Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter

Essays on Borders, Cosmopolitanism, and Globalization

Barrie Axford, Alistair Brisbourne, Sandra Halperin, Claudia Lueders, Barrie Axford, Alistair Brisbourne, Sandra Halperin, Claudia Lueders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000168686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers transdisciplinary scholarship which challenges the agendas of and markers around traditional social scientific fields.

It builds on the belief that the study of major issues in the global cultural and political economies benefit from a perspective that rejects the limitations imposed by established boundaries, whether disciplinary, conceptual, symbolic or material. Established and early career academics explore and embrace contemporary political sociology following the 'global' and 'cultural' turns of recent decades. Categories such as state, civil society, family, migration, citizenship and identity are interrogated and sometimes found to be ill-suited to the task of analyzing global complexities. The limits of global theory, the challenges of global citizenship, and the relationship between globalisation and situated and mobile subjects and objects are all referenced in this book.

The book will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, Geography, Area studies and European studies.

Part I

Encounters beyond borders

1 What is a border comrade?

Olivier Thomas Kramsch

Death is the ultimate border. We who write for a living realise with the passing of a comrade that we write on the hither side of this border, approaching it ourselves on borrowed time. We, too, shall inevitably cross over it, onto the ‘other side’, into the vastness of that starry night. Appropriate to his all too short lifetime’s intellectual engagement, Chris crossed this border with grace and dignity, leaving behind a lasting legacy for the field of border studies (among many other disciplines he touched). This chapter does not mean to survey the entirety of Chris’s contribution to the border studies literature. It will, however, attempt to take stock of some of his major intellectual moves, setting them in dialogue with his contemporaries, the better to highlight the pioneering problems and issues he raised. Among those to be canvassed here are Chris’s embrace of the late twentieth-century ‘spatial turn’ for the field of border studies; his drawing attention to the ‘changing consciousness’ and concomitant ‘cosmopolitanisation’ of borders resulting from the embodied experience of crossing borders as part of everyday life in Europe; his influential notion of ‘borderwork’, which re-oriented border studies’ scholarly gaze away from state-driven bordering practices to those of vernacular and bottom-up citizen initiatives producing not only local borders but those resonating over wide geopolitical terrains (i.e. ‘global borders’); and finally his late-career intuition regarding the need to develop a multiperspectival approach to borders, one which segued beyond the ‘territorial trap’ of state-centric thinking and legitimised a space from which to ‘see like a border’. Each of these moves, I argue, illuminate Chris’s ongoing curiosity towards the cultural encounter, framed in this case as a generous and worldly border-crossing encounter with the Other.

Jumping ‘the pond’

At a conference dinner I hosted in Nijmegen some years ago, the political scientist Malcolm Anderson asked me what I was doing ‘in this small pond’, by which I took him to mean the relatively small community of Continentally-based scholars studying European borders. The implication, which irked at the time, was that someone like me should be ‘out in the world’, presumably among les Anglo-Saxons, where the real action was to be found in border studies. If I may be permitted to hold fast to Anderson’s watery metaphor, Chris did swim out there in the big wide sea among the Anglos (but of course more than just the Anglos), and we can all be grateful for that. The width and depth of that sea allowed Chris a certain freedom and latitude of thought the significance of which some Continentally-based border scholars have yet to appreciate.¹ Whereas by the mid-2000s some scholars were preaching ‘interdisciplinary dialogue’ (Newman, 2006a), for instance, Chris by then was doing so robustly, most notably in his important call to connect the study of borders to critical social theoretical debates relating to the consequences of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, networked community, mobilities and flows (Rumford, 2006: 155; Urry, 1999; Castells, 2000; Sassen, 2002). For Chris, border studies’ more active engagement with critical social theory held the promise of overcoming what he perceived to be a major conceptual impasse in the field, defined by an unproductive choice between a neoliberal, elite-driven ‘borderless world’ narrative resulting from the supposed disappearance of borders under the impact of heightened global flows, and a ‘world of borders’, increasingly prevalent in the wake of security concerns after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers and the hardening of borders worldwide in the subsequent ‘war on Terror’.

Chris was far too much the gentleman to directly name the academic peddlers of what I have elsewhere called border studies’ ‘blackmail’ (Kramsch, 2010), one made all the more defensive and reactionary to the degree that it offers scholars no way out but to accept a world of heightened border controls, surveillance, compartmentalisation and a purification of social life marked starkly by relations of Us/Them (see especially now peripatetic Newman, 2006b; also Paasi, 2009; Wastl-Walter, 2011). Reaching out to critical social theory allowed Chris to break through the deeply conservative implications of this stalemate by arguing neither along the lines of a ‘borderless world’ scenario, nor from the vantage point of a world of heightened border closure, but from the perspective of those who cross and re-cross a world of multiplying borders. Furthermore, turning to social theory allowed him to clarify the uses of theory and theorisation in border studies more broadly. During a period when scholars have been agonising futilely over whether the field should or should not have a single, unifying theoretical framework (Paasi, 2011), Chris’s explicit turn to critical social theory allowed him to pose unabashedly normative questions about borders and the bordering dynamic, while injecting an implicit emancipatory agenda into a field traditionally hostile to such approaches.

