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In recent years, European states have become creative in developing strategies to curtail international migration while escaping their obligations under human rights law. These strategies aim at stopping migrants before they can enter a state's jurisdiction, under the argument that states are not bound to their obligations while operating outside their jurisdictional boundaries. This article adopts a geographic perspective to examine the concept of jurisdiction under the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and particularly its nexus with territory. During the last decade, the ECtHR has interpreted jurisdiction to encompass situations where states apprehend migrants outside their borders, thus extending jurisdiction to extraterritorial operations. However, states can circumvent this by manipulating the territorial organisations of their borders to prevent migrants from reaching their territory without directly apprehending them. These strategies include agreements with countries of transit along with other, specific interventions. I take the case of N.D. and N.T. v. Spain as an example of this trend, and of the ECtHR's failure to make European states accountable. As a solution, I argue that jurisdiction should be interpreted to encompass territoriality as one of its components, and under a definition of territory informed by geographic research, and distinct from its conventional definition under international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of aura deployed in this article – a notion contained in inchoate form in the popular usage of "backyard" – evokes the tension between the apparent stable boundaries of the state and its much more ambiguous incarnation. It allows for a view of the state that is both unconfined to its physical boundaries and that melts into its contiguous neighbours. Building upon the recent work of philosophers on more-than-human entanglements and symbiotic assemblages, the auratic can also help challenge the Darwinian model currently predominant in geopolitics. Indeed, adopting collaboration and symbiosis as organising metaphors rather than zero-sum survival predicated on competition and rivalry seems especially crucial in the current context of climate change and pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the conventional understanding of North Korean borders as classic barriers that block infiltration of outside influences, this paper argues that the Sino-North Korean border region has undergone considerable transformations, especially at the local level. By analysing local-level trans-border activities, it shows that North Korea seeks to develop the Sino-North Korean border region as a space of opportunity. Even the heightened political conflicts between China and North Korea and the tightened international sanctions against North Korea failed to dampen local actors' economic imperatives, particularly after the 2012 and 2013 decentralisations in North Korea. Local actors were active in driving trans-border economic practices and, in turn, transformed the Sino-North Korean border region into potential cross-border cooperation zones. Although there has been conflict and competition in border region development between North Korea and China, we argue that local governments and entrepreneurs' efforts to maximise economic independence in the border regions are persisting, and their geo-economic imperatives are important factors in reshaping the Sino-North Korean border region by initiating and advancing trans-border interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a sonic, more-than-human geography of the US–Mexico borderlands. I draw on creative practice to make an empirical contribution to critical border studies. Listening to border architecture offers a way to analyse the politics of border landscapes as they reverberate with sound. Sonic methods assert the living and nonliving qualities of borderscapes and additional valences of violence enacted through border landscapes and atmospheres. Through field recordings I show how sounds carry political significations and might draw listeners into new political possibilities. Listening is an opportunity to scan the breadth of the landscape for spaces in resisting the border's imposition on place. Through sound, the political ecology of critical border studies becomes more proximate, material, and apparent. As an approach to witnessing the border as a tangible entity yet encountered atmospherically and as a relational and topological field, sounding the border refracts its sensory affects – the border as experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To expedite the construction of barriers along the border with Mexico, U.S. Secretaries of Homeland Security have waived an extensive array of laws since 2005 when authority for such actions was first delegated to that position as part of the REAL ID Act. This paper contextualises the political origins of what is referred to as Section 102(c) waiver authority, shows how these waivers are used to dramatically expand border barrier construction, and reviews legal challenges. In doing so, it connects the use of waivers in governance as viewed through the study of law with the theoretical prominence of Agamben in the discipline of geography. By examining the specific ways in which these legal practices and their geographic expression have institutionalised a state of exception that pushes the boundary of legal acceptability, we arrive at a more transdisciplinary understanding of the role of states of exception as a tool of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a plethora of research on border disputes, border dispute resolution, unsettled borders, and artificially drawn borders. Yet, no study has so far been conducted on the comparative analysis of borders settled with mandatory powers and between nation-states. This article fills this research lacuna and makes a novel contribution to border scholarship by exploring the linkages between border settlement dynamics and the border status quo. In analysing and comparing Turkey's borders drawn between the 1920s and the 1930s, it is shown that Turkey's Iraqi and Syrian borders settled with mandatory powers (Britain and France respectively) have resulted in the emergence of alternative border imaginations by one of the neighbouring states, albeit without reaching the level of an official demand to change the status quo. Since its independence, Syria has produced an alternative border imagination with respect to its Turkish border by showing Turkey's Hatay province within its borders in its official maps and documents. Since the cession of Mosul to Iraq, Turkey's alternative border imagination has taken the form of state actors' contemplations about resettling the border. In sharp contrast, the