Borders and borderlands

Jan 15th 2018

Border games: ‘going inside’
 Boundaries
• Boundary making – classification and
purification
• Us v them/home v alien territory
• Mental maps and check points
• Zones of uncertainty and security
• Boundary activation and violence
From open frontiers....
..to closed borders
 Boundaries: artificial constructs,
material effects
‘The longer a boundary functions,
especially on an international boundary,
the harder it becomes to alter it. The
transportation net gets adjusted to the
boundary, market towns take their
specific importance from it, habits of the
local population are shaped by it, ideas
are moulded under the impact of
different educational systems’ (Fischer,
1949:197-8)
 A typology of borderlands

- Classical borderlands
- Internal borderlands
- Frontier states/global borderlands
 A History of Violence
• Violent legacies and
borderlands as
militarized zones
• How states deal with
unruly borderlands –
and how
borderlanders deal
with states
• The ‘performance’ of
security at borders
• Borderlands as violent
‘neuralgia points’
‘Extruding blood’: borders, belonging
and purification
• States, citizenship and the margin
• Belonging, performance and
purification
• Borders contested, unsettled and
transgressed – borders as hybrid
zones
• Borders as containers of nationalism
and conduits of transnationalism
 The economics of borderlands
• Spaces of avoidance and
incorporation – comparative
advantage in illegality
• Fencing wealth, exploiting difference
• Frontier booms towns and arbitrage
economies
• Frontier development - settlement,
enclosure, primitive accumulation
• Crime, wars and borderlands
economies
 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
power
material
interests
institutions

A
A
BORDERLA
BORDERLAND
ND
PERSPECTIVE
PERSPECTI
VE
POLITICAL
GEOGRAPHY HISTORY
space time
place temporality
territory
 Concluding thoughts
• War, peace and space – struggles over competing
spatial logics, mental maps and boundary
checkpoints

• Beyond ‘seeing like a state’ – breaking out of the

‘territorial trap’

• Borderlands as sites of experimentation, special

economic zones, incubators of development

• On policy/practice – beyond ‘borderland

blindness’