Border Studies

Local consequences of the Trianon Peace Treaty have not been researched thoroughly. This study describes the everyday life of rural people on both sides of the Eastern part of the new border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Based on research in Hungarian and Czech archives and with the help of newspaper articles, the author illustrates the difficulties of re-establishing the old familial and economic ties between villages that were separated by the border. Many activities of the borderland people were illegal. The paper discusses how authorities responded to these offences. Besides long and small distance traffic and the problems of dual landowners, illegal crossing, contraband, and border incidents are also part of the analysis. Contrary to all hardships, the border remained permeable in the interwar period.

As India successfully positions itself as one of the core, influential nations of the world, its security scenario has become more vulnerable and complex. The roots of India's security challenges lie not only at the regional and international levels but also from within. These threats can be dealt with by securing the borders efficiently. However, the borders of India and their associated problems, geographical, social and cultural, are vivid and varied. Each border receives a different kind of treatment in accordance with the existing mutual relationship across the border. If the border people cannot connect with the country's mainstream, national security is affected. Indian policymakers face a hard challenge to formulate an integrated policy for borderlands and borders. While there are many common cross-border issues, chiefly non-security threats, there are other cross-border issues which are border specific. Besides, soft approaches to economic and cultural cross-border interactions are beneficial. The border security approach focuses on defending the borders from various threats but the border management approach involves protecting the interests of the country across the border.

Ceuta y Melilla, las ciudades fronterizas de la Unión Europea en África, pueden ser definidas como territorios de excepción. Fundamentalmente por dos motivos. El primero: el estatus jurídico-político diferenciado que la arquitectura institucional española y comunitaria les reserva. Y el segundo: las particularidades de la política de control migratorio/fronterizo allí implementada. Ceuta y Melilla no están constituidas en Comunidades Autónomas. No forman parte del espacio aduanero de la Unión Europea, el Tratado de Schengen se despliega sobre ellas con notables singularidades y, formalmente, se hallan fuera del paraguas de protección de la OTAN.
Enmarañado con las reivindicaciones territoriales de Marruecos, este estatus jurídico-político especial convierte a Ceuta y a Melilla en claras «excepciones de Estado». En este caldo de cultivo, en torno a las vallas que separan a ambas ciudades del resto de África opera un régimen de movilidad acrobático. Con harta frecuencia el régimen fronterizo de Ceuta y Melilla se muestra incompatible con el respeto a los derechos humanos y a la integridad física de los migrantes, conformando un «estado de excepción» de facto en materia de control migratorio.

Europe is currently experiencing a "refugee crisis", demonstrated by millions of displaced people unseen since World War II. This book examines the interface between the EU's response to irregular flows, in particular the main extraterritorial border and migration controls taken by the Member States, and the rights asylum seekers acquire from EU law.

"Remote control" techniques, such as the imposition of visas, fines on carriers transporting unsatisfactorily documented third-country nationals, and interception at sea are investigated in detail in a bid to assess the impact these measures have on access to asylum in the EU. The book also thoroughly analyses the rights recognised by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights to persons in need of international protection, inclusive of the principle of non-refoulement, the right to leave any country including one's own, the right to asylum, and the right to remedies and effective judicial protection.

The fundamental focus of the book is the relationship between the aforementioned border and migration controls and the rights of asylum seekers and, most importantly, how these rights (should) limit the scope of such measures and the ways in which they are implemented. The ultimate goal is to conclude whether the current series of extraterritorial mechanisms of pre-entry vetting is compatible in EU law with the EU rights of forced migrants.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

