Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders

A. Amilhat-Szary, F. Giraut

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137468840
• eBook ISBN: 9781137468857
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the emerging forms and functions of contemporary mobile borders. It deals with issues of security, technology, migration and cooperation while addressing the epistemological and political questions that they raise. The 'borderities' approach illuminates the question of how borders can be the site of both power and counter-power.

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Borderities: The Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders

Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary and Frédéric Giraut

After a long period of oblivion that lasted for much of the second half of the 20th century, border studies over the past 20 years have once again become a fertile topic of discussion and debate, as national and international politics have brought them to the forefront of our news media. While knowledge about borders is growing steadily, their constant evolution invites scholars and practitioners alike to continue to revise ideas about what they represent for us and what they do to our lives. Following historical attempts to draw a universal understanding of the international border (Ancel, 1938; Foucher, 1986; Guichonnet & Raffestin, 1974; Martinez, 1994; Prescott, 1978), the focus has been on border dynamics, essentially that of debordering and rebordering (Amilhat Szary & Fourny, 2006; Kaplan & Häkli, 2002; Newman & Paasi, 1998; Popescu, 2011). However, the multiplication of borders seems to induce a shift from fixity to multi-location (Balibar, 2009; Squire, 2011; Vaughan-Williams, 2008). Through these processes, what appeared to be a linear divide loses its traditional topography, symbolic power and function as it disseminates in a reticular and relational manner that is always renegotiated in a way that could lead us to envision the border as ‘mobile’. We have been calling for a research agenda on the mobile border since one of our research projects bore this expression in its title in 2008, which was soon followed by preparations for an important international conference, the XIth meeting of the ‘Border Regions in Transition’ (BRIT) network (Amilhat Szary & Giraut, 2011). The apparently oxymoronic expression that is ‘mobile border’ could impose itself because a growing number of scholars are confirming that the contemporary border can only be grasped through its portativity and a change of focus toward the individual and his/her personalization of a mobile device (Agier, 2013; Cuttitta, 2006; Jones & Johnson, 2014; Steinberg, 2009; Weber, 2006), and also because of a developing awareness that mobility is imposing a new understanding of the social (Büscher, et al., 2011b; Retaillé, 2005; Söderström, et al., 2013). In that respect, a detour through some of the ‘hotspots’ of border studies may prove to be relevant to the goal of shedding light on the project of this book. A renewed deciphering of the most famous examples of hard borders, such as the US/Mexico divide, as well as soft borders, such as the Franco-Swiss border within the Geneva cross-border metropolis, may be revealed to be less orthodox than expected.

1 Questions raised by a short illustrative detour

Within one of the most cited examples of cross-border integration, namely the Geneva metropolis, various actors stand alongside, and interact with, one another. Very different relations and regimes of border living and border crossing co-exist in that region: traditional elites of the old Calvinist city state view themselves as being responsible for the upkeep of its international vocation and the provincial qualities that co-exist with each other. The global leaders, managers and traders of the international institutions and financial services co-exist with the French border workers who have assumed an important share of local employment in the past few decades, and both the old and new migrant workers held their national flags with pride at the ephemeral ‘fan zone’ of the recent soccer World Cup. The new Swiss borderers cross the line to France in search of cheaper accommodation, while the xenophobic activists call for closed borders to serve their objective of social upliftment. In this context, border issues can and should be addressed as the expression of complex layouts and the confrontation of different individualized regimes of crossing, but also of access to rights and resources.

At the heart of what can be considered as both one of the primary examples of walled borders (Rosière & Jones, 2012) and an authentic ‘border society’ (Dear, 2013), the regions around the line separating the United States and Mexico also bear witness to a growing complexity. Shifts in spatial and temporal scales are needed to perceive the border in its multiple forms, functions and implantations. This border dwells on the superposition of vast sets of technologies of control, and valorization over culturally hybrid ‘borderlands’, traditionally grasped through migratory chains between hometowns and destination cities. It now expands through its connections to spreading maquiladoras, special police in airports and border areas, and drones from both cartels and border patrols. The production of differentiated norms occurs in complex transnational circuits embedded in the flows of migrants and (more or less legal) goods. What may henceforth appear to be a ubiquitous border raises difficult theoretical and conceptual challenges that call for the mobilization of the spatial figures of layout, dissemination and projection. The advent of a mobile border – and its consequences, the diversification of ‘borderities’, provisionally defined here as the multiple rules and experiences of what a border can be – creates the framework for the questions this volume seeks to address.

