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Exploring the Critical Potential of the

Borderscapes Concept
a

Chiara Brambilla
a

Center for Research on Complexity, University of Bergamo, Italy

Published online: 09 May 2014.

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To cite this article: Chiara Brambilla (2015) Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes
Concept, Geopolitics, 20:1, 14-34, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2014.884561
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Geopolitics, 20:1434, 2015

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2014.884561

Exploring the Critical Potential of the

Borderscapes Concept

Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 05:48 04 September 2015

CHIARA BRAMBILLA
Center for Research on Complexity, University of Bergamo, Italy

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by

important changes in the last twenty years. After the processual
shift of the 1990s (from border to bordering), in recent years there
has been increasing concern about the need to critically question the current state of the debate on the concept of borders.
Within this framework, this article explores the critical potential
of the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative
approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that,
though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and methodological. Such approaches show
the significant potential of borderscapes for future advances of critical border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational
flows, thereby contributing to the liberation of (geo)political imagination from the burden of the territorialist imperative and to the
understanding of new forms of belonging and becoming that are
worth being investigated.

THE CONCEPTUAL EVOLUTION OF BORDERS: FROM THE

PROCESSUAL SHIFT TO BORDERSCAPES
The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by significant
changes in the last twenty years. In order to outline an argument for the
critical potential of the borderscapes concept, it is necessary to begin by
tracing how the concept of borders has changed over time.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after a somewhat premature attempt
to discard political borders in a paradigm suggesting a borderless,1 globalised world, newer approaches acknowledged the continued relevance of
Address correspondence to Chiara Brambilla, Center for Research on Complexity (Ce. R.
Co.), University of Bergamo, Piazzale S. Agostino, 2, Bergamo, 24129, Italy. E-mail: chiara.
brambilla@unibg.it
14

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15

borders for politics and everyday life. However, research interests increasingly shifted from an initial focus on borders as territorial dividing lines
and political institutions to borders regarded as socio-cultural and discursive
processes and practices. As a consequence, border research went from
being a sub-discipline of political science and international relations into
an interdisciplinary field, combining expertise from political science, geopolitics, human and cultural geography, anthropology and sociology as well as
cultural, literary and media studies.2 This new interdisciplinary interest in
borders is a result of the major changes in world politics in the last twenty
years. Among these, the most notable is the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the dissolution of the order imposed by the Cold War together with the
re-emergence of many boundary disputes, setting off the rise of new territorial claims. The processes of change due to globalisation have, on the
one hand, led to greater integration and global consciousness and, on the
other, led to a renewed demand for certainty, identity and security followed
by the spread of protectionist policies on the economic level and feelings
of anti-immigration. Finally, it is important to remember the reconfiguration
of practices and discourses concerning European borders with respect to
funding and investment in research on cross-border cooperation within the
European Union.3
In this context, we have moved away from classic approaches in which
borders, assumed to be mere delimitations of sovereignty, were considered
as naturalised and static territorial lines.4 In the face of contemporary global
changes, these approaches appeared to have limitations and it was necessary
to develop new concepts capable of revealing the dynamic social and spatial relationships that take place in and across borders.5 The transition from
the concept of border to that of bordering, at the centre of the processual
shift in border studies, allowed borders to be viewed as dynamic social processes and practices of spatial differentiation.6 This conceptual shift results in
the understanding of spreading and multiplying borders,7 showing the most
important points from which to start thinking about the territorial, political,
and socio-cultural changes of the current world at different levels and, thus,
not only along the dividing lines of nation-state sovereignties.8 However,
not only is this a matter of dis-locating and re-locating borders, but it also
involves a reflection on the multiplication of border forms, functions and
practices through their distribution and proliferation in a variety of social
and political arenas, which determine a progressive movement of borders
from the margins to the centre of the political sphere.9 Hence, it is important to analyse borders in a way that allows us to consider not only their
institutional nature, but which also allows reflection on their quality of social
institution on a wider level.10
After the processual shift of the 1990s, in recent years there has been
increasing concern about the need to critically question, on the one hand,
the current state of the debate on the concept of borders and to reflect,

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Chiara Brambilla

on the other, upon the possible strategies to outline the topics of greatest
importance for a new programmatic agenda of border studies. In 2009, the
article Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies
was published in the Geopolitics journal.11 Two years later, in 2011, the
same journal published an interesting reflection by James Sidaway on The
Return and Eclipse of Border Studies? Charting Agendas.12 During the same
year, Political Geography published an article by various authors entitled
Intervention on Rethinking the Border in Border Studies.13 At the same
time, two manuals dedicated to border studies were published; one edited
by Doris Wastl-Walter as part of the Border Regions series by Ashgate, and
the other edited by Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan.14 In both manuals,
particularly in the one edited by Wilson and Donnan, it is clear that there is
an intention to not only recall the most convincing evolutions in the recent
reflection on borders but also to reflect on some key issues to develop a new
agenda for border studies.15
Comparing the insights offered by these recent contributions, it is possible to understand the reasons for the urgency to critically question some
of the most important issues in the interdisciplinary debate on borders by
including them as part of contemporary political life. Going into the substance of these interventions, it is first worth considering the arguments in
the collectively authored Agenda for critical border studies.16 At the outset
of the article the authors clarify their aim to outline what they regard as
some of the most pressing questions and problems facing those engaged in
the multi-disciplinary study of borders in contemporary political life.17 In so
doing, their main concern is that border studies needs re-tooling in face of
the diffusion and complexification of borders moving beyond the territorialist epistemology still pervasive in the study of borders.18 In spite of the
work of a growing number of scholars that takes into account the increasing complexity of the relationship between borders, territory, sovereignty as
well as citizenship, identity, and otherness, what the field continues to lack,
however, is a substantive reference point for scholars to identify a number of
research questions which taken together constitute a stimulating ground for
what alternative epistemologies, and equally ontologies and methodologies,
are called for by the changing nature of the border.19 This reference point
would help to free border studies from the epistemological, ontological,
and methodological shackles of an ultra-modernistic, territorialist Western
geopolitical imagination.20 Without moving away from this imagination the
risk is that border studies will be unable to address the ongoing complexification of bordering processes in global politics that entails ethical and
normative issues of in/exclusion with which border studies has been rather
ill-equipped to handle until now.
At the end of 2012, Geopolitics published an issue that was introduced
with a contribution by Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams proposing
to formalise critical border studies as a distinctive approach within the

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The Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept

17

broader interdisciplinary literature on border studies.21 In their article, Parker

and Vaughan-Williams refer to the reasons for the development of such a
line of critical analysis as they were already presented in the programmatic
Agenda signed collectively with other border scholars in the same journal
three years before.22 However, the authors point out that they aim to broaden
and deepen the Agenda as well, raising a number of entrance points oriented around this core objective: the need to problematise the border not as
a taken-for-granted entity, but as a site of investigation, by exploring alternative border imaginaries beyond the line and therefore able to reveal the
manifold nature of the border that is in a constant state of becoming; the
growing sense among critical scholars of border studies that the territorial
trap is now even more inadequate for conceptualising the spatial and temporal coordinates of contemporary political and everyday life;23 the need
to develop tools for identifying and interrogating what and where borders
are and how they function in different settings, with what consequences,
and for whose benefit; the call for a shift from the concept of the border
to the notion of bordering practice and the reference to the imaginary of
performance for an alternative paradigm for (re)thinking border politics; the
urgency to understand that borders are also temporally not fixed; the interrogation of the link between bordering practices and violence in the past and
present as well as the various forms of contestation and resistance border
practices give rise to.24
Sidaway also addresses these issues posing the relevant question, But
looking forward what are the agendas now for border studies?.25 The
authors arguments can be closely associated with those advanced by Parker
and Vaughan-Williams in broadening and deepening their Agenda. Sidaway
highlights the need to critically reflect on the significance of the sharpest
borders and the multiplication as well as the persistence of borders and
bordering in contemporary global scenarios arguing that now is the time for
a deeper contribution of a focus on borders/bordering within wider social
and political theory.26 In this context, Sidaway goes further stating that what
is needed are not more border studies per se. . . . Rather we need to think
about how a variety of bordering illustrates changing configurations of the
social and political.27
Concerning where the need to critically question the current state of the
debate on borders comes from, similar arguments are advanced in the essay
in Political Geography on rethinking the border in border studies.28 At the
outset of the essay, Corey Johnson and Reece Jones declare that the contributors aim to put forth possibilities for a more coherent, interdisciplinary
agenda for border studies focusing on the interconnected themes of place,
performance, and perspective.29 Later on a fourth theme is added to this list:
political. Following Johnson and Jones, The shifting nature of borders has
made them neither less politicized, nor lessened the need for scholars to be
mindful and critical of the complicated relationship between state power and

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Chiara Brambilla

space and the fact that this relationship is perhaps most apparent at borders,
wherever they are found.30
All these contributions draw attention to the continued need to think
about alternative geopolitical visions in which novel approaches to borders
are mobilised in the contemporary era of globalisation and transnational
flows. All scholars make a variant of the point that epistemic and political
categories are mutually reinforcing. While borders continue to have considerable relevance today, there are ways in which we need to revisit them in
light of constantly changing historical, political and social contexts, grasping
their shifting and undetermined nature in space and time. Consequently, we
need to take inspiration from the research questions posed by border studies
in the last two decades that have remained partially unresolved in order to
develop alternative approaches to borders. These approaches lie along three
main axes of reflection that, though inevitably interrelated and to some extent
overlapping, can be analytically distinguished as: epistemological, ontological
and methodological.
Reflecting upon the borderscapes concept, seems to me to suggest a
potentially useful way of developing innovative reflections for each of the
three axes moving our understanding of the relationships between borders,
forms of power, territory, political systems as well as citizenship, identity and
otherness forward.

BORDERSCAPES AND AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL INSIGHT

INTO CRITICAL BORDER STUDIES
The aim of this article is to identify and describe the critical potential of
the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative approaches
to borders along the three main axes of reflection as distinguished above.
Such a potential is mainly inscribed in the opportunity that the concept of
the borderscape offers us to highlight the constitutive role that borders in
modernity have played in the production of political subjectivity, thereby
showing the potential of the borderscape as a space for liberating political
imagination from the burden of the territorialist imperative while opening
up spaces within which the organisation of new forms of the political and
the social become possible. To put it differently, the borderscapes concept
provides a political insight into critical border studies that goes beyond the
issue of the complexity of borders to embrace ethical and normative issues
of in/exclusion, which seem to me to constitute a core epistemological blind
spot at the heart of border studies, as currently configured.
I take the term borderscapes from the work of Prem Kumar Rajaram
and Carl Grundy-Warr in their book Borderscapes. Hidden Geographies and
Politics at Territorys Edge.31 In the introduction, the two scholars describe
their conceptual perspective on borderscapes, which is recalled in their

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argument from one of the contributions in the volume, that by Suvendrini

Perera on the borders of Australia.32 Perera argues that this use of the term
borderscapes is linked to the urgency to find a new concept that can express
the spatial and conceptual complexity of the border as a space that is not
static but fluid and shifting; established and at the same time continuously
traversed by a number of bodies, discourses, practices, and relationships that
highlight endless definitions and shifts in definition between inside and outside, citizens and foreigners, hosts and guests across state, regional, racial,
and other symbolic boundaries. In other words, Perera aims to describe
new geographies and socio-spatial identities that, as the result of negotiations between identity and territorial claims and counter-claims, challenge
the modern geopolitical, territorialist imaginary.33 Related to this imaginary
are John Agnews state-centric territorial traps in which states are viewed
as the self-enclosed geographical containers of socioeconomic and politicalcultural relations.34 With the borderscapes concept, Perera tries to give new
shape to the edges of the nation-state by showing them as places where different ideas of space, territoriality, sovereignty as well as identity, citizenship
and otherness in and across the nation-state boundary lines are formulated,
reformulated, negotiated and acted to react to the violence of the territorialist epistemology.35 Pereras effort does not entail however a denial of
the states continued relevance in contemporary political life, but rather a
rethinking of the meaning of both state territoriality and political space in an
era of globalisation and transnational flows. Accordingly, in the book edited
by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, the borderscapes concept is used as a conceptual and analytical tool for rethinking categories of political belonging. This
is possible through the articulation of new configurations based on a novel
concept of community that is (re)defined by giving attention to the fluidity
of nation-state borders and the complexity of the experiences of those who
live in them and/or across them. In this context, borders are not neutral
lines of separation between nation-state sovereignties, but they simultaneously define membership and exclusion, marking the boundary between
rule and its exceptions.36
The move from the concept of border to bordering has encouraged a
significant turning point in the reflection on borders. However, I find that the
bordering concept is not sufficient by itself to fully capture the complexity of
the many implications that the search for alternative epistemological, ontological and methodological reflections involves. For instance, one aspect that
should be further analysed is the relationship between bordering processes
and the where of the border, that is to say its shifting and changing location.
Questioning the where of the border also involves a focus on the way in
which the very location of borders is constantly dis-placed, negotiated and
represented as well as the plurality of processes that cause its multiplication
at different points within a society, making it visible or invisible depending on the case. In this regard, the critical potential of borderscapes can

