The condition of borders has been crucial to many recent exhibitions, conferences and publications. But there does not yet exist a convincing critical frame for the discussion of border discourses. Rethinking Borders offers just such an introduction. It develops important contexts in art and architectural theory, contemporary film-making, criticism and cultural politics, for the proliferation of 'border theories' and 'border practices' that have marked a new stage in the debates over postmodernism, cultural studies and postcolonialism.
A timely and provocative challenge to the foundations of our global order: why should national borders be unchangeable? The inviolability of national borders is an unquestioned pillar of the post–World War II international order. Fixed borders are believed to encourage stability, promote pluralism, and discourage nationalism and intolerance. But do they? What if fixed borders create more problems than they solve, and what if permitting borders to change would create more stability and produce more just societies? Legal scholar Timothy Waters examines this possibility, showing how we arrived at a system of rigidly bordered states and how the real danger to peace is not the desire of people to form new states but the capacity of existing states to resist that desire, even with violence. He proposes a practical, democratically legitimate alternative: a right of secession. With crises ongoing in the United Kingdom, Spain, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and many other regions, this reassessment of the foundations of our international order is more relevant than ever.
Aims to provide a guide for peacemaking at the territorial borders of the nation state Employs an innovative 'preferred futures' methodology Will be of interest to students of border studies, migration studies, peace studies, critical security and IR
Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India. Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.
While sovereignty is increasingly contested within academic circles, most recent military conflicts have been over issues of sovereignty in some form. Focusing on Yugoslavia in the 1990s, this book explores the issues surrounding 'sovereignty' and calls for a radical rethinking of the notion and the institutions and practices that it grounds.
This book documents border porosities that have developed and persisted between Greece and North Macedonia over different temporalities and at different localities. By drawing on geology's approaches to studying porosity, the book takes an innovative approach arguing that similarly to rocks and minerals that only appear solid and impermeable, seemingly impenetrable borders are inevitably traversed by different forms of passage. The rich ethnographic case studies spanning between the history of railroads in the region, border town beauty tourism, child refugees during the Greek Civil War, mining and environmental activism, and the urban renovation project in Skopje, show that the political borders between states do not only restrict or regulate the movement of people and things but are also always permeable in ways that exceed state governmentality.
Why is it that we so readily accept the boundary lines drawn around nations or around regions like ‘Asia’ as though they were natural and self-evident, when in fact they are so mutable and often so very arbitrary? What happens to people not only when the borders they seek to cross become heavily guarded, but also when new borders are drawn straight through the middle of their lives? The essays in this book address these questions by starting from small places on the borderlands of East Asia and looking outwards from the small towards the large, asking what these ‘minor pasts’ tell us about the grand narratives of history. In the process, it takes the reader on a journey from Renaissance European visions of ‘Tartary’, through nineteenth-century racial theorising, imperial cartography and indigenous experiences of modernity, to contemporary debates about Big History in an age of environmental crisis.
This book focuses on critical issues and perspectives concerning globally mobile students, aspects that have grown in importance thanks to major geopolitical, economic, and technological changes around the globe (i.e., in and across major origins and destinations of international students). Over the past few decades, the field of international higher education and scholarship has developed robust areas of research that guide current policy, programs, and pedagogy. However, many of the established narratives and wisdoms that dominate research agendas, scope, and foci have become somewhat ossified and are unable to reflect recent political upheavals and other changes (e.g. the Brexit, Trump era, and Belt and Road Initiative) that have disrupted a number of areas including mobility patterns and recruitment practices, understanding and supporting students, engagement of global mobile students with their local counterparts, and the political economy of international education at large. By re-assessing established issues and perspectives in light of the emerging global/local situations, the contributing authors – all experts on international education – share insights on policies and practices that can help adapt to emerging challenges and opportunities for institutions, scholars, and other stakeholders in international higher education. Including theoretical, empirical, and practitioner-based methods and perspectives provided by scholars from around the world, the book offers a unique and intriguing resource.
This interdisciplinary volume written by experienced scholars in border studies explores the political role of images and narratives addressing borders, borderscapes and migration. The volume offers new methodologies to approach the political aesthetics of the border and related issues such as borderland identities and border-crossings.
The political materialities of borders aims to bring questions of materiality to bear specifically on the study of borders. In doing this, the contributors have chosen an approach that does not presume the material aspect of borders but rather explores the ways in which any such materiality comes into being. Through ethnographic and philosophical explorations of the ontology of borders from the perspective of materiality, this volume seeks to throw light on the interaction between the materiality of state borders and the non-material aspects of state-making. This enables, it is shown, a new understanding of borders as productive of the politics of materiality, on which both the state project rests, including in its multifarious forms in the post-nation-state era.
