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This essay contributes to literature on the intersections of white settler colonialisms, racial capitalism, and U.S.-Mexico borderlands history by tracing the web of spatial, temporal, and legal power relations that produced El Paso, Texas' seemingly legitimate possession of stolen Mexican territory known as "El Chamizal" in the El Paso-Cd. Juárez borderlands. This land theft became the Chamizal Dispute: an international land and boundary conflict between the U.S. and Mexico caused by the meandering Río Grande that defines the "fixed" international border between El Paso, Texas and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua. In the 1860s, multiple shifts in the Rio Grande "relocated" El Chamizal north of this river/boundary. Soon thereafter, and despite Mexico's sustained claim to and jurisdiction over this land, recently arrived Anglo American settlers incorporated El Chamizal into the nascent City of El Paso. In 1964, the U.S. and Mexico finally agreed to resolve this conflict by virtue of the landmark Chamizal Treaty, which ceded 630-acres of El Paso to Cd. Juárez as El Chamizal. Contrary to what dominant state accounts and the mainstream historical literature on this settlement would have us believe, however, this ceded land includes only a fraction of the original contested terrain. El Chamizal therefore remains a stolen tract of land nestled within the heart of El Paso. Drawing on oral histories, court testimonies and affidavits, and an array of binational records, this essay demonstrates that this ongoing theft is not a finite or complete project. Rather, the process hinges on a fragile web of spatial, white settler temporal, and legal practices of concealment/denial anchored to a colonial rumor that refuses to open this region to the mystery and wonder of the Río Grande's "wayward life, beautiful experiment in how to live." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proceeds from a moment of impromptu 'border-fixing' in the wake of an inter-communal conflict, to explore the everyday spatialisation of the state in a rural region of Central Asia. Drawing on ethnography from the Kyrgyzstan - Uzbekistan border, it contributes to a growing concern to understand how the state is rendered 'integral' in everyday life. Rather than focusing on the enactments and justificatory statements of state officials, the paper explores instead the diffuse but passionate work of borderland dwellers in policing the state edge in a context of political upheaval. 'Territory' in this reading is not just an a priori attribute of the state, nor only the product of official imaginings and interventions, but the site, too, of everyday practical and symbolic work, a vehicle for claims making and the means of performative enactments of belonging and difference. The paper calls for greater attention to the 'ordinary affects' that are elicited by borders and boundedness and the need to bring discussions of territoriality into conversation with a literature on the affective life of the state. Doing so, it argues, will both enrich our understanding of everyday state formation and give us greater purchase on the role of events in rupturing and reconfiguring state space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narratives of fear and uncertainty from the discourse of the 'global war on terror' have been used by many governments to expand securitization processes. As more aggressive security tactics have been deployed, scholars have sought to understand the changing relationship between individual rights and the authority of sovereign states by drawing on Giorgio Agamben's insights into the state of exception. In this paper I argue that borderlands are a key site for investigating the connections between the state of exception and securitization processes because political borders are the symbolic markers of the limits of a sovereign's authority. I trace the securitization of the borderlands between India and Bangladesh and I describe the increasingly exceptional measures employed by Indian border security forces in order to prevent terrorist threats from entering India. At the intersection of the state of exception in the borderlands and the securitization narratives and practices of the global war on terror, Muslims in both India and Bangladesh are marginalized in the affairs of the state and targeted in state-sanctioned violence. I conclude that borderlands, as an explicitly spatial example of the state of exception, are a crucial site for locating and understanding the decision on the exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars have examined the non- or more-than-human world from a variety of unique positions. This article draws on contemporary archaeology and assemblage theories in geography to put forward an understanding of everyday geopolitics that includes the presence of objects in the formation of state subjectivity. Our approach, however, reveals not only this disciplining force of objects but also the ontological absences that are also at the heart of post-structuralist theories of subjectivity. As such, the formation of object-oriented geopolitical subjectivity is also always haunted by these other affective forces that are part of being in the world. These theoretical considerations are substantiated in our study of the material culture of a military outpost in the highlands of northern Chile where the objects left behind by soldiers offer insight into the complexities of state subjectification and state–society relations in border regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon and contributing to a feminist geography of borders, the chosen methodological approach examines women's bodily experiences at a Southern EUropean border, the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article scrutinises the care interactions unfolding in a Centre for Immigrants between medical humanitarians and women residing there in their position as both migrants and patients. The analysis foregrounds the gendered forms of domination that the care function of the humanitarian border entails. I argue that medical humanitarians are vested with the power to decide over women's mobility in the name of care on the basis of an entanglement of administrative and medical procedures in this border context. While women are subject to greater humanitarian intervention due to the association of their embodied states with vulnerability, the biopolitical migration management of the border grants medical humanitarians a decision-making authority. The article uncovers how medical humanitarianism, enmeshed in the border regime, yields gendered constraints from practices of immobilisation to imposed practices of mothering. It traces the rationale for these practices to racialised and gendered processes of othering that usher in perceptions of undeservingness and sustain a humanitarian claim for biopolitical responsibility over these women's mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]