Paasi, Anssi (2011): Book review on Kirby, P.W., editor, 2009 Boundless worlds: an anthropological approach to movement. Progress in Human Geography (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020
Borders have been major research objects in political geography, even if their significance has varied in the course of time. Since the 1990s, and particularly after the turn of the Millennium, borders have become ever more important, largely following from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the evolution of technologies mobilized in border management and the increasing border-crossings of migrants around the world. These border-crossings mirror the deepening inequality between the developed and developing world, ongoing conflicts and wars, as well as environmental problems. While borders are instrumental in the governance of territorial spaces at various spatial scales, state borders have been the most significant in political geography. Globalization, economic flows, migration, and the threat of terrorism, for example, have challenged the takenfor-granted views of bounded state spaces as major containers of social life but also raised concerns connected to national security. A major future challenge for political geographers is to theorize and analyze empirically the multifaceted and perpetually changing meanings and roles of borders. Borders are not simple lines separating state spaces; rather they are diffused as landscapes of symbolic control and landscapes of technical control widely over state territories and at times stretch beyond their borders. Current complexity of borders raises important questions about the changing bordering practices and discourses as well as on the sites, actors and technologies involved in border producing and reproducing practices. Recognizing this complexity is critical for understanding both the persistence and gradual transformation of borders and their relation to various forms of human mobility, nationalism, ethnicity and racism, for example.
: Symbolic artifacts that help to understand and define spatial discontinuities, boundaries and borders are essential to our territorial alphabet. The text first recalls on the historic construction of a bounded form of thinking (spatially) within the Western world, according to a model that was disseminated worldwide through colonization. The focus shed by globalization on flows and networks profoundly questions the nature of boundaries and borders, making them appear as more and more topological. In this context, where de/rebordering processes cannot be considered as symmetric to de/reterritorialization processes, contemporary borders have to be grasped through their portativity, considering a change of focus towards the individual and his/her personalization of a mobile device. The chapter ends sketching the premises of an ontology of the mobile border, allowing time and instability to be instilled into a renewed analysis of spatial limits.
State boundaries have constituted a major topic in the tradition of political geography. Boundary analysis has focused on the international scale, since international boundaries provide perhaps the most explicit manifestation of the large-scale connection between politics and geography. The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in boundaries, both within geography and from the wider field of social theory. Geographers have sought to place the notions of boundary within other social theoretical constructs, while other social scientists have attempted to understand the role of space and, in some cases, territory in their understanding of personal, group, and national boundaries and identities. Recent studies include analyses of the postmodern ideas of territoriality and the`disappearance' of borders, the construction of sociospatial identities, socialization narratives in which boundaries are responsible for creating the`us' and the`Other', and the different scale dimensions of boundary research. These can be brought together within a multidimensional, multidisciplinary framework for the future study of boundary phenomena.
2019
The 1990s witnessed a major renaissance in border studies and also the rise of the borderless world thesis. The social and technological circumstances behind these phenomena are wellknown: the collapse of the geopolitical West-East divide, the development of the internet, the rise of flows and mobility, and the acceleration of globalization. This chapter will trace critically the rise of borderless world -thesis and the emerging new border studies that mostly opposed this thesis. This chapter traces at first the peculiar life-cycle of the notion of borderless world that has become ever more significant by 'swimming against the tide' in social science literature, hence providing an object of critique for border scholars in its apparently naïve cosmopolitanism. The chapter then compares this notion with the emerging ideas of open borders and no borders and related activism. This analysis opens some fresh horizons to reflect the links between borders and mobilities, and more widely to problematize the role of bounded spaces in the social scientific thinking and social practice.
Borders, Movement, and Being-in-Between
International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Education: Subject, Action & Society, 2023
This work in the format of interview opens the Special Issue of Vol. 2, 2022 dedicated entirely to the theme of borders starting from different multidisciplinary perspectives. The interviewed guest is Thomas Nail, Professor of Philosophy at University of Denver, and author of a now classic book Theory of Border (Oxford University Press, 2017). For many years, he has been studying the social, economic and political dynamics that are activated along border devices. During the interview, the Editors of the Journal-Prof Filippo Pergola and Prof. Raffaele De Luca Picione-discuss with the guest about a series of topics related to the definition of borders, their dynamics of movement, processes of in-betweenness, and both the specificities and diversity of border types (the fence, the wall, the cell, and the checkpoint). The study of borders is shown to be an essential means for understanding human phenomena in the contemporary world.