Brambilla

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Geopolitics, 00:1–21, 2014

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online

DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2014.884561

Exploring the Critical Potential of the

Borderscapes Concept

CHIARA BRAMBILLA

Center for Research on Complexity, University of Bergamo, Italy

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by important changes in the last twenty years. After the processual shift of the 1990s (from border to bordering), in recent years there has been increasing concern about the need to critically question the current state of the debate on the concept of borders. Within this framework, this article explores the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that, though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and methodological. Such approaches show the significant potential of borderscapes for future advances of critical border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby contributing to the liberation of (geo)political imagination from the burden of the ‘territorialist imperative’ and to the understanding of new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated.

THE CONCEPTUAL EVOLUTION OF BORDERS: FROM THE

PROCESSUAL SHIFT TO BORDERSCAPES

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by significant changes in the last twenty years. In order to outline an argument for the critical potential of the borderscapes concept, it is necessary to begin by tracing how the concept of borders has changed over time.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after a somewhat premature attempt to discard political borders in a paradigm suggesting a ‘borderless’,1 globalised world, newer approaches acknowledged the continued relevance of

Address correspondence to Chiara Brambilla, Center for Research on Complexity (Ce. R. Co.), University of Bergamo, Piazzale S. Agostino, 2, Bergamo, 24129, Italy. E-mail: chiara. brambilla@unibg.it

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borders for politics and everyday life. However, research interests increasingly shifted from an initial focus on borders as territorial dividing lines and political institutions to borders regarded as socio-cultural and discursive processes and practices. As a consequence, border research went from being a sub-discipline of political science and international relations into an interdisciplinary field, combining expertise from political science, geopolitics, human and cultural geography, anthropology and sociology as well as cultural, literary and media studies.2 This new interdisciplinary interest in borders is a result of the major changes in world politics in the last twenty years. Among these, the most notable is the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the order imposed by the Cold War together with the re-emergence of many boundary disputes, setting off the rise of new territorial claims. The processes of change due to globalisation have, on the one hand, led to greater integration and global consciousness and, on the other, led to a renewed demand for certainty, identity and security followed by the spread of protectionist policies on the economic level and feelings of anti-immigration. Finally, it is important to remember the reconfiguration of practices and discourses concerning European borders with respect to funding and investment in research on cross-border cooperation within the European Union.3

In this context, we have moved away from classic approaches in which borders, assumed to be mere delimitations of sovereignty, were considered as naturalised and static territorial lines.4 In the face of contemporary global changes, these approaches appeared to have limitations and it was necessary to develop new concepts capable of revealing the dynamic social and spatial relationships that take place in and across borders.5 The transition from the concept of border to that of bordering, at the centre of the processual shift in border studies, allowed borders to be viewed as dynamic social processes and practices of spatial differentiation.6 This conceptual shift results in the understanding of spreading and multiplying borders,7 showing the most important points from which to start thinking about the territorial, political, and socio-cultural changes of the current world at different levels and, thus, not only along the dividing lines of nation-state sovereignties.8 However, not only is this a matter of dis-locating and re-locating borders, but it also involves a reflection on the multiplication of border forms, functions and practices through their distribution and proliferation in a variety of social and political arenas, which determine a progressive movement of borders from the margins to the centre of the political sphere.9 Hence, it is important to analyse borders in a way that allows us to consider not only their institutional nature, but which also allows reflection on their quality of social institution on a wider level.10

After the processual shift of the 1990s, in recent years there has been increasing concern about the need to critically question, on the one hand, the current state of the debate on the concept of borders and to reflect,

