The Routledge Research Companion to Border Studies

Doris Wastl-Walter, Doris Wastl-Walter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317043980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Throughout history, the functions and roles of borders have been continuously changing. They can only be understood in their context, shaped as they are by history, politics and power, as well as cultural and social issues. Borders are therefore complex spatial and social phenomena which are not static or invariable, but which are instead highly dynamic. This comprehensive volume brings together a multidisciplinary team of leading scholars to provide an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of all aspects of borders and border research. It is truly global in scope and, besides embracing the more traditional strands of the field including geopolitics, migration and territorial identities, it also takes in recently emerging topics such as the role of borders in a seemingly borderless world; creating neighbourhoods, and border enforcement in the post-9/11 era.

PART I
THEORIZING BORDERS: CONCEPTUAL ASPECTS OF BORDER STUDIES

1
A Border Theory: An Unattainable Dream or a Realistic Aim for Border Scholars?

Anssi Paasi

Introduction

After a relative silence during the post-World War II decades, political borders have become highly salient objects in research during the last two decades. This has not been merely a coincidental change in academic winds but has been related to major transformations in the international geopolitical landscape. The collapse of the rigid Cold War divide between West and East at the turn of the 1990s and the accelerating globalization – related to economics, culture, and consciousness – were the principal macro-level backgrounds (Paasi 2003). The rise of the politico-economic importance of regions as part of the re-scaling of new state spaces in global capitalism (Brenner 2004) has provided another background. This has triggered off new keywords such as cross-border regions (Kramsch and Hooper 2004; Perkmann and Sum 2002), regional states (Ohmae 1995), or city regions (Scott 2001). The development of information technology – partly generating globalization and partly illustrating it – was also a significant context.

The politico-territorial and scalar consequences of the 9/11 terrorist attack in the USA in 2001 and the transforming hegemony of the USA on the global geopolitical (Agnew 2005) and regional scene (Katzenstein 2005) have also forced politicians and the prevailing statecraft to consider the lines dividing societies, nations, states and even cultural realms. New fears, images of friends and enemies, dividing lines between us and them, and insides and outsides have emerged, perhaps mocking the optimism of the early post-Cold War period and challenging the seeds of cosmopolitanism that emerged after the collapse of the dividing lines which characterized that period. This has not, however, discouraged the representatives of critical, socially situated cosmopolitanism from searching for a new basis for their thinking, which seems to have become more differentiated spatially in the current world (Delanty 2006). This challenges us to recognize such emerging asymmetries related to borders as the gendered and generation-based features of de-bordering and re-bordering.

The expansion and the ongoing integration of the European Union have rapidly transformed Europe as the major context and laboratory for border studies (another major laboratory being the US-Mexico border). European integration was set in motion originally in order to maintain peace between the enemies of the World Wars, and the EU has invested a lot in promoting cross-border cooperation, regional economies and the development of infrastructures. There are currently over 100 new regions within the EU, varying greatly in their areal scope and economic functions (Deas and Lord 2006). The borders of the EU are nowadays often seen rather stereotypically as simply becoming lower inside the Union and stronger around its outside. The Union’s area is more complex, however, and such features as the Schengen zone make a major difference. The situation of the EU and its internal and external borders serve to characterize more broadly the key issue related to borders: their selective openness.

This is the complex setting that border scholars have faced from the 1990s onwards. It is no wonder, then, that contrary to much of the social science dominated by Anglophone scholars, border studies are today more international than many other fields of social science. Much of the current research and conceptual ideas come from scholars working outside the Anglophone linguistic realms. But in spite of this fact, the accelerating flow of new book titles and journal articles published in the English language implies that one more new dimension behind the mushrooming of border studies is academic capitalism. This phenomenon, which is related to the globalization of knowledge production and international competition between states, becomes apparent in the first instance in the increasing numbers of researchers in various countries (several border research institutes, for instance, have been established since the 1990s) and secondly in the demands expressed for scholars to operate internationally. The simultaneous establishment of academic merit systems around the world, based on competition and publications, also brings the corporate interests of international publishing businesses into play (Paasi 2005). The relative numbers of researchers and published scientific articles have become indicators of the international competitiveness of a state. Paradoxically, it may then be argued that such a tendency towards internationalization and border crossings is based on academic nationalism.

