Borders Mobility And Belonging

Questions of migration and citizenship are at the heart of global political debate with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump having ripple effects around the world. Providing new insights into the politics of migration and citizenship in the UK and the US, this book challenges the increasingly prevalent view of migration and migrants as threats and of formal citizenship as a necessary marker of belonging. Instead the authors offer an analysis of migration and citizenship in practice, as a counterpoint to simplistic discourses. The book uses cutting-edge academic work on migration and citizenship to address three themes central to current debates – borders and walls, mobility and travel, and belonging. Through this analysis a clearer picture of the roots of these politics emerges as well as of the consequences for mobility, political participation and belonging in the 21st century.

Using cutting-edge academic work on migration and citizenship to address three themes central to current debates - borders and walls, mobility and travel, and belonging - the authors provide new insights into the politics of migration and citizenship in the UK and the US.

This book critically challenges the usual territorial understanding of borders by examining the often messy internal, transborder, ambiguous, and in-between spaces that co-exist with traditional borders. By considering those less visible aspects of borders, the book develops an inclusive understanding of how contemporary borders are structured and how they influence human identity, mobility, and belonging. The introduction and conclusion provide theoretical and contextual framing, while chapters explore topics of global labor and refugees, unrecognized states, ethnic networks, cyberspace, transboundary resource conflicts, and indigenous and religious spaces that rarely register on conventional maps or commonplace understandings of territory. In the end, the volume demonstrates that, despite being "invisible" on most maps, these borders have a very real, material, and tangible presence and consequences for those people who live within, alongside, and across them.

The implications for criminology of territorial borders are relatively unexplored. This book presents the first systematic attempt to develop a critical criminology of borders, offering a unique treatment of the impact of globalisation and mobility. Providing a wealth of case material from Australia, Europe and North America, it is useful for students, academics, and practitioners working in criminology, migration, human geography, international law and politics, globalisation, sociology and cultural anthropology.

Migrations and Border Processes: Practices and Politics of Belonging and Exclusion in Europe from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century brings together scholars from history, sociology and anthropology to explore cross-boundary mobility and migration during the formation, development, and transformation of the modern (nation-)state explicating the conflictive and fluctuating character of borders. Current media images of a "fortress Europe" suggest that migrations and borders are closely connected. The historical perspective demonstrates that such bordering processes are not new. However, they have developed new dynamics in different historical phases, from the formation of the modern (nation-)state in the nineteenth century to the creation of the European Union during the second half of the twentieth century. This book explains the dynamic relationships between borders and migratory movements in Europe from the nineteenth century to the present by approaching them from four different, overlapping angles: (1) the multiple actors involved, (2) scales and places of borders and their crossings, (3) the instruments and techniques employed and (4) the significance of social categories. Focusing on the historical, local specificity of the complex relations between migrations and boundaries will help denaturalize the concept of the border as well as further reflection on the shifting definitions of migration and belonging. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

This volume responds to the question: How do you know when you belong to a country? In other words, when is the nation-state a homeland? The boundaries and borders defining who belongs and who does not proliferate in the age of globalization, although they may not coincide with national jurisdictions. Contributors to this collection engage with how these boundaries are made and sustained, examining how belonging is mediated by material relations of power, capital, and circuits of communication technology on the one side and representations of identity, nation, and homeland on the other. The authors’ diverse methodologies, ranging from archival research, oral histories, literary criticism, and ethnography attend to these contradictions by studying how the practices of migration and identification, procured and produced through global exchanges of bodies and goods that cross borders, foreclose those borders to (re)produce, and (re)imagine the homeland and its boundaries.

The crossing of national state borders is one of the most-discussed issues of contemporary times and it poses many challenges for individual and collective identities. This concerns both short-distance mobility as well as long-distance migration. Choosing to move - or not - across international borders is a complex decision, involving both cognitive and emotional processes. This book tests the approach that three crucial thresholds need to be crossed before mobility occurs; the individual’s mindset about migrating, the choice of destination and perception of crossing borders to that location and the specific routes and spatial trajectories available to get there. Thus both borders and trajectories can act as thresholds to spatial moves. The threshold approach, with its focus on processes affecting whether, when and where to move, aims to understand the decision-making process in all its dimensions, in the hope that this will lead to a better understanding of the ways migrants conceive, perceive and undertake their transnational journeys. This book examines the three constitutive parts discerned in the cross-border mobility decision-making process: people, borders and trajectories and their interrelationships. Illustrated by a global range of case studies, it demonstrates that the relation between the three is not fixed but flexible and that decision-making contains aspects of belonging, instability, security and volatility affecting their mobility or immobility.

This volume addresses processes of human mobility in times of crisis from different scientific perspectives and at a global and trans-regional level. The first part sets out to discuss established paradigms in migration studies and politics in order to suggest new approaches to analyse mobility, migration and to challenge boundary making approaches. The second part presents empirical cases from Latin America and Spain to demonstrate how migrants challenge, negotiate and mobilize citizenship and belonging. The third part deals with the question how belonging is produced and identity is constructed at a transnational level. New information and communication technologies, human mobility but also the mobility of concepts, ideas and values foster these collectivization processes across and within physical and symbolic borders.