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CHAPTER 22

The shifting landscapes of border studies

and the challenge of relational thinking

Anssi Paasi

Imagine a contested border region. It might be anywhere in the world.

There are a range of ways to settle the issue: violence, a referendum,

international arbitration. Whatever the means adopted, or imposed, the

outcome will have consequences for people on both sides, depending on

who they are. While some will accept it, some may not. Populations may

move, towns and regions may be ‘cleansed’, genealogies may be rewritten.

The boundaries of the collectivity may be redrawn. (Richard Jenkins 2004,

3)

Introduction

This book provides a rich collection of theoretical interventions on borders issues and

a set of contextual case studies that illustrate the history and contemporary life on

various internal and external border regions of Europe and also how ethnic and

demographic dimensions have been embedded in the making of borders and in the

proliferation of cross-border activities. This book likewise highlights the wider effects

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of bordering, for example, in the case of the Schengen area. These studies

convincingly display the prominence of context in understanding the regional and local

geo-histories and in making sense of the meanings of borders for social communities

and wider societies.

This final chapter will discuss some challenges that border scholars seem to face

today. It will look first at the ongoing importance of borders for territorial thinking and

will then briefly look at the changes in conceptual perspectives that have characterized

border studies. The main part of the chapter will scrutinize the pros and cons of the

so-called relational thinking that has emerged in social sciences and in human

geography since the 1990s. This approach is particularly important since it seems to

challenge all kind of ‘bounded spaces’ and also usefully forces researchers to ponder

on what boundedness in effect means in the contemporary globalizing world and,

indeed, on where borders actually are located in the current complex world.

Such crucial questions are often put aside when scholars work with individual borders.

A conceptual understanding of the relational quality of border making might therefore

provide some possibilities for generalizations and a wider understanding of what is

common to the processes of border making. Such processes are always context-bound

but at the same time today also occur in the wider globalizing world.

Borders and the making of territory

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Border has been one of the most significant keywords in the history of political

geography, indeed a mirror image of the idea of the territorial state. “A world of

sovereign states is a world divided by boundaries”, suggested one of the leading

political geographers, Peter Taylor (1993, 164) in his much-used textbook, an idea

that has been reproduced even in the most recent versions of the same book. This

comment ascribes, most likely unintentionally, a certain fixity to both state territories

and their boundaries. “Most likely unintentionally”, since Taylor has long been a

serious advocate of an historical approach to space and territory. He has also been

one of the most serious critics of so-called embedded statism, the state-centric

thinking that has characterized political geography. Taylor’s critical views have been

shared by several scholars in geography and international relations studies. Besides

the critique on ‘embedded statism’, also concepts such as ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew

1994), ‘cartographic anxiety’ (Krishna 1996) and ‘spatial socialization’ (Paasi 1996)

have all aimed at revealing how territoriality is produced and practiced by bringing

together ideas about the supposed organic link between a state and nation/culture, by

separating domestic and foreign policies, or by accentuating the power of various

institutions (such as education) in the production and maintenance of the visions of

bounded state spaces.

Borders have traditionally been regarded as ‘necessary’ but contingent components of

the sovereignty of state territories (Agnew 2009). Under international law, individual

states generally define – by drawing on their own laws – the conditions that have to

be met by a person to legitimately cross its borders, as well as those that prevent

persons from crossing their borders when in violation of such laws. In political

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geography ‘bounded spaces’ have been understood in two major ways. Firstly, states

have been recognized as the dominant territories in the world system, and

respectively borders have been viewed as the key media in exercising territoriality, in

practicing sovereignty and in maintaining socio-spatial control in this system (Agnew

2009). While the well-known critiques of state-centrism noted above raise questions

about the ways how state power works and how nationalism and identity narratives

are mobilized by the key institutions of state socialization (education, media), these

queries have not made territory less important. Rather, such challenges have

motivated new research on how we should understand territory and borders (e.g.