Turkish-Iranian border, settled after long consultations between two independent nation-states, effectively resolved boundary-related problems, resulting in the mutual endorsement of the border status-quo. This article concludes that border settlement processes create path-dependent effects that are carried over to subsequent generations of state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores through visual arts the making of borders and nations and how they affect bodies and their mobility through the work of visual artist Susan Harbage Page. Harbage Page has created work about the U.S-Mexico Border since 2007 which explores why certain bodies are contested due to race, or status (refugee vs. illegal), and personal histories (culture/birthplace/social/marriage). This article examines how prescribed roles determine different levels of access to safety, work, and privilege. How social and political contexts of race, class, gender, and sex determine how an individual body experiences bordering practices. How a passport becomes one of the symbols agreed upon as a marker of belonging in a particular nation and only functions if it is respected and understood by other nations outside its boundary lines. It also explores the positionality and personal history of the researcher/artist and the role it plays in representation and the influence it has on visual research and artistic production. This article returns the discussion of borders back to embodiment and the roles that are projected onto bodies and then used to sift those bodies into differing terrains through bordering practices. It explores ways in which borders both serve to protect, exclude, and contain. This article is a first-person narrative that combines artistic practice with personal history to understand how situated knowledge impacts the production of artwork addressing social justice issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporary protection is increasingly presented as a 'novel approach' to displaced people that have crossed an international border as it can provide a level of protection and access to basic social services for a defined time period. This paper calls into question the objectives of such measures by highlighting the geopolitical context in which they operate. We argue that while temporary arrangements, particularly in so-called 'transit' countries, may address humanitarian needs of displaced people, they also embed precarity and temporality into protection norms. Combined with polices that externalise migration management, they risk normalising the exclusion of individuals from avenues to permanent protection in a country that they feel safe. By analysing the potential implications of holding temporary status, with recipients' well-being and permanent status application in mind, an alternative lens is provided. Using examples of temporary protection mechanisms in Turkey and Mexico, we argue that a deeper critical assessment is needed to understand their impact for people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special section on "Engaging Geopolitics through the Lens of the Intimate", we first locate the papers collected here in the context of developing an "Intimate Geopolitics" project at the University of Manchester. We then review the importance of 'intimacy' and the concept of 'the intimate' across an array of disciplinary studies, drawing especially on the rich body of work by critical geopolitics scholars who have long challenged categorical binaries and territorial boundaries. Our focus here is exploring what insights we can bring to understanding the nexus of intimacy and global politics by deploying the lens of the intimate--understood as a variety of processes of attachment and relationality--in six globally dispersed case studies. Collectively, the papers presented here not only engage a wide range of issues and locations, but also contribute to research engaging geographically specific contexts and practices. We note that the papers 'cluster' around issues of migration, borders, 'home', asylum and visa regimes, prompting us to suggest that the papers productively inform three foci of inquiry. Specifically, the papers 1) enrich our understanding of bordercrossing beyond simple association of this with the movement of people, things and ideas; 2) deepen our understanding of how geopolitics is constituted by forms of attachments and relationality that are integral to forms of governance; and 3) help us explore how attachments are not simply additive but productive of geopolitical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alarmism has enabled the extension and reconfiguration of sovereign power at thresholds of human mobility in ways that exemplify the shifting and polymorphic nature of borders. Extending critical geopolitical scholarship on alarmism and the geographies of bordering, this paper examines how alarmism is used to exert control over legal-discursive thresholds that people must cross to gain political asylum in the US. By analysing the most ambiguous area of asylum protection: proving that persecution is motivated by one's "membership in a particular social group", I demonstrate how refugee definitions are often contested and changed in response to "floodgate fears", a type of alarmist legal argumentation. Rather than addressing the merits of an individual asylum case, the floodgate argument invites speculation about the effects a particular juridical decision will have on future cases, and therein translates wider racist, nationalist fears of being overwhelmed by alien "others" into otherwise banal legal codes. In precedent-setting asylum law, these fear-laden speculations can shape legal-discursive thresholds for years to come, enacting targeted exclusion and widening the pool of "legitimate" targets of evolving border enforcement tactics. This analysis of legal alarmism and the formation of asylum case law focuses on the unique relationship between the particular social group threshold and the history and contemporary struggles of Central American asylum seekers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wakhan, northeast Afghanistan's peripheral panhandle, is situated between Afghanistan's borders with Tajikistan, China and Pakistan. Once subject of Great Game rivalry, it requires multiagency fieldwork to better understand its geopolitical vulnerabilities. Existing accounts of Wakhan are deemed inadequate and inappropriate, exceptionalising its wildness and wilderness, and drawing (in)civility distinctions that legitimise a near-divine right to dominion. Reassessing Wakhan in a boundary biography, the paper argues that by conceiving boundaries as local manifestations of international dynamics, marginal boundary regions can serve as tests for the 'state' of international affairs. The paper firstly assesses evolving understandings