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on the other, upon the possible strategies to outline the topics of greatest importance for a new programmatic agenda of border studies. In 2009, the article ‘Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies’ was published in the Geopolitics journal.11 Two years later, in 2011, the same journal published an interesting reflection by James Sidaway on ‘The Return and Eclipse of Border Studies? Charting Agendas’.12 During the same year, Political Geography published an article by various authors entitled ‘Intervention on Rethinking ‘the Border’ in Border Studies’.13 At the same time, two manuals dedicated to border studies were published; one edited by Doris Wastl-Walter as part of the Border Regions series by Ashgate, and the other edited by Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan.14 In both manuals, particularly in the one edited by Wilson and Donnan, it is clear that there is an intention to not only recall the most convincing evolutions in the recent reflection on borders but also to reflect on some key issues to develop a new agenda for border studies.15

Comparing the insights offered by these recent contributions, it is possible to understand the reasons for the urgency to critically question some of the most important issues in the interdisciplinary debate on borders by including them as part of contemporary political life. Going into the substance of these interventions, it is first worth considering the arguments in the collectively authored ‘Agenda’ for critical border studies.16 At the outset of the article the authors clarify their aim to outline what they regard as ‘some of the most pressing questions and problems facing those engaged in the multi-disciplinary study of borders in contemporary political life’.17 In so doing, their main concern is that border studies needs re-tooling in face of the diffusion and complexification of borders moving beyond the ‘territorialist epistemology’ still pervasive in the study of borders.18 In spite of the work of a growing number of scholars that takes into account the increasing complexity of the relationship between borders, territory, sovereignty as well as citizenship, identity, and otherness, what the field continues to lack, however, is a substantive reference point for scholars to identify a number of research questions which taken together constitute a stimulating ground for ‘what alternative epistemologies, and equally ontologies and methodologies, are called for by the changing nature of the border’.19 This reference point would help to free border studies ‘from the epistemological, ontological, and methodological shackles of an ultra-modernistic, ‘territorialist’ Western geopolitical imagination’.20 Without moving away from this imagination the risk is that border studies will be unable to address the ongoing complexification of bordering processes in global politics that entails ethical and normative issues of in/exclusion with which border studies has been rather ill-equipped to handle until now.

At the end of 2012, Geopolitics published an issue that was introduced with a contribution by Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams proposing to formalise ‘critical border studies’ as a distinctive approach within the

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broader interdisciplinary literature on border studies.21 In their article, Parker and Vaughan-Williams refer to the reasons for the development of such a line of critical analysis as they were already presented in the programmatic ‘Agenda’ signed collectively with other border scholars in the same journal three years before.22 However, the authors point out that they aim to broaden and deepen the ‘Agenda’ as well, raising a number of entrance points oriented around this core objective: the need to problematise the border not as a taken-for-granted entity, but as a site of investigation, by exploring alternative border imaginaries ‘beyond the line’ and therefore able to reveal the manifold nature of the border that is in a ‘constant state of becoming’; the growing sense among critical scholars of border studies that the ‘territorial trap’ is ‘now even more inadequate for conceptualising the spatial and temporal coordinates’ of contemporary political and everyday life;23 the need to develop tools ‘for identifying and interrogating what and where borders are and how they function in different settings, with what consequences, and for whose benefit’; the call for ‘a shift from the concept of the border to the notion of bordering practice’ and the reference to ‘the imaginary of performance for an alternative paradigm for (re)thinking border politics’; the urgency to understand that borders are also temporally not fixed; the interrogation of ‘the link between bordering practices and violence’ in the past and present as well as ‘the various forms of contestation and resistance’ border practices give rise to.24

Sidaway also addresses these issues posing the relevant question, ‘But looking forward what are the agendas now for border studies?’.25 The author’s arguments can be closely associated with those advanced by Parker and Vaughan-Williams in broadening and deepening their ‘Agenda’. Sidaway highlights the need to critically reflect on ‘the significance of the sharpest borders’ and ‘the multiplication as well as the persistence of borders and bordering’ in contemporary global scenarios arguing that ‘now is the time for a deeper contribution of a focus on borders/bordering within wider social and political theory’.26 In this context, Sidaway goes further stating that ‘what is needed are not more border studies per se. . . . Rather we need to think about how a variety of bordering illustrates changing configurations of the social and political’.27