Brighenti 2010, Elden 2010, Sassen 2013). Elden (2010), for example, has aimed at

expanding the traditional views on territory. He proposes that territory consists of

political-economic (land) and political-strategic (terrain) relations, but this is not all.

Territory is also dependent on political-legal (law) and political-technical (calculative

technologies) elements. Territory is thus part of a specific rationality, a ‘political

technology’ that is dependent on calculation as much as on control and conflict (Elden

2010). Further, identity is also an important dimension of (state) territory. Seen from

this angle, borders, too, are simultaneously instruments and expressions of

territoriality and part of the (changing) rationalities employed to govern state spaces

(Paasi 2012).

Secondly, supra- and sub-state regions have become increasingly important examples

of ‘bounded spaces’ in political geography and political science/international relations

studies (Jessop 2002, Paul 2013). Contrary to state spaces, such units have a more

diffuse character but they may be significant for citizens when they are related to

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constituencies. In the case of sub-state regions, borders have been exploited in the

contested practices of territorial governance, for instance in the devolution of power or

in the amalgamation of regional spaces, processes that often provoke resistance.

Supra-state regions are often taken by citizens as given, superimposed economic,

administrative or statistical spaces. In some contexts (like in the EU) much work has

been done to brand the region-building process as a ‘people’s project’ by rescaling

state spaces and by ‘lowering’ the internal borders and powers of the state by

accentuating the role regions (as part of a Europe of regions) as units that come ‘near

the citizens’. Thus, just as state spaces transform in a dynamic matrix of internal and

external relations, the local, national and international roles of borders change

perpetually as well. What we see as territorial transformation is both constituted by

and constitutive of those political, economic, and cultural practices and processes that

tend to separate territorial entities from each other in one way or other. We may label

these practices and processes, following the language of critical geopolitics, as

boundary-producing practices, that is the discourses and performances that

characterize the everyday life of states and citizens (Paasi 2013a, 2013b).

Slow regional transformation is perhaps most evident in the ongoing rise of new

‘national states’. The transformation can also be at times rapid, as it was in the case of

the collapse of the socialist Eastern Europe that gave rise to tens of new states.

Regional transformation processes often powerfully display the fact that the border

between states and nations may be fuzzy and that state-nation relations are often

characterized by tensions. Regional transformation reveals itself in the reshaping of

sub-state and supra-state spaces and in institutional economic and political

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arrangements but also in the proliferation of cross-border activities that are nowadays

an important part of the modification and rescaling of state-spaces at various spatial

scales (Jones and Paasi 2013, Zimmerbauer and Paasi 2013). Cross-border

regionalization has become a crucial strategy for the integration and rescaling of the

state system around the world, but particularly in the European Union where more

than 150 such regional arrangements exist (Jessop 2002, Deas and Lord 2006, Paul

2012). These tendencies are expressions of new (neoliberal) political rationalities that

embrace cost savings (‘economies of scale’), competitiveness and more effective

governance.

Shifting landscape of border studies

If territories and borders change perpetually, boundary/border studies too move on

and transform. Border studies have been at the core of political geography since the

institutionalization of the subfield at the turn of the 20th century, but the 1990s in

particular witnessed a major boom. The collapse of the Cold War divide between West

and East was the major background for this but numerous concurrent societal and

technological processes had their impact, too. Globalization, international integration

occurring on supra-state scale, the related opening of borders between states, and the

fast development of IC technologies seemed to change the ‘slow geography’ that

characterized the Cold War world order into a much faster one. A further stimulus for

the thematic expansion of border studies were the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA

that gave rise to a boom of security-related studies that subsequently have focused on

bordering, ordering and the analysis and pre-empting of terrorism, human trafficking,

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smuggling, (illegal) immigration, and organized crime and their supposed threats to

national identities/identification (Paasi 2012). All these developments have led to a

situation where the understanding of borders as mere formal dividing lines has

changed and the clear-cut, inside-outside partition has become fuzzy. Yet, many

borders still stubbornly exist. While only two of world’s total 29 major armed conflicts

during 2001 - 2010 have been interstate (SIPRI 2011), a notable ‘hardening’ of state

borders has simultaneously occurred in many places around the world.