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Chiara Brambilla

be seen in the contribution that the concept gives to explain the complex
dynamics characterising the link between the persistence of old boundaries
and the multiplication of new forms, functions and practices of borders in
contemporary globalised scenarios.37 In fact, the borderscapes concept offers
the opportunity for a critical questioning at multiple levels of investigation.
First, it concerns an analysis of the normative dimension of the border,
that is, critically assessing the ethical, legal and empirical premises and arguments used to justify particular cognitive and experiential regimes on which
border policies are articulated (what we can call hegemonic borderscapes).
On the other hand, this implies a consideration that borders involve struggles
that consist of multiple strategies of resistance against hegemonic discourses
and control practices through which they are exercised (what we can call
counter-hegemonic borderscapes). This also involves moving towards the
new political conception hoped for by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr with attention to the political dimension of the borderscape, which is expressed
through different social and political contexts where various strategies of
adaptation, accommodation and contestation take place, challenging the
traditional top-down geopolitical control of borders.
Within this framework, the first section of the paper offers a discussion
of the etymology of the borderscapes concept and the ways in which it
is employed in border studies. This etymological reflection shows the polysemicity of the borderscapes concept, enlightening its asset of meaning
beyond being only an aesthetic image, thereby showing its relevant political
implications. A second section outlines some key issues to capture this potential of the concept for the development of alternative critical approaches
to borders along three main axes of reflection: epistemological, ontological
and methodological. In the final section, I conclude by reaffirming that the
borderscapes concept has not only a significant potential for future advances
of border studies, but the concept also gives us a chance to grasp new forms
of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated in a time of
globalisation and transnational flows.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE

BORDERSCAPES CONCEPT
In international border studies,38 Elena DellAgnese was among the first
scholars to use the term borderscapes. It was during the Borderscapes:
Spaces in Conflicts/Symbolic Places/Networks of Peace conference held in
Trento in June 2006.39 The conference was a seminal event for two successive conferences, respectively in Trapani in 2009 (Borderscapes II: Another
Brick in the Wall?) and in Trieste in 2012 (Borderscapes III). As can be seen
by reading the presentations about these events and the related calls for
papers,40 the term borderscapes is used as a conceptual tool to question

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21

the complexity of the dynamics through which border landscapes are produced, across and along the boundary lines between different nation-state
sovereignties. This is with particular attention to border representations and
to borders as a representation themselves, that is to say as discursive landscapes,41 revealing the border as both a symbolic and material construction
resulting from the interweaving of a multiplicity of discourses, practices, and
human relations.42 Therefore, this use of the term borderscapes is related to
the seminal reflections on border landscapes by John Robert Victor Prescott,
which are proposed in the fourth chapter of his book The Geography of
Frontiers and Boundaries, and continued later by Dennis Rumley and Julian
Minghi in their edited book, The Geography of Border Landscapes.43 These
studies provide significant conceptual contributions to the reading of borders
by showing the limits of previous attempts to reflect on border landscapes,
mainly in geography, while at the same time developing new possibilities
of dialogue on borders with other social sciences. Rumley and Minghi highlight the need to overcome overly classificatory and descriptive analytical
orientations towards borders. They argue that these approaches are conceptually limited since they continue to view the border as a mere discontinuity
between nation-states that should be observed mainly for its conflictual character according to a sort of conflict syndrome which has prevailed in the
literature on borders since the two World Wars and in the post-war climate.
The reflection of the two authors leads instead to a rethinking of border
landscapes in situations of harmony and normality that are not necessarily
conflictual, focusing on the dynamic process of differentiation in perceptions
and identity constructions stimulated by the social production of the border.
The term borderscapes, as described in the previous section, is more
recently employed by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr in their edited book
Borderscapes. Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys Edge, where
they take the term borderscapes from the work of Perera on the shifting
borders that circumscribe Australias territory from the Pacific zone. The conceptualisation of Perera, Rajaram and Grundy-Warr is further discussed by
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their reflection on borderscapes of
differential inclusion,44 in which they offer a critical analysis of the relationship between justice and borders. Starting from the assumption already
mentioned by Balibar, according to which borders are no longer at the
edge of the nation-state territory, but rather dis-located to the centre of the
political space, the authors show the inadequacy of interpreting the relationship between justice and borders based on the binary inclusion/exclusion
opposition. Embracing this perspective becomes crucial for coping with the
emerging mechanisms of differential inclusion in a globalised world.45
From the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, the concept of border landscapes
greatly contributed to the processual shift in border studies, contributing to
an understanding of the complexity of international borders as territorial,
political as well as social, cultural and economic phenomena, which are

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Chiara Brambilla

characterised by a number of relationships and exchanges that affect individuals and their community organisations.46 The borderscapes concept seems
to push forward the conceptual evolution of the border landscape term for
understanding the changing scenarios of globalised contemporaneity as well
as the major changes affecting it, including transnational flows and migration.
These considerations also help to clarify the relationship that the concept of borderscapes has with the five dimensions of global cultural flows
that Arjun Appadurai defines as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes,
financescapes and ideoscapes.47 As shown by Appadurai, his choice of the
suffix -scape is because it expresses the fluid and uneven form of these
landscapes of globalisation. As a result, it is possible to think of globalisation
as a multidimensional process that requires an alternative spatial rendering.
This is the effect of multiple interactions, overlaps and disjunctions that question the binary inside/outside and centre/periphery opposition by referring
instead, to a complex and transnational construction of contemporary landscapes at the intersection between globalisation and localisation. In line with
Appadurais reflection, the borderscapes concept brings the vitality of borders to our attention, revealing that the border is by no means a static line,
but a mobile and relational space. The border is a perspectival construction,
in the sense given to the term by the Indian anthropologist; it is developed as
a set of relations that have never been given, but which vary in accordance
with the point of view adopted in interpreting them, which changes with the
fluctuation of historical, social, cultural, and political events.48 Thus, the concept of borderscape enables a productive understanding of the processual,
de-territorialised and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuing regimes
and ensembles of practices.49 Such a reflection offers us an opportunity to
adopt a multi-sited approach not only combining different places where
borderscapes could be observed and experienced both in borderlands and
wherever specific bordering processes have impacts, are represented, negotiated or displaced but also different socio-cultural, political, economic as
well as legal and historical settings where a space of negotiating actors, practices, and discourses is articulated at the intersection of competing and even
contradictory emplacements and temporalities.50
Appadurais argument provides another important interpretation for
exploring the critical potential of the borderscapes concept by showing its
conceptual evolution compared to that of the border landscape term. In fact,
by detaching the suffix -scape from the prefix land-, the anthropologist
liberates the conceptual potential of new terms, which he coins with the
same suffix (and in this way also the word border-scape), from restrictions imposed by the etymological ambivalence that characterises the term
landscape.51
In English, as well as in other modern European languages, the word
landscape is characterised by a particular ambivalence, for which the term
means either the (mostly visual) representation of a portion of space with