Concerning where the need to critically question the current state of the debate on borders comes from, similar arguments are advanced in the essay in Political Geography on rethinking the border in border studies.28 At the outset of the essay, Corey Johnson and Reece Jones declare that the contributors aim to ‘put forth possibilities for a more coherent, interdisciplinary agenda for border studies focusing on the interconnected themes of place, performance, and perspective’.29 Later on a fourth theme is added to this list: ‘political’. Following Johnson and Jones, ‘The shifting nature of borders has made them neither less politicized, nor lessened the need for scholars to be mindful and critical of the complicated relationship between state power and

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space and the fact that this relationship is perhaps most apparent at borders, wherever they are found’.30

All these contributions draw attention to the continued need to think about alternative geopolitical visions in which novel approaches to borders are mobilised in the contemporary era of globalisation and transnational flows. All scholars make a variant of the point that epistemic and political categories are mutually reinforcing. While borders continue to have considerable relevance today, there are ways in which we need to revisit them in light of constantly changing historical, political and social contexts, grasping their shifting and undetermined nature in space and time. Consequently, we need to take inspiration from the research questions posed by border studies in the last two decades that have remained partially unresolved in order to develop alternative approaches to borders. These approaches lie along three main axes of reflection that, though inevitably interrelated and to some extent overlapping, can be analytically distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and methodological.

Reflecting upon the borderscapes concept, seems to me to suggest a potentially useful way of developing innovative reflections for each of the three axes moving our understanding of the relationships between borders, forms of power, territory, political systems as well as citizenship, identity and otherness forward.

BORDERSCAPES AND AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL INSIGHT

INTO CRITICAL BORDER STUDIES

The aim of this article is to identify and describe the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along the three main axes of reflection as distinguished above. Such a potential is mainly inscribed in the opportunity that the concept of the borderscape offers us to highlight the constitutive role that borders in modernity have played in the production of political subjectivity, thereby showing the potential of the borderscape as a space for liberating political imagination from the burden of the territorialist imperative while opening up spaces within which the organisation of new forms of the political and the social become possible. To put it differently, the borderscapes concept provides a political insight into critical border studies that goes beyond the issue of the complexity of borders to embrace ethical and normative issues of in/exclusion, which seem to me to constitute a core epistemological blind spot at the heart of border studies, as currently configured.

I take the term borderscapes from the work of Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr in their book Borderscapes. Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge.31 In the introduction, the two scholars describe their conceptual perspective on borderscapes, which is recalled in their

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argument from one of the contributions in the volume, that by Suvendrini Perera on the borders of Australia.32 Perera argues that this use of the term borderscapes is linked to the urgency to find a new concept that can express the spatial and conceptual complexity of the border as a space that is not static but fluid and shifting; established and at the same time continuously traversed by a number of bodies, discourses, practices, and relationships that highlight endless definitions and shifts in definition between inside and outside, citizens and foreigners, hosts and guests across state, regional, racial, and other symbolic boundaries. In other words, Perera aims to describe new geographies and socio-spatial identities that, as the result of negotiations between identity and territorial claims and counter-claims, challenge the modern geopolitical, territorialist imaginary.33 Related to this imaginary are John Agnew’s state-centric ‘territorial traps’ in which states are viewed ‘as the self-enclosed geographical containers of socioeconomic and politicalcultural relations’.34 With the borderscapes concept, Perera tries to give new shape to the ‘edges’ of the nation-state by showing them as places where different ideas of space, territoriality, sovereignty as well as identity, citizenship and otherness in and across the nation-state boundary lines are formulated, reformulated, negotiated and ‘acted’ to react to the violence of the territorialist epistemology.35 Perera’s effort does not entail however a denial of the state’s continued relevance in contemporary political life, but rather a rethinking of the meaning of both state territoriality and political space in an era of globalisation and transnational flows. Accordingly, in the book edited by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, the borderscapes concept is used as a conceptual and analytical tool for rethinking categories of political belonging. This is possible through the articulation of new configurations based on a novel concept of ‘community’ that is (re)defined by giving attention to the fluidity of nation-state borders and the complexity of the experiences of those who live in them and/or across them. In this context, borders are not neutral lines of separation between nation-state sovereignties, but they simultaneously define membership and exclusion, marking the boundary between rule and its exceptions.36