Injecting the ‘spatial turn’ into border studies

Such social theoretical moves were further enabled by three crucial insights, all established as vital research frontiers by the mid-2000s. Firstly, Chris was one of the first scholars to see the theoretical possibilities of the broadly defined ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences as a boon for a border studies still mesmerised by the ‘territorial trap’ of state-centric spatial thinking.² Thus, drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Étienne Balibar and Ulrich Beck, Chris argued that our very understanding of space had to change in order to take account of the heightened pluralisation, fluidity and cosmopolitanisation of social life (and thus, borders), in the wake of 9/11 (Bauman, 2002; Balibar, 1998; Beck, 2004). Concretely, Chris perceived the changing spatiality of politics in the rise of supranational governance (i.e. the European Union), networks of global cities, and transnational diasporic communities, all signalling for him that bordering processes had achieved a ‘spatiality beyond territoriality’ (Rumford, 2006: 160).³ Chris called on border scholars to engage more fully with such a changing spatiality of politics as one pathway out of the dichotomising impasse of the borderless/rebordered world debate, and saw the European Union as a privileged laboratory for working out the implications of this novel spatiality, thinking with and from its multidimensional ‘borderlands’.

Cosmopolitan borders

Secondly, Chris drew attention to what he called the ‘changing consciousness of borders’ resulting from changing ‘state-society relations’ under conditions of globalisation (2006: 156, 162). Here, Chris observed that the full meaning of borders could not be exhausted by ‘lines on a map’ or the securitised boundaries characterised by security check-points and passport controls, but had to consider the extent to which ‘borders and the regular crossing of borders, have become part of our routine experience, particularly in Europe where borders proliferate … but where the importance of individual borders is in many cases very much reduced’ (2006: 156). Although we may quibble to what degree the experience of routine border crossing (at least in Europe) is still very much an activity within the purview of an elite Erasmus business class, Chris firmly embedded the experiential, embodied dimension of borders as a key variable in taking account of their transformation in the early millennium, echoing parallel calls for a border studies more attuned to the ‘lived spatiality’ of borders in everyday life (Kramsch and Hooper, 2004). For Chris, the perceived unmooring of society and nation-state and the concomitant freedom for citizens and social movements to connect with others located beyond the confines of state institutions offered the promise of cosmopolitanising world society ushered by accelerating mobility (Rumford, 2007; following Beck, 2004). The gradual cosmopolitanisation of national societies for Chris would have important implications for our understanding of borders, as it would trouble the complacent dichotomies of inside/outside, us/them, national/international characteristic of mainstream approaches in border studies (Rumford, 2008a; see also Kramsch, 2002). The elegant ruse of Chris’s conceptualisation of ‘cosmopolitan borders’ was that it did not presuppose the eradication of borders but their exuberant proliferation:

Borders and mobilities are not antithetical. A globalizing world is a world of networks, flows and mobility; it is also a world of borders. It can be argued that cosmopolitanism is best understood as an orientation to the world which entails the constant negotiation and crossing of borders. A cosmopolitan is not only a citizen of the world, someone who embraces multiculturalism, or even a ‘frequent flyer’. A cosmopolitan lives in and across borders.

(Rumford, 2006: 163)

Borderwork

Thirdly, by posing the provocative questions ‘who borders?’ and ‘where are borders?’, Chris helped shift attention from border studies’ fixation on the state as primary bordering agent to a range of civil society actors operating at both supra- and sub-state levels. Whether by producing the dramatic downfall of the Berlin Wall, the more prosaic creation of ‘gated communities’ or lobbying for the creation of a new national border police in the United Kingdom, Chris argued that the ‘borderwork’ of ordinary citizens, as well as states, have the power to border and deborder space (Rumford, 2006, 2008b). Although in conversation I gently chided Chris for a moral ambivalence inherent in the concept of ‘borderwork’ – in my view the term embraced both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of bordering, i.e. both repressive and emancipatory – it would arguably become Chris’s most powerful intervention, with the most enduring legacy for our field. The term would go on to influence a range of work addressing both the actions of states bordering their territories and the counter-movements of citizens seeking to overcome the repressive border regimes entailed by state actions (Paasi and Prokkola, 2008; Bialasiewicz, 2011; Johnson et al., 2011; Topak, 2014; Varró, 2016).

Moreover, where some leading border scholars argue that the complexity of state borders as locatable objects of research draws on the fact that the meanings attributed to such borders are ‘inward-oriented’ and thereby closely linked to the ideological apparatus of the state (Paasi, 2011: 14), Chris asserted otherwise that some borders – most paradigmatically the Cold War Iron Curtain separating East from West, but more recently borders such as the Mediterranean or Ukraine –, in addition to expressing national territoriality also have a global resonance, hence constituting ‘global borders’ (Rumford, 2010; following Balibar, 1998). For Chris the study of global borders held the promise of refocusing the attention of border studies on the non-state, vernacular and ‘bottom up’ dimension of boundary producing practices (see also Perkins and Rumford, 2013); exploring borders ‘buried’ by nation-state borders, notably during colonialism; and reconceptualising borders as sites of encounter and connectivity, rather than only of division, purification, and death (Kramsch, 2010a).

