1. An/Other IR: Views from the South
Week Seven: Border Crossing

2. Border Methods
Uncritical belief in theorising that the ‘flows’ of globalization will lead to a borderless world and retreat of the nation-state
The proliferation and fortification of Borders: national borders just one among many: continental, international, regional, fragmentary borders of economics and politics
Borders are much more than just geographical constructs.
Borders are saturated with significance; they are devices for the politics of articulating the friend/enemy distinction – there can be no ‘we’ without a ‘they’, no inclusion without exclusion
Borders are not just about the blocking of subjects; they are about the articulation of subjects – of bringing subjects into discourse

3. Practices of Bordering
From points-based immigration systems to detention centers, removal centers and the production and deployment of legal systems, borders are a method of exclusion through inclusion (in a system of bureaucracy and governmentality).
Sophisticated and complex mobilization of social, legal, financial and policing infrastructure: coast guard, shipping companies, insurance firms, risk management firms, courts of law, etc
Control of global times: regimes of deterrence and waiting and spaces: free ports, extraction zones (within foreign national borders), supply chains.
Control of global spaces: extra- and intra-territorial zones (airside of the airport); free ports, extraction zones (within foreign national borders), supply chains
Practices of segmentation, hierarchisation, management and control of flows (of globalisation/capital)

4. Body as Border
The new line of the border “is along the skin, over the iris, and even inside the body to the vocal chords and their specific sound”.
Technologies that open the body up to the gaze of others (cf. Foucault and disciplinary power)
What one would want to remain private becomes the basis for public tracking/training
Biometric data creates the body as a site of power’s articulation

5. Biopolitics and exceptionalism
Fundamental purpose of the border is the construction of boundaries demarcating the internal versus the external.
Identity and population management (governmentality)
Biopolitics – mobile regulatory site through which people’s everyday lives can be made amenable to intervention and management.
The border as a producer of Bare Life (Agamben).
Borders obscure official state responsibility for the moral consequence of the bare life made possible through maintenance of states of exception
They provide a moral alibi

6. Cognitive Borders
The straight line border is not just a geographical entity; it can be a border of the mind: producing any concept it is necessarily to draw a border – cognitive disciplines
Cognitive borders can equate with geographical ones (Area Studies), but more often than not represent systems of unknowingness and mutual ignorance
Epistemological borders in IR: between North and South, social science prediction (describing the ‘real’ world) and humanities self-reflectiveness (description as interpretation), developed/privileged self and underdeveloped/silenced Other

7. The Spectacle of Borders

9. The Spectacle of Borders
Following Michael Rogin: to what extent does the theatre of Border spectacle obfuscate our understandings of borders and border-crossing?
Following Schmitt/Agamben: to what extent does the spectacle of the Border obfuscate the fact that the state of exception has not flipped back?

10. Rethinking Borders: Borderwork
The need to re-think borders to de-articulate the hegemonic image that centres of power try to impose on the border
Borders not as things, but as complex social relationships for the production and management of subjects; they are transitory, hybrid and mutating phenomena
Borders as Corridors:
The sameness of border towns as an indication of the homogenisation of space through the circulation of top down representations of poverty, crime, violence, not lives lived.
Connections of capitalism flow across borders via corridors unaffected by state politics

11. Border as Non-Space Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez: Middle Worlds
Worlds between nations populated by migrants and itinerants
They are everywhere in their belonging and not-belonging
Its citizens are uncitizens
Liminal space between the 1st World and the 3rd World
Not of the centre but of the Other
Marc Augé: Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity
Spaces of transit: airports, hotels, lounges, waiting rooms
Spaces of capital: cash machines, stock market, shopping malls
Spaces of information: internet

12. Heterotopia
Michel Foucault: “Of Other Spaces” Diacritics 16/1 (1986):
If the Utopia represents the singular space of aspiration and political hope, the heterotopia represents a curious inversion through multiplicity and difference.
Characteristics:
Site of contestation: forbidden or sacred spaces, spaces of crisis; or sites of deviation, change of transformation
Juxtaposition of different spaces in the same space (stage, screen, set)
Linked to slices of time: accumulating time (libraries), fleeting time (festivals), historical time (theme parks and resorts)
Opening and closing / permeable and impenetrable (compulsory access or exclusion (prison, barrack, hotel)

13. Border Art