Towards a theory of the discordant border (original) (raw)
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Borders in Globalization Review
With the politics of borders, the socio-economic divide between the United States and Mexico is evident. The geographic proximity to the U.S. makes the Mexico–Guatemala border an extension of the U.S. border enforcement regime. This article argues that the politics surrounding the U.S.–Guatemala border have not necessarily changed, because, at the core, the main objective of these border governance practices is to stop the movement of undesirable bodies (Khosravi 2011). Further, the article argues that the practices of containment force migrants to resist through their movement and seek strategies of survival. By comparing the administrations of Peña Nieto and López Obrador (AMLO) and analyzing the survival strategy of migrant “caravans” through border policy analysis and fieldwork conducted in 2014, I show that this border is a site of struggle between the state’s power and migrants’ forms of resistance. I find that border tactics are influenced by U.S. border enforcement requireme...
In cooperation with the German-American Institute Saarland, the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies (NamLitCult) at Saarland University (UdS) will hold its annual UdS American Studies Graduate Forum (ASGF) that invites advanced Master students, doctoral candidates, as well as junior scholars to present their current work-in-progress in a workshop-style setting. This year's UdS American Studies Graduate Forum will be integrated into the Seminar Border Studies 2023 "Borders in Crisis," organized by the UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland University, and the VW-project "Borders in Crisis." The ASGF will offer participants a chance to discuss their research with peers as well as with more advanced scholars. This year, we invite submissions dealing with the construction, representation, and assessment of borders in crisis.
Journal of Political Ecology, 1:43-65. , 1994
Link: http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/volume\_1/HEYMAN.PDF . The Mexico-United States border has recently been used in anthropology as a metonym for the study of inequality, power, global economics, and connections among cultures and societies. This use occurs not only in studies that literally describe Mexico-U.S. border (or near-border) locales but also in works that are either theoretical or works that concern relationships between Mexicans and the United States conceived broadly. The Mexico-U.S. border contains many well-publicized developments--immigration law enforcement, maquiladoras (and thus, NAFTA), and cultural interchange--that make it appear to be relevant and happening for intellectuals. American anthropology has, of course, emerged into the search for relevance from an era that largely emphasized the romantic search for cultural distance. In this change, anthropologists have mixed sense with nonsense, arch rhetoric with penetrating rethinkings of flawed social science concepts. The problem is, can the border withstand being a buzzword for theories of power, struggle, and connection? I propose that a single-image representing grand theoretical assertions is too general for the political and economic environment of the border. I propose that we specify our analytical tools for the border: that is, that we respect the concretely located nature of the Mexico-U.S. border. In so doing, I will propose a model combining the territorial nature of state activities and the partly deterritorialized activity of capital, both partaking of bureaucratic forms of action by contrast with border populace network action. If the border is to contribute to rethinking the social sciences, it will do so by careful exposition of state and capital actions and limitations, not through momentarily satisfying but paper thin imagery.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2002
This article is a critique of two different types of essentialisms that have gained widespread acceptance in places as distant as the U.S.-Mexico border and different Mercosur frontiers. Both essentialisms rely on metaphors that refer to the concept of "union," and put their emphasis on a variety of "sisterhood/brotherhood" tropes and, in particular, the "crossing" metaphor. This kind of stance tends to make invisible the social and cultural conflict that many times characterizes political frontiers. The article wants to reinstall this conflictive dimension. In that regard, we analyze two different case studies. The first is the history of a bridge constructed between Posadas, Argentina and Encarnación, Paraguay. The second is the community reaction toward an operation implemented by the Border Patrolin 1993 ("OperationBlockade") in a border that for many years was considered an exemplar of the "good neighbor relationships" between Mexi...
Journal of the Southwest, 2018
On June 5, 2014, the right-wing website Breitbart News released photos of South Texas detention facilities overflowing with women and children. The headline, “Leaked Photos Reveal Children Warehoused in Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed,” demonstrates the role of contestation in shaping border policies. This publicity sparked an important turn to strengthening border enforcement and provided a nationally significant political symbol, both at the time and in the 2016 election. Understanding the full impact of this event and the surrounding maelstrom of humanitarian and anti-immigrant responses to the increase in Central American refugee families requires a holistic and multiscalar analysis of contending actors and how they changed and reproduced that which we call the “border.” Despite the Central American increase, total U.S. southern border arrests have declined, but border immigration enforcement has continued, and in some ways grown. This is the central paradox we wish to explore: In light of drastically reduced apprehensions, and the prevalence within that apprehension pool of law-abiding asylum seekers, we ask why has border immigration enforcement increased, not declined? Recent empirical evidence has linked these contending discourses about borders and immigration to niche right-wing media, and to the election of Donald Trump. The themes we raise here—contention around Central American migration of families and unaccompanied children, the political construction of border “crisis,” and the symbolic and material saliency of the U.S.-Mexico border in immigration debates—continue to be central under the Trump administration. Our theoretical approach for answering these questions has two thrusts. One is that the social world is constructed through contentious politics, though such contention occurs within a wider structural backdrop. Contestation involves multiple actors coalescing and conflicting to seek social and political outcomes. Such outcomes are contingent, with multiple factors and actors entering into play, and may not be what was sought or predicted, even by “winners.” The other is that borders are not simple facts on the ground, but rather are outcomes of state and societal action that continually are produced, reproduced, or changed. This approach is summarized with a process word, “bordering.” Scholars have recently explored this concept of bordering processes (such as interior security surveillance, exterior consular visa control) set away from conventional geopolitical boundaries. However, bordering is not only adding such practices to novel sites. The push to move beyond the border through expanding the criteria of how we view journeys does not detract from the necessity of understanding how the specific place that is the border is remade through conflict, a process which has direct ramifications farther away. We contend that the bordering process perspective also applies to formal nation-state borders. The specificities of these traditional borders are not just inherent qualities of geopolitical lines on a map. Long-established power geographies like the U.S.-Mexico border were historically constructed, and can again mutate through processes of struggle and transformation, or have their characteristic power practices reauthorized, rejustified, and resourced. Their social-political arrangements thus require continual reproduction or reworking, shaped by contentious politics within wider social domains.
Contributions of US Mexico Border Studies to Social Theory
The study of borders draws on, and is a significant contributor to, important theoretical developments in the social sciences. We have moved away from envisioning societies and cultures as pure, bounded units, for which we identified inner essences (cultural patterns, social structures), toward envisioning them as internally and externally varied webs of relations, for which we trace connections and changes over time (Wolf 1982). Borders present precisely such mixtures and interactions. The agenda of this chapter, then, is to draw out theoretical lessons from work done on the U.S.-Mexico border. While grounded in a review of the literature on this region, the theoretical lessons are clear and transportable, both to other borders and to complex social and cultural situations generally. My approach derives from place-based science, which rejects abstract, timeless, and placeless theorizing in favor of building theory upward from particular places and times via nested generalizations; those generalizations can be transported and recontextualized for other places and times. I likewise draw on non-dogmatic Marxian theory, attending to the constitutive role of unequal relationships unfolding across historical time. No one border can do justice to all borders, and different lessons would be drawn from other sites; the point is not to hold this region as quintessential but to ask if ideas suggested here are informative and helpful as we range about the social world.
Border Politics : Defining Spaces of Governance and Forms of Transgressions (Introduction)
Guenay, C. & Witjes, N. (Eds). Border Politics : Defining Spaces of Governance and Forms of Transgressions. Springer International Publishing AG, 2016
In the light of mass migration, the rise of nationalism and the resurgence of global terrorism, this timely volume brings the debate on border protection, security and control to the centre stage of international relations research. Rather than analysing borders as mere lines of territorial demarcation in a geopolitical sense, it sheds new light on their changing role in defining and negotiating identity, authority, security, and social and economic differences. Bringing together innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives, the book examines the nexus of authority, society, technology and culture, while also providing in-depth analyses of current international conflicts. Regional case studies comprise the Ukraine crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh, the emergence of new territorial entities such as ISIS, and maritime disputes in the South China Sea, as well as the contestation and re-construction of borders in the context of transnational movements. Bringing together theoretical, empirical and conceptual contributions by international scholars, this Yearbook of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs offers novel perspectives on hotly debated issues in contemporary politics, and will be of interest to researchers, graduate students and political decision makers alike.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2019
This is a book review of Matthew Longo's, The politics of borders: Sovereignty, security, and the citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Humans have been making borders for a long time, but only recently does it seem that borders are absolutely everywhere. Contemporary border politics is a constant topic of political conflict, media attention, and popular opinion in specific ways it has not been before. How did we get here? Matthew Longo's book answers this question.