Search

The notion of vulnerability is gaining traction in EU border protection. On the one hand, the concept refers to vulnerable migrants and their affectedness by insecurity and violence. On the other, it indicates the susceptibility of borders to irregular crossings and cross-border crime. Both forms of vulnerability are assessed through dedicated procedures under the umbrella of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex. To make sense of these seemingly contradictory conceptual and practical uses of vulnerability, we draw on feminist postcolonial scholarship in security studies and political geography. We argue that a shared colonial matrix of gendered and racialised meanings and problematisations enables analogies between borders and bodies as (un-)deserving of protection. In a discourse-theoretical analysis of Frontex documents, we show how the ambiguous use of vulnerability legitimises the EU border regime and its security practices by constructing EU bordering as neutral and objective and EU borders as objects of care. We conclude that vulnerability becomes increasingly important for normalising the EU's violent borders in the context of the EU's broader claims to liberal values of freedom, protection, and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream post-positivist approaches to Border Studies typically represent national borders as losing their importance or blurring. This insight usually fails to grasp the perspective of those who have to cross ‘hard’ borders, for whom these borders are primarily ‘hard facts’ quite precisely restricting territorial limits of their movement. Aiming to take this perspective and practical problems experienced by such border crossers into account, the author proposes an approach focusing on communication between those who cross ‘hard’ borders and those who protect these borders. The case of the EU-Russian border shows that border crossers have an increasing range of options to make themselves heard by their own country's officials, though it is much more difficult for them to reach gatekeepers and public on the other side of the border without resorting to intermediaries (such as their states or business actors). The author suggests that border crossers could be heard better if cross-border cooperation initiatives would prioritise this purpose thus making the EU's external borders not only ‘friendly’ or ‘blurred’ but also ‘dialogic’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the film Frozen River (2008) for the purpose of considering how the US-Canadian border is dramatised within the context of two women caught up in a illicit trading of migrants via a Native American Reservation. Re-calibrating more mainstream Hollywood's fascination with the United States' southern border, Frozen River usefully focuses attention on two areas that deserve further reflection namely the materiality of borders and border crossings and biopolitics. The paper concludes with some reflections on how borders, biopolitics, dispossession and sovereignty need further theorization by political geographers and other scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Border-management policies are designed to balance national interests of border control with the costs of monitored cross-border interaction. These policies, formulated by national authorities, are often based on constructed definitions and interests of national security rather than wider understandings of the components of human security. This is especially evident in post-conflict borders where local initiatives of economic, social and environmental cross-border interaction are posed to contribute to regional stability and security. This article analyzes civilian cross-border cooperation in the southern section of the Israel-Jordan border region, distinguishing between local and national perspectives regarding border management. Focusing mainly on Israel's policies the article demonstrates how despite the vision of good neighbourly relations and their potential contribution towards regional prosperity and stability, local cross-border initiatives have been inhibited in the name of national security. The case study demonstrates the mechanisms and ramifications of exclusive securitisation policies of post-conflict border management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how cultural and artistic work constitutes a powerful means for mediating the collective memory of state borders. The empirical case study concerns the commercialisation of a borderland culture in the form of a 'Smuggling Opera' in a cross-border project on the Finnish-Swedish border region where border crossing has been unrestricted for decades. This theatrical performance constructs a particular local narrative which contests the authorised representation of borders in the discourse of the nation-state. The narrative analysis method is applied to this popularised border narrative and its interpretation among local participants, leading to the conclusion that the understanding of state borders differs between authorised border narratives and the stories of borderland people for whom it represents part of the everyday surroundings, although both serve to fix the meaning and moral justification of the border or argument for its rejection. The narratives of people living in the 'borderless' Finnish-Swedish border region show the continuing significance of the border in people's lives as both a barrier and a place of contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African states and their boundaries have been a long running research theme on the continent. The re-opening of the debate over African boundaries is important for theoretical and practical reasons. The purpose of this essay is to engage in recent trajectories of the African boundary discourse, and to debate alternative ways of looking at the future of hitherto colonially inscribed boundaries. I argue that priority in the decolonization of the African map should be given to changing the character of colonial boundaries rather than their physical appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses recent ‘border control’ policies implemented in the US-Mexico borderlands specifically ‘Operation Hold the Line’, an initiative designed to seal the boundary from unofficial incursions of undocumented workers into the US. Through an interpretative, qualitative, and critical ‘border analysis’ that reads the relationships between borders, territoriality, and collective identity in an increasingly transnational and ‘turbulent’ moment of late modernity, the piece examines both the policy manifestations of the ‘hardening’ of the borderlands and the discourses which support it. The analysis is informed by new thinking about borders, widely defined, in International Relations as well as other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]