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23

aesthetic values, and the thing itself, or rather the territory in its concrete
physical and anthropic reality.52 This ambivalence was determined at a certain point in the history of Western modernity, in the fifteenth century, when
the Dutch word Landschap was used to designate a new kind of painting
launched in the Flemish environment, the landscape painting. It is in this
way that modern culture has gradually shaped its own idea of space, by
structuring it through that particular kind of artistic representation based on
the rational presuppositions of modern science and the geometrical linear
perspective. Landscape involved the shaping of an external space represented in painting; a visual representation that could only be seen from
afar, from the outside, when placed at the right distance by the perspective
construction. The landscape is reduced then to an image used by a contemplative subject kept at a distance. In other words, the initial reference to a
genre of painting ended up being shifted to designate its real referent, the
territory. It is through a similar process that the vitality of the border landscape is concealed in the mapping of boundaries as dividing lines between
nation-state sovereignties.53
However, the reference to the etymology of the landscape term and
the -scape suffix reveals how the landscape can not only be reduced to
an image by allowing us to bring to mind another original meaning of the
landscape term previous to the ambivalence with which it is burdened in
the modern period. It is a meaning originated in the relationship between
the suffix -scape and the term shape, for which landscape refers to the act
of shaping a composition of man-made spaces on the earth that work and
evolve not based on natural laws but to serve a community, thus arising from
the collective nature of the landscape. The landscape is the land scaped,
shaped or created as place and polity by people through their practices of
dwelling their doing, undoing, and redoing of landscape.54
This etymological perspective supports the particular meaning that
Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, in the wake of Appadurai, attribute to the
borderscape concept: it can not only be interpreted as a visible place, that is
to say according to its aesthetic image, but it originates in a complex web of
conditions of possibility that are not immediately visible and inscribed in the
relationship between space, lived experience and power. Thus, borderscapes
are constructed spaces that, far from being fixed in space and time, are
constantly evolving. As argued by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, borderscapes
show that every society is in a state of becoming, every political system
is always contingent and the boundary between belonging and exclusion
is floating and continually contested.55 This shows the double meaning of
borderscapes. On the one hand, they retain a derivative dimension from
human landscapes and, more specifically, from the relationship that they
have with the exercise of power in space, being a political tool for ordering
reality (hegemonic borderscapes). On the other hand, they are a context from
which discourses and practices of dissensus can originate, through which it

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Chiara Brambilla

is possible to think of alternatives to the static exclusivity of landscapes of

dominant power (counter-hegemonic borderscapes).56
As its etymological evolution reveals, the notion of scapes is part of a
political project of making that highlights the ways in which the borderscape
affords particular sets of reproductive practices and shapes political subjectivities in a particular manner. As a consequence, the concept of the
borderscape enables an understanding of the transition from a politics of
being to a politics of becoming, that sees politics as process, community
as disconnected from the rigid territorial spatialities of the nation-state . . .
[and as] forming new, irregular, and fluid spatialities and communities as it
operates.57 Not only is the borderscapes concept relevant to deepening our
concern of the border as a space of complex interactions, but it also draws
attention to another key argument within our reflection, that is to say the
notion of becoming. Hence, borders critical potential should be searched
for in their conception as paradoxical structures that are both markers of
belonging and places of becoming.58

BORDERSCAPES, OR NEW EPISTEMOLOGICAL, ONTOLOGICAL,

AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO BORDERS
This section explores the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for
the elaboration of novel approaches to borders along the three main axes
of reflection that can be distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and
methodological.
Along the epistemological axis, the question is mainly concerned with
finding alternative spatio-temporal topologies to the binary oppositions
(inside/outside, centre/periphery, etc.) that modern Western thought has
privileged, affirming a conception of the border as a line separating two
mutually exclusive differences. Parker and Vaughan-Williams speak eloquently about decentring the border, pointing out the need for a renewed
reflection aimed at problematising the border not as an entity taken for
granted, but as an interesting place of investigation.59 This means getting
the courage to show and cope with the paradoxes of the modern territorialist geopolitical imaginary by deconstructing essentialisms and forms of
dualism,60 opening the door to a dynamic epistemological approach that is
close to the relational philosophy as already proposed by Michel Foucault
and Pierre Bourdieu.61 Taking this one step further, there is concern that borders should be re-defined as analytical spaces where a new spatio-temporal
in-between order can be found in the phenomena of spatial and temporal
breaking that characterise complex contemporary sceneries.62
The borderscapes concept aptly fits in this reflection, carrying with
it significant implications for this new epistemological approach. In fact,
borderscapes foster a new multi-sited organisation of border knowledge,

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able to overcome the binary oppositions through specific attention paid to

the multiplicity of symbolic and material interactions at/in/across borders.
Embracing this viewpoint, a novel epistemological gaze on borders is
outlined, which could be defined as both kaleidoscopic and double. It is a
gaze that, just like the lens of a kaleidoscope, is able to grasp the variations
of borders in space and time, transversally to different social, cultural, economic, legal, and historical settings criss-crossed by negotiations between a
variety of different actors, and not only the State. Thus, through the lens of
the borderscape, it is possible to highlight the relevant role of border variations and to grasp the variability of borders that seems to correspond to a
simultaneous process of doing, undoing and retracing of borders themselves
in time and space.63 To understand the importance of border variations, it
is worth referring to the guest editorial by Annemarie Mol and John Law in
the theme issue on Boundary Variations of Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space.64 According to Mol and Law, boundary variations are a
useful conceptual tool for exploring the complexity of boundaries in their
materialities, their paradoxes, their leakages, their fractionalities, and their
practical enactments.65 Thus, border variations tell us that borders are blurring; they move around and fold. Borders themselves also travel and are not
fixed, but are designed to be as mobile as the subjects and objects on the
move that they seek to control.66 This would help investigate the multiplication as well as the persistence of borders,67 by also contributing to the
analysis of the diffusion and stratification of borders moving away from the
limits of nation-states. It is also a double gaze able to grasp the configurations
assumed by the border on a small and large scale, globally and locally, and
taking into account not only the big stories of the nation-state construction,
but also the small stories that come from experiencing the border in dayto-day life.68 By seeing double it is possible to be aware of geographical and
territorial borders as well as ethnic, social and cultural boundaries, also considering their visible and hidden interactions. In this light, one could speak
of an innovative epistemology of/from the borders, which the borderscapes
concept helps to develop. Borderscapes also contribute to highlighting the
potential of such an epistemological gaze by developing a new pluritopical and plurivocal interpretation of borders,69 capable of expressing the
multiperspectival view advocated by Chris Rumford as being central in critical border studies and defined as seeing like a border as an alternative to
seeing like a state.70
The ontological reflection axis proposes alternative reflections that could
adequately respond to the epistemological challenge described above. The
search for these alternative ontological reflections arises from a question
regarding the condition of the border, that is to say What is the border?,
by showing the urgency to re-think borders beyond the mosaic of States
through which the legal and political order of Western territorialist modernity
has been expressed and represented.71 Rethinking the ontology of borders

