The political materialities of borders by Olga Demetriou Rozita Dimova

Author:Olga Demetriou, Rozita Dimova [Olga Demetriou, Rozita Dimova]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526123855
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 40645730
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

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Lines, traces, and tidemarks: further reflections on forms of border

Sarah Green

Conceptually, borders are nowadays more often understood as being processes and acts of the imagination rather than as being objects. Indeed, I myself have participated in that kind of discussion.1 The debate has been part of a critique of the idea of borders as fixed, relatively self-evident things placed in the landscape by political authorities to mark territory. It has also involved a critique of the idea that borders are lines – an idea that, according to many historical accounts, is the defining characteristic of Westphalian-style borders, the kinds of borders that are built by states, and particularly by nation-states – which includes most contemporary forms of border, with some significant exceptions, such as European Union (EU) borders (Del Sarto 2010; Linklater 1998; Hassner 2002).2 The key argument is that the idea of border as line is part of a particular political concept of border; it is not something that belongs to borders as a natural characteristic, but is instead historically and ideologically specific. As a result, many border scholars have replaced the idea of line with a panoply of other metaphors to describe a much messier and more complex, fluid, and shifting reality: networks and rhizomes are among the most common of those metaphors.3

Given the focus on the discursive construction of the concept of border in this debate, it is unsurprising that the way these fluid or rhizome-like metaphors relate to the material form that borders take has been much less discussed. Of course, that non-materiality is a core characteristic of these debates, which often argue that borders are not things, but activities. Here border is better thought of as a verb, ‘to border’, rather than as a noun, ‘a border’ (Van Houtum, Kramsch, and Zierhofer 2005).

An alternative perspective is that borders exist everywhere and nowhere simultaneously and that there is no fixed location for borders, which are discursive rather than material entities (Robinson 2007). That approach has tended to mean that the actual physical entities that are built in the landscape, and which are referred to by most people as ‘borders’, have been relatively neglected by this conceptual debate. At the same time, those working on the actual architecture of border practices have repeatedly noted not only the visceral power that these objects, techniques, and constructions can exercise, but also how rapidly and sometimes radically these material characteristics are changing (Andersson 2014; Vaughan-Williams 2015; Weizman 2007). My aim in this chapter is to bring that intellectual work on the historically variable, discursive concept of border into relation with the material forms that contemporary borders take in practice, to think through what aspects of the material and immaterial become entangled here.

One of the important departures I will take is to retain the concept of ‘line’ in thinking about contemporary borders. This is not because I disagree with all the scholarship demonstrating that border thought of as a line is a historically contingent concept. On the contrary, I am retaining

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