According to William Zartman “Borders run across land but through people. On maps they appear
as fine one-dimensional lines, whereas on the ground they have many dimensions. Borders are
boundaries in depth, space around a line, place where state meets society” (Zartman 2010:16). It is
impossible to understand borders, without peripheral relations between the states and societies they
contain. Itself borders are zones in which people create special relationship with other people.
In this thesis, I plan to write about the case of a small minority group located on the periphery in
Georgia in order to understand how minorities find a place in an ethnically diverse and rapidly
changing society. Their responses to changing central policies and border conditions provide an
ideal opportunity to see how elements of the population not only respond to, but also actively
constitute, the conditions of a border regime and sovereignty.
Georgia is a state with a highly diverse population, and boundary conditions are everywhere in the
society. In addition, the country has complex borders with neighboring countries such as Russia,
where population groups are distributed across boundaries and have a long history of coping with
border conditions. Borderlands are “zones of varying widths, in which people have recognizable
configurations of relationships to people inside the zone, on both sides of the borderline but within
the cultural landscape of the borderlands, and, as people of the border, special relationships with
other people and institutions in their respective nation and state‟‟ (Donnan and Wilson 1994:8).
The post-independence period has been one of rapid change, which makes it possible to observe
the ways that sovereignty is formed in local contexts, and the role of elements of the population in
relations between the state and the population.
In case of the form of comparative analysis of the state border political changes, in this thesis I will
show socio-cultural and economic changes of ethnic minority in Georgia. I will show how borders
affect the groups living near them.

P.S.
First published
https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/handle/1956/8505/122858637.pdf?sequence=1

Borderlands 2016 Table of Contents and Introduction

The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world.  But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today?  What do we know about the individuals who fill these places, their hopes and fears, and about the kinds of social relationships that form between the groups of people who confront one another there – the migrants and refugees, the local residents, the police and other officials of the state? 

In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of  subject, the border inhabitant (or) the border dweller, who is  both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is  obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people.  In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a ‘cosmopolitan condition’ in which the experience of the unfamiliar is  more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal. .

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and politics, as well as anyone concerned with the pressing issues raised by migration today.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

Until the late nineteenth century, the Chinese-Korean Tumen River border was one of the oldest, and perhaps most stable, state boundaries in the world. Spurred by severe food scarcity following a succession of natural disasters, from the 1860s, countless Korean refugees crossed the Tumen River border into Qing-China's Manchuria, triggering a decades-long territorial dispute between China, Korea, and Japan. This major new study of a multilateral and multiethnic frontier highlights the competing state- and nation-building projects in the fraught period that witnessed the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War. The power-plays over land and people simultaneously promoted China's frontier-building endeavours, motivated Korea's nationalist imagination, and stimulated Japan's colonialist enterprise, setting East Asia on an intricate trajectory from the late-imperial to a situation that, Song argues, we call modern.

Całą książkę można zakupić na stronie wydawnictwa: https://wydawnictwo.umk.pl/pl/products/5530/nomadyczna-europa-poststrukturalistyczne-granice-europejskiego-uniwersalizmu

Ebook dostępny jest tutaj: https://www.ibuk.pl/fiszka/253907/nomadyczna-europa-poststrukturalistyczne-granice-europejskiego-uniwersalizmu.html

This article records my field experiences with the Tumen River, which forms the boundary between China and Korea. Based on my field notes at three different locations—the river mouth, where territories belonging to China, North Korea, and Russia adjoin; a small town midway along the river where pioneer Korean immigrants risked their lives to cross the border; and the “source” of the contemporary border in a dense mountain forest—my narrative links historical memories of the Tumen border from the seventeenth century to the present. The trips, which were taken over the course of thirteen years, urged me to inquire about and rethink the meaning of state borders from the perspective of local residents, trespassers, and the environment. The article questions the popular notion that boundaries are naturally formed, static, and always clearly defined. On the contrary, they are arbitrarily made, fluid, and often ambiguous. As my physical and intellectual journey along this river revealed the humanistic aspect of boundaries, I myself completed a transformation from journalist to historian.

This essay maps the dialectical relationship between desire and the US-Mexico border in Benjamin Alire Saénz's short story, "He Has Gone to Be with the Women," and his young-adult novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I analyze how queer Latinx subjects partake in epistemological quests in which their desires are unresolved mysteries. Situating private feelings within the social, I suggest that experiences with shame, alienation, and melancholia may lead to queer and more possible worlds. I argue that mapping the mysteries of desire at the border offers the possibility to contest, critique, and reimagine social power.