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means, therefore, to deconstruct the epistemological interweaving between

political practices of inclusion-exclusion and the images created to support
and communicate them on the cultural level. It is an attempt to elaborate a
novel ontological outlook capable of cancelling the absence of an ontology
of borders for the contemporary situation of globalisation and transnational
flows where borders appear, dis-appear, and re-appear with the same but
different locations, forms and functions.72 This means to leave the realistic
approach to the ontology of borders which entails that ontology stands a priori to human intervention, prior to cognition and recognition suggesting that
there is some dimension of borders that pre-exists human understanding and
action(s). Rather, the concept of borderscapes calls for a processual ontology that conceives reality as actively constructed, as what constitutes reality
depends on human understanding and praxis. Thus, processual ontology of
borders recognises that reality is evolving and constantly emerges and reemerges showing that being and becoming are not inseparable (part of our
being is becoming).73
The borderscape concept, by revealing the ontology of the border as a
complex process, highlights the limitations of the analytical tools and concepts elaborated within the framework of methodological nationalism,74
which assumes that the classic nation/state/territory trilogy is the natural social and political form of the contemporary world, thereby denying
the ontological multidimensionality of borders. On the contrary, this multidimensionality emerges in the interactions between the multiplication and
stratification of borders and global processes, including migration and other
transnational phenomena. On the one hand, borders do not simply block
flows across them, on the other, transnational mobility not only weakens modern nation-state boundaries and sovereignty, but also determines
a reconfiguration of them thanks to a novel reinscription of space.75 In light
of this, we can argue that the critical reflection on borderscapes also offers
a good chance to investigate migration governance and governmentality
practices and policies in the age of globalisation.76
Another important implication of this new ontological reflection on borders is the possibility of revealing the hidden and silenced borders that are
made invisible by the big stories of nation-states.77 This leads to highlighting
stories of conflict and often interrupted, irregular agencies and different actorial strategies aimed at using the border, depending on the circumstances, as
an opportunity to be exploited, or an obstacle to overcome. Therefore, the
borderscapes concept shows the border as a fluid field of political, economic, social, and cultural negotiations, claims and counter-claims; as a
geo-political-cultural margin that is never marginal but rather the engine of
social organisation and change.
Borderscapes allow a multi-sited approach to borders that is not only
spatial but also temporal by encouraging a genealogical perspective on borders based on a new ontological standpoint on them capable of taking into

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account both their spatiality and temporality as well as the mutual implications between these two dimensions.78 Borders are also temporary; they are
not fixed and the borderscapes concept enables us to understand that the
time-space of borders is inherently unstable and infused with movement and
change. Furthermore, the focus on borderscapes avoids the ahistorical bias,
which besets much of the discourse on borders and globalisation. Whilst
we are now observing new forms of de-bordering and re-bordering, these
processes are not per se new: de- and re-bordering processes that occurred
during periods of transition in the past have comparative value for understanding new hybrid scenarios originated from changes in the contemporary
world.
The last axis of reflection is that concerning the methodology. Since the
processual turn in border studies of the 1990s, there has been an urgency for
a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary methodological approach that may
account for ethnographic attention to the border accompanied by archival
and desk research on historical sources, documents, texts and other forms of
cartographic, photographic, artistic and, more recently, digital representation
of borders.79
However, I would argue that the reference to two more aspects at the
centre of the borderscapes concept could help us push the reflection on
the methodological axis forward. These two aspects are, respectively, that
of experiences and that of representations. With regard to experiences, great
emphasis is placed on the need to humanise borders, by giving attention to
experiences, and thus recovering the phenomenological dimension of border
studies. In particular, the borderscapes concept allows to describe how the
experience of borders often clashes with the assumptions of geopolitical
theory, and to investigate how the rhetoric and policies of borders impact,
conflict and are in a dynamic relationship with everyday life; how these
rhetoric and policies are experienced, lived and interpreted by those who
inhabit borders by paying particular attention to issues of citizenship, identity
and transnational migration.
At the same time, there is a need to search for new ways to give voice
to these experiences and make them visible, embracing the very concept
of visibility as elaborated by Hannah Arendt, that is to say a kind of visibility understood as a first way to access the public sphere.80 It is precisely
at this point in our reflection that the critical potential of the borderscapes
concept is shown in full, by referring to the ambivalence that characterises
its etymological evolution, for which the term borderscape expresses the
representation of borders as well as individual and collective practices of
construction (bordering), deconstruction (de-bordering) and reconstruction
(re-bordering) of borders. This etymological duplicity of borders is the
keystone to critically, and finally, connect border experiences with border
representations by rethinking borders through the relationship between politics and aesthetics, in which borderscapes arise. This means grasping the

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opportunity to overcome Euclidean geometry, which has greatly contributed

