ABSTRACT
Mobility is one of the distinguishing characters of modern globalization, demonstrated in dramatically increased empirical flows of capital, information, and people. The border has become one of the dominant spatio-legal metaphors of contemporary politics, either in their purported disappearance, rearticulation, or surprising persistence. Michele Acuto says “borders have to be measured for their presence, or absence, and the role they play in constructing social relations” (2008: 1).Manuel Castells, Zygmunt Bauman, and John Urry use metaphors of flow, liquidity or fluidity to describe the essence of globalization; the character of these movements is determined by the porosity of borders. In Castells’ terms, borders can be understood the “hubs and nodes” that determine the speed, direction, and composition of the “space of flows” (2000: 443).Within this global network society, routing and identification become key vectors of control. Bauman cautions that mobility should not be over-estimated, arguing that 98 percent of all people are immobile. Borders must be examined in concert with mobility because, as Mimi Sheller and Urry argue,“the study of mobility also involves those immobile infrastructures that organise the intermittent flow of people, information, and image, as well as the borders or ‘gates’ that limit, channel, and regulate movement or anticipated movement” (Sheller and Urry 2006: 212). Even as mobility becomes one of the primary axes of global inequality, “the map image of the borders of the state still exercises a major influence on the territorial imagination of whose security is at stake, and who most threatens it” (Agnew 2007: 300). Globalization studies, not to mention sociology, and geography, political science, international relations, and anthropology, bring different perspectives to the study of borders. There are two broad perspectives on borders: difference machines vs. “good fences make
good neighbors.” From the universalist, solidarist or cosmopolitan perspective, the innate worth of individuals and communities is harmed by their division into us/them, self/other, inside/outside. These binary (or multiple) identities lead, necessarily, to the validation of the self through the denigration of the other, “the consolidation of identity through the constitution of difference. The self-reassurance of identity through the construction of otherness (Connolly 1991: 9). Borders are necessarily undemocratic, divisive, and should be undone, subverted, or revealed to be constructed (rather than natural). From a particularist, pluralist, or civilizational
perspective, identities and cultures are like scientific paradigms that are incommensurable, and the value choices that underpin these borders are irreconcilable. Borders that provide a functional way for those identities, cultures, and communities to regulate their limits (and their population) therefore decrease conflict or at least render the political choices of conflict clear. Borders are particularly important because they are one of the key institutions of the sover-
eign state. They represent the limit of the state, the space of law, authority, and responsibility. Highly militarized borders are organized around the exclusion of others, whereas internal borders, such as in Europe, are constructed around a different management problem. Borders have evolved, along with other institutions of the modern state system, as a way of answering the governmental problems of security, population management, economic circulation, and identity. Borders define clearly what space needs to be protected, and where citizens may seek refuge (although this was quickly undone with the invention of the airplane, aerial bombing, and missile technologies). Borders are the primary membrane of the traveling population, and determine who gets in and who stays out. Borders inscribe a particular set of economic relations through taxes, duties, and regulation – including the regulation of copyright, technologies, and expertise (although this is undone with globalized commodity chains).Borders are symbolically important for the assertion of a unique identity (even as the importance of physical boundaries is diminished by the ease of global communications). Borders are limits, zones, points, or lines between different communities that have functional
effects, such as legal jurisdiction, social rules or norms, economic regulations, cultural identity, or imaginary differentiation. They are proliferating as the discriminatory effect of the border to exclude or to include is dispersed throughout global space: bordering occurs as much at the fenced and secured physical frontier between nations as at the visa window of an embassy, at UNHCR offices, at the airport, and even virtually in remote databases. There is an important analytical distinction to be made between borders, which have particular effects of exclusion and inclusion in the sovereign community of a state, and boundaries, which have more general effects of exclusion and inclusion in other kinds of communities (Paasi 1998). The bordering function is present whenever inclusion/exclusion is defined: as Connal Parsley argues “as a judgment is performed … so the border is augured into being” (2003: 55). Chris Rumford highlights this change in the discriminatory geopolitical function of borders:“borders are now less important in terms of military defence and coercive control, and are notable for their (selective) permeability to human mobility” (2006: 159). Borders always involve the limit of a sovereign state’s legal jurisdiction,whereas boundaries exist in many social and political settings. For this article, we focus on the border as a crucial (if dispersed or deterritorialized) site of decision. Étienne Balibar characterizes borders as overdetermined, polysemic, and heterogenous.
Borders are overdetermined because each border represents overlapping political, economic, linguistic, social, and cultural boundaries: they are “world-configuring,” and not simply territorial (Balibar 2002: 79). Identities are created and reified by borders, which become heavy with social, cultural, and political meaning. Borders are polysemic, that is to say that borders