The move from the concept of border to bordering has encouraged a significant turning point in the reflection on borders. However, I find that the bordering concept is not sufficient by itself to fully capture the complexity of the many implications that the search for alternative epistemological, ontological and methodological reflections involves. For instance, one aspect that should be further analysed is the relationship between bordering processes and the ‘where’ of the border, that is to say its shifting and changing location. Questioning the ‘where’ of the border also involves a focus on the way in which the very location of borders is constantly dis-placed, negotiated and represented as well as the plurality of processes that cause its multiplication at different points within a society, making it visible or invisible depending on the case. In this regard, the critical potential of borderscapes can

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be seen in the contribution that the concept gives to explain the complex dynamics characterising the link between the persistence of old boundaries and the multiplication of new forms, functions and practices of borders in contemporary globalised scenarios.37 In fact, the borderscapes concept offers the opportunity for a critical questioning at multiple levels of investigation. First, it concerns an analysis of the ‘normative dimension’ of the border, that is, critically assessing the ethical, legal and empirical premises and arguments used to justify particular cognitive and experiential regimes on which border policies are articulated (what we can call hegemonic borderscapes). On the other hand, this implies a consideration that borders involve struggles that consist of multiple strategies of resistance against hegemonic discourses and control practices through which they are exercised (what we can call counter-hegemonic borderscapes). This also involves moving towards the new political conception hoped for by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr with attention to the political dimension of the borderscape, which is expressed through different social and political contexts where various strategies of adaptation, accommodation and contestation take place, challenging the traditional top-down geopolitical control of borders.

Within this framework, the first section of the paper offers a discussion of the etymology of the borderscapes concept and the ways in which it is employed in border studies. This etymological reflection shows the polysemicity of the borderscapes concept, enlightening its asset of meaning beyond being only an aesthetic image, thereby showing its relevant political implications. A second section outlines some key issues to capture this potential of the concept for the development of alternative critical approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection: epistemological, ontological and methodological. In the final section, I conclude by reaffirming that the borderscapes concept has not only a significant potential for future advances of border studies, but the concept also gives us a chance to grasp new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated in a time of globalisation and transnational flows.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE

BORDERSCAPES CONCEPT

In international border studies,38 Elena Dell’Agnese was among the first scholars to use the term borderscapes. It was during the Borderscapes: Spaces in Conflicts/Symbolic Places/Networks of Peace conference held in Trento in June 2006.39 The conference was a seminal event for two successive conferences, respectively in Trapani in 2009 (Borderscapes II: Another Brick in the Wall?) and in Trieste in 2012 (Borderscapes III). As can be seen by reading the presentations about these events and the related calls for papers,40 the term borderscapes is used as a conceptual tool to question

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the complexity of the dynamics through which border landscapes are produced, across and along the boundary lines between different nation-state sovereignties. This is with particular attention to border representations and to borders as a representation themselves, that is to say as ‘discursive landscapes’,41 revealing the border as both a symbolic and material construction resulting from the interweaving of a multiplicity of discourses, practices, and human relations.42 Therefore, this use of the term borderscapes is related to the seminal reflections on border landscapes by John Robert Victor Prescott, which are proposed in the fourth chapter of his book The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries, and continued later by Dennis Rumley and Julian Minghi in their edited book, The Geography of Border Landscapes.43 These studies provide significant conceptual contributions to the reading of borders by showing the limits of previous attempts to reflect on border landscapes, mainly in geography, while at the same time developing new possibilities of dialogue on borders with other social sciences. Rumley and Minghi highlight the need to overcome overly classificatory and descriptive analytical orientations towards borders. They argue that these approaches are conceptually limited since they continue to view the border as a mere discontinuity between nation-states that should be observed mainly for its conflictual character according to a sort of ‘conflict syndrome’ which has prevailed in the literature on borders since the two World Wars and in the post-war climate. The reflection of the two authors leads instead to a rethinking of border landscapes in situations of harmony and ‘normality’ that are not necessarily conflictual, focusing on the dynamic process of differentiation in perceptions and identity constructions stimulated by the social production of the border.

