Bordering

Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss, Kathryn Cassidy

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509504985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Controlling national borders has once again become a key concern of contemporary states and a highly contentious issue in social and political life. But controlling borders is about much more than patrolling territorial boundaries at the edges of states: it now comprises a multitude of practices that take place at different levels, some at the edges of states and some in the local contexts of everyday life – in workplaces, in hospitals, in schools – which, taken together, construct, reproduce and contest borders and the rights and obligations associated with belonging to a nation-state.

This book is a systematic exploration of the practices and processes that now define state bordering and the role it plays in national and global governance. Based on original research, it goes well beyond traditional approaches to the study of migration and racism, showing how these processes affect all members of society, not just the marginalized others. The uncertainties arising from these processes mean that more and more people find themselves living in grey zones, excluded from any form of protection and often denied basic human rights.

1
Introduction
Framing Bordering

Introduction

The argument of this book is that borders and borderings have moved from the margins into the centre of political and social life. We aim to show how bordering has redefined contemporary notions of citizenship, identity, and belonging for all, affecting hegemonic majorities as well as racialised minorities in their everyday lives while creating growing exclusionary ‘grey zones’ locally and globally.

The borders … are dispersed a little everywhere. (Balibar, 2004: 1)

When Étienne Balibar made his famous comments on the change of bordering technologies in Europe at the beginning of the noughties, he was referring to the spread of border checking points from the territorial borders at the edge of states into a multiplicity of locations, especially in the metropolis – in train stations, sweatshops, restaurants – wherever border agencies feel that there is a chance to catch ‘irregular’ or ‘undocumented’ migrants. Similarly, borders have been moved away from the territory of their state into the territories of other countries: not only are US border checks taking place in Canadian airports and British ones in Eurostar terminals in continental Europe, but consulates in most countries have effectively turned into passport and visa checkpoints. In this way, the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of borders have been taking place globally.

As analysed in this book, these debordering and rebordering practices have marked a fundamental change. This change has been caused not just by the technologies that have been employed in bordering processes, but also by the political projects of governance and belonging that underlie them. As will be discussed here, these political projects themselves emerged as a result of, and in response to, neoliberal globalisation and its associated double crisis of governability and governmentality (Yuval-Davis, 2012). The growing centrality of borders and bordering in the contemporary political and social order has in its turn had a profound effect on global social inequalities, which are multiscalar (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).

Controlling national borders has acquired in the second decade of the twenty-first century a political and emotional poignancy that it has not had since the end of the Cold War, or even earlier. After decades in which the importance – or even existence – of borders was seen as waning in a world increasingly dominated by the rise of globalisation – economic, cultural, political (Hudson, 1998; Wonders, 2006) – rebordering the states has become a symbol of resistance to the pressures that emanate from neoliberal globalisation. Thus Donald Trump, whose promise to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico played an important role in his election victory in 2016, argued in his 2018 lecture to the UN General Assembly: ‘We reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism’ (Guardian, 25 September 2018).

Discourses regarding the control of national borders have been central to political projects in the West as well as in many other parts of the world (Geschiere, 2009). Such discourses relate to the control of immigration at a time when the ‘migration and refugee crisis’ is being described as the most serious one since the end of the Second World War (Geddes and Scholten, 2016). They also relate to trade agreements, tariff controls, and protection from competing cheap imports and from the ‘chipping away’ of state authorities by global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Sassen, 2015a). Some of the more ‘creative’ solutions suggested by the British government as to how to resurrect the United Kingdom’s borders, especially regarding the passage of goods to and from the Irish Republic to Northern Ireland, show how complex, contested, and torn between the demands of the polity and those of the market these bordering processes have become. They also show how bordering has become dependent to a considerable degree on digital and virtual technologies. This is also a central facet of the other, related political bordering discourse, namely the securitisation discourse: the demand that the government should ‘keep our nation safe’ (Andreas, 2003) from ‘global terrorism’. Therefore borderings, regarded as spatial and virtual processes – dynamic and shifting, multiscalar and multilevel – that construct, reproduce, and contest borders, make a considerable contribution to a variety of local, regional, and global political projects of governance and belonging. They determine individual and collective entitlements and duties as well as social cohesion and solidarity. As such, bordering can be considered a pivotal ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) as well as of hegemonic social imaginaries (Taylor, 2004).