to the representation of borders as divisive lines on modern maps, moving towards a new multidimensional choreography of borders,81 which
allows us to recognise and accept the complexity of border processes as
constructed, lived and experienced by human beings. Borderscapes, inhabited by continuous processes of claim and counter-claim, also affect and
call into question every predetermined social and political order, showing
the urgency to rethink the modern categorisations of political belonging by
revealing their fluid and contextual character.82 Hence, the borderscapes perspective provides a powerful link between processes of social and political
transformation, conceptual change and local experience.
Although there are good reasons for the call to take phenomenological
experience and visibility as starting points for a renewed methodology in
border studies, the actual ways to develop such a methodological outlook
in terms of practical methodological agenda-setting should deserve deeper
attention. How could this methodological approach actually be carried out?
How to go about finding out?
To answer the question, I borrow a few terms from Jeremy W. Crampton
and conceive this alternative methodological approach as performative,
participatory, political.83
A performative approach would help us to grasp the ability of the
borderscape to bring together experiences and representations. Following
Anke Strver, the construction of borders takes place through representations, through performative acts, through acts of narration, visualization,
and imagination including their interpretations and can be conceived as
borderscaping.84 In so doing, the borderscape allows to move beyond the
often-criticised gap between practices and representations, by bringing the
concept of performativity into the foreground. Taking it one step further, it
is worth referring to Strvers reflection on the interrelations between representations and practices through Judith Butlers notion of performativity
in the context of the Dutch/German borderscape. For Butler, performativity
is the reiterative and citational practice through which discourse produces
the effects that it names.85 According to Strver, Performativity is thus
constitutive of representations and their meanings as well as of embodied identities and practices.86 Embracing this viewpoint, the anthropological
method ethnography could represent an important vantage point for
actually developing the performative methodological approach.87
A participatory approach would entail researching not on different actors
involved in the borderscape but with them, opening up new possible pathways towards novel forms of political participation, understood as existence
(becoming) rather than essence (fixed realistic/territorialist ontology). In the
contemporary era of globalisation and transnational flows, participatory
methods call for a more careful analysis of the working of border regimes
and for the inclusion in the picture of what is happening every day at

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whatever external frontier of the agency of migrants. Abandoning the often

socially constructed idea that the migrants are needy human being without any agency, participatory methods give a chance to develop strategies
for empowerment and advocacy. A participatory approach to borders can
empower migrants entailing the inclusion of new political agencies and subjectivities into the changing realm of the social. These emergent subjectivities
can be regarded as expressions of resistance to the misrepresentation of the
absent agents determined by hegemonic understandings of global border
and migration regimes.88
Last but not least, to understand how this renewed methodological
approach can be actually carried out, I make the argument that we should
devote attention to its political dimension. Concerning this, I find it helpful
to refer to what Mezzadra and Neilson argue in their recent book Border
as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour: For us the question of border
as method is something more than methodological. It is above all a question of politics, about the kinds of social worlds and subjectivities produced
at the border and the ways that thought and knowledge can intervene in
these processes of production.89 That is, the assumption that method is as
much about acting on the world as it is about knowing it.90 Hence, adopting
the borderscapes as method involves a shift from a fixed knowledge to a
knowledge capable of throwing light on a space of negotiating actors, experiences, and representations articulated at the intersection of competing and
even conflicting tensions revealing the border also as a site of struggle.91 By
highlighting the role of borders as sites of struggle where the right to become
can be expressed, the borderscapes method opens a new space of political possibilities, a space within which new kinds of political subjectivities
become possible.92

NOT AN ENDING, BUT A BEGINNING

I do not want to provide conclusions here, but I would like to reaffirm that
the borderscapes concept has a significant potential for future advances of
border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby
allowing us to push forward the critical reflection on borders connecting it
to the phenomena of contemporary political and social life.
The kaleidoscopic and double gazes thanks to the borderscapes concept
pass through the three axes of epistemological, ontological and methodological reflection at the centre of analysis hoped for in a new agenda for critical
border studies. These particular gazes are useful for opening the way to
novel political experiments capable of overcoming the modern territorialist (geo)political imaginary and moving towards a new politics of becoming
based on a pluritopical and plurivocal interpretation of borders. This interpretation forms part of a democracy to-come in the sense given by Jacques

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Chiara Brambilla

Derrida,93 that is to say a democracy that originates from a promise that

can be understood by acting on the critical potential of the borderscapes
concept.
Thus, borderscapes make us think and act. It is necessary then to think
of them and act on them in order to operationalise their critical potential
through different analytical dimensions, such as politics and policies, practices, representations, perceptions, and interpretations. Said differently, the
notion of borderscape gives us the chance to relate the somewhat abstract
level of conceptual change in border studies to actual borderscaping as
practices through which fluctuating borders are imagined, materially established, experienced, lived as well as reinforced and blocked but also crossed,
traversed and inhabited.
Not only is this a way to contribute to a renewed critical shift in border knowledge but it is also a mode to grasp new forms of belonging and
becoming that are worth being investigated in a time of globalisation and
transnational flows.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Elena dellAgnese for organizing the wonderful Borderscapes
conference series at which the first ideas for this paper were discussed. I
am grateful to Martin Lemberg-Pedersen for stimulating conversations on
the critical potential of borderscapes to inquire into the Euro/African border nexus. Holger Ptzsch is thanked for a lively chat on the issues of
in/visibility and (audio-visual) borderscapes. I am grateful to Olivier Kramsch
for inspiring conversations on postcolonial borderscapes and critical border
studies. I would also like to gratefully thank the three anonymous reviewers for critically challenging and inspiring me with their thought-provoking
comments.
My research for this text has been conducted within the framework
of EUBORDERSCAPES funded by European Commission FP7-SSH-2011-1
(290775).

NOTES
1. K. Ohmae, The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York:
HarperCollins 1990).
2. D. Newman and A. Paasi, Fences and Neighbours in the Post-Modern World: Boundary
Narratives in Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography 22/2 (1998) pp. 186207.
3. J. Scott, Euroregions, Governance and Transborder Co-Operation within the EU, European
Research in Regional Science 10 (2000) pp. 104115.
4. H. van Houtum, The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries, Geopolitics 10 (2005) pp. 672679.
5. H. van Houtum, O. Kramsch, and W. Zierhofer (eds.), B/Ordering Space (Aldershot: Ashgate
2005).

