Paasi, Anssi (2014). The shifting landscape of border studies and the challenge of relational thinking. In Bufon, M, Minghi, J & A Paasi (eds.). The New European Frontiers: Social and Spatial (Re)integration Issues in Multicultural and Border Regions. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

The growing interdisciplinarity of border studies has moved discussion away from an exclusive concern with geographical, physical and tangible borders. Instead, contemporary research appears to privilege cultural, social, economic, religious and other borders that, while often invisible, have major impacts on the way in which human society is (re)ordered and compartmentalized. Similarly, the traditional dividing lines between the domestic and the international and between what it is “inside” and “outside” specific socio-spatial realms have been blurred. This has given way to understandings of borders embedded in new spatialities that challenge dichotomies typical to the territorial world of nation-states. Contemporary borders are mobile: they can be created, shifted, and deconstructed by a range of actors. With this essay the authors engage a central question that characterises contemporary debate, namely: how are formal (e.g. state) and informal (social) processes of border-making related to each other? Borders are constantly reproduced as a part of shifting space-society relationships and the bordering processes they entail. Two aspects of these will be dealt with here: 1) the evolving process of reconfiguring state borders in terms of territorial control, security and sovereignty and 2) the nexus between everyday life-worlds, power relations and constructions of social borders. Both of these processes reflect change and continuity in thinking about borders and they also raise a number of ethical questions that will be briefly discussed as well.

Geopolitics, 2005

What a joy it was. Re-reading two of the classic works in boundary and border studies, that is Julian Minghi's overview and review of boundaries studies in political geography of 1963 and Victor Prescott's work on the geography of frontiers and boundaries published in 1965, in order to write this commentary under the rubric 'the classics revisited', gave me a lot of enjoyment. It was an inspiring experience to be reminded again of the early insights of what could be considered two of the founding-persons in boundary and border studies. It was for instance pleasantly narcissistic and flattering for a boundary/border scholar to be reminded again by Minghi that boundaries touch the heart of the political geographical discipline: boundaries 'are perhaps the most palpable political geographic phenomena'. 1 I could not agree more. Re-reading these two classics particularly reminded me as well of how embedded the past (as well as current) boundary and border paradigms and themes have been and are in the dominant academic thinking of the various times. We are children of our time. In the beginning of the twentieth century, different themes were debated, different approaches were popular and different views were held on how to approach and study the boundary/border. Where in the early 1960s the field of border studies was pre-dominantly focused on the study of the demarcation of boundaries, the lines, now the field of boundaries and border studies has arguably shifted from boundary studies to border studies. 2 Put differently, the attention has moved away from the study of the evolution and changes of the territorial line to the border, more complexly understood as a site at and through which socio-spatial differences are communicated. Hence, border studies can now dominantly be characterised as the study of human practices that constitute and represent differences in space. In other words, the border is now understood as a verb in the sense of bordering. 3 Confusingly, in anthropology, the definition is usually precisely opposite, here a boundary generally means the socio-spatially constructed differences between cultures/ categories and a border generally stands for a line demarcated in space. 4

Geopolitics, 2022

Can the border be considered an epistemological starting point for the analysis of border theories and processes? Whether we look at Rumford’s ‘Seeing like a border’, Mezzadra and Neilson’s ‘Border as Method’, or at Mignolo’s ‘Border thinking’, the answer seems to be a positive one. Similar in their way of employing a different gaze to look at and from the border, yet radically divergent in their methods and outcomes, each of these approaches has indeed provided a unique perspective on borders. However, I argue, a more critical analysis of such approaches reveals how they tend to (1) reproduce those epistemological distinctions that have cut across border studies in the past thirty years and (2) selectively consider some aspects in the analysis of borders, while omitting or overlooking others. All of them appear therefore necessary to grasp the multiplicity of processes, networks, and conflicts that produce and shape – while being simultaneously produced and shaped by – borders. Drawing from, yet critical towards these works, the article will take the border itself as a starting point of investigation, in order to (1) empirically analyse the processes, forces, and conflicts unfolding across borders and (2) analytically interrogate the various epistemological approaches with their advantages and shortcomings. The paper argues that borders should be better thought of as ‘meeting points’, i.e., places of encounter, interaction/clash, and reassessment/redefinition of different theories and processes. Conceiving borders as such, the paper concludes, can provide a more comprehensive framework for the analysis of borders, capable of looking at them not just as passive places moulded by different forces and encapsulated through conventional theoretical approaches, but as active, complex, and variegated processes capable of generating social outcomes and changes.

The current renewed interest in the study of borders and border-lands is paralleled by a growing concern and debate on the possibility of a border model, or models, and of a border theory, or theories. Certainly, there is a new attention to theoretical consideration and discussion that could help sharpen our understanding of borders. In this essay, I argue that a model or general framework is helpful for understanding borders, and I suggest a theory of borders. The seeds of my arguments are grounded in a variety of discussions and in the works of border scholars from a variety of social science disciplines. My contention is that the literature on borders, boundaries, frontiers, and borderland regions suggests four equally important analytical lenses: (1) market forces and trade flows, (2) policy activities of multiple levels of governments on adjacent borders, (3) the particular political clout of border-land communities, and (4) the specific culture of borderland communities. A model of border studies is presented in the second part of this essay, and I argue that these lenses provide a way of developing a model that delineates a constellation of variables along four dimensions.

2017

Recognising the close interrelationships between social change and paradigm shifts, this article contributes to an interpretation of conceptual change in the study of borders. While borders continue to have considerable relevance today, we need to revisit them in light of their constantly changing historical, political, and social contexts, grasping their shifting and undetermined nature in space and time. The article underlines the multilevel complexity of borders – from the geopolitical to the level of social practice and cultural production at and across the border at different levels and, thus, not only along the dividing lines of nation-state sovereignties. It seeks to make a constructive contribution to debate within border studies by encouraging a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialised, and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuring regimes in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, as well as showcasing border research as an interdiscipl...

European Jnl of Social Theory, 2006

The renaissance of border studies during the past decade has been characterized by a crossing of disciplinary borders, bringing together geographers, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, legal experts, along with border practitioners engaged in the practical aspects of boundary demarcation, delimitation and management. This growth in border studies runs contrary to much of the globalization discourse which was prevalent during the late 1980s and early 1990s, positing a new 'borderless' world, in which the barrier impact of borders became insignificant. The article points to the common use of terminology which can create a shared border discourse among a diverse group of scholars, such as boundary demarcation, the nature of frontiers, borderlands and transition zones, and the ways in which borders are crossed. The article also discusses the reclosing of borders which is taking place as a result of 9/11 as part of the stated war against global terror.

The expansive understanding of borders and boundaries in recent scholarship has enriched border studies, but it has also obscured what a border is. This set of interventions is motivated by a need for a more sophisticated conceptualization of borders in light of the recent trajectories of border scholarship. In contrast to the much-feted "borderless world" of the early 1990s, the trend during the past decade has been to consider the exercise of state sovereignty at great distances from the border line itself as "bordering". Indeed, Balibar's (1998) notion that "borders are everywhere"dthat the sovereign state's loci of bordering practices can no longer be isolated to the lines of a political map of statesdhas gained tremendous currency but it is also quite a departure from traditional border studies. Thus the broad question posed to our contributors was: Where is the border in border studies?