Thus we argue that, in order to understand contemporary local and global political and social relations, the management of social solidarity and social difference, and the regulation of labour and of the economy at large, we need to analyse the bordering processes and technologies that are used as discourses and practices in different, multiscalar locations. The present book shows how, in this historical conjuncture, bordering processes weave together arenas of social, political, and economic configurations in complex and contested ways, which cannot be understood while remaining within the boundaries of more traditional subdisciplines such as social policy, international relations, migration studies, social identities, or race and ethnic studies. In recent years there has been a lot of discussion on the limitations of national methodologies (e.g. Beck and Sznaider, 2010; Büscher and Urry, 2009). We argue that bordering studies, which originally emerged in the very different fields of geography (Newman, 2006; Paasi, 2012) and cultural studies (Anzaldúa, 1987), play a crucial role in the understanding of contemporary global–local society – or ‘glocal’, to use Brenner’s (1998) term – and need to be studied in a holistic (if complex) interdisciplinary way. At the same time we argue that, to fully understand the role of bordering in contemporary society, we need to encompass in our analysis of macrosocial structures and processes the gazes of differentially situated individual and collective social actors.

In this introductory chapter we present and explain the theoretical and methodological framing of our approach to bordering as well as the overall context in which we see borderings as operating today.

We start by locating bordering in-between the political and the sociocultural or, more specifically, at the intersection of political projects of governance and belonging.

The section that comes after this examines the paradoxical roles that borders and borderings play in contemporary neoliberal globalisation, as they are both a constitutive part of this process and a response to its effects. It demonstrates how these roles affect contemporary hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, and thus glocal inequalities.

The following sections expand on our methodological and epistemological approach to the study of bordering. We first discuss the processual turn in border studies and then argue for the addition of an everyday, situated intersectionality approach that should contribute to a comprehensive and valid understanding of bordering.

Bordering: In-between the political and the sociocultural

Doreen Massey (1994: 149) used the term ‘power geometry’ to address new images of space, highlighting that such analysis includes ‘how different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to … flows and interconnections’. Henri Lefebvre (1991) has argued that space is the ultimate locus and medium of struggle, and therefore a critical political issue. Border work (Vaughan-Williams, 2008; Rumford, 2008, 2013) is thus about producing, controlling, and regulating (as well as resisting and contesting) such spatial power geometries, producing discourses and practices related to borders that continuously divide – and connect (Donnan and Wilson, 1999) – territorial, social, and economic spaces.

In consequence, borders need to be seen as constitutive parts of the world rather than as segmenting a pre-given ‘natural’ whole. Importantly, bordering is not only about who moves and who does not, but also about who controls whose movements. In other words, some of the crucial analytical as well as political questions related to bordering concern the understanding of the ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of the construction and control of specific borders in specific times and spaces.

Bordering, then, is continuously happening. Different kinds and levels of bordering connect apparently unrelated social, political, economic, and ecological phenomena – from the governance of international trade, climate change, and criminalisation of particular people to social and economic inequalities within and between states. Most importantly, as Nash and Reid (2010) claim, state bordering processes acquire a double meaning, as processes related on the one hand to state territorial boundaries and on the other to symbolic social and cultural lines of inclusion and difference, material and imagined, physical and cultural. As Popescu (2012) argues, borders can be regarded as dynamic and creative discontinuities that play a crucial role in encouraging the multiple, complex interplay between political and territorial and between cultural and identitarian processes. They are based both on collective historical narratives and on individual identity constructions of self in which difference is related to space but not reducible to it. Given these characteristics, borders and bordering need to be seen as material and virtual processes that existed even before digital technologies came to play such crucial roles in contemporary borderings. And, to understand them fully, we need to incorporate into our analysis both everyday vernacular (Jones and Johnson, 2014) and situated and intersectional (Yuval-Davis, 2015a) perspectives. On these we will expand towards the end of this chapter.

Barth (1998) and others following him have argued that what is crucial in processes of ethnicisation and racialisation is the existence of ethnic (and racial) boundaries rather than that of any specific ‘essence’ around which these boundaries are constructed. Any physical or social signifier can be used to construct the boundaries that differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’. State borders are but one of the technologies used to construct and maintain these boundaries. Henk van Houtum and his colleagues (van Houtum and van Naerssen, 2002; van Houtum et al., 2005) have argued that all bordering processes are a combination of ordering and othering. Indeed, as will be shown throughout the book, bordering has a double character, as a political project of governance and as a political project of belonging.

In the empirical chapters of the book, we show that political projects of governance and belonging tend to be entangled and to support and shape each other in concrete social and political situations. However, in this introductory chapter we consider it useful to separate these strands.

