The Ashgate Research Companion To Border Studies

Throughout history, the functions and roles of borders have been continuously changing. They can only be understood in their context, shaped as they are by history, politics and power, as well as cultural and social issues. Borders are therefore complex spatial and social phenomena which are not static or invariable, but which are instead highly dynamic. This comprehensive volume brings together a multidisciplinary team of leading scholars to provide an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of all aspects of borders and border research. It is truly global in scope and, besides embracing the more traditional strands of the field including geopolitics, migration and territorial identities, it also takes in recently emerging topics such as the role of borders in a seemingly borderless world; creating neighbourhoods, and border enforcement in the post-9/11 era.

A Companion to Border Studies A Companion to Border Studies “Taking into consideration all aspects this book has a very important role in the professional literature of border studies.” Cross-Border Review Yearbook of the European Institute “Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” Choice “This book, with its interdisciplinary team of authors from many world regions, shows the state of the art in this research field admirably.” Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm University “This volume will be the definitive work on borders and border-related processes for years into the future. The editors have done an outstanding job of identifying key themes, and of assembling influential scholars to address these themes. David Nugent, Emory University “This urgently needed Companion, edited by two leading figures of border studies, reflects past insights and showcases new directions: a must read for understanding territory, power and the state.” Dr. Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick “This impressive collection will have a broad appeal beyond specialist border studies. Anyone with an interest in the nation-state, nationalism, ethnicity, political geography or, indeed, the whole historical project of the modern world system will want to have access to a copy. The substantive scope is global and the intellectual reach deep and wide. Simply indispensable. ” Richard Jenkins, University of Sheffield Dramatic growth in the number of international borders has coincided in recent years with greater mobility than ever before – of goods, people and ideas. As a result, interest in borders as a focus of academic study has developed into a dynamic, multi-disciplinary field, embracing perspectives from anthropology, development studies, geography, history, political science and sociology. Authors provide a comprehensive examination of key characteristics of borders and frontiers, including cross-border cooperation, security and controls, migration and population displacements, hybridity, and transnationalism. A Companion to Border Studies brings together these disciplines and viewpoints, through the writing of an international collection of preeminent border scholars. Drawing on research from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, the contributors argue that the future of Border Studies lies within such diverse collaborations, which approach comparatively the features of borders worldwide.

Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices. Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a more established part of political geography it has attracted ever more critique: from feminists for its apparent blindness to the embodied effects of geopolitical praxis and from those who have been uncomfortable about its textual focus, while others have challenged critical geopolitics to address alternative, resistant forms of geopolitical practice. Again, critical geopolitics has been reworked to incorporate these challenges and the latest iterations have encompassed normative agendas, non-representational theory, emotional geographies and affect. It is against the vibrant backdrop of this intellectual development of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline that this Companion is set. Bringing together leading researchers associated with the different forms of critical geopolitics, this volume produces an overview of its achievements, limitations, and areas of new and potential future development. The Companion is designed to serve as a key resource for an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the spatiality of politics.

EU studies increasingly recognize the salience of new regional insights. Hence, this collection of original essays provides a broad overview of regionalism, together with detailed analyses on the construction, activities, and implications of both established and emerging examples of formal political and economic organizations as well as informal regional entities and networks. Aimed at scholars and students interested in the continuing growth of regionalism, The Ashgate Research Companion to Regionalisms is a key resource to understanding the major debates in the field. Organized into three main sections, this volume deals with a wide range of issues covering the following important research areas: -Section one covers theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of established and formal regionalism, emerging and informal regionalism, inter-regionalism, and levels of regionalism. -Section two provides detailed case-studies of established and formal regionalisms: EU, NAFTA, ASEAN, SAARC, OAS, MERCOSUR, AU, ECOWAS, and SADC. -Section three offers case-studies that investigate emerging and informal regionalisms in Oceania, the Arab League, BRICSAM, and the Commonwealth(s) as well as thought-provoking chapters on micro-regional processes evident in spatial development initiatives, transnational gangs, transfrontier conservation areas, and the migration-conflict nexus in natural resource sectors. With the study of regionalism becoming an increasingly important part of politics, international relations, development, and global studies courses, this comprehensive volume is a valuable addition for classroom use.

This innovative Research Agenda uncovers links between different levels of border-making processes, or bordering, from the political to the cognitive, and connects everyday processes and experiences of border-making to the wider social world. It addresses the question of how everyday bordering practices and discourses can be productively linked to different aspects of social relations.

This book focuses on interstitial spaces or in- between borders in the Middle East. Using various case studies, it raises the question how actors living in these regions perform their belonging despite the apparent constraints of history and politics. In recent years, the Middle East has seen States attempts to shape buffer zones or safe zones in border regions, for example, in Syria’s borderlands in the aftermath of the civil war. Typically studies on in- between borders refer to three interrelated aspects: space (territorial, symbolic), power (states or non-state actors) and identity (definition of the self/other). In this volume, the authors investigate these axes of research through the notions of sovereignty and belonging in order to assess how these concepts may highlight in-betweenness through a political dimension. Stemming from a perception of the borders as processes, these various studies aim to explore the theoretical potential of in- between border spaces to re-think sovereignty and identity belonging in such interstitial zones. While notions such as heterotopia, margins, liminality, borderlands, buffer zones, no man’s land or frontiers will be explored, each case study highlights how actors, territory and powers relate to each other in order to improve our understanding of historical and political process that are shaping identities under spatial constraints. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

Assessing the different kinds of borders between African nations, the contributors present a borderland and trans-region approach to understanding the challenges and opportunities facing the peoples of the African continent. Africa faces rampant violence, terrorism, deterioration of water-energy-food provision, influxes of refugees and immigrants, and religious hatred under the trends of globalization. Solutions for these issues require new perspectives that are not attempted by conventional state-building approaches. Statehood is limited in many places on the African continent because many states are combined by loose political ties. African states’ borders tend to be regarded as porous and fragile. However, as the contributors to this volume argue, those porous borders can contribute to cultural and socio-economic network construction beyond states and the creation of active borderlands by increasing people’s mobility, contact, and trade. A must read for scholars of African studies that will also be of great value to academics and students with a broader interest in nationhood, globalization, and borders.