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6. On the processual shift from borders to bordering, see among others A. Paasi, Boundaries as
Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows, Geopolitics 3/1 (1998) pp. 6988; H. van Houtum and
T. van Naerssen, Bordering, Ordering and Othering, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
93/2 (2002) pp. 125136; D. Newman, Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue,
European Journal of Social Theory 9/2 (2006) pp. 171186.
7. See . Balibar, We, the People of Europe. Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton:
Princeton University Press 2003).
8. For a careful summary and critical reflection on the main features of border studies following
their renaissance at the end of the last century, see the contributions in the special issue of European
Journal of Social Theory on Theorizing Borders 9/2 (2006) edited by Chris Rumford.
9. On dis-locating and re-locating borders, see open access working papers and other materials of
Relocating Borders: A Comparative Approach, Second EastBordNet Conference, Humboldt University,
Berlin, 1113 Jan. 2013, available at <http://www.eastbordnet.org/working_papers/open/>, accessed
Oct. 2013. See also: S. Green, Borders and the Relocation of Europe, Annual Review of Anthropology 42
(2013) pp. 345361.
10. On borders as a social institution see P. Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social
Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the US-Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas
Press 2000).
11. N. Parker and N. Vaughan-Williams et al., Lines in the Sand: Towards an Agenda for Critical
Border Studies, Geopolitics 14/3 (2009) pp. 582587. As noted by James Sidaway, it is relevant to mention
the fact that Geopolitics was founded in 1996 under the name of Geopolitics and International Boundaries
Studies, precisely in order to focus on the study of international borders. See J. Sidaway, The Return
and Eclipse of Border Studies? Charting Agendas, Geopolitics 16/4 (2011) pp. 969976. Also of interest
are: V. Kolossov, Border Studies: Changing Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, Geopolitics 10/4
(2005) pp. 606632; and E. Brunet-Jailly, Theorizing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Reflection, Geopolitics
10/4 (2005) pp. 633649.
12. Sidaway (note 11).
13. C. Johnson, R. Jones, A. Paasi, L. Amoore, A. Mountz, M. Salter, and C. Rumford, Interventions
on Rethinking the Border in Border Studies, Political Geography 30 (2011) pp. 6169.
14. D. Wastl-Walter (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies (Farnham: Ashgate
2011); T. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds.), A Companion to Border Studies (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing
2012).
15. Another contribution to this debate is a recent article by Nick Megoran, Rethinking the Study of
International Boundaries: A Biography of the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Boundary, Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 102/2 (2012) pp. 464481.
16. Parker and Vaughan-Williams et al. (note 11).
17. Ibid., p. 582.
18. See Y. Lapid, Introduction: Identities, Borders, Orders: Nudging International Relations Theory
in a New Direction, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson, and Y. Lapid (eds.), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking
International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001) pp. 121.
Lapid (p. 8) cites Neil Brenners argument on territorialist epistemology: By mid-twentieth century each
of the conceptual building blocks of modern social science in particular the notion of state, society,
economy, culture, and community had come to presuppose this territorialization of social relations
within a parcelized, fixed, and essentially timeless geographical space. The resultant territorialist epistemology has entailed the transposition of the historically unique territorial structure of the modern interstate
system into a generalized model of sociospatial organization, whether within reference to political, societal, economic, or cultural processes. See N. Brenner, Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and
Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies, Theory and Society 28 (1999) pp. 3978.
19. Parker and Vaughan-Williams et al. (note 11) p. 583.
20. Ibid., p. 586.
21. N. Parker and N. Vaughan-Williams, Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the
Lines in the Sand Agenda, Geopolitics 17/4 (2012) pp. 727733.
22. Parker and Vaughan-Williams et al. (note 11).
23. J. Agnew, The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,
Review of International Political Economy 1 (1994) pp. 5380. Agnews conception of the territorial trap
draws attention to three geographical assumptions of international relations theory that are crucial to be
overcome towards an agenda of critical border studies: states are fixed and secure territorial units of

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sovereign space; the domestic/foreign polarity based on which domestic and foreign spaces are distinct
and separable spheres; the territorial sovereign state is the appropriate container of society that is subordinated to the existence of the territorial state. On the territorial trap concept, also interesting are the
contributions to the special symposium, Geopolitics Roundtable: New Thinking on Territory, Sovereignty
and Power, Geopolitics 15/4 (2010) pp. 752784. See S. Reid-Henry, The Territorial Trap Fifteen Years
On (pp. 752756), which introduces the roundtable providing an overview of the most significant reflections in the other contributions. Also see J. Agnew, Still Trapped in Territory (pp. 779784) that closes
the symposium giving a response to the other contributors on moving on with the territorial trap.
24. Parker and Vaughan-Williams (note 21).
25. Sidaway (note 11) p. 972.
26. Ibid., pp. 973974.
27. Ibid., p. 974.
28. Johnson et al. (note 13).
29. Ibid., p. 62.
30. Ibid., p. 62.
31. P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr, Introduction, in P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.),
Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press 2007) pp. ixxl.
32. See S. Perera, A Pacific Zone? (In)Security, Sovereignty, and Stories of the Pacific Borderscape,
in P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys
Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2007) pp. 201227.
33. Parker and Vaughan-Williams et al. (note 11) p. 586.
34. Brenner (note 18) p. 40.
35. This approach is close to the use of the term borderscapes given by the cultural geographer
Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary in her recent contribution, Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display,
Journal of Borderlands Studies 27/2 (2012) pp. 213228.
36. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 31) p. x.
37. E. DellAgnese and E. Squarcina (eds.), Europa. Vecchi confini e nuove frontiere (Torino: UTET
2005).
38. It is worth clarifying that the etymological reflection on the term borderscapes proposed in this
article addresses only the use of the word in the international academic debate on borders and does not
consider the way in which it is used in the wider context of the English language.
39. To be precise, dellAgnese had already used the term borderscape a year before at the AAG
pre-conference (Political Geography Specialty Group) at the University of Colorado at Boulder (35 April
2005). She presented a paper entitled Bollywoods Borderscapes. For the abstract, see <http://www.
colorado.edu/ibs/aagpreconference/papers/abstracts.html>, accessed Oct. 2013. Also of interest is the
way in which Josh Kun introduces the border(audio)scape concept in his essay The Aural Border,
Theatre Journal 52 (2000) pp. 121.
40. See: <http://www.unitn.it/archive/events/borderscapes/index.htm>; <http://www2.units.it/
borderscapes3/>, accessed Oct. 2013.
41. A. Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the FinnishRussian Border (Chichester: John Wiley 1996).
42. The term borderscapes is used in a similar way by Anke Strver in her book Stories of the Boring
Border: The Dutch-German Borderscape in Peoples Minds (Berlin: LIT 2005).
43. See J. R. V. Prescott, The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries (London: Hutchinson University
Library 1965); D. Rumley and J. Minghi (eds.), The Geography of Border Landscapes (London and
New York: Routledge 1991).
44. See S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Borderscapes of Differential Inclusion: Subjectivity and
Struggles on the Threshold of Justices Excess, in . Balibar, S. Mezzadra, and R. Samaddar (eds.), The
Borders of Justice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2011) pp. 181203.
45. N. De Genova, Migrant Illegality and Deportability in Everyday Life, Annual Review of
Anthropology 31 (2002) pp. 419447.
46. See P. Guichonnet and C. Raffestin, Gographie des Frontires (Paris: PUF 1974) pp. 147218.
47. A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press 1996).
48. See C. Brambilla and H. van Houtum, The Art of Being a Grenzgnger in the Borderscapes of
Berlin, Agora 4 (2012) pp. 2831.

