Week 12: The Political Sociology and Political Geography of Borders

Borders remain a contested topic, both in academic scholarship and public discourse. They are likely to remain so because borders are intimately intertwined with such a range of basic human concerns. Indeed, many issues, like standards of living, identity, governance, and security, are at the center of political sociology and political geography, and in a broader sense across the social sciences and humanities. At the risk of great simplification, much of the debate boils down to two seemingly incompatible positions. The first regards borders as intrinsically negative and detrimental to human progress. This ‘borders-are-bad’ perspective emphasizes borders as sites of violence, extortion, and pejorative exclusion. They provide a mechanism for the accumulation and institutionalization of advantage and privilege in select parts of the world and thereby perpetuate overall global inequalities. As Joseph Nevins (2002, p. 216) wrote: ‘we need to argue and struggle for practices and mechanisms that are consistent with the ethics demanded by a common humanity, one of the most important of which is solidarity – one that knows no boundaries’.

On the other side, or what we could call the ‘borders-are-good’ perspective, some note the role of borders in framing the practical extent of social reciprocity, civil beneficence, and participatory dem

groups, but the everyday experiences of the vast majority of people are still heavily mediated through senses of territorial attachment and belonging, defined at some scale by various types of borders. Indeed, claims of cosmopolitan status, i.e. the view from nowhere, prove rather superficial upon closer examination since borders remain integral components of human activity and organization, even for the richest, jet-setting billionaire. As John Williams (2003, p. 42) noted, ‘territorial boundaries need not be inherently and irretrievably the products of immoral power, aimed at the domination and repression of human beings’.

But perhaps this ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ dichotomy misses the point somewhat since the definition of those categories generally reflects biases for or against some policy or practice, instead of the actual border per se. The same could be extended to the ongoing debate as to whether borders are opening or closing. In fact, these dichotomies wax and wane across time and place, but more interestingly, they often coexist. The simplest explanation for these apparent contradictions is that humans are dynamic place-makers and, as such, our places and the borders that mark them are never static in policy, practice, or even actual location, although we often invest a great deal in making them appear unchanging and immutable. Thinking of borders as processes, performances, methods, and technologies help move us beyond simple binaries and personal biases. These approaches also highlight the importance of understanding borders on their own terms and their varied capacities to serve as areas of opportunity and insecurity, zones of contact and conflict, sites of cooperation and competition, places of ambivalent identities and aggressive assertions of difference. They also highlight the challenges of retaining the ability of borders to catalyze belonging and identity while diminishing their propensity for exclusion and the creation of ‘others’. It remains highly questionable how successful that balancing act might be, but, regardless, borders will remain fundamental features of political sociology, international relations, and political geography for the foreseeable future, as well as basic facts of everyday life for countless people.