of boundaries before conceiving them as local manifestations of international dynamics. Existing narratives are then observed to render the region subaltern. Wakhan is thereafter rethought in a boundary biography revealing how marginal boundary regions are malleable instruments of statecraft. Wakhan is observed, in the assessment, to continuously reflect the changing 'state' of international affairs. Such reassessment rids Wakhan of its 'wild' otherness, transitioning it from untaken virgin land to a vulnerable periphery, forced to adapt to exogenous change. Rethought in this way, Wakhan constitutes a local site of international contestation, a demonstration that place at the margin has the potential to be concurrently local and international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of Euroscepticism on regional cross-border cooperation between Germany and Denmark. It demonstrates that Euroscepticism, while absent from local mainstream politicians, had already caused civic unrest in the 1997 attempts to construct a return to history Euro-region Schleswig. It resulted in a re-scaling of the Euro-Region to Region and Schleswig to "Sønderjylland/Schleswig", omitting any reference to Europe, European identity or a commitment to a closer European union in the relevant agreements. Border controls, on the agenda in 2011 and again since 2015, have demonstrated the institutional weakness of cross-border politics when faced with determined initiatives from the national center. Furthermore, the Eurosceptic Danish People's Party had its best results in the border precincts both at the latest European and Danish national elections. Euroscepticism, even though difficult to measure on a regional level, seems to have been an ever present underneath current despite a political rhetoric of successful cooperation and cross-border reconciliation. The Danish-German case's development might be more distinct, but nonetheless representative for European border (and cross-border) regions. While European metropolises develop into thriving cosmopolitan post-nation state societies, this is not necessary the case at Europe's borders, where categorization and bordering remain common social practices by the large majority of national borderlanders with only a small portion of transnational borderlanders or 'regionauts' getting involved in border crossing social practices on a larger scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis of this article is that if borders did not exist, Euroscepticism would have invented them. If Sartre is paraphrased, it is to emphasize that Euroscepticism needs borders in the same intense political and symbolic way as anti-Semitism needs Jews. This thesis is argued in three steps. The first analyses the paradox of the intense theoretical deconstruction of borders in the era of an overbordered world and argues the ideas of the 'revenge of the state' and of the emergence of the 'neo-post-Westphalian order'. The second part examines the post-communist Europeanisation as de-bordering and distinguishes three forms: Europeanisation through utopianization, Europeanisation through ethnic de-bordering and Europeanisation through de-territorialization. The third part analyses the interferences and intensification of re-bordering and Euroscepticism. The stato-national and the ethno-identitarian bordering practices are analysed through the images of wall and body. Two types of Euroscepticism – extremist and crypto – are distinguished and compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-Cold War period, the European Union's neighbourhood policy towards its emerging eastern neighbours aims to surround the European Union (EU) with a ring of secure, stable and prosperous neighbouring countries. Advancing conflict transformation through cross-border cooperation initiatives constitutes a crucial part of the European neighbourhood policy. Cross-border interaction and cooperation are expected to lessen the heavy burden of sealed borders by decreasing isolation and indifference and promoting mutual interaction, dialogue and confidence-building between conflicting parties. However, there are several ethno-political contestations whose historical animosities cast a shadow on the effectiveness of the EU's neighbourhood and cross-border cooperation policies for conflict transformation. The Turkish-Armenian case testifies to the persistence of physical and mental borders that stem from competing historical memories, longstanding grievances and contesting national claims, as well as from regional dynamics. This article aims to assess the impact of the EU's neighbourhood policy and cross-border cooperation initiatives on conflict transformation on the Turkish-Armenian border. The EU's policies have remained partially relevant and effectual by initiating interaction and dialogue at the civil societal level. Advancing conflict transformation at the political level, however, would require the EU to develop a more comprehensive framework that considers the cross-cutting context of the competing historical memories and regional dynamics and shifts that currently undermine the impact of further transformative attempts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the making and contestation of mobile borders around the Channel Tunnel, the fixed link connecting Britain and the European continent. It suggests that the bordering of the infrastructural and vehicular spaces is both an object of inquiry in its own right and a productive lens for reflecting on questions related to European Union (EU) territory, the heterogeneous nature of borders as well as the interplay between regimes of control and resistance. The article starts by reviewing the legal and institutional frameworks in which the Channel Tunnel area is governed and envisioned as an interstate and European/Schengen borderzone. It then examines the uncoordinated efforts of national, private and European authorities in managing the episodic migration controversies around this area, which bring together the interconnected rationales of security, economy and humanitarianism and expose the dissonance between and within them. Finally, the article considers how the acts of turbulent mobilities interact with this contingent assemblage of mobility governance and realise the radical potential of territorial borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will read the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), whose infrastructure and installations are currently being built across Pakistan, as a moving border-making event which inscribes difference within Pakistan. The article will begin with a discussion of borders and border-making. The discussion will then turn to the different registers of difference that will be created in Pakistan through CPEC. The article will conclude with a speculative look at how