Seeing like a border

A final gift: building on his observation of almost a decade earlier regarding the ‘changing consciousness of borders’, towards the end of his life Chris argued that to move the field of border studies beyond the territorial trap of state-centric thinking it needed to embrace a ‘multiperspectival’ approach (2012). Drafting alongside a contemporaneous observation of mine regarding the ‘hidden’ quality of global borders during European overseas imperialism (Kramsch, 2012), Chris asserted that a multiperspectival border studies must dispense both with the idea of consensus on what a relevant border is as well as the notion that borders are all equally visible to all parties concerned (Rumford, 2012: 891–2). Inspired by Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledge’ (1991), Chris argued that moving beyond an Aristotelian ‘high point’ in studying societal transformation would allow the field of border studies to open up to a much larger range of actors and events involved in bordering processes, thereby proffering an enlarged variety of perspectives. Indeed, Chris went so far as to argue that rather than ‘seeing like a state’ (the traditional perspective of border studies), a multiperspectival border studies could invite us to ‘see like a border’ (Rumford, 2012: 896).

Tantalisingly underdeveloped in Chris’s late work, the notion of ‘seeing like a border’ held the promise of dovetailing with postcolonial border studies scholarship, an emergent body of work seeking to grasp European bordering practices from an assertively subaltern perspective (Mignolo, 2000; Davison and Muppidi, 2009; Bhambra, 2009; Anderson et al., 2015; Aparna et al., in press). Yet despite this potential convergence, Chris maintained a curious political quietism in widening critical border studies’ perspectival lens. Chris claimed that the goal of a multiperspectival border studies is ‘not to occupy the ‘standpoint of the subjugated’, which is but one perspective’ (2012: 894). When offering examples of ‘seeing like a border’, his cases almost all involve everyday acts of border reinforcement, ‘the project of those seeking to gain further advantage in society: entrepreneurs or affluent citizens, for example. Why remain passive in the face of other peoples’ borders when you can obtain advantage by becoming a proactive borderer?’ (2012: 897). Whence this political reticence? What invisible border prevented Chris from crossing the line into a much more robustly normative stance, thus fulfilling border studies’ critical potential?

Coda: uncorking the spatial genie

In sum, by offering us a much more nuanced, differentiated and creatively imagined view of borders, Chris created a space for our generation of border scholars to break out of the shackles of a number of unproductive binaries that continue to impoverish our field, i.e. borderless/rebordered-securitised worlds; borders of comfort/alienation; Us/Them. Most interestingly, while lamenting the lack of attention of mainstream border studies to the ‘spatial turn’ in social theory, he may have unwittingly hit upon the reason for this lacuna in an almost throwaway observation from the mid-2000s:

The spatial turn has encouraged us to look to space first, and borders second … [It] may work to subordinate borders to spaces, as if the former were somehow dependent upon a prior spatial ordering.

(Rumford, 2006: 166)

Chris’s entire subsequent life’s work was dedicated to proving that intuition wrong. Pace determined efforts to continue policing the boundaries of the field so that it does not become contaminated by critical spatial thinking, borders are intricately bound up with an expansive view of socio-spatial life. Once the spatial genie is out of the bottle, she cannot be corked back into it so easily again. We can all be grateful to Chris, a true border comrade,⁴ for having uncorked that wine and sharing it so generously with us.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tony Cooper for inviting me to contribute to this Festschrift volume, as well as to the wise editorial guidance of an anonymous reviewer. A shout out to the Radboud Postcolonial Reading Group, whose members, perhaps without knowing it, keep the embers of the ‘spatial turn’ alive in the Netherlands and in Continental Europe.

Notes

1 How else to read Anssi Paasi’s recent and puzzling conflation of the burgeoning field of border studies with international ‘academic capitalism’? Linking the efflorescence of border scholarship in the English language with the heightened international scientific competition between states, Paasi avers the paradox that, as he sees it, ‘such a tendency towards internationalization and border crossings is based on academic nationalism’ (2011: 12). Implicit in Paasi’s ‘paradox’ is the charge that border studies scholarship’s engagement with social theory’s critical problematisation of borders is an expression of an English-language nationalist (US? UK? Australasian?) drive for hegemony over Continental European border scholarship. More troubling still, yoking English-language scholarship concerned with boundary transcending narratives (as evinced in Chris’s work on cross-border, networked, or cosmopolitan borders) to capitalist production norms resonates all too uneasily with early-twentieth century Continental European ideologies associating minority groups who did not ‘fit’ into the hardening nationalist mold(s) – Jews, Gypsies, Roma, ex-colonial émigrés, homosexuals, dissident thinkers – with global capitalist conspiracies. In an early twenty-first ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: the importance of the ‘cultural encounter’
• PART I: Encounters beyond borders
• PART II: Everyday encounters and strangeness
• PART III: Global studies and interdisciplinarity
• Index