This chapter will scrutinize the current state of border studies and reflect particularly on the role of theory in a situation where borders and border studies are becoming more diverse, more integrated – and more international. The major motive for looking at such a theme is the fact that claims have recently been made regarding the need for a theory in border studies (Newman 2003). The key aim here is to reflect the rhetorical question put forward in the title: is border theory a realistic aim, an unattainable ideal or perhaps something that is not needed at all, as the empiricist tradition of political geography has implied? Or is this a question that is, as I suggest, crucially related to our concept of theory and the need to see this as a verb, that is theorization? This chapter will not only look at how the need for theory has been expounded and justified in border studies but will also illustrate how our understanding of borders is itself perpetually transforming and that this continual striving to re-define them has been a crucial part of theorization, whether the aim has been to work towards universalistic certitude or to recognize historical-geographical contingency (Agnew 2006).

The chapter is organized as follows. It will first discuss the complexity of political borders as research objects and then go on to investigate the purported shaping of the interdisciplinary field of border studies. This will be followed by a discussion on how various concepts of theory could inform border studies, after which it will scrutinize some recent debates in which the concept of border has been challenged, re-interpreted and expanded. This discussion aims at showing how there can be gaps not only between various camps in academic debates but also between such debates and the concrete world, and that such gaps may ultimately be unfortunate and prevent the development of new theoretical approaches in border studies. Finally some conclusions will be set out.

The complexity of borders as research objects

Political borders are currently attractive but simultaneously complex objects of research. The first background to this complexity is the perpetually increasing number of state borders, their changing roles and functions in the globalizing world and the international pressure existing in each border area. They are all factors that make a difference. The current world harbours some 200 states and more than 300 land borders between them, and in addition there are scores of sea boundaries. This corpus has been perpetually expanding along with the rise of new states, especially after major upheavals such as wars. This is exemplified by the fact that there are some 600-800 cultural groupings or purported nations in the world (according to some opinions as many as 4,000, based on diverging languages), many of which are struggling to establish a state of their own. These efforts are balanced and managed by international law and other agreements and by certain regional systems of rules such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Such systems often draw on the principle of collective security, placing states into an alliance of shared responsibilities, as it were. One of the EU’s key requirements for new members, for example, is that they should not have unresolved border conflicts with their neighbours. One further variable that complicates this constellation arises from the perpetually changing meanings of sovereignty (Murphy 1996; Krasner 2001).

Political borders are processes and institutions that emerge and exist in boundary-producing practices and discourses, and they may be materialized and symbolized to greater or lesser extents (Paasi 1996). Ó Tuathail and Dalby (1998) have pointed out that approaches looking at boundary-producing practices should investigate both the material borders at the edges of states and the conceptual borders that designate material boundaries between an apparently secure interior and ‘an anarchic exterior’. It will also be argued below that such conceptual/symbolic borders may be located outside the border areas proper. The meanings of borders are not constant, as the case of the EU shows, and political transformations may cause some borders become lower or softer fairly rapidly, while some others become harder. This is also illustrated by the situation of failing states with corroding and porous borders (Juss 2008), most of which are currently to be found in Africa, with Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe as the most recent examples.

While conflicts rarely occur nowadays between states, for example, across their borders, internal conflicts are still common, often displaying the perpetual power of ethnicity. The year 2007 was the fourth consecutive year in which no interstate conflict existed in the world. According to statistics compiled by Stockholm’s Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 14 major armed conflicts were actively going on in 13 locations around the world in 2007, implying that the number of active conflicts of this kind has declined globally over the past decade or so. The decline has been uneven, however, and has varied on a yearly basis, with major drops occurring in 2002 and 2004 and an increase in 2005 (SIPRI 2008).

Even though the number of border-related conflicts has been decreasing, we have been recently reminded of the power of military-strategic interests by the events in Ossetia, where citizens suffered severely from the conflict between Russia and Georgia. For some observers this represented a return to both power politics and the sphere-of-interest way of thinking that characterized the geopolitical order during the Cold War. Of course, the activities of the US-led coalition in Iraq were much wider examples of this thinking, and Georgia’s aspirations towards the NATO and its close relations with the US may be regarded as one more example of sphere-of-interest thinking.

Secondly, the complexity of state borders as research objects is based on the fact that the meanings attributed to such borders are inward-oriented: They are closely related to the ideological state apparatus, ideological practices such as nationalism (and related national identity narratives) and the material basis of such practices, which manifests itself in territoriality. Territoriality is an ideological practice and discourse that transforms national spaces and histories, cultures, economic success and resources into bounded spaces (Sack 1986; Paasi 1996). The most significant and widely exploited territorial form of ideology is nationalism, the proponents of which often gain some of their ideological power from discourses and practices that make a contrast between a community (We) and The Other. This phenomenon has been recognized by border scholars in various contexts since the 1990s and has been seen to manifest itself in foreign policy discourses, educational practices and popular culture. The processes of Othering and the means by which such processes become part of a banal or mundane nationalism, a theme invented in cultural and postcolonial studies (Said 1978), have been scrutinized in many International Relations (IR) and geographical studies (Campbell 1992; Dalby 1990; Paasi 1996).

