little to border theorising per se’ (Payan, 2014, 5). Whether this is wholly true or speculative, what seems to be being criticised here is not that interdisciplinary border studies produces theory per se, but that the theory on offer is for the most part descriptive and therefore does not explain or predict, which is deemed good theory and beneficial for the advancement of border research (see Brunet-Jailly, 2005; Kolossov, 2005; Newman, 2003). Such criticism gives legitimacy to those who work towards the construction of predictive models and frameworks.

Border models and frameworks

Striving for testable theoretical models and developing common typographies and characteristics within border studies have proved popular, and this section will briefly touch upon and give an overview of some examples. Martinez’s (1994, 14) work on borderlands provides a starting point, viewing borderlands as important sites of social science research because of the human environment they contain. They are human environments, he argues, that can be generalised:

Conditions in borderlands worldwide vary considerably because of profound differences in the size of nation-states, their political relationships, their levels of development, and their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic configurations. Despite this heterogeneity, however, it is possible to generalize about features common to all and to posit a classification scheme based on cross-border contact.

For Martinez (1994, 14), it is clear that borders/borderlands are formed at the peripheries of nation-states – what he terms a binational milieu – and are particularly defined by the geopolitical relationships between them, particularly in an increasingly interconnected world. Within his schema he categorised borderlands into four different models: ‘alienated’, ‘co-existent’, ‘interdependent’ and ‘integrated’. He also discussed characteristics that formed the ‘borderland milieu’, including transnationalism, international conflict and accommodation, ethnic conflict and accommodation, otherness and separateness. Other examples of theoretical framing take a similar course. Dissa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figure
• List of table
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: thinking theoretically and philosophically about the concept of the border
• Part 1 Border studies
• Part 2 Philosophy
• Part 3 Border studies and philosophy
• Index