This study offers a critical investigation of the symbolic construction of Greek/Turkish borders in the newsprint media in Greece and Turkey by pointing out the news about ‘Syrian Exodus’. The study conceptualises borders as social and historical constructions since “they are physical entities and run through geographies of the mind as well as physical landscapes” (Mathur, 2013). To this end, a distinction between ‘hard borders’ and ‘soft borders’ (Eder, 2006) is made out in the context of the former as the legitimised territorial borders and the latter as the symbolic borders which are socially constructed with the help of the news media. In this frame, the study endevours to explore the ways that territorial borders which are institutionalised by legal conventions are discursively reconstructed in newspaper articles as creating soft borders. In order to achieve this end, the study draws on the constructed images of the lands and borders of Greece and Turkey by considering that these borders are the external European Union borders which elaborate the conceptualisation of where and what Europe is. Grounded within social constructionist paradigm, the study delves into the linguistic units representing geographical spaces which lead up to a spatial reference of a borderland between Greece and Turkey, between European and non-European lands.

The data of the study have been collected from one national newspaper of Greece, Kathimerini, and one of Turkey, Daily Sabah since the very beginning of 2015. In both newspapers, the news about Syrian migration towards Europe is taken into consideration. That is because the news about ‘Syrian Exodus’ contains linguistic constructions of Greek and Turkish borders since Syrians can tentatively be labelled as the crossers of the Greek/Turkish border. It is observed in the data that there is a transformation in the understanding of the Greek/Turkish border from ‘hard borders’ to symbolic ‘soft’ ones. That is, the linguistic representation of geographical spaces are used to construct symbolic borders which are not totally harmonious to the legal territorial borders. By providing a detailed discussion of the borders through a spatial reference, the study also brings explanation about the influence of the historical trajectory of Greek/Turkish relationship to the narrative construction of the symbolic borders.

Key Words: discursive construction, symbolic borders, newsprint media, spatial reference

ABSTRACT Border studies posit that twin cities represent aspirations to proactively and deliberately become one entity resulting in fundamental changes to the social, economic and political identity of the two communities involved. While some twin cities in the EU and between EU and Russia do follow this pattern, this is not the case in the Russian Far East. The cities of Blagoveshchensk (Russia) and Heihe (China) claim to be twin cities even though they have deliberately confined their twinning activities to trade and tourism and specifically excluded any change that may involve administrative boundaries or national security. Based on interviews and examination of public documents and relevant studies, we argue that the case of Blago and Heihe can be characterized as ersatz in the sense that their city twinning effort is deliberately compartmentalized. We argue that this approach is the local officials’ response to obstacles generated by nationalism, history, vast divergence in economic trajectory and population trends, and close scrutiny by respective national governments. In spite of these, the two cities regard twinning as a valuable marketing tool and have progressively, though asymmetrically, adopted this brand. We further argue that pursuing the rhetoric of city-twinning allows the officials to advance claims to opportunities in trade and tourism and potential access to additional national resources without tackling the difficult questions of more comprehensive cross-border interactions.

La zone frontalière dans la tourmente · L’accession à l’indépendance du Soudan du Sud en 2011 n’a pas mis un terme au plus vieux conflit africain. Au contraire, la rébellion contre Khartoum a repris dans les États soudanais du Kordofan du Sud et du Nil Bleu, avant de s’étendre à la frontière entre les deux Soudan. Une instabilité qui risque de s’accroître avec la dissidence qui s’est développée dans le Soudan du Sud contre le président Salva Kiir, menée par l’ancien vice-président Riek Machar.

В статье уточнены свойства трансграничных территорий с позиции системного подхода. В качестве особенностей проявления общесистемных свойств, обусловленных двухзвенной структурой трансграничья, установлены такие черты, как относительная целостность, глобальность (включенность в мировое хозяйство) и наличие дублированных элементов. Именно эти свойства
превращают трансграничье в территорию особой стратегической значимости для двусторонних
отношений сопредельных государств и место, требующее выстраивания многоуровневого многоакторного механизма сотрудничества и решения проблем. В качестве примера полимасштабного анализа сопоставлены данные плотности населения российско-китайского трансграничного региона на микро-, мезо- и макроуровнях. Сделан вывод о том, что демографические диспропорции приграничных
административных единиц низового уровня России и Китая значительно (в восемь раз) меньше диспропорций административных единиц высшего уровня. Для китайской части трансграничного региона характерны более значительные внутрисистемные демографические диспропорции, чем для российской, проявляющиеся в снижении плотности населения при переходе от макро- к мезоуровню.

The article identifies key features of cross-border regions as territorial systems and points at those of them that are influenced by their binary structure. They are relative integrity of cross-border regions, their embeddedness into the world economy and the presence of duplicated elements. These features predetermine the (bi)national strategic importance and peculiar attention to cross-border territories as well as the need for multi-layer multi-actor problem-solving and collaboration. Contrasting
population density data of the Sino-Russian borderland at multiple scales allows to conclude that demographic disproportion of administrative entities of lower level is significantly smaller (by factor of eight) than the one of regional entities. Internal demographic disproportion is substantially higher on the Chinese side of the cross-border region and its key manifestation is the decrease of population density as we downscale the research unit from the macro- and the meso-level.

O texto discute as imagens que derivam e podem ser projetadas sobre as cidades situadas na fronteira entre o Brasil e o Uruguai, relativizadas a partir dos conceitos de punctum e studium e da teoria situada. Essas imagens representam os trânsitos fronteiriços ora como uma indicação de costumes tradicionais, integração e paz, ora como um problema de segurança nacional e pública a ser controlado através da instalação de câmeras de videomonitoramento. Em 2013, uma portaria do Ministério da Justiça do Brasil habilita processos de instalação de câmeras de videomonitoramento no âmbito da Estratégia Nacional de Fronteiras. Através de trabalhos de campo, revisão de bibliografia e do acompanhamento das normativas, conclui-se que a violência presente na fronteira gaúcha, ligada a situações domésticas e familiares, não pode ser diminuída apenas com a instalação de câmeras. Assim, a imagem da violência produzida pelas câmeras não corresponde à verdade da violência nessas cidades de fronteira e amplia a estigmatização da região.

A partir de pesquisas etnográficas realizadas desde 2009 em Corumbá, na fronteira Brasil-Bolívia, procuro compreender alguns aspectos das relações de poder que se tornam mais visíveis por meio da análise dos conflitos sociais entre brasileiros e bolivianos. Para organizar os principais temas envolvidos nessa pesquisa, o artigo está dividido em três partes. Na primeira, abordo as interseções entre nacionalidade e etnicidade como critérios de classificação social na fronteira e as representações estigmatizantes sobre os bolivianos produzidas no lado brasileiro. Na segunda, discuto as estratégias de trabalho dos bolivianos em Corumbá em torno do comércio informal, relacionando etnicidade e nacionalidade com as oportunidades de trabalho e as formas de organização social. Por fim, nas considerações finais, busco compreender quais os efeitos sociais da deslegitimação progressiva dos bolivianos no lado brasileiro, manifestados nas políticas de controle e vigilância na fronteira, a partir d...

Although, the Sahara Wall was built, at first, in a specific context and for a specific goal, today it reflects multidimensional aspects of a long-term conflict –the Western Sahara issue that still threatens the stability of the Maghreb region. The future of the Sahara Wall is closely related to the original issue itself which needs a negotiated, realistic and equitable solution due to its complex dimensions.

Through a reading of the novel Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides, 2002), this paper aims at facing the queer body in relation to private and public spaces, as these arise as contrasting but complementary places for the definition and construction of sexual identity. Artificial places, constructed locations, imaginary homelands and the adaptation of the body to such locations will be discussed and analysed, as concepts of ‘home’, ‘exile’ and ‘non-place’ are questioned. The importance of the travel as a creator of an in-between place will also be a matter of discussion.
The purpose of this paper is to define a place of representation which does not comply to dichotomies or binary thinking, in which the body is then perceived as an in-between space in itself which meanders within such constructs, without fully representing any, becoming then a space in itself.

While the boundary between Canada and the United States has rhetorically been dubbed ‘the longest undefended border in the world’, Canadian narratives have vigorously sought to defend the border in symbolic terms. In 1972, Margaret Atwood suggested this nationalist project to withstand American cultural hegemony reflected the recurring theme of survival in Canadian fiction. Similarly, theorists of Canadian television have found that discerning Canadian identity, separate from that of its southern neighbour, is a frequent (and anxious) theme in its programming. This chapter examines this symbolic border-defending through a discursive analysis of two successful English Canadian television shows, Due South and The Border, with particular emphasis on the ways in which they differentiate Canadian and American styles of justice. Although the shows represent different genres, occupy different settings, and take place in different time periods, both articulate Canadian national pride in terms of law enforcement. Both plots devote a substantial amount of time dramatising the tension, and often the conflict, between Canadian and American approaches to justice...
As will become evident, the events of September 11th serve as a significant landmark that divides the imaginaries of the two shows. I argue that a comparison of the televised shift from ‘self-othering’ a Canadian against an American backdrop in Due South, to ‘othering’ an American against a Canadian backdrop in The Border, reflects both the political climate of the day, and a strengthening sense of self in the Canadian imaginary. Amidst America’s ‘war on terror’, and in relation to international protest against
American foreign policy, many episodes of The Border depict Canada as a mature and progressive nation that strikes a better balance between security and rights. No longer needing to just survive, Canadian policing identity appears robust and confident.

In the face of the ‘refugee crisis’, many European governments, even in traditionally liberal states, unilaterally introduced a number of restrictive and, often, controversial migration, asylum, and border control policies. The author argues that past legal-bureaucratic choices on migration and asylum policies, ongoing developments in international relations at that time, the structural and perceived capacity of receiving states to cope with the refugee influx, and long-standing migration-related security concerns influenced the responses of many European governments amid the mass population movement. However, the author also suggests that the surfacing of particular policies across Europe was related to the newly elected Greek government’s attempted U-turn from similar repressive and controversial policies during that time. In this regard, the author maintains that repressive and controversial migration, asylum, and border control policies cannot simply be abolished within the cont...

Borders have come to play a critical role as interfaces between domestic concerns and wider interstate and intercultural contexts. As markers of difference, their role as barriers to undesirable influences and threats perceived has only been reinforced. Instead of taking the widespread rhetoric around the closing of state borders as a mere struggle over space, this chapter also includes in its analysis factors of ontological insecurity and the psychological comfort that borders can be seen to produce. It examines the prevailing security-oriented rhetoric, the related gatekeeping processes, and the walls of fear that have grown in popularity and allowed the debate on migration to be hijacked, overshadowing many of its benefits. These practices, it is argued, carry elements of identitary and normative, if not civilisational, bordering, producing in the process an illusion of social order and fortifying inflexible social-spatial imaginaries and definitions of acceptable norms, appearance, and behaviour that seek to communicate who is welcome and who is not.

The case of the disputed Southern Kuril Islands/Northern Territories is used to introduce the term 'hyper-border' in order to examine the instrumental and pragmatic nature of identity. It seeks to capture how, on one of Russia's most isolated borders, the quotidian realities and challenges of life 'beyond' the state had profound implications for how discourses around state, nation, sovereignty and identity are conceived. During the 1990s these islands became a site neither fully within, nor without the state. As the functions of the Russian state diminished and the border with Japan dematerialised, it was the Japanese state that came to provide welfare, infrastructure and economic opportunities for the islanders. This paper attempts to capture how the identity of islanders became articulated not on ethnic, religious or linguistic grounds, but on a purely pragmatic desire for a better life. Among some Kuril islanders an alternative vision of belonging was formulated, which sought to take them beyond the nation and into the state. This paper also traces the counter-function of the hyper-border and how an immense material and discursive response to these circumstances by the Russian state led to the recovery of the meaning of these distant islands. On a site between sovereignty regimes, this idea of the hyper-border attempts to capture how the fluctuating political authority of the state can render identity as contingent, malleable and instrumental.

The paper deals with the conflicts between groups of young unmarried peasants  of some villages of Veneto in the first half of nineteenth century. Several criminal trials instructed from the local courts concerned homicides or wounds which originated from the amorous rivalries between young unmarried men of bordering villages or hamlets.