It is, indeed, difficult to find any book on nationalism and nationhood that does not somehow recognize the historical importance of territory and boundaries in the practice of state territoriality and in the making of a homeland (Sack 1986; Kaiser 2002). Everywhere, the legislation generated by the state and its instruments of socialization aim at constructing the limits of nationality, citizenship and identity by defining the borders of inclusion and exclusion. And this again raises complicated questions regarding the power and operation of social institutions, symbols and national iconographies. Identification with a territory may occur in various more or less material practices, for example in economic or political spheres, and not purely at the level of mental acts and discourses as identity is often understood.

Thirdly, the spatial scale also makes a difference with respect to the complexity of borders. While state borders are often regarded as both local and national phenomena, some borders are also global and their meanings fluctuate in the sense that so many economic and symbolic practices, discourses or emphasis on difference can be associated with them. Think, for example, the changing meanings of the US-Mexico border or the EU’s external boundaries. Besides state borders, which are relatively hard in terms of purported territorial control and nationalist ideologies and practices, each state also harbours a number of soft internal political boundaries that are perpetually being produced and reproduced (some of these sub-state borders in all states are concomitantly state borders, which fuses their spatial meanings with those associated with such borders). Sub-state borders (and territories) are produced and institutionalized by the state in various forms of territorial governance or through processes of devolution. Such changes and the corresponding new regionalizations may also be expressions of efforts to manage and control the activities of ethno-nationalist or regionalist groupings (Paasi 2009a). In spite of globalization and the apparent opening of borders, states still have a great interest in maintaining their relative power in the governance of space economy, the minds and well-being of citizens, and thereby social order and cohesion. The key administrative vehicle in this process is the resilient modification of the structures of regional governance and policy. The multi-scalar importance of borders is accentuated by the fact that while the number of states has quadrupled since World War II, the number of sub-national units of governance has multiplied even more (Lovering 2007).

A reappraisal of state spaces towards higher scales has occurred simultaneously with this, and an increasing number of supra-state boundaries have been drawn, some of which are crucial to the organization of international economic and strategic relations and the control of flows of various kinds, for example in the context of blocks such as the EU, NAFTA, Mercado Común del Sur (Mercosur), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and so on (Paasi 2009a). The importance of such units is increasing, and some scholars have suggested that normative regionalism and cosmopolitanism are currently significant factors, for example in Asia and Europe, and that they could serve as alternatives to nationalism and narrowly defined globalism (Delanty and He 2008).

Fourthly, there are several methodological approaches to border studies that draw on diverging theoretical principles. Such approaches often operate at different levels of abstraction and can be used in relation to different conceptual apparatus (for example state, nationalism or identity theory), and at the same time are available on different spatial scales. For some political economists, for instance, it is the macro-level mobility of capital across borders and the possible control of such flows that is at stake and which normally forces researchers to reflect the changing faces of capitalism and the changing global conditions and strategies of capital accumulation (Sparke 2006). For those interested in the power of statecraft and foreign policy elites in shaping images of threat and associated fears in international relations it has been the analysis of foreign policy texts, media space texts and various popular texts (written, pictorial, cinematic) that has attracted the attention of scholars. Such textual approaches originally drew on the poststructuralist thinking promoted by dissident IR scholars and representatives of critical geopolitics, who strived to deconstruct the self-evident traits associated with bounded territories and the meanings of mobile identities and shifting boundaries (Campbell 1992; Shapiro and Alker 1996; Ó Tuathail 1996). Accordingly, attention has been paid to the state and governmental boundary-drawing practices and performances that characterize the everyday life of states and their relations to each other.

For researchers interested in the local narratives that people associate with borders and border crossings in their everyday lives, it is often ethnographic approaches, participant observation, depth interviews and narrative analys...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: THEORIZING BORDERS: CONCEPTUAL ASPECTS OF BORDER STUDIES
• PART II: GEOPOLITICS: STATE, NATION AND POWER RELATIONS
• PART III: BORDER ENFORCEMENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY
• PART IV: BORDERS AND TERRITORIAL IDENTITIES: THE MECHANISMS OF EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION
• PART V: THE ROLE OF BORDERS IN A SEEMINGLY BORDERLESS WORLD
• PART VI: CROSSING BORDERS
• PART VII: CREATING NEIGHBOURHOODS
• PART VIII: NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT
• Names Index
• Places Index