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49. C. Brambilla, Borders Still Exist! What Are Borders?, in B. Riccio and C. Brambilla (eds.),
Transnational Migration, Cosmopolitanism and Dis-Located Borders (Rimini: Guaraldi 2010) pp. 7385.
50. See Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 31) p. xxx; C. Brambilla, Pluriversal Citizenship and
Borderscapes, in M. Sorbello and A. Weitzel (eds.), Transient Spaces. The Tourist Syndrome (Berlin:
argobooks 2010) pp. 6165; C. Brambilla, Shifting Italy/Libya Borderscapes at the Interface of EU/Africa
Borderland: A Genealogical Outlook from the Colonial Era to Post-Colonial Scenarios, ACME An
International E-journal for Critical Geographies (forthcoming, 2014).
51. Actually, although embracing a quite different perspective, Rumley and Minghi have already
considered in the Introduction to The Geography of Border Landscapes the problems that could be caused
by inserting the reflection on borders within the wider context of the studies on landscape.
52. L. Bonesio, Paesaggio, identit e comunit tra locale e globale (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis
2007) p. 17; see also J. Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press 1984) pp. 155.
53. K. Olwig, Performing on the Landscape versus Doing Landscape: Preambulatory Practice, Sight
and the Sense of Belonging, in T. Ingold and J. L. Vergunst (eds.), Ways of Walking. Ethnography and
Practice on Food (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008) p. 83.
54. Ibid., p. 82. See also A. Turco, Paesaggio: pratiche, linguaggi, mondi (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis
2002).
55. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 31) p. xxiv.
56. J. Rancire, Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by S. Corcoran (London:
Continuum International Publishing Group 2010) p. 149.
57. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 31) pp. xixii.
58. Philosophy has traditionally distinguished between the study of being and the study of becoming
since the time of Platos dialog the Timaeus: Plato, Timaeus and Critias (London: Penguin Books 1977).
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari write extensively on becoming in A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008).
59. Parker and Vaughan-Williams (note 21) p. 728. Also see S. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights.
From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006).
60. D. Reichert, On Boundaries, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10/1
(1992) pp. 8798.
61. P. Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques: sur la thorie de laction (Paris: Seuil Galliard 1994); M. Foucault,
Il faut dfendre la socit (Paris: Seuil Galliard 1997).
62. See W. D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000).
63. See U. Beck and E. Grande, Das kosmopolitische Europa (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2004).
64. A. Mol and J. Law, Guest Editorial Boundary Variations: An Introduction, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005) pp. 637642.
65. Ibid., p. 637.
66. Parker and Vaughan-Williams (note 21) p. 730.
67. Sidaway (note 11) pp. 97374.
68. Brambilla, Borders Still Exist! (note 49) p. 75.
69. W. D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 2006) p. 15.
70. C. Rumford, Toward a Multiperspectival Study of Borders, Geopolitics 17/4 (2012) pp. 887902.
Similar arguments are used in: O. T. Kramsch and C. Brambilla, Transboundary Europe through
a West African Looking Glass: Cross Border Integration, Colonial Difference and the Chance for
Border Thinking, Comparativ. Zeitschrift fr Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaft 17/4
(2007) pp. 95115.
71. Parker and Vaughan-Williams et al. (note 11) p. 586.
72. On the search for an alternative ontology in which the continual reformulation of entities in
play in postinternational society can be grasped, see N. Parker, From Borders to Margins: A Deleuzian
Ontology for Identities in the Postinternational Environment, Alternatives 34 (2009) pp. 1739.
73. In this regard, see: R. Kitchin and M. Dodge, Rethinking Maps, Progress in Human Geography
31 (2007) pp. 331344. Kitchin and Dodge (p. 335) call for an ontogenetic approach to mapping, arguing
that we need to shift from ontology (how things are) to ontogenesis (how things become). Hence, the
ontogenetic approach to mapping is close to what I have called processual ontological approach to
borders.

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Chiara Brambilla

74. See N. Glick-Schiller, L. Basch, and C. Blanc-Szanton (eds.), Nations Unbound: Transnational
Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Langhorne: Gordon and Breach
1994).
75. See A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, Beyond Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,
Cultural Anthropology 7/1 (1992) pp. 623.
76. S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Between Inclusion and Exclusion: On the Topology of Global
Space and Borders, Theory, Culture & Society 29/4-5 (2012) pp. 5875.
77. C. Rumford, Guest Editorial Global Borders: An Introduction to the Special Issue, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010) pp. 951956.
78. C. Brambilla, Shifting Italy/Libya Borderscapes (note 50).
79. Sidaway (note 11) p. 973. An interesting example of interdisciplinary methodological approach
which contributes to finding the complementarities between different social sciences and humanities
approaches, thereby looking for ways of bridging them together in contemporary border studies debate
is the work of the Border Aesthetics research project (20102013) under the Research Council of Norway
KULVER programme, initiated by the Border Poetics Research Group at the University of Troms. See:
<http://uit.no/hsl/borderaesthetics> and <www.borderpoetics.wikidot.com>, accessed Oct. 2013. Also
of interest: J. Schimanski and S. Wolfe (eds.), Border Poetics De-Limited (Laatzen: Wehrhahn Verlag 2007);
J. Schimanski and S. Wolfe, The Aesthetics of Borders, in K. Aukrust (ed.), Assigning Cultural Values
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2013) pp. 235250.
80. See H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1958);
M. Borren, Towards an Arendtian Politics of In/Visibility: On Stateless Refugees and Undocumented
Aliens, Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 15/2 (2008) pp. 213237.
81. H. van Houtum, Mapping Transversal Borders: Towards a Choreography of Space, in B. Riccio
and C. Brambilla (eds.), Transnational Migration, Cosmopolitanism and Dis-located Borders (Rimini:
Guaraldi 2009) pp. 119137.
82. See J. Rancire, Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, South Atlantic Quarterly 103/2-3
(2004) pp. 297310.
83. J. W. Crampton, Cartography: Performative, Participatory, Political, Progress in Human
Geography 33/6 (2009) pp. 840848.
84. Strver (note 42) p. 170.
85. J. Butler, Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge 1993) p. 2.
86. Strver (note 42) p. 167.
87. Also see N. Megoran, For Ethnography in Political Geography: Experiencing and Re-imagining
Ferghana Valley Boundary Closures, Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 622640.
88. See: B. De Sousa Santos, Toward an Epistemology of Blindness. Why the New Forms
of Ceremonial Adequacy neither Regulate nor Emancipate, European Journal of Social Theory 4/3
(2001) pp. 251279.
89. S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke
University Press 2013) p. 17.
90. Ibid., p. 17.
91. Ibid., p. 18.
92. Arendt (note 80).
93. J. Derrida, A Word of Welcome, in J. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford
University Press 1999) pp. 13123.