Along with the expansion of research an interest in new theoretical approaches, novel

interdisciplinary perspectives and in ‘disciplinary border-crossings’ has occurred, as has

a rise in wider interpretations of what actually constitutes a ‘border’. A number of

scholars still operate with concrete state borders as experts of border drawing and

governance, but all kinds of societal boundaries and dividing lines have also emerged

on research agenda (Sibley 1995, Paasi 2011). And as students from different

academic fields have brought their own approaches into the debate, at times it has

been an arduous task to see what, indeed, is the ‘border’ that scholars are talking

about. Tens of new books and edited journal issues now have titles that use border,

frontier or boundary as keywords, often citing these concepts in ways that look

askance at long tradition of border studies that historically provided border scholars

with a clear-cut vocabulary. Geographers such as Prescott (1987) once carefully

defined the terminology of border studies: boundary was the abstract line that

separated state territories, frontier was a zone category, and borders were the areas

adjacent to boundaries. While such definitions are still valid, from the present day

perspective such definitions may seem somewhat flawed, firstly, because of their

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rather straight-forward state-centrism and, secondly, since they fasten the language of

border research to specific ‘artefacts on the ground’, dividers or edges of power

containers that, once established, are relatively stable, and are often invoked as ‘holy’

entities in state ideologies (Agnew 2008).

In contemporary research these ‘parallel terms’ are normally used as synonyms. It

seems, however, that the ‘border’ has gradually become the more dominant but at the

same time somewhat vaguer keyword. It is perhaps no overstatement to note that the

redefinition or re-theorization of border terms and proposals for new theoretical

approaches seems to be today an unending, self-feeding activity. While most scholars

have now abandoned the notion of a general border theory (Paasi 2011), such re-

theorization seems to be related to the wider tendency to continually invent new

keywords in social and cultural sciences, which perhaps reveals something of the

mode of operation in the contemporary, increasingly competitive academia that

demands ‘novelty’ of its scholars. Of course, the purposeful drive to see and

conceptualize the role of borders in new ways, to develop new concepts, approaches

and methods for border research, has normally a much more serious intellectual

rationale. To take but one example, the new but slightly vague spatial keywords

related to globalization and security issues (e.g. the world of flows, annihilation of

space, borderless world, end of the territory, de/re-territorialization, mobility,

hybridity, post-modern condition, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism, inside/outside,

internal/external security) all seem to have challenged the apparent fixity that had

characterized – perhaps even more than the world – the world of border research

during the Cold War period (Newman & Paasi 1998). Instead of seeing them merely as

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fixed lines, borders are now also seen as social processes, practices, discourses,

knowledge, narratives, symbols and institutions. New approaches have provided an

alternative perspective on borders but have not totally replaced the tradition that

focuses on concrete border cases and issues.

During the last 10-15 years or so border studies have become increasingly diversified.

While a catch-all theory of borders might be an unattainable dream, there exists a

vital search for new conceptualizations on the changing roles of borders. Often this

work echoes the early calls to study hegemonic and counter-hegemonic boundary-

producing (and reproducing) practices, discourses and performances that are not

related merely to state governance and security issues but also to the everyday lives

of citizens (Paasi 2013). Researchers argue now that bordering always reflects power

relations, choices, and negotiation. Such practices divide living spaces and resources,

and are part of meaning making at various spatial scales. Bordering is related to

politics in many ways. It connotes not only the politics of delimitation and

classification, but also the politics of representation and the politics of identity that

come into play. Bordering practices keep things apart or bring them together; borders

are articulated in particular terms, and they allow certain expressions of identity and

collective memory to exist while blocking others. Respectively such practices are open

to contestation at the level of state but also in everyday life, which raises a question

as to how borders should actually be drawn, where they are and how do they function

(Johnson et al. 2011, Nolan et al. 2013).

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It is also important to realize that those operating with borders or studying them have

various motives. The statecraft that shapes and runs security policy and leaders of

national (or European-wide) border guarding systems certainly firmly believe in

borders and boundary-producing/reproducing practices. These elements are probably

even crucial to their professional identity. Similarly, scholars participating in concrete

delimitation processes of contested boundary lines certainly have different motives

and purposes than those operating with more conceptual issues or proposing ideas of

a cosmopolitan ‘borderless world’. Yet all such views are constitutive of the

contemporary complexity of borders, and what is needed is a dialogue between

various actors.

Relational thinking: a challenge for territorial approaches?

Relational thinking has been one of the new shibboleths in social and cultural sciences.

This thinking refers to a complex set of ideas and arguments that has very long roots

in the social sciences and philosophy. A new feature since the 1990s has been the

tendency to lean on relational views in order to challenge bounded spaces. In

geography, relational thinking dominates the current theoretical debates on place,

region and territory. For some scholars relational perspective is an inevitable

normative political perspective associated with globalization. Economic geographer

Amin (2003, 33), for example, notes that “…globalization and the general rise of a

society of transnational flows and networks no longer allow a conceptualization of

place politics in terms of spatially bound processes and institutions” (emphasis mine).

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Relational views have entered, since the 1990s, also into the discussion on ‘soft’

planning spaces.

A relational perspective was powerfully launched by Doreen Massey (1995). In her

widely cited article, ‘The Conceptualization of Place’, she proposed that while

recognizing the individual uniqueness of each place, such places as well as their

identities or citizen’s identities may be conceptualized as essentially porous, open and

interlinked. Contrary to many relationalists who do not at all problematize the idea of

the border, she stressed that places (her discussion on ‘place’ covered very different

examples: nation-states, counties, European Union and parishes) do have boundaries

around them but there are a number of points that have to be considered about such

boundaries. She made four important observations that have forced scholars to reflect

on the complexity of each unique boundary and place.

Firstly, she noted, “these lines” do not embody any eternal truth about places but

rather are “lines” drawn by the society to serve particular purposes. Massey usefully

pointed out that all boundaries are as much the product of society as are the other

social relations that constitute social space. She also suggested that all boundaries,

whether national borders in the world atlas or lines marking property and parish on a

local map, are “socially constructed”. Of course this widely cited idea, perhaps

irritatingly, simplifies the concrete making of borders in an often loose language of

social constructionism. It is well known that the making of state boundaries, their

demarcation and delimitation are often the result of war and violent conflicts, and are

related to international law and complicated ideas of sovereignty. The ‘social

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construction’ of an administrative border inside states is often a much simpler and less

painful process, even if such borders may also be contested. On the other hand, social

constructionism itself means many things: it is important to know whether we are

discussing the process of constructing something or a ready-made construct that is –

once produced – then reproduced (cf. Hacking 1999). Massey’s view of boundaries as

lines has also been challenged since the 1990s. In a word, her first comment calls for

considerable sensitivity on the part of border scholars.

Secondly, she pointed out that boundaries unavoidably cut across some of the other

social relations which construct social space. Therefore, the places that borders

enclose are not pure. This theme has been developed further by Sibley (1995), who

looked at the idea of purity in relation to borders and discussed the mobilization of

xenophobia and moral panic. Sibley suggests that such xenophobia based on images

of purified national identities sits uneasily with the flows and cultural fusions which are

generated by global capitalism. Also Massey argued that places – whatever spatial

units they are – gain (and have also earlier gained) their character by links with

elsewhere. State borders are agreed between states, and the images of trust or threat

mobilized in foreign policy discourses are based on dividing lines between parties.

Narratives of national identities mobilized in nationalist discourses raised against

immigration are examples of a tendency to create spatial imaginaries that represent

spaces as ‘pure’. Under its current policy the EU has taken strong steps in lowering

internal borders by managing and modifying the existing social relations between

states. Simultaneously a strengthening of the external border between the ‘EU-rope’

and non-Europe has occurred. In many states, especially in southern and western

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European states, immigration and refugees have begotten moral panic and

xenophobia. The discussion of geographers about the need to erase borders has not

arisen out of the blue but echoes voices raised earlier in critical anthropology, where

scholars questioned the conventional taken-for-granted links between bounded spaces

and people’s assumed fixed identities (Gupta and Ferguson 1992).

Third, boundaries matter in the sense that where people live in relation to borders

determines many highly significant elements related to identity and mobility such as

their nationality, which borders they may cross or which they are not allowed to cross,

for example. In this sense, boundaries are significant means of organizing, controlling

and managing social space and social relations. This adds a strong element of

governance (and biopolitics) into borders (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008). While

borders are today widely understood as much more than mere lines, also the location

of a physical border makes a difference. While the citizens of a state typically live and

operate under similar national socialization mechanisms, and often adopt similar

hegemonic images of threat or views of enemies, life on the immediate vicinity of a

border differs in many ways from life elsewhere in the state because the border and

the imaginaries related to it become part of the daily life practices (Paasi 1996).

Fourthly, Massey argued that drawing boundaries is an exercise of power, and this

holds true in the case of determining national borders but also in the making of local

governance units. Indeed, such border drawing is crucial in all social relations and in

the making of social communities and the rules of inclusion and exclusion. One power-

related quality of boundaries is, Massey states, the fact that they can be constructed

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as protection by the relatively of weak but also by the strong to protect their already

privileged position. The promotion of boundedness is typically related to the questions

of belonging and who belong and who do not. The current situation in the EU is an

example of the latter. Borders and new smart border management technologies and

practices are developed to control the mobilities and stays of those trying to move to

Europe from the outside as tourists, workers or immigrants.

It is an interesting point that, in spite of making suggestions and claims regarding the

meanings of boundaries, relational thinkers such as Amin or Massey are not border

scholar in the traditional sense of the word. These scholars have been interested in

borders as hindrances to normative, progressive politics that would see borders as

open but have not studied concrete political/state borders in the making or their socio-

cultural meanings produced and reproduced by certain social collectives or individuals.

For them boundaries are in general regressive elements that reflect the cartographic

legacy of measuring location on the basis of geographical distance and territorial

jurisdiction. Relational thinkers more often than not lean on network thinking and

many of them accentuate the importance of post-structuralist theoretical perspectives

(Murdoch 2006).

Moving beyond territorial-relational divide

Relational thinkers thus encourage us not to take borders or bounded spaces for

granted and challenge opinions, which propose, for instance, that culture and

bounded territories are related to each other in unproblematic ways. This collection of

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articles gives empirical evidence on the importance of such claims. Ethnicity and

cultural elements are never strictly bounded. Yet, in spite of the powerful rise of

relational thinking, we cannot rid ourselves of (state) borders by just declaring that we

live in a world of relations and interactions, not to speak of the predictions regarding

the rise of a borderless world that were so common in the 1990s among globalization

theorists. Martin Jones (2009) aptly states that “When performing their practical

politics, agents imagine and identify a discrete, bounded space characterized by a

shared understanding of the opportunities or problems that are motivating the very

nature of political action.” This action occurs in multi-scalar processes and practices

related to geo-economy, control and management of state spaces and populations, as

well as in the processes of spatial socialization, for instance, in education and media.

