Abstract
Doris Wastl-Walter’s excellent volume The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies brings together contributions from numerous distinguished authors, making a comprehensive and welcomed companion to the interdisciplinary field of border studies. While borders and bordering practices are increasingly discussed and studied in human geography, international relations, sociology, anthropology and many other disciplines, this volume is the first wide-ranging introduction to border studies. The collection is also future oriented because it strives for equality not merely in geographical terms but also by giving more voice to female and younger scholars. The book has been thematically divided into eight parts which all include several individual articles. Each of the total 32 contributions provides a sophisticated theoretical approach and a well-elaborated empirical investigation, so that a reader can easily select the relevant articles for his/her purposes.
The companion begins with a brief introduction by the editor and theoretical and conceptual explorations from the leading scholars in the field. In Chapter 1, Anssi Paasi discusses challