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Borders and borderlands: Windows on statecraft
Political Geography 30 (2011) 111–114
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Review Essay Borders and borderlands: Windows on statecraft Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State, Alexander Diener, Joshua Hagen (Eds.). Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham (2010). Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border, Alison Mountz. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2010). Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion, I. William Zartman (Ed.). University of Georgia Press, Athens and London (2010). Travelling from Dublin to Belfast with British undergraduates on a recent field trip, few could tell when they had crossed the Irish/ Northern Irish border. Ostensibly an inconspicuous and open border today, the positive changes in the troubled territory that forms the boundary between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have been rapid yet arguably unstable. Having grown up north of the border this has been for me an area of contradictory experiences, memories and narratives. There is, today, both simultaneous consolidation and erosion of this border for, whilst the British Army watchtowers have now been dismantled, the legitimacy of the border itself is increasingly recognised by the Irish (with the caveat of British agreement to end partition should that be demanded both in the north and south). At a more everyday level, from my grandmother’s tales of smuggling butter on the Dublin to Belfast train, to 1980s security checks at crossings on ‘approved roads’ and today remembering to top up the petrol on the ‘right’ side depending on the exchange rate, this is a border(land) that is both mundane and exceptional. It is a border which, whilst ‘fixed’ on the map since 1921, is highly dynamic and perceived in radically different ways by various borderlanders and border-crossers, as well as politicians in Dublin, London and Belfast. It is such dynamism of borders and borderlands, the practices of those who live beside or strive to cross them and the insight they provide into processes of statecraft that each of the books under consideration here seek – and succeed in varying degrees – to address. Each endeavouring to engage with geographies beyond the now clichéd extremes of a ‘borderless world’ and militarised walls and fences, in very different ways these accessible texts take a refreshing look at diverse borders and borderlands. Indeed, the range of case studies highlighted in these texts is impressive, particularly the focus of the two edited collections on sites in Central Asia, South America and Africa that are often overlooked by border studies more generally. In reading these books together it is striking that, while engaging with a range of issues pertinent to international borders including imperialism, security, nationalism and transnationalism, international migration and economic
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.10.002
integration, they are at least as different as they are similar. Not only are edited volumes and a research monograph very different projects, but the authors and editors under consideration here take markedly diverse approaches to what borders are – physically, institutionally and normatively – what functions they serve, what goes on there and how to study them. Since the well documented ‘renaissance’ of border studies within and beyond political geography in the early 1990s (Newman, 2006; Paasi, 2005), there has been an increasingly diverse and theoretically engaged body of literature striving to understand the processes involved in border construction and management. Posited as an important driver of this scholarship has been a desire to provide a counter-narrative to the claim that the de-territorialisation of political identities and state authority has led to the emergence of a borderless world. As such, many border studies in the past 20 years have been framed around a discourse that borders between states still profoundly matter and should be the focus of scholarly investigation. It is such an assertion which forms the rationale behind Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen’s eclectic edited collection Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State. With contributions from familiar names within political geography, this accessible volume in many ways constitutes a useful showcase of contemporary geographical research on borders. However, whilst the empirical chapters clearly demonstrate the fallacy of proclamations of a post-territorial world, and those by Jones, Megoran, Culcasi and Carter are particularly engaging, they are let down by what is a somewhat limited theoretical framing of the volume itself. Frustratingly, the text fails to go much beyond a mere stating of the importance of borders and their role as ‘sites of cultural interaction, exchange and possible hybridity’ (Diener & Hagen, 2010: 10), a well-rehearsed argument which is somewhat overlaboured in the editors’ introduction. Not only, as Newman has argued, is it ‘passé to continue to spend our time discussing whether the world is becoming borderless or not’ (2006: 156), but the editors’ approach to borders struggles to extend beyond Hartshorne’s refutation of their ‘naturalness’ and demonstration of their social construction. While this could well be due to a target audience of more general readers, it does nevertheless feel as though this text falls short of doing more than provide case study illustrations for earlier arguments made elsewhere. Where the text strives to strike a new path is in foregrounding a particular set of borders and borderland polities as geopolitical ‘oddities’. As the editors explain in their brief concluding chapter, the aim of the text is to portray ‘the complex histories and contingent events that shaped some of the oddest-looking borders and how those dividers of geopolitical space have affected lives even to this day’ (2010: 190). These include examples as varied as Ostergren’s chapter on the microstate of Lichtenstein, Diener and Hagen’s account of the strategic importance of exclaves such as Kaliningrad
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Review Essay / Political Geography 30 (2011) 111–114
and Lloyd’s contribution on the history of the anomalous borders of the Caprivi Strip in Namibia. Whilst such ‘odd’ spaces and lines on the political map have long caught the popular imagination, and the text is very much aimed at the ‘curious’ reader, I was initially resistant to the editors’ overt framing of these borderlines and borderlands as ‘oddities’. Not only did there seem to be a lack of self-reflection as to the implications of such branding in terms of playing to and perpetuating somewhat anachronistic western geographical imaginations about these regions, but the value-laden term ‘oddity’ can be (mis)read as demeaning and trivialising the everyday lives and politics that are enacted in these spaces. Perhaps more significantly, such terminology can also be read as accepting that other borders are ‘natural’ and ‘correct’, an assumption which directly contradicts the theoretical framework of social construction (nominally) subscribed to in the rest of the book: ‘by focusing on some of the most visually striking borders, the volume aims to demonstrate that all borders and territories. are social constructions’ (Diener & Hagen, 2010: 4). That said, turning a critical gaze to the margins of geopolitics is to be commended and points to an avenue of research which can offer an insightful strategy for political geography more generally. For, like other geopolitical ‘anomalies’, borderland polities can provide an invaluable window on the mutable and contingent practices that underlie the social construction of political power in so-called ‘normal’ states. Whilst this volume arguably struggles to fully develop how these ‘odd’ borderlands inform our broader understandings of border processes, it nevertheless gestures towards an approach to borderland polities as sites where the processes of statecraft are enacted in a heightened and revealing way. More generally, expanding our empirical gaze to critically engage with more varied forms of geopolitical arrangements offers an important starting point for discussions seeking to venture beyond the conventions of the contemporary international system. For example, a critical focus on borderland polities could contribute to broader debates on the diversification of international society away from a Westphalian ‘ideal’ of sovereign nation-states and towards a complex political order displaying varying degrees of sovereignty and territoriality (Agnew, 2005). Pointing to these possibilities, and something of an anomaly within Diener and Hagen’s text, is Culcasi’s chapter on the stateless nation of Kurdistan. Seeking to ‘locate Kurdistan’s ambiguous. boundaries and explain the importance of these elusive boundaries in modern geopolitical conflict and the Kurd’s continued marginalisation’ (2010: 107), Culcasi not only exposes the power of maps to ‘normalize the way we think of Kurdistan as a stateless region’ (2010: 117) but also challenges the territorial trap of perceiving sovereign nation-states as the only form of political space worth examining. Crucially, such an approach both foregrounds alternative borderings and geographical imaginaries which contrast with Western notions of territorial fixity, and also frames ‘oddities’ as important sites of transformative geopolitical processes rather than throwbacks to another era. Speaking directly to such dynamism of borders and borderlands, I. William Zartman’s edited volume Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion innovatively brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines including history, sociology, security studies, archaeology, gender studies and art history, though notably no self-identified geographers. Although structured in a similar format with an introductory section followed by chapters on different case studies, where Diener and Hagen’s volume could be described as distinctly ‘light’ on theory, Zartman’s text takes a strikingly different approach. Setting this out in his introduction to the text, Zartman argues that ‘two characteristics of the border are salient, its political nature and its depth’, with the former referring to the border’s peripheral location and
relation to ‘power centres’, and the latter indicating the ‘degree of difference occurring in that area between the two sides of the border’ (2010: 6). Bringing together these border characteristics and drawing on Barth’s (1969) work on ethnic groups and boundaries, Zartman proceeds to sketch out ‘three possible spatial models for social relations in borderlands’ (2010: 7): a black-and-white model depicting a sharp distinction between peoples; a grey model where different populations fully integrate; and intermediate spotty, buffered and layered models characterised by distinct border communities, enclaves and settler colonies respectively. Such a prescriptive political science approach is notably out of sync with the critical theory trends that have dominated the theorisation of borders within political geography and which received scant attention in this text. Moreover, whilst Zartman acknowledges that these models are ‘gross simplifications’, and references to them in the chapters often appear cursory, they do seem to fit uncomfortably with his parallel concern with demonstrating the dynamism of border(lands). That said, this volume has important contributions to make to understandings of borderlands and offers a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives with which geographers could and should be engaging. Conceptualising borderlands as ‘boundaries in depth. the place where state meets society’ (Zartman, 2010: 1), this volume make a convincing case for the socio-political importance of these under-theorised spaces and their warrant of as much analytical attention as borderlines. Such an approach opens up productive lines of enquiry. As Feldman puts it in a concluding chapter – a contribution which is considerably more theoretically nuanced than the introduction to the text – ‘there is much to learn from borderland communities, not only because they provide a window on processes of community and identity formation. but also because. they provide a site where collectivities are not defined primarily by spatio-territorial categorization’ (2010: 241). Thus understood as liminal state spaces, borderlands can, this volume argues, offer valuable insights into the processes, practices and relations of the state itself. In foregrounding borderlands as social processes, this collection thus seeks to demonstrate how these regions are characterised by constant movement in time, space and social practices, and argues that, in their mobility, ‘borderlands always prepare for the next move at the same time that they respond to the last one’ (Zartman, 2010: 10). As such, Understanding Life in the Borderlands ambitiously includes case studies from four millennia, ranging from pre-Westphalian empires (Bárta; Schryver) to colonial boundary drawing (Blumi; Havrelock) and the tensions surrounding borders in the contemporary period (Stea, Zech and Gray; Romo and Márquez). Indeed, it is the focus on the historical contingency of borders and archival approach to borderlands employed in a number of chapters in this volume that is particularly enlightening, and one often overlooked in political geography. Exemplary of this are Schryver’s archaeological analysis of the Crusader state borderlands on the island of Cyprus (1191–1489) and Bárta’s chapter on borderland contacts between the ancient Egyptian state and the Levant during the third millennium BC when the ‘concept of a border and borderlands underwent substantial development’ (2010: 37). Indeed, in countering dismissals of a focus on extinct societies, Bárta persuasively asserts that the ‘performance of power, strategies of order and legitimacy. and the state’s responses to inner crises and outer pressure, as reflected in contemporary Egyptological evidence, find many parallels in our modern world’ (2010: 21). Taking up a similar theme in a nuanced institutional history of the first Ottoman–Greek land boundary, the chapter by Gavrilis demonstrates the utility of examining the life course of an entire border in providing a ‘warning to policymakers
Review Essay / Political Geography 30 (2011) 111–114
today on how to think about designing border control organisations and that provide both security and openness’ (2010: 41). In addition, it is worth highlighting here two chapters from Diener and Hagen’s volume which similarly offer detailed historical accounts of the construction and evolution of borderlands. Though more descriptive than analytical, Rowe’s chapter on the ‘Great Game’ manoeuvres around the Wakhan corridor in north-west Afghanistan offers a fascinating insight into the construction of Afghanistan as a classic ‘buffer state’ and the repercussions of this border construction for contemporary inhabitants. In another particularly timely contribution, Megoran’s chapter provides an incisive historical and political analysis of the troubled boundary between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Deftly illustrating how this has become a region where the intersections of nationality, ethnicity, territory and socialism come into stark relief, Megoran traces the competing geopolitical visions and ‘struggles over the power to identify, claim and rule post-Soviet Ferghana Valley space’ (2010: 35). A related approach to border studies which chapters from both the Zartman and Diener and Hagen volumes demonstrate with aplomb is that of national and local narratives around borderlands. In a fascinating account of the cultural and political history of Misiones, the triple frontera region of Argentina which borders Brazil and Paraguay, Carter’s chapter in the latter collection demonstrates how ‘a selective reading, reshaping and repetition of local history serves as a foundation for a coherent cultural and political identity’ (2010: 156). Illustrated with a variety of cartographic representations of the province, the author contrasts the region’s foundational narratives which uphold ‘an implicit argument for Misiones as a natural, inevitable, and bounded political entity’ with the ‘recurring theme of Misiones’s vulnerability, which derives from the province’s geographic situation and unusual, protruding shape’ (2010: 156). Likewise focusing on competing political narratives, Havrelock’s chapter in Zartman’s volume turns to the fluctuating borderland around the Jordan River Valley and traces how symbolic borders are drawn in national mythology in such ways as to ‘outline national identity and draw contrasts with neighbouring groups’ (2010: 190). In unpacking these narratives and teasing out claims to authenticity and the construction of divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Havrelock turns critical attention to the borderland and border-crossing tales of Israeli pioneers and Palestinian refugees. However, whilst offering fascinating vignettes of these borderland narratives, these contributions and the edited collections more generally struggle to push beyond the increasingly well documented role of boundaries in identity construction through demarcations of inside/outside and self/other (Newman & Paasi, 1998). Indeed, with the notable exceptions of Romo and Márquez’s skilful examination of the ‘complexity of identity construction for individuals living transnational lives along the US-Mexico border’ (2010: 218) in Zartman’s text and Jones’s empathetic account in Diener and Hagen’s volume of the impact the enclaves along the Indian-Bangladeshi border have on the everyday lives of those who live in these stateless spaces, these edited collections fail to adequately address issues of identity construction and agency at and around the border. Acknowledging the restrictions of edited volumes where snapshots of diverse cases are prioritised over in-depth research, nevertheless the voices, personal narratives and memories of borderlanders themselves are distinctly absent from these collections. Alison Mountz’s monograph Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border goes a considerable way to addressing these critiques. The book brings together her ethnographic research on the bureaucratic limbo faced by smuggled Chinese migrants whose boats were intercepted by Canadian immigration authorities off the coast of British Columbia in 1999 (chapters 1–4) with a more
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wide-ranging investigation of the geographical and legal strategies that refugee-receiving states employ to control migration (chapters 5–7). Whilst the second half of the book tries to cover almost too much ground, and feels somewhat rushed compared to the more detailed analysis in the preceding chapters, the text as a whole offers a refreshing and innovative approach to the study of border(land)s. Rather than attending to particular borderlines or lands and the communities that reside there, Mountz focuses on the nature of the border itself: to those who strive to cross international borders and, more specifically, to the bureaucratic administration established to police and control such movement. Indeed, it is the focus on the bureaucracy of the border that offers a particularly fascinating insight. Guiding the reader through the geographical imaginations and practices of the state, the book begins ‘in the belly – the bureaucracy’ and then proceeds to move ‘outward beyond the office and into the architecture of everyday life’ with each chapter tracking the state’s bureaucracy ‘in action’ (2010: xxxii). Through asserting that ‘bureaucrats act on geographical imaginations that simultaneously reproduce and transcend international borders’ (2010: xxi) and thus highlighting the centrality of space and place to immigration controls, Mountz foregrounds the ‘power of states to alter the relationship between geography and the law’ (2010: xv). Moreover, it is when the legal meets the ethnographic that particularly productive insights are gained. Drawing on Smith’s (1987) ‘institutional ethnography’ in her focus on Citizenship and Immigration Canada (the Canadian government’s immigration agency) and literature on the ‘anthropology of the state’ (Sharma & Gupta, 2006) more generally, Mountz argues that an ethnographic approach both enables ‘closer examination of points of identification, intimacy, and difference through which the state is constituted’ (2010: 90) and demonstrates how ‘“the state” does not exist outside of the people who comprise it’ (2010: xxiv). Thus, not only does attending to the ‘microlevel, grounded daily practices of government employees’ (2010: xiv) expose ‘the operation of power at multiple scales and centres’ (2010: xxiii), but the interweaving of vignettes such as that of Raúl (chapter 6) – a US citizen of Latino heritage who is hassled by US immigration officials 25 miles from the border with Canada – also produces a more politically engaged text than conventional textual analyses. For, in foregrounding border practices as an arena where power relations are laid bare, Mountz sets down a welcome if challenging gauntlet for researchers: ‘while civil servants work furiously to manage human migration, social scientists must work equally hard to trace the changing nature of sovereignty and the many contradictions involved in its exercises of border enforcement’ (2010: 167). Interwoven with this ethnographic approach and commitment to political engagement is Mountz’s arresting conceptualisation of what and where the border actually is. Offering a very different reading from that proposed by the edited collections described above, Mountz dismisses borders as fixed lines on a map and instead focuses on the dispersed, chaotic geographies of borders which are daily reproduced. Thus attending to the marginal zones and administrative centres where borders are created and managed, the author argues that ‘states have been shrinking spaces of asylum through creative enforcement in peripheral zones’ (2010: xvii). As a consequence, and drawing on feminist analyses of the embodiment of the state, Mountz argues that the border itself moves and is effectively reconstituted around the bodies of refugee claimants. This innovative shift in perspective and scale productively builds upon the idea of borders as a series of practices and, in drawing attention to the intimate, bodily geographies of the border, has the effect of simultaneously humanising the border through highlighting de-humanising bureaucratic practices. Forming a core argument of the book, Mountz describes this corporeal geography of the border in legally ambiguous locations
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as ‘stateless by geographical design’ (chapter 5). A typology of four kinds of such sites where states ‘manipulate geography’ in order to enforce immigration restrictions are presented to illustrate this: offshore detention facilities on islands and at sea; sites of interdiction abroad; short-term stateless zones such as airports; and ‘remote detention centres within sovereign territory that restrict access to refugee determination processes’ (2010: 124). With these liminal spaces therefore being ‘at once characterised by both the presence and the absence of nation-states’ (2010: 123) and so requiring a ‘remapping of the boundaries of sovereign territory’ (2010: 125), they not only fundamentally problematise concepts of territory and statehood, but also add to a growing call within political geography to turn critical attention to the often hidden micro-geographies of sovereign practices. The author’s engagement with principles of vision and visual registers in chapter 2 is particularly instructive in this regard in terms of unpacking how states see borders and affirming Amoore’s (2007) emphasis on states’ deployment of visuality in securing sovereignty. In asking how such zones that are stateless by geographical design can and should be conceptualised Mountz, like many scholars grappling with such issues, turns to Agamben’s (1998) theorisation of exceptionalism in marginal zones of the state. However, the author refreshingly resists and critiques Agamben’s totalising narrative by demonstrating the utility of empirically grounding exceptionalism and attending to the ‘intimacies of exclusion where performative states redefine borders at the scale of the body’ (2010: 143). As such, her assertion that an ethnographic approach to the state is key to materially mapping sites of exception and understanding how these spaces emerge promotes a potentially productive disciplinary bridge between political geography and anthropology. In concluding, I want to return briefly to the international border closest to ‘home’ for me – the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland – and reflect on how my memories, experiences and reading of this border might be informed by each of these three texts. I am left with an array of juxtaposing and productive approaches. The Irish/Northern Irish border is certainly a ‘curious’ borderland, not least in its current ‘invisibility’ on the ground, and the practices that occur in and around this border tell us much about the statecraft of the sovereign authorities on either side of it. Fitting somewhere between a ‘grey’ and ‘layered’ model, this border is also undoubtedly a site of dynamic cultural and political interaction and
one where the borderland has, one could argue, itself played a role in the violence to the north. Finally, and perhaps most persuasively, this is a border which comes to prominence at times of crisis, is constituted around the bodies of those who seek to cross it, and challenges conventional understandings of sovereign, territorial statehood. Indeed, in responding to Paasi’s (2005) call for border studies to attend to issues of agency, power relations, social practices and cultural processes, each of the texts discussed here encourages us, in different ways, to adopt an unconventional approach to borders and borderlands in order to expose the complex relations which are so often obscured by state-centric views of political space. Foregrounding cross-disciplinary exchanges and broadening methodological approaches, these volumes promote border(land)s as significant rather than marginal actors in reconfiguring notions of sovereignty, territory and statehood, and thus as a vibrant and challenging field for political geography.
References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agnew, J. (2005). Sovereignty regimes: territoriality and state authority in contemporary world politics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2), 437–461. Amoore, L. (2007). Vigilant visualities: the watchful politics of the war on terror. Security Dialogue, 38(2), 215–232. Barth, F. (Ed.). (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Newman, D. (2006). The lines that continue to separate us: borders in our ‘borderless’ world. Progress in Human Geography, 30(2), 143–161. Newman, D., & Paasi, A. (1998). Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography. Progress in Human Geography, 22 (2), 186–207. Paasi, A. (2005). Generations and the ‘development’ of border studies. Geopolitics, 10 (4), 663–671. Sharma, A., & Gupta, A. (Eds.). (2006). The anthropology of the state: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Fiona McConnell School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Daysh Building, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK E-mail address: fi[email protected].
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Review Essay Borders and borderlands: Windows on statecraft Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State, Alexander Diener, Joshua Hagen (Eds.). Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham (2010). Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border, Alison Mountz. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2010). Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion, I. William Zartman (Ed.). University of Georgia Press, Athens and London (2010). Travelling from Dublin to Belfast with British undergraduates on a recent field trip, few could tell when they had crossed the Irish/ Northern Irish border. Ostensibly an inconspicuous and open border today, the positive changes in the troubled territory that forms the boundary between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have been rapid yet arguably unstable. Having grown up north of the border this has been for me an area of contradictory experiences, memories and narratives. There is, today, both simultaneous consolidation and erosion of this border for, whilst the British Army watchtowers have now been dismantled, the legitimacy of the border itself is increasingly recognised by the Irish (with the caveat of British agreement to end partition should that be demanded both in the north and south). At a more everyday level, from my grandmother’s tales of smuggling butter on the Dublin to Belfast train, to 1980s security checks at crossings on ‘approved roads’ and today remembering to top up the petrol on the ‘right’ side depending on the exchange rate, this is a border(land) that is both mundane and exceptional. It is a border which, whilst ‘fixed’ on the map since 1921, is highly dynamic and perceived in radically different ways by various borderlanders and border-crossers, as well as politicians in Dublin, London and Belfast. It is such dynamism of borders and borderlands, the practices of those who live beside or strive to cross them and the insight they provide into processes of statecraft that each of the books under consideration here seek – and succeed in varying degrees – to address. Each endeavouring to engage with geographies beyond the now clichéd extremes of a ‘borderless world’ and militarised walls and fences, in very different ways these accessible texts take a refreshing look at diverse borders and borderlands. Indeed, the range of case studies highlighted in these texts is impressive, particularly the focus of the two edited collections on sites in Central Asia, South America and Africa that are often overlooked by border studies more generally. In reading these books together it is striking that, while engaging with a range of issues pertinent to international borders including imperialism, security, nationalism and transnationalism, international migration and economic
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.10.002
integration, they are at least as different as they are similar. Not only are edited volumes and a research monograph very different projects, but the authors and editors under consideration here take markedly diverse approaches to what borders are – physically, institutionally and normatively – what functions they serve, what goes on there and how to study them. Since the well documented ‘renaissance’ of border studies within and beyond political geography in the early 1990s (Newman, 2006; Paasi, 2005), there has been an increasingly diverse and theoretically engaged body of literature striving to understand the processes involved in border construction and management. Posited as an important driver of this scholarship has been a desire to provide a counter-narrative to the claim that the de-territorialisation of political identities and state authority has led to the emergence of a borderless world. As such, many border studies in the past 20 years have been framed around a discourse that borders between states still profoundly matter and should be the focus of scholarly investigation. It is such an assertion which forms the rationale behind Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen’s eclectic edited collection Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State. With contributions from familiar names within political geography, this accessible volume in many ways constitutes a useful showcase of contemporary geographical research on borders. However, whilst the empirical chapters clearly demonstrate the fallacy of proclamations of a post-territorial world, and those by Jones, Megoran, Culcasi and Carter are particularly engaging, they are let down by what is a somewhat limited theoretical framing of the volume itself. Frustratingly, the text fails to go much beyond a mere stating of the importance of borders and their role as ‘sites of cultural interaction, exchange and possible hybridity’ (Diener & Hagen, 2010: 10), a well-rehearsed argument which is somewhat overlaboured in the editors’ introduction. Not only, as Newman has argued, is it ‘passé to continue to spend our time discussing whether the world is becoming borderless or not’ (2006: 156), but the editors’ approach to borders struggles to extend beyond Hartshorne’s refutation of their ‘naturalness’ and demonstration of their social construction. While this could well be due to a target audience of more general readers, it does nevertheless feel as though this text falls short of doing more than provide case study illustrations for earlier arguments made elsewhere. Where the text strives to strike a new path is in foregrounding a particular set of borders and borderland polities as geopolitical ‘oddities’. As the editors explain in their brief concluding chapter, the aim of the text is to portray ‘the complex histories and contingent events that shaped some of the oddest-looking borders and how those dividers of geopolitical space have affected lives even to this day’ (2010: 190). These include examples as varied as Ostergren’s chapter on the microstate of Lichtenstein, Diener and Hagen’s account of the strategic importance of exclaves such as Kaliningrad
112
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and Lloyd’s contribution on the history of the anomalous borders of the Caprivi Strip in Namibia. Whilst such ‘odd’ spaces and lines on the political map have long caught the popular imagination, and the text is very much aimed at the ‘curious’ reader, I was initially resistant to the editors’ overt framing of these borderlines and borderlands as ‘oddities’. Not only did there seem to be a lack of self-reflection as to the implications of such branding in terms of playing to and perpetuating somewhat anachronistic western geographical imaginations about these regions, but the value-laden term ‘oddity’ can be (mis)read as demeaning and trivialising the everyday lives and politics that are enacted in these spaces. Perhaps more significantly, such terminology can also be read as accepting that other borders are ‘natural’ and ‘correct’, an assumption which directly contradicts the theoretical framework of social construction (nominally) subscribed to in the rest of the book: ‘by focusing on some of the most visually striking borders, the volume aims to demonstrate that all borders and territories. are social constructions’ (Diener & Hagen, 2010: 4). That said, turning a critical gaze to the margins of geopolitics is to be commended and points to an avenue of research which can offer an insightful strategy for political geography more generally. For, like other geopolitical ‘anomalies’, borderland polities can provide an invaluable window on the mutable and contingent practices that underlie the social construction of political power in so-called ‘normal’ states. Whilst this volume arguably struggles to fully develop how these ‘odd’ borderlands inform our broader understandings of border processes, it nevertheless gestures towards an approach to borderland polities as sites where the processes of statecraft are enacted in a heightened and revealing way. More generally, expanding our empirical gaze to critically engage with more varied forms of geopolitical arrangements offers an important starting point for discussions seeking to venture beyond the conventions of the contemporary international system. For example, a critical focus on borderland polities could contribute to broader debates on the diversification of international society away from a Westphalian ‘ideal’ of sovereign nation-states and towards a complex political order displaying varying degrees of sovereignty and territoriality (Agnew, 2005). Pointing to these possibilities, and something of an anomaly within Diener and Hagen’s text, is Culcasi’s chapter on the stateless nation of Kurdistan. Seeking to ‘locate Kurdistan’s ambiguous. boundaries and explain the importance of these elusive boundaries in modern geopolitical conflict and the Kurd’s continued marginalisation’ (2010: 107), Culcasi not only exposes the power of maps to ‘normalize the way we think of Kurdistan as a stateless region’ (2010: 117) but also challenges the territorial trap of perceiving sovereign nation-states as the only form of political space worth examining. Crucially, such an approach both foregrounds alternative borderings and geographical imaginaries which contrast with Western notions of territorial fixity, and also frames ‘oddities’ as important sites of transformative geopolitical processes rather than throwbacks to another era. Speaking directly to such dynamism of borders and borderlands, I. William Zartman’s edited volume Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion innovatively brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines including history, sociology, security studies, archaeology, gender studies and art history, though notably no self-identified geographers. Although structured in a similar format with an introductory section followed by chapters on different case studies, where Diener and Hagen’s volume could be described as distinctly ‘light’ on theory, Zartman’s text takes a strikingly different approach. Setting this out in his introduction to the text, Zartman argues that ‘two characteristics of the border are salient, its political nature and its depth’, with the former referring to the border’s peripheral location and
relation to ‘power centres’, and the latter indicating the ‘degree of difference occurring in that area between the two sides of the border’ (2010: 6). Bringing together these border characteristics and drawing on Barth’s (1969) work on ethnic groups and boundaries, Zartman proceeds to sketch out ‘three possible spatial models for social relations in borderlands’ (2010: 7): a black-and-white model depicting a sharp distinction between peoples; a grey model where different populations fully integrate; and intermediate spotty, buffered and layered models characterised by distinct border communities, enclaves and settler colonies respectively. Such a prescriptive political science approach is notably out of sync with the critical theory trends that have dominated the theorisation of borders within political geography and which received scant attention in this text. Moreover, whilst Zartman acknowledges that these models are ‘gross simplifications’, and references to them in the chapters often appear cursory, they do seem to fit uncomfortably with his parallel concern with demonstrating the dynamism of border(lands). That said, this volume has important contributions to make to understandings of borderlands and offers a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives with which geographers could and should be engaging. Conceptualising borderlands as ‘boundaries in depth. the place where state meets society’ (Zartman, 2010: 1), this volume make a convincing case for the socio-political importance of these under-theorised spaces and their warrant of as much analytical attention as borderlines. Such an approach opens up productive lines of enquiry. As Feldman puts it in a concluding chapter – a contribution which is considerably more theoretically nuanced than the introduction to the text – ‘there is much to learn from borderland communities, not only because they provide a window on processes of community and identity formation. but also because. they provide a site where collectivities are not defined primarily by spatio-territorial categorization’ (2010: 241). Thus understood as liminal state spaces, borderlands can, this volume argues, offer valuable insights into the processes, practices and relations of the state itself. In foregrounding borderlands as social processes, this collection thus seeks to demonstrate how these regions are characterised by constant movement in time, space and social practices, and argues that, in their mobility, ‘borderlands always prepare for the next move at the same time that they respond to the last one’ (Zartman, 2010: 10). As such, Understanding Life in the Borderlands ambitiously includes case studies from four millennia, ranging from pre-Westphalian empires (Bárta; Schryver) to colonial boundary drawing (Blumi; Havrelock) and the tensions surrounding borders in the contemporary period (Stea, Zech and Gray; Romo and Márquez). Indeed, it is the focus on the historical contingency of borders and archival approach to borderlands employed in a number of chapters in this volume that is particularly enlightening, and one often overlooked in political geography. Exemplary of this are Schryver’s archaeological analysis of the Crusader state borderlands on the island of Cyprus (1191–1489) and Bárta’s chapter on borderland contacts between the ancient Egyptian state and the Levant during the third millennium BC when the ‘concept of a border and borderlands underwent substantial development’ (2010: 37). Indeed, in countering dismissals of a focus on extinct societies, Bárta persuasively asserts that the ‘performance of power, strategies of order and legitimacy. and the state’s responses to inner crises and outer pressure, as reflected in contemporary Egyptological evidence, find many parallels in our modern world’ (2010: 21). Taking up a similar theme in a nuanced institutional history of the first Ottoman–Greek land boundary, the chapter by Gavrilis demonstrates the utility of examining the life course of an entire border in providing a ‘warning to policymakers
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today on how to think about designing border control organisations and that provide both security and openness’ (2010: 41). In addition, it is worth highlighting here two chapters from Diener and Hagen’s volume which similarly offer detailed historical accounts of the construction and evolution of borderlands. Though more descriptive than analytical, Rowe’s chapter on the ‘Great Game’ manoeuvres around the Wakhan corridor in north-west Afghanistan offers a fascinating insight into the construction of Afghanistan as a classic ‘buffer state’ and the repercussions of this border construction for contemporary inhabitants. In another particularly timely contribution, Megoran’s chapter provides an incisive historical and political analysis of the troubled boundary between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Deftly illustrating how this has become a region where the intersections of nationality, ethnicity, territory and socialism come into stark relief, Megoran traces the competing geopolitical visions and ‘struggles over the power to identify, claim and rule post-Soviet Ferghana Valley space’ (2010: 35). A related approach to border studies which chapters from both the Zartman and Diener and Hagen volumes demonstrate with aplomb is that of national and local narratives around borderlands. In a fascinating account of the cultural and political history of Misiones, the triple frontera region of Argentina which borders Brazil and Paraguay, Carter’s chapter in the latter collection demonstrates how ‘a selective reading, reshaping and repetition of local history serves as a foundation for a coherent cultural and political identity’ (2010: 156). Illustrated with a variety of cartographic representations of the province, the author contrasts the region’s foundational narratives which uphold ‘an implicit argument for Misiones as a natural, inevitable, and bounded political entity’ with the ‘recurring theme of Misiones’s vulnerability, which derives from the province’s geographic situation and unusual, protruding shape’ (2010: 156). Likewise focusing on competing political narratives, Havrelock’s chapter in Zartman’s volume turns to the fluctuating borderland around the Jordan River Valley and traces how symbolic borders are drawn in national mythology in such ways as to ‘outline national identity and draw contrasts with neighbouring groups’ (2010: 190). In unpacking these narratives and teasing out claims to authenticity and the construction of divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Havrelock turns critical attention to the borderland and border-crossing tales of Israeli pioneers and Palestinian refugees. However, whilst offering fascinating vignettes of these borderland narratives, these contributions and the edited collections more generally struggle to push beyond the increasingly well documented role of boundaries in identity construction through demarcations of inside/outside and self/other (Newman & Paasi, 1998). Indeed, with the notable exceptions of Romo and Márquez’s skilful examination of the ‘complexity of identity construction for individuals living transnational lives along the US-Mexico border’ (2010: 218) in Zartman’s text and Jones’s empathetic account in Diener and Hagen’s volume of the impact the enclaves along the Indian-Bangladeshi border have on the everyday lives of those who live in these stateless spaces, these edited collections fail to adequately address issues of identity construction and agency at and around the border. Acknowledging the restrictions of edited volumes where snapshots of diverse cases are prioritised over in-depth research, nevertheless the voices, personal narratives and memories of borderlanders themselves are distinctly absent from these collections. Alison Mountz’s monograph Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border goes a considerable way to addressing these critiques. The book brings together her ethnographic research on the bureaucratic limbo faced by smuggled Chinese migrants whose boats were intercepted by Canadian immigration authorities off the coast of British Columbia in 1999 (chapters 1–4) with a more
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wide-ranging investigation of the geographical and legal strategies that refugee-receiving states employ to control migration (chapters 5–7). Whilst the second half of the book tries to cover almost too much ground, and feels somewhat rushed compared to the more detailed analysis in the preceding chapters, the text as a whole offers a refreshing and innovative approach to the study of border(land)s. Rather than attending to particular borderlines or lands and the communities that reside there, Mountz focuses on the nature of the border itself: to those who strive to cross international borders and, more specifically, to the bureaucratic administration established to police and control such movement. Indeed, it is the focus on the bureaucracy of the border that offers a particularly fascinating insight. Guiding the reader through the geographical imaginations and practices of the state, the book begins ‘in the belly – the bureaucracy’ and then proceeds to move ‘outward beyond the office and into the architecture of everyday life’ with each chapter tracking the state’s bureaucracy ‘in action’ (2010: xxxii). Through asserting that ‘bureaucrats act on geographical imaginations that simultaneously reproduce and transcend international borders’ (2010: xxi) and thus highlighting the centrality of space and place to immigration controls, Mountz foregrounds the ‘power of states to alter the relationship between geography and the law’ (2010: xv). Moreover, it is when the legal meets the ethnographic that particularly productive insights are gained. Drawing on Smith’s (1987) ‘institutional ethnography’ in her focus on Citizenship and Immigration Canada (the Canadian government’s immigration agency) and literature on the ‘anthropology of the state’ (Sharma & Gupta, 2006) more generally, Mountz argues that an ethnographic approach both enables ‘closer examination of points of identification, intimacy, and difference through which the state is constituted’ (2010: 90) and demonstrates how ‘“the state” does not exist outside of the people who comprise it’ (2010: xxiv). Thus, not only does attending to the ‘microlevel, grounded daily practices of government employees’ (2010: xiv) expose ‘the operation of power at multiple scales and centres’ (2010: xxiii), but the interweaving of vignettes such as that of Raúl (chapter 6) – a US citizen of Latino heritage who is hassled by US immigration officials 25 miles from the border with Canada – also produces a more politically engaged text than conventional textual analyses. For, in foregrounding border practices as an arena where power relations are laid bare, Mountz sets down a welcome if challenging gauntlet for researchers: ‘while civil servants work furiously to manage human migration, social scientists must work equally hard to trace the changing nature of sovereignty and the many contradictions involved in its exercises of border enforcement’ (2010: 167). Interwoven with this ethnographic approach and commitment to political engagement is Mountz’s arresting conceptualisation of what and where the border actually is. Offering a very different reading from that proposed by the edited collections described above, Mountz dismisses borders as fixed lines on a map and instead focuses on the dispersed, chaotic geographies of borders which are daily reproduced. Thus attending to the marginal zones and administrative centres where borders are created and managed, the author argues that ‘states have been shrinking spaces of asylum through creative enforcement in peripheral zones’ (2010: xvii). As a consequence, and drawing on feminist analyses of the embodiment of the state, Mountz argues that the border itself moves and is effectively reconstituted around the bodies of refugee claimants. This innovative shift in perspective and scale productively builds upon the idea of borders as a series of practices and, in drawing attention to the intimate, bodily geographies of the border, has the effect of simultaneously humanising the border through highlighting de-humanising bureaucratic practices. Forming a core argument of the book, Mountz describes this corporeal geography of the border in legally ambiguous locations
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as ‘stateless by geographical design’ (chapter 5). A typology of four kinds of such sites where states ‘manipulate geography’ in order to enforce immigration restrictions are presented to illustrate this: offshore detention facilities on islands and at sea; sites of interdiction abroad; short-term stateless zones such as airports; and ‘remote detention centres within sovereign territory that restrict access to refugee determination processes’ (2010: 124). With these liminal spaces therefore being ‘at once characterised by both the presence and the absence of nation-states’ (2010: 123) and so requiring a ‘remapping of the boundaries of sovereign territory’ (2010: 125), they not only fundamentally problematise concepts of territory and statehood, but also add to a growing call within political geography to turn critical attention to the often hidden micro-geographies of sovereign practices. The author’s engagement with principles of vision and visual registers in chapter 2 is particularly instructive in this regard in terms of unpacking how states see borders and affirming Amoore’s (2007) emphasis on states’ deployment of visuality in securing sovereignty. In asking how such zones that are stateless by geographical design can and should be conceptualised Mountz, like many scholars grappling with such issues, turns to Agamben’s (1998) theorisation of exceptionalism in marginal zones of the state. However, the author refreshingly resists and critiques Agamben’s totalising narrative by demonstrating the utility of empirically grounding exceptionalism and attending to the ‘intimacies of exclusion where performative states redefine borders at the scale of the body’ (2010: 143). As such, her assertion that an ethnographic approach to the state is key to materially mapping sites of exception and understanding how these spaces emerge promotes a potentially productive disciplinary bridge between political geography and anthropology. In concluding, I want to return briefly to the international border closest to ‘home’ for me – the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland – and reflect on how my memories, experiences and reading of this border might be informed by each of these three texts. I am left with an array of juxtaposing and productive approaches. The Irish/Northern Irish border is certainly a ‘curious’ borderland, not least in its current ‘invisibility’ on the ground, and the practices that occur in and around this border tell us much about the statecraft of the sovereign authorities on either side of it. Fitting somewhere between a ‘grey’ and ‘layered’ model, this border is also undoubtedly a site of dynamic cultural and political interaction and
one where the borderland has, one could argue, itself played a role in the violence to the north. Finally, and perhaps most persuasively, this is a border which comes to prominence at times of crisis, is constituted around the bodies of those who seek to cross it, and challenges conventional understandings of sovereign, territorial statehood. Indeed, in responding to Paasi’s (2005) call for border studies to attend to issues of agency, power relations, social practices and cultural processes, each of the texts discussed here encourages us, in different ways, to adopt an unconventional approach to borders and borderlands in order to expose the complex relations which are so often obscured by state-centric views of political space. Foregrounding cross-disciplinary exchanges and broadening methodological approaches, these volumes promote border(land)s as significant rather than marginal actors in reconfiguring notions of sovereignty, territory and statehood, and thus as a vibrant and challenging field for political geography.
References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agnew, J. (2005). Sovereignty regimes: territoriality and state authority in contemporary world politics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2), 437–461. Amoore, L. (2007). Vigilant visualities: the watchful politics of the war on terror. Security Dialogue, 38(2), 215–232. Barth, F. (Ed.). (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Newman, D. (2006). The lines that continue to separate us: borders in our ‘borderless’ world. Progress in Human Geography, 30(2), 143–161. Newman, D., & Paasi, A. (1998). Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography. Progress in Human Geography, 22 (2), 186–207. Paasi, A. (2005). Generations and the ‘development’ of border studies. Geopolitics, 10 (4), 663–671. Sharma, A., & Gupta, A. (Eds.). (2006). The anthropology of the state: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Fiona McConnell School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Daysh Building, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK E-mail address: fi[email protected].