Pakistan and the wider region may be impacted once the construction of CPEC is complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I read a selection of Pashto literatures against the grain of world history, as critical thought about geopolitics. Drawing on Michael Shapiro's concept of aesthetic subjects, as well as on border theory, I argue that the authors, the content, and the literary networks of these works all critically comment on global relations of power, ranging from the local bordering effects of geopolitics, to systems of knowledge embedded in the spatiality and temporality of empire. I argue that past and current imperial processes have led to fragmenting effects in Afghan society, and literature both reflects and analyses this. More than that, though, I argue - using the lives of authors as well as their work - that literary activity in Pashto has actively negotiated such processes throughout its recent history, and offers strategies for different notions of global connectivity. The decentralized and multiperspective images of life in these works sit in counterpoint not only to the systems-oriented views that drive military and other policy in Afghanistan during the on-going US moment, but also to universalist perspectives upon which disciplines like world history and geopolitics have traditionally relied. This contributes to the aesthetic turn in IR by arguing that it is not only the aesthetic vision in works that can challenge dominant forms of knowledge: the shape of the Pashto literary formation itself, organic with its contents, is an alternate form of knowledge-in-practice about the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seven years after the beginning of the Syrian uprising and thirteen years after the transformation of Iraq into a federal state, one can notice the permanence of the nation state borders in the Middle East despite the worst prediction of a general breakdown of the colonial lines. But the Middle East, like no other region in the world, seems to face such a challenge to the state border system with the lasting internal fragmentations in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq. In reaction to this threat, governments erected sophisticated and costly fences at the edge of the states, transforming the regional landscape, raising issues of states’ sovereignty and regimes’ legitimacy; they are also highlighting the existence of the local communities (religious, ethnic or tribal) that are largely straddling across the international borders, defining alternative boundaries of belonging. This special issue intends to deal with two main questions: how do borders influence actors’ identity building? And how do identity politics at the local or national level re/define borders and boundaries? Six case studies stemming from intensive fieldwork research provide insights on state-community relationships through the lens of border issues in the Machreq and the Gulf areas thanks to different disciplinary approaches. Through IS territorialisation, Jordanian Bedouins, Kuwait’s national identity representations, Israel’s Lebanese residents, Oman’s construction of political sovereignty and representations of Gulf and Middle Eastern borders, authors highlight multi-scalar processes of identity building and representations through the bordering of the national, tribal or religious group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an historical analysis, this article discusses outward investments promotion as an underexplored aspect of geoeconomics. The empirical focus is on Italy’s institutional support to the internationalization of firms from 1992 to 2015, between the post-socialist transformation of Central and Eastern Europe and the years following the global crisis of 2008. The main argument is that large geopolitical events led to complex interactions between Italy’s firms and policymakers. These interactions reshaped Italy’s geo-economic strategies as well as territorialities. The article identifies the emergence and consolidation of a group of public, semi-public and private actors, thus building a new model of an investment promotion community (IPC). It finds that (a) the IPC emerged to provide an institutional infrastructure necessary to project Italy’s sovereignty beyond national boundaries and (b) in so doing, the elites involved interpreted firms’ needs within broader political issues. Thus, the emergence of the IPC represents a shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jordan is a country of contrasts. Few people can boast of being a hundred percent rooted within the boundaries of the actual Kingdom. Almost everyone has relatives across several borders. The aim of this article is to explore the extent to which tribalism in Jordan acts as an identity source or the extent to which it is politicized and instrumentalized to protect economic and social benefits. My literature framework is the instrumentalist theory of ethnicity and the border studies literature. The extent to which ethnicity guarantees a return to the people determines people’s adherence to it. Some scholars regard ethnicity as a tool of political mobilization because ethnic groups could be considered also as interest groups. This theory provides an explanation of tribal behavior regarding the role of identity. As an example, I describe how East Bankers have reacted to challenges from the Palestinian population since 1948. In particular, the present-day delicate equilibrium among East Bankers and Palestinians is deeply decisive in regard to the Jordanian response to the regional crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewed academic interest in the Middle Eastern border is inevitable with the marked increase in fortified territorial limits across the region and the appearance of new borderland spatialities in the sovereign margins of the war-torn Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni states. If the consequent spectacle of displaced populations confronting state power at the international boundary seems a defining image, this article concentrates on two other dominant, less publicised but still relevant border representations from the recent past: territorial definition and its deterministic association with conflict in the northern Gulf and the resource-driven finalisation of the peninsula’s territorial framework. This follows consideration of the significance of the borderland in the region. The author reflects back here on a long record of research into these issues and argues that all of these contexts must be acknowledged in any balanced appraisal of the Middle Eastern border. The article comments on the challenge of extending regional approaches to the study of borders and - on the centenary of the infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot treaty - acknowledges that the Middle East region’s experience of international boundaries continues to be depicted as exceptional. Unsurprisingly, it will conclude that there is no one typical Middle Eastern border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing body of work, scholars have rarely engaged with the classic divide of structure and agency in border studies. Drawing on theory of structuration by Anthony Giddens, this article proposes a theoretical approach and/or tool that views borders as the result of a continuous production and reproduction of structure(s) and agents. The framework offers an analysis of what makes each border distinct and of the performance of borderwork. The article briefly overviews major theoretical approaches in critical border studies, presents a brief summary of the theory of structuration, discusses the proposed theoretical framework for border studies, and presents a case study based on the recently exchanged Bangladesh-India border enclaves to demonstrate the application of this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present geopolitical situation has made the debate on borders and their functions, significance, and symbolism more prominent than at any time since the end of the Cold War. While the various processes of globalisation have challenged the traditional border concept, the scalar model of identity and society remains primarily anchored in national space. The understanding of the state as a multiscalar construction, constantly negotiated and reconfigured by its actors at different levels, allows us to broaden the scope of our analysis and rethink and transform the spatial formations previously taken for granted in assessing the impacts of globalisation more regionally. State borders continue to have considerable relevance today, yet as the articles brought together in this special section will demonstrate, borders must be understood as complex, multiscalar, multidimensional, yet dynamic entities that have different symbolic and material forms, functions, and locations. With examples from Europe, Southeast Asia and the global south, this section aims to advance our knowledge of the multiscalar dynamics of border politics. The articles investigate how borders are negotiatedvis-à-visquestions of identity, belonging, political conflict, and societal transformation, and how they are re- and deconstructed through various institutional and discursive practices at different levels and by different actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After Poland’s accession to the EU, the Polish-Russian border became the EU external border. This significantly changed its nature and started the new type of cross border relation. Since 2012, when the Small Border Traffic (SBT) zone came into force, the border has changed its blockade function and started instead to be treated as a resource. The fundamental loosening of the border crossing regime reduced the social and functional distance between Poland and Kaliningrad, and in a broader sense between EU and Kaliningrad. This paper will try to show how small but meaningful initiative, the SBT, has had an impact on cross-border region. The present paper will describe the relationship between larger geopolitical actors and how they affect local border relations. The aim of this paper is to present phenomenon of new visa regime at the Polish-Russian border. The paper likewise describes the impact of the SBT on local communities and their economies, as well as national relations between adjacent countries. The analysis is based on the interviews and surveys conducted in the Polish-Russian border region in late 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last two years, the so-called “Islamic State in Iraq and Sham” has transformed the Syrian Civil War, effecting serious confrontations in Iraq and Lebanon, dismantling security regimes along the Iraq-Syria border, and causing the mass exodus of ethno-religious communities across the region. These dramatic events are often interpreted through the official rhetoric of the group itself, which draws on discourses of the “Sykes-Picot” conspiracy and narratives of returning to Islamic principles. Tempting though it is to deconstruct such rhetoric on its own, efforts in this direction have over-emphasised its Islamic and territorial elements to the detriment of a deeper understanding of the locally varying, strategic nature of ISIS’s activities in the Middle East. Accordingly, this paper considers how local interests articulate with ISIS’s transnational movement, looking at their activities along the border region of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. It begins with a discourse analysis of one important narrative in early analysis of ISIS’s “border-breaking” rhetoric, the narrative of Sykes-Picot, before laying out how geographers have engaged with the geopolitics of radical Islamist militant groups more generally. Then drawing on a combination of secondary sources and ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and Jordan, it elaborates how the politics of place shapes ISIS’s political practice, using the example of the Syrian-Iraqi borderland (the Jazirah). In doing so, I hope to emphasise the relative importance of historical-geographic context over discourse and narrative for understanding the actions of ISIS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Transboundary flows of energy across Yunnan Province in China and to Southeast Asian states provide insight into the changing nature of borders and border areas. Rather than monolithic symbols of state sovereignty, China’s southwest borders in Yunnan can be more accurately characterised as zones of connectivity and exchange, serving a range of local, national and regional objectives. Energy production and distribution in and across Yunnan can be understood as functioning in a set of dynamic transnational processes that serve as economic and political bridges – increasing interaction and deepening regional integration – while also working to mitigate risk to China’s energy demands. In this article, energy projects in Yunnan and Southeast Asia demonstrate the ways border regions can respond to increasing globalisation, simultaneously strengthening national energy security while promoting regional interconnection and diplomacy. Thus, connections to and through a once peripheral region present an apparent contradiction: once rigid territorial borders are increasingly characterised by transboundary infrastructure development and exchanges of energy, capital and diplomacy, while promoting broader, diversified national energy security objectives – essentially strengthening national security through transnational energy projects. This article investigates how energy development works to shape Yunnan’s role as an “energy conduit,” while advancing both transnational and national geopolitical objectives, and thus, suggesting that these projects can be understood as trans-political in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Development is inextricably related to the state-centred cartography of world spaces defined by borders, both in its historical trajectory and contemporary entanglements. Yet the multiplicity of channels and directions characterising their articulation are scarcely explored. This article contributes to this emerging field of enquiry. It delineates the essential traits of theborders and development nexusby establishing a systematic dialogue between the fields of Border Studies and Development Studies, a dialogue framed by concerns with scalar politics. More specifically, the paper places borders in development in two ways. First, it places borders in Development Studies: it identifies borders as a useful analytical vantage point that lay at the intersection between state- and non-state centred geographies of development. Second, it places Border Studies in development: focusing on the tension between borders and bordering processes, it interrogates economic growth- and poverty-related policies. Three contributions to the study of development arising from placing borders in development in this way are highlighted. The paper also expands the emerging field of enquiry concerned with the relation between borders and development, by considering development policies not yet been examined through the prism of borders, and by emphasising the hierarchical and yet unpredictable nature of the borders and development articulation. At its broadest, the discussion dis-entangles the multiplicity of scales and directions in which borders, bordering and the development process intersect. It is at this scalar intersection that the force of development, and the potentials for engaging, opposing, avoiding, or subverting it, lay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent geopolitical changes and the strengthening of the security/economy nexus have multiplied the types and functions of territorial borders in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR). These borders have been insufficiently addressed in previous research even though macro-regions cross over multiple borders, which are highly affected by geopolitical events and conflicts. This paper contributes to the debate about multiple borders with particular emphasis on the question how de- and re-bordering affect the regionalisation process in practice and how it influences the cooperation within the BSR. The results, which are based on a discourse analysis of a corpus of documents, show that the region-building process in the BSR itself creates new borders, which define the level of the member state’s political participation in the region. The governance of macro-regions would benefit from the development of such analytical frameworks that take into account the impact of the multitude of borders on the practical level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent discussion in critical border studies has reaffirmed the validity and necessity of multiperspectival approaches which move beyond state-centric outlooks to include diverse viewpoints of people at or on borders. One understudied aspect of everyday border life involves how international development organisations fit within wider dynamics of cross-border activities. Drawing upon experiences of development projects at a key border crossing between Kenya and Uganda, I explore (1) how perceptions of risk and danger contribute to constructions of the border towns as places in need of development interventions, and (2) how this border also adds to practical and logistical concerns already held by development organisations as they deliver these interventions. I argue that the place-based mix of location, material forms, and perceptions or practices impacts how ‘inter-national development’ is rationalised in border regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by important changes in the last twenty years. After theprocessual shiftof the 1990s (from border tobordering), 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 theborderscapesconcept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that, though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as:epistemological, ontologicalandmethodological. 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 andbecomingthat are worth being investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary world is increasingly marked by borders, fences and walls, which run through the spaces we live in. Borders are the result of a composite articulation of material aspects, concerning their external realisation, and structures of imagination, symbolic constructs and conceptual formations that involve the border and make it meaningful. In this dynamic and mutable field, artistic practices and interventions can interrupt and alterate the logic of the border, opening up a space of resistance and critical imagination, where the transparent, immutable and essentialist representation of the border is constantly challenged. Works of artists such as Bajevic, Hatoum, Salcedo, Rosver and Meredith-Vula will be analysed. They are used to transforming this separation, which they have usually lived personally, in symbolic landscape like interior landscapes. Working on imagination and creating alternative spaces, artists are able to challenge dominant representations and hegemonic discourses, making the border an active site of resistance and struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between cartography and power has aroused much interest in recent years, stimulated by innovative critical approaches. The empiricist and neo-positivist paradigms, no longer satisfactory, have been abandoned, while the analysis has been extended to include not only state-sponsored, but also popular cartography. Regardless of the character of the map or its source, it continues to be inserted in the context of the modern territorial state, as it is perceived as a key instrument for conveying the state’s narrative. Seen in this light, cartography inevitably comes out on the subordinate end of this relationship, since it fully conforms to the orthodox state-centred world view that has dominated modernity. Overturning this mechanically deconstructionist approach, this paper proposes, instead, to apply a concept introduced by John Brian Harley, the father of critical cartography – that of the map’s internal power. This concept, usually considered a given and rarely tested in empirical studies, is evaluated here through an analysis of the border sign in a series of unorthodox maps (in the work of Reclus, Mackinder, Renner, Spykman, Horrabin, Radó, Ratzel, Kjèllen, Haushofer) which have received little scientific attention to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including border landscapes and border aesthetics, the political impact of cultural production at the border, and the bordermaking process using the map.

Physical barriers are an increasingly popular political mechanism for central government control over the flows of goods and people at borders. This medium also, however, serves as a canvas for unsanctioned expressions of belonging. Just as graffiti and art are deployed in the urban landscape as unconventional means of claiming space, they are utilised on international border barriers to contest prevalent political winds and re-claim local and alternative senses of who belongs and what is deemed important in debates over border policy. This paper considers unauthorised text and visual imagery on the border barriers of the Arizona-Sonora section of the US-Mexico boundary as a therapeutic reaction to a state-dominated border policy which downplays local impacts. It is argued that such imagery serves to re-scale border space and thereby re-capture a sense of belonging by those whose roles are marginalised by national politics and the neoliberal global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular music has not yet been widely considered by popular geopolitics practitioners. This paper develops such a perspective, using the US–Mexico border as a case study. In the area, the classic corrido and the more recent narcocorridos are flourishing. Their lyrics, exalting the deeds of border trespassers, usually represent the border as a superimposed boundary. Around the border, other more hybrid kinds of music stand for a very mixed borderland. The border is also portrayed in Anglo songs, referring to the ‘South of the border’ experience. In these, depiction leaves room for a different perception, since the border is represented as an open frontier, easy to cross, to find an abundance of girls and alcohol on the other side. Popular music can also offer a metaphorical representation of the US–Mexico border, transforming it from a local space to the symbol of all global power asymmetries, as in Manu Chao’s songs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assumption that the border between Spain and Portugal is a stable one since medieval times is commonplace. Thus, the territorial trap conception, as defined by John Agnew, dominates understanding of this border. This paper will focus on a specific border area, the Couto Mixto, in an effort to contest this territorial trap. Furthermore, using some of the emerging border studies concepts, mainly borderscapes and border poetics, this research will discuss how this particular territory has been recently recovered and recreated. The theoretical underpinnings are followed by an analysis of what the Couto was and how it has been reappropriated in narrative terms in the last twenty years. The paper concludes by discussing the empirical findings on the Couto in light of the theoretical sections. It is eventually suggested that tourism based on specific immaterial border legacy could encourage Couto’s inhabitants and the precarious economy of the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses whether the maps made by visual artists and media designers can be a form of counter-mapping, communicating narratives that may blur how state borders are currently defined. Maps and artworks have inseparable histories and many studies have been carried out in order to explore the role of cartography in the construction of national imaginations. If official maps published in atlases and textbooks are still limited to national territories, artistic maps became an important source of information about shared identities and cross-border activities. Taking as a case study maps made in a collaborative art project between Colombia and Venezuela and maps published in the Colombian mainstream press, the paper identified contradictory narratives, which can simultaneously dissolve and reinforce international borders. Starting with the analysis of images created in a very particular context, this paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates regarding the relations between map art and popular geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The borderscape is a flexible entity that goes beyond the space of the border and the borderland. This article argues that art and literature can be constitutive elements in the borderscape, along with other kinds of bordering and demarcation. Art and literature can help create resistance through performative acts of “borderscaping”, taking place in different locations and involving different perspectives. The article uses the aesthetic categories of the sublime, the postmodern, and the defamiliarised to trace forms of “distance” or “distancing” as they appear in conceptualisations of the borderscape. Artistic practices in the Norwegian-Russian borderscape are examined in an evaluation of their geopolitical significance, with particular attention given to descriptions of the Norwegian-Russian border in novels by John Fowles and Kjartan Fløgstad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audience research has traditionally been neglected within the subfield of popular geopolitics. However in recent years, geographers are increasingly focusing on the making of geopolitical meanings by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts. Drawing on recent assemblage thinking in geopolitics, this paper argues that audiences form part of the animators of a network that links the human body with places, environments, objects and discourses related to geopolitics. By investigating Filipinos’ critical readings of and engagements with the ‘war on terror’ in Mindanao as represented through the national newspaper, thePhilippines Daily Inquirer, the agency and power of audiences in the creative enactments of geopolitics and geography are illuminated. As such, understanding the complex interactions between popular media and its audiences can prove useful in casting insights into the everyday, geopolitical ‘playing out’ of issues of terrorism, violence and peace in the Philippines context and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cross-border integration is a multifaceted as well as contextually contingent process. While various conceptualisations have been developed, the theoretical foundations of the concept appear insufficient in order to grasp the very significance of such a process of cross-border regionalism. In order to help make sense of the diversity of configurations observed, this article seeks to deconstruct the concept according to the role played by the border as a resource and to develop a theoretical framework based on two contrasted models of cross-border integration. The underlying hypothesis is that cross-border integration does not derive from the mere opening of national borders that it supposedly helps at the same time to remove, but stems from the strategic behaviour of actors who actively mobilise borders as resources. The first model, called ‘geo-economic’, is mainly based on the mobilisation of the border as a differential benefit and aims to generate value out of asymmetric cross-border interactions. In doing so, this process of functional integration is likely to increase cross-border socio-economic disparities and leads to cooperation oriented towards instrumental purposes such as increasing the economic utility of the border or regulating negative externalities. The second model, called ‘territorial project’, emphasises the border resources that involve a convergence of both sides of a border, either through a process of hybridisation/innovation or via the territorial and symbolic recognition borders entail. In this process of place-making that transcends the border, mutual understanding and trust between the actors is seen to be key and the willingness to cooperate essential. Conceived as ideal-types, the two models of cross-border integration are contrasted and to some extent contradictory. They are however not mutually exclusive and different kinds of combinations are examined based on concrete examples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Union is often conceptualised as an entity that is profoundly different from that of the modern state. Through a reading of the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece, the paper challenges the understanding that the crafting of the European Union (‘Euro-crafting’) is qualitatively different from the crafting of the modern state. Conceptually, the paper proposes that Euro-crafting should be thought through in relation to practices of statecraft, instead of a priori postulated as qualitatively different from such practices. Putting such an understanding of Euro-crafting to work, the paper explores the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece and demonstrates how practices of Euro-crafting mirror the major desire-driven practices of modern statecraft; practices of ordering, bordering, and identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this contribution is to present a conceptual framework with potential application across the interdisciplinary field of border studies. This framework should embrace interdisciplinarity and the contextual nature of borders. Based on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it elaborates an understanding of borders as being related to a dynamic process of social bordering/bounding processes that involves spatial, social, and conceptual boundaries. By introducing the notion of ‘empirical boundary’, our framework aspires to bridge the gap between (radical) constructivist theorising and the analysis of physical realities involved in the (re)production of boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Critical geopolitics is the dominant school of geopolitics in contemporary geography. Critical geopolitics is a body of radical scholarship that emerged in the 1980s that attempts to move beyond classic geopolitics. In order to resuscitate geopolitics, critical geopoliticians had to distance themselves from the imperialist, racist, and environmentally determinist geopolitics of the 1940s. In doing so, however, critical geopoliticians created a body of scholarship that omits important explanatory variables necessary to understand post–Cold War geopolitics. We argue that critical geopolitics unnecessarily limits the wider application of geopolitics because it is: 1) anti-geopolitics; 2) anti-cartographic; and 3) anti-environmental. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The boundary between Spain and Portugal is supposed to be one of the most – if not the most – fixed and stable borders in the world, with some authors stating that it has a history of almost a thousand years. However, this paper demonstrates that this is not the case by arguing that it has a mobile nature. After formulating a theoretical framework on borders and border studies, this contribution focuses on the raia between Galicia and Portugal as a specific section of the international Spanish-Portuguese border; several questions elucidating the mobile nature of the raia are answered, embracing historic, geographic, social, cultural, linguistic and economic issues. The paper finishes by considering the effects of the new period of European integration and by providing some concluding remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

For the Geopolitics Lecture at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2010, the paper examines the core features of Mackinder's geopolitical imaginary, reviews contemporary challenges to those elements and develops an alternative conception of space for a Progressive Geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues for the importance of attending to both affective and emotional experience in analysing the origins and effects of border and immigration efforts in the US/Mexico border region. We do so by engaging with theoretical understands of the politics of affect and emotion among cultural and feminist geographers and social scientists. We then examine Arizona's SB 1070 and its connection to a larger history of border and immigration enforcement in Arizona. Drawing from ethnographic work, interviews, and media and policy analysis, we engage with narratives provided by border area ranchers to unpack how these ranchers' encounters with unauthorised migrants have changed over time. We then examine how the everyday fear and anxiety associated with these encounters drive political activism and state intervention in the region. We conclude by discussing how this intervention, in turn, reproduces racial and gender hierarchies, hierarchies that are themselves affectively mediated. [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]

The ambivalence of borders, as both bridges and barriers, is analysed in the South American borderlands, in the cross-border region between Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. The main hypothesis behind this work is that borders not only refer to the state but they are also a result of a social construction. Through their practices and narratives, the actors involved shape the border configuration. Through a multi-scalar approach (from a continental to a local level) and by collating practices and representations of various social agents (from continental organisations to the complexity of social groups on the border), I show that different territorial complexes converge on the border and I explain the spatial dialectic of the latter. Two ideas emerge as a conclusion to this study: the co-existence of territorialities that are not so exclusive and the key role played by the state despite the changes it undergoes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]