Relational critique also often implies – and Massey (1995) stated explicitly – that

borders are lines that surround spatial entities, lines that are increasingly crossed in

the current world characterized by relations. Yet in the case of state territories such

line-thinking can also be challenged: we may well argue that borders, symbolism and

institutions related to borders, state and nation become fused in the processes in

which territorial spaces become institutionalized (Paasi 1996). This perspective

suggests that borders are not only to be found in border areas and border landscapes

but are ‘located’ in broader social practice and discourse in the broader societies, and

increasingly even outside of state spaces in the wider, global space. The idea that

‘borders are everywhere’ was originally launched by Etienne Balibar (1998) who

claimed that borders have become so diffuse that they have transformed whole

countries into borderlands. Respectively, borders or rather new bordering practices are

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located at airports, in shopping centres or in streets, for example. It is also

increasingly often expected that not only border guards but also ordinary citizens

participate in bordering practices. The picture below, taken at an airport in New York,

encourages just such civil vigilance.

Fig. 1. “Security is everyone’s business”. “Stay alert”. “Be aware”. “Speak up”. Poster

encouraging vigilant behaviour in passengers at an international airport in New York

(photo by the author).

Also postnationalism and transnationalism would suggest that sovereignty is spreading

away from the nation-state, which would dissolve the links between political identities,

participation and the territorial state. Especially for extreme transnational theorists,

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identities and political activities are now multilocal. They suggest that it does not make

sense to see loyalties in relation with the nation-state, and likewise territory and

politics are not in a one-to-one relation. This thinking has also produced certain forms

of rhetoric and lines of thought which force us to consider especially the current and

future roles of citizenship, a status that is quite dramatically related to borders and the

rights to border crossings (Paasi 2011)

Towards a wider understanding of borders

Rather than disappearing, as the extreme globalization theorists proposed during the

1990s, the meanings of borders are thus simply transforming, becoming more

complex and fuzzy. Surveillance technologies associated with increasing border control

– to prevent terrorism, for example – may someday exist practically everywhere, far

away from the state borders proper – even in other state territories. While many

borders are increasingly concrete barriers, the securitization of ‘bounded’ state spaces

is occurring ever more in global space through border crossings. In the name of

security, border control and management stretch across borders. The UK Border

Agency, for example, is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the UK and

tells in its home page how “We are a global organisation operating in local

communities and in about 130 countries worldwide”. Borders exist therefore not

merely at borders proper, but at airports, in shopping precincts, and in streets

(Rumford 2006) wherever ‘suspicious activity’ is monitored (see Fig. 1). Vaughan-

Williams (2010) has identified three key dimensions that characterize the UK border

security: the offshoring of the border area from the UK territory, the reliance on

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technologically advanced forms of identity management and an increasingly pre-

emptive logic based on risk profiling. Such increasing bordering complexity may in fact

strengthen border maintenance in a society and be constitutive of social, cultural,

ethnic and political distinctions.

The expanding ‘securitization complex’ suggests that borders be must understood also

as processes that are related to circulation and technologies. Stephen Graham (2010,

89) has recently argued that “states are becoming internationally organized systems

geared towards trying to separate people and circulations deemed risky or malign

from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection.” This ‘separation’ process occurs

both inside and outside of state territorial borders and, indeed, results in a blurring

between international and urban/local borders. This leads also to the fusing of the

scalar dimensions of borders. Local, national and global are no longer, if they ever

have been, a neatly structured hierarchy.

This forces us to reflect in more detail on what such relocation of borders means in

theoretical terms and how the contemporary functions and manifestations of borders

should be understood. I have proposed that this expansion of meanings and

increasing complexity of borders can be conceptualized in the form of two overlapping

modalities, which are historically and spatially contingent (Paasi 2013b). If borders are

understood as marking the spread of societal and political control into society (and at

times even outside of existing state borders), there must also exist other ways in

which borders are more widely present. At first, borders as expressions of territoriality

are normally crucial to what can be called the discursive landscape of social power.