These recent evolutions can hardly be understood, both methodologically and conceptually, with too classic a toolbox. What is at stake is not a change of focus or a shift from state to everyday life approaches, nor is its purpose to attain a universal model of borders. This book is part of a recent effort to help formalize a truly epistemological body of thought about borders, which answers the call for theory in the field, a call that has gone unheeded for a decade (Newman, 1999, 2003), and strengthens the hypothesis that borders constitute a relevant laboratory for studying socio-spatial relations and could ultimately lead to border analysis in terms of models (Brunet-Jailly, 2005; Hamez, et al., 2013). Its project may be even more ambitious: confronting borders with mobility lenses and the individualization processes they induce incentivizes the exploration of a renewed political and cultural geography of continuities and discontinuities, no longer based on the identification of spatial objects through their boundaries and their links, but functioning on the basis of categories whose property is to remain invisible. What if the world was not divided by lines whose visibility gives a sense of political balances but was structured by limits that are constantly being redefined?

The idea of ‘borderity’, a new term forged for the purposes of discussion, is intended to help develop an analysis that would throw off the constraints of the tautological relationship between territory, state and borders, by which the definition of any one term of this triptych is based on the existence of the other two. For that reason, the potential deconstruction of this triangle may reveal radical political content. Border studies may no longer be building geopolitics as praxeology but, on the contrary, may lead to the highlighting of spaces of critical intervention in a globalized world where ideological debate often hides behind narratives of efficiency and competitiveness. This volume seeks to understand how border studies’ tautological binding of territory, state and border has prevented thinking ‘border politics’, and set the conditions for exploring the conditions of renewed border politics.

2 Identifying two foundational paradigms of contemporary border studies

We clearly belong to an era that has seen the destabilization of a world order based on the quest for a stable balance between states, an era whose spatial alphabet has relied on dividing lines in the form of borders (or dyads). This first paradigm of contemporary border research is a processual one that relies on two phenomena (the opening and closing of borders) that were long thought to oppose one another, until border studies finally concluded that both these phenomena could affect the same border at the same time. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which marked the end of the international bipolar opposition that had prevailed during the Cold War, the general consensus was that walls would disappear and borders would open. This hope was reinforced by the technological progress of the 1990s, which saw the rise of the Internet and mobile communications as well as the generalization of flexible commercial and financial regulations, leading to what some dared to call the end, not just of territories and borders, but more broadly, of distance and geography (Badie, 1995; Moore, 2003). What we have witnessed since then is in fact the opposite: a short remission (destruction of a few Cold War barriers) was followed by both the multiplication of new walls (Bigo, et al., 2009; Brown, 2010; Ritaine, 2009; Vallet & David, 2012), the most visible aspect of this phenomenon, and the creation of new borders through ‘balkanization’. The temptation of borders (to both create and use them) remains very real at all levels of the new territorial production sets (Antheaume & Giraut, 2005). One of the main conclusions of border studies is that the debordering/rebordering processes are concomitant and happen simultaneously everywhere (Wastl-Walter, 2012; Wilson & Donnan, 2012).

