Borders As Infrastructure

An investigation of borders as moving entities that influence our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. In Borders as Infrastructure, Huub Dijstelbloem brings science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology, to the study of borders and international human mobility. Taking Europe's borders as a point of departure, he shows how borders can transform and multiply and and how they can mark conflicts over international orders. Borders themselves are moving entities, he claims, and with them travel our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. The philosophies of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk provide a framework for Dijstelbloem's discussion of the material and morphological nature of borders and border politics. Dijstelbloem offers detailed empirical investigations that focus on the so-called migrant crisis of 2014-2016 on the Greek Aegean Islands of Chios and Lesbos; the Europe surveillance system Eurosur; border patrols at sea; the rise of hotspots and "humanitarian borders"; the technopolitics of border control at Schiphol International Airport; and the countersurveillance by NGOs, activists, and artists who investigate infrastructural border violence. Throughout, Dijstelbloem explores technologies used in border control, including cameras, databases, fingerprinting, visual representations, fences, walls, and monitoring instruments. Borders can turn places, routes, and territories into "zones of death." Dijstelbloem concludes that Europe's current relationship with borders renders borders--and Europe itself--an "extreme infrastructure" obsessed with boundaries and limits.

Today millions of technologically empowered individuals are able to participate freely in international transactions and enterprises, social and economic. These activities are governed by national and local laws designed for simpler times and now challenged by a new technological and market environment as well as by the practicalities and politics of enforcement across national boundaries. Borders in Cyberspace investigates issues arising from national differences in law, public policy, and social and cultural values as these differences are reformulated in the emerging global information infrastructure. The contributions include detailed analyses of some of the most visible issues, including intellectual property, security, privacy, and censorship.

In Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa research findings from a truly inter-disciplinary research project on new spatial practices in Africa and their ordering effects on social relations are introduced.

Across the Chinese borderlands, investments in large-scale transnational infrastructure such as roads and special economic zones have increased exponentially over the past two decades. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Borderland infrastructures. Trade, Development, and Control in Western China addresses a major contradiction at the heart of this fast-paced development: small-scale traders have lost their historic strategic advantages under the growth of massive Chinese state investment and are now struggling to keep their businesses afloat. Concurrently, local ethnic minorities have become the target of radical resettlement projects, securitization, and tourism initiatives, and have in many cases grown increasingly dependent on state subsidies. At the juncture of anthropological explorations of the state, border studies, and research on transnational trade and infrastructure development, Borderland infrastructures provides new analytical tools to understand how state power is experienced, mediated, and enacted in Xinjiang and Yunnan. In the process, Rippa offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of life across China's peripheries.

If the frontier, in all its boundless possibility, was a central organizing metaphor for much of U.S. history, today it is arguably the border that best encapsulates the American experience, as xenophobia, economic inequality, and resurgent nationalism continue to fuel conditions of division and limitation. This boldly interdisciplinary volume explores the ways that historical and contemporary actors in the U.S. have crossed such borders—whether national, cultural, ethnic, racial, or conceptual. Together, these essays suggest new ways to understand borders while encouraging connection and exchange, even as social and political forces continue to try to draw lines around and between people.

Focussing European borders: The book provides insight into a variety of changes in the nature of borders in Europe and its neighborhood from various disciplinary perspectives. Special attention is paid to the history and contemporary dynamics at Polish and German borders. Of particular interest are the creation of Euroregions, mutual perceptions of Poles and Germans at the border, EU Regional Policy, media debates on the extension of the Schengen area. Analysis of cross-border mobility between Abkhazia and Georgia or the impact of Israel's »Security Fence« to Palestine on society complement the focus on Europe with a wider view.

The fixity or mobility of borders are key themes within the border studies literature and have useful critical application to urban and environmental planning through theory, pedagogy and practice. This offers potential for transformative change through the processes of re-bordering and re-orienting established boundary demarcations in ways that support and promote sustainability in a climate of change. Planning Across Borders in a Climate of Change draws on a range of diverse case studies from Australasia, North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia and offers the application of border theory, concepts and principles to planning as a critical lens. It applies this lens to a range of international case studies in key areas such as climate change adaptation, food security, spatial planning, critical infrastructure and urban ecology. This collection fills an important gap in the border studies literature, bringing climate change considerations to bear on planning. It should be of interest to students, scholars and professionals in the field of urban and environmental planning, climate change adaptation, border studies, urban studies, human and political geography, environmental studies and development.