The term borderscapes, as described in the previous section, is more recently employed by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr in their edited book

Borderscapes. Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, where they take the term borderscapes from the work of Perera on the shifting borders that circumscribe Australia’s territory from the Pacific zone. The conceptualisation of Perera, Rajaram and Grundy-Warr is further discussed by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their reflection on ‘borderscapes of differential inclusion’,44 in which they offer a critical analysis of the relationship between justice and borders. Starting from the assumption already mentioned by Balibar, according to which borders are no longer at the edge of the nation-state territory, but rather dis-located to the centre of the political space, the authors show the inadequacy of interpreting the relationship between justice and borders based on the binary inclusion/exclusion opposition. Embracing this perspective becomes crucial for coping with the emerging mechanisms of ‘differential inclusion’ in a globalised world.45

From the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, the concept of border landscapes greatly contributed to the processual shift in border studies, contributing to an understanding of the complexity of international borders as territorial, political as well as social, cultural and economic phenomena, which are

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characterised by a number of relationships and exchanges that affect individuals and their community organisations.46 The borderscapes concept seems to push forward the conceptual evolution of the border landscape term for understanding the changing scenarios of globalised contemporaneity as well as the major changes affecting it, including transnational flows and migration.

These considerations also help to clarify the relationship that the concept of borderscapes has with the five dimensions of global cultural flows that Arjun Appadurai defines as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes.47 As shown by Appadurai, his choice of the suffix ‘-scape’ is because it expresses the fluid and uneven form of these landscapes of globalisation. As a result, it is possible to think of globalisation as a multidimensional process that requires an alternative spatial rendering. This is the effect of multiple interactions, overlaps and disjunctions that question the binary inside/outside and centre/periphery opposition by referring instead, to a complex and transnational construction of contemporary landscapes at the intersection between globalisation and localisation. In line with Appadurai’s reflection, the borderscapes concept brings the vitality of borders to our attention, revealing that the border is by no means a static line, but a mobile and relational space. The border is a ‘perspectival’ construction, in the sense given to the term by the Indian anthropologist; it is developed as a set of relations that have never been given, but which vary in accordance with the point of view adopted in interpreting them, which changes with the fluctuation of historical, social, cultural, and political events.48 Thus, the concept of borderscape enables a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialised and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuing regimes and ensembles of practices.49 Such a reflection offers us an opportunity to adopt a multi-sited approach not only combining different places where borderscapes could be observed and experienced – both in borderlands and wherever specific bordering processes have impacts, are represented, negotiated or displaced – but also different socio-cultural, political, economic as well as legal and historical settings where a space of negotiating actors, practices, and discourses is articulated at the intersection of ‘competing and even contradictory emplacements and temporalities’.50

Appadurai’s argument provides another important interpretation for exploring the critical potential of the borderscapes concept by showing its conceptual evolution compared to that of the border landscape term. In fact, by detaching the suffix ‘-scape’ from the prefix ‘land-’, the anthropologist liberates the conceptual potential of new terms, which he coins with the same suffix (and in this way also the word ‘border-scape’), from restrictions imposed by the etymological ambivalence that characterises the term landscape.51

In English, as well as in other modern European languages, the word landscape is characterised by a particular ambivalence, for which the term means either ‘the (mostly visual) representation of a portion of space with