Contemporary borders obey a second paradigm, one that has certainly attracted fewer academic studies, possibly because it is intuitively more difficult to understand. The forms and functions of borders no longer coincide. Borders were invented to materialize the terms of a set of political conventions, whereby the balance of forces allowed for a distinction to be made between two political bodies. Whether the origins of borders are to be found in the walls of the first Sumerian cities 4,000 years ago or in the boundaries invented by European sovereigns with the signing of the treaties of Westphalia that marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the start of a quest for territorial stability on the continent, borders appear as arbitrary figures that embody a range of functions. They at once materialize primary anthropological divisions between one social group and another, embody economic needs (to control and tax commercial exchanges) and constitute visual elements that contribute to landscape differentiation. It has been shown that it is no coincidence that the ‘invention’ of modern borders occurred at the same time as the emergence of more accurate maps that allowed new political artifacts to be drawn. Over the centuries that followed, border functions were located on fixed boundary lines and were often concentrated at points that enjoyed a distinct regime: the ‘doors’ of the house were obviously its main points of entry (besides the windows and the chimney). The border posts, however, could not function in an isolated manner and had to be linked to a decision center, making them appear peripheral. The metaphor of the house may help us better understand the contemporary confusion about the relationship between border functions and forms. The border functions of division, regulation and control have not changed as much as their place of enactment. The house is now linked to the world through a multiplicity of networks that penetrate its walls through electrical and fiber lines or satellite linkage. Who has not experimented with their mobile communication device to see how many networks will appear on their screen? This does not mean, however, that houses collapse or that anyone can enter, even only electronically, any type of space. Moreover, inhabitants of the same house can each construct their own bordering/debordering experience. The terms and conditions of spatial ordering have been seriously shaken, and it is time to rethink the border.

Most critical thinking on the evolution of borders concentrates on the impact of technological change on border functions (Johnson, et al., 2011), often interpreting it as a virtualization of world power relations. Seldom have any efforts been made to relate this topology to some kind of spatial anchoring that all networks are subject to (Popescu, 2011). The two paradigms that we identify here lead us to confirm that contemporary borders have not become dematerialized and should be analyzed through their viscosity and friction in relation to the multiple dimensions of space. Walls and barriers are only one part of this phenomenon of controlling access, the other being that surveillance ‘dispositifs’ (or sets of techniques and practices in the Foucauldian sense) rely on hard devices to support all networks and the topological circulation of information. Borders have not disappeared from our landscapes, and they are not virtual: the need to see the border persists (Amilhat Szary, 2012). However, the material expression of the border does not always coincide with its functions, which become more diffuse every day: the control of different types of flows is henceforth enacted using a multitude of adapted technologies that not only distinguish between persons, goods, capital and information, but also between those flows that are desirable and those that are not.

This growing dissociation between border functions and border locations provides the border with a mobile dimension that breaks with its traditional fixity in time and space. We are witnessing an epistemological breakdown, from the definition of the border as a palimpsest that fixes the memory of past movements (Foucher, 2007; Raffestin, 1986b) to the analysis of mobile bordering processes that tend to focus on the ongoing changes affecting borders (Amilhat Szary & Giraut, 2011). Whether it originated in the proliferation of flows resulting from globalization (Sheller & Urry, 2006) or in the wearing of mobile lenses to analyze them (Büscher, et al., 2011a), the disappearance of a fixed and integrated border calls for a renewal of border studies. The conceptualization of these changes should be able to account for the emerging dissociation and crystallization processes at work and shed light on their meaning. One could say the border is becoming a complex assemblage (Allen & Cochrane, 2010; Anderson & McFarlane, 2011), or a ‘socio-technical network’ (Latour, 2005b), and consider it as a ‘collective entity associating objects, actors (migrant or border police), places and regulations’ (Fourny, 2013). However, we tend to think that this kind of interpretation could erase the very politics of border places and bordering processes. Shifting the focus from institutions to practices by emphasizing the vernacularization of borders (Perkins & Rumford, 2013) brings the individual back into borders but not necessarily his subjectivity. This extends Balibar’s proposal that the border is no longer on the margins of the state but constitutes the heart of politics (Balibar, 1996). If the border is potentially everywhere, due to the dissemination of its functions, what remains of the borderline? And can this border that is everywhere still be considered a border?

The problem thus shifts from the need to describe a phenomenon endowed with infinite variability to one of formalizing the constituent elements of a renewed epistemology. In a way, the changing focus of border studies in response to the conceptualization of the border as a more mobile entity illustrates the way in which the social sciences adapt to relativity and chaos theories, as they have to function as a basis for categories that do not have fixed limits between them. Our conceptualization of a mobile border allows for an in-depth analysis of the contradictions that the contemporary border paradigms highlight. It answers the need for a relational framework of debate and discussion by providing the notion of a device that is permanently adapting to the flows it tries to control. However, this proposal is far from neutral, and one is bound to ask, what are the normative stakes implied by the politics of such a disruption in border thinking?

3 Borderity as a technology of power: the governmentality of territorial limits

Our interest in the control of flows has obviously led us to more of Foucault’s work, with a focus not so much on the disciplinary axis of his analysis of power as on his governmentality approach, in particular the concepts of dispositifs, technologies and biopolitics. From Foucault’s classes at the Collège de France in 1976–1977 on ‘Security, Territory, Population’ (Foucault, 2004), it would appear that he tended to disregard borders: ‘it is not so much about fixing limits, borders ( ... ) it is not so much about determining locations, but above all, essentially about allowing, guaranteeing, and securing flows’ (p. 31). By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty and its spatial expression in the modern era, he strives to demonstrate that territory is the outcome of a disciplinary vision applied to an environment in order to regulate it. Here we propose linking his various preoccupations with flows, territory and sovereignty (which are usually understood by commentators as defining distinct socio-historical times) in a way that makes them appear to be combinable modalities (Dean, 1999). This leads to a better understanding of his contempt for borders, as well as a possible extension of his reasoning regarding power, which helps us better understand the border.

Foucault’s writings can help us to come back to the initial, classical definition of the border as an arbitrary line, which was invented to secure a balance of forces between emerging states, and to escape the frequent tautology that establishes a necessary link between territory (as a bounded space, confined by borders) and state, or between state (as a power bestowed with sovereignty over space) and territory (and its borders). When he writes that we must not reduce the state to a ‘mythicized abstraction’ (Dean, 1999, p. 112) but rather consider it as a ‘regulatory idea’ (1999, p. 29), he makes a renewed analysis of borders possible. We could use the method he developed to deconstruct a ‘composite reality’ (1999, p. 112), that of the state, to decipher that of another political category, namely borders. We base this suggestion on the fact that borders can no longer be reduced to their functions, given that the spatial characteristics of borders and functions no longer coincide, as shown above.

If borders are not disappearing today, either in the field or in rhetoric, but are instead proliferating in the name of heightened security, it leaves us with a central, very Foucauldian question: where lies the political sense in inventing and maintaining borders? And how does such a scheme affect the forms and functions of power? Taking inspiration from Foucault’s observation that ‘The state is thus a principle of intelligibility of what is, but it is also what should be’ (2004, p. 295), we first thought of replacing ‘state’ by ‘border’ in one of the key sentences of his book, which provided us with a most interesting proposal: ‘the [border] (state) is thus a principle of intelligibility of what is, but is also what should be.’ (2004, p. 295).

Based on this substitution, we proceeded to re-examine Foucault’s theory of governmentality as a technique of government, which led us to forge a new term, ‘borderity’, derived directly from Foucault’s analysis of state and power. By ‘borderity’ we mean any technology of spatial division or socio-spatial division. In other words, borderity could be defined as the governmentality of territorial limits and their access.. This method proves very feasible in light of the ease with which one word can be replaced by the other in such central definitions: ‘By [borderity] (governmentality), [we mean] the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit complex, form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge, political economy, and as its essential technical means, the apparatus [or what Foucault calls ‘dispositifs’], of security’ (2004, p. 111).

In his historical approach, Foucault shows how the state has emerged through the stabilization of a territorialization process, guaranteed by a set of diplomatic and military measures closely lin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Borderities: The Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders
• Part I  Controlling Mobility: The Normative Power of Borderities
• Part II  Biopolitics: Embodying the Mobile Border
• Part III  Dispositifs: Interpreting Complex and Mobile Borders
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index