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This is a construct that has become institutionalized in contemporary states in the long

term and manifests itself in many ways in material landscapes such as military

commemorations, as well as in ideologies and nationalist performances throughout

state territory (Paasi 1996). That these matters often draw on banal, mundane forms

of nationalism (Billig 1995) makes them even more persistent in daily life. Think, for

example, how much emotional bordering is entrenched in national celebrations and

holidays, independence days, or military parades. And think how national landscapes

and other elements of national iconographies are mobilized in all states to celebrate

the uniqueness of the state in question. Given that the current mechanisms of

surveillance and societal control are expanding deep into society, it may similarly be

argued that the key location of a national(ist) border does not lie at the concrete line

but in the manifestations of the perpetual nation-building process and nationalist

practices, and that the roots of these manifestations need be traced to the histories of

these practices and iconographies.

The fact that borders are part of the discursive landscapes of social power, which are

based on symbolic and physical violence, means that scholars need to be sensitive to

the complex meanings associated with national borders and bordering. Different

generations may have varying experiences of borders. Through their socialization at

school and in the family, and particularly through the printed and electronic media,

children and young people pick up that national borders – often defined on historical

grounds – are the ‘correct’ territorial borders of ‘their’ community. Sometimes, of

course, they are also taught that borders are simply wrong, ‘unnatural’. We are also

forced or persuaded to learn the legitimate and hegemonic national meanings

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attached to these borders and what the proper pools of emotions, fears and memories

that we must draw on in this connection (such meanings can, of course, always be

challenged and can even change as a consequence of revolutions, occupations and

the like) (Paasi 2013b). The power of borders for national identity narratives and

nationalism is not a homogeneous phenomenon. Rather, such power is highly context

dependent, and even the power and manifestation of the individual borders of a state

can vary radically. They can also be challenged by immigration. A fitting example is

the Finnish state where the (Schengen) border between Finland and Sweden is

practically non-existent, whereas the flows across the Finnish-Russia border are

effectively controlled by border guarding systems and visa regimes.

On the other hand, borders have at the same time become elements of wider control

and surveillance infrastructures in the current dynamic world characterized by flows of

people, ideas, ideologies and goods and by a fluctuating fear of terrorism. If the

landscapes related to nationalist ideas and a national identity can be labelled

‘discursive landscapes of social power’ that draw on effects, affects and emotions,

such technical landscapes of control and surveillance are also gaining importance

(Paasi 2012). The manner in which these exist in various societies is a context-bound

feature, however. We certainly also have cases (like many ‘failed states’) where

neither emotional landscapes (and symbolic violence) nor technical landscapes (and

physical violence) seem to be feasible.

The simultaneous existence of these two landscapes may strengthen bordering in

some specific society as well as be constitutive of social, cultural and political

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distinctions between social groups and also contribute to the making of calculable

territories. On the other hand, the strengthening of increasingly technical landscapes

of control is an expression of the new political and economic rationality where mobility

of ideas and human beings is seen as a problem that needs a new, costly technical

solution. The control of mobilities is often seen as a security issue but it definitely is

related to the perpetual Othering of cultures, like the fear of poor immigrants.

These two overlapping ‘landscapes’ link the abstract ideas of border to wider social

categories. They clearly show that the site of borders is increasingly in the discourses

and practices that are exploited to both mobilize and fix territoriality, security,

identities, emotions, social memories, the past-present-future-axis and forms of

national socialization (Paasi 2013b). These landscapes eventually function to the same

end: to fortify the national community as a bounded unit, however porous it might be.

All this suggests that it is continuously vital to reflect on what kind of forms borders

and bordering practices take in various contexts. It is equally important to reflect how

the State and diverging alliances of states work in this respect. The physical and

symbolic territorial control of all kinds of flows, (national) ideologies and socialization –

the key mediators in how borders enter into the institutional practices and discourses

of daily lives, civil society and ethnic groupings – thus represent highly important and

increasingly complex objects of research for border scholars.

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Agnew, John. 2009. Globalization & Sovereignty. New York: Lanham, Rowman &

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Amin, Ash. 2003. “Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place.” Geografiska

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Balibar, Etienne 1999. “The borders of Europe.” In Cosmopolitics, edited by Cheah,

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