Bordering constitutes a principal organising mechanism in constructing, maintaining, and controlling social and political order. This mechanism includes determining not only who is and who is not entitled to enter the country, but also whether those who do would be allowed to stay, work, and acquire civil, political, and social rights. Different political projects of governance determine in different ways the differential criteria for these different entitlements and the individual and collective duties of those governed, be they formal citizens or not. While these bordering constructions might seem to affect only those who were not born in the country, they actually affect the society as a whole, both materially and normatively. They determine what everyone should expect as a citizenship entitlement or as a duty, especially when one compares oneself to people of different origins and formal citizenship status whom one encounters in everyday life. In this way bordering affects all members of society, although in different ways, according to their situated positionings as well as according to the racialised imaginary and the normative social order.

Bordering processes, which are related to different functions of governance, are multilayered. This is true not just in relation to different levels of state, or in relation to regional and global institutions of supra-state borderings, but also within the state borders. In different states there are different spatial and governance hierarchies of territorial borders – of neighbourhoods, cities, country regions, and federal states. For example, in the United States individual states are known to interpret differently the US constitution regarding the rights of undocumented migrants (Park, 2015) and in Britain there is much talk of ‘postcode lottery’ – a term that refers to the ways in which the spatial location of citizens’ places of residence determines at least a part of their rights and duties (Press Association, 2016).

Thus there are many situations in which the spatial governance of internal borders acquires an importance of its own. Of course, these spatial borderscapes intersect with ethnic and other social categorisations that hold among a country’s population, to establish a shifting and contested hierarchy of citizenship statuses and entitlements to different state resources.

Nevertheless, national borders have important roles in establishing territorial, national identities; they also constitute the bedrock of international social order. As Häkli (2015) has pointed out, ‘the border is in my pocket’: more and more frequently and in more and more places, people are asked to prove the legitimacy of their stay within particular state borders by showing their passports and visas.

The decisions, however, regarding the criteria for selecting such people are not intrinsic to the bordering technologies in operation but rather reflect the political, economic, social, cultural, and security interests linked in various ways to the states’ and supra-states’ governance. In other words, when we study contemporary borderings, we need to pay close attention not just to their mode of operation and their discursive imaginaries but also to the particular roles they play in particular political projects.

As mentioned above, van Houtum and van Naerssen (2002) correlated the terms ‘bordering’, ‘ordering’, and ‘othering’ – which Popescu (2012) calls ‘borderology’ – to refer to the interplay between contemporary social and political ordering and border-making. Physical borders are there not only by virtue of tradition, wars, agreements, and high politics; they are also made and maintained through other cultural, economic, political, and social activities, which are aimed at determining who belongs and who does not.

It is for this reason that particular constructions of bordering constitute not only particular political projects of governance but also particular forms of political projects of belonging. Processes of bordering always differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’, those who are in and those who are out, those who are allowed to cross the borders and those who are not.

Different political projects of belonging would construct the borders as more or less permeable, would view those who want to cross the border as more or less of a security or cultural threat, and would construct the borders around different criteria for participation and entitlement for those who do cross them. Thus bordering constructions are intimately linked to specific political projects of belonging, which are at the heart of contemporary political agendas and whose contestations are closely related to different constructions of identity, belonging, and citizenship.

It is important to differentiate between belonging and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Belonging relates to emotional (or even ontological) attachment, about feeling ‘at home’, comfortable, and (although feminists who have worked on domestic violence would dispute this) ‘safe’ (Ignatieff, 2001). It is a material and affective space that is shaped by everyday practices and social relations as well as by emotions, memories, and imaginaries (Blunt, 2005: 506). This construction of belonging as being at home is also linked to views on who has a right to share the home and who does not belong there, that is, views on bordering. As we shall see later on, technologies of everyday bordering and securitisation that are supposedly aimed at making people feel safe by keeping out those who do not belong can end up undermining these feelings of safety and raising instead a sense of precarity.

Belonging, especially in terms of self-identification, tends to be naturalised (Fenster, 2004). It becomes articulated, formally structured, and politicised only when it is perceived to be under threat in some way. The politics of belonging comprises specific political projects aim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Framing Bordering
• 2 Bordering, Governance, and Belonging: An Historical Overview
• 3 Firewall Bordering at State-Managed Border Control Points
• 4 Everyday Bordering, Citizenship, and Belonging
• 5 Bordering and Grey Zones
• 6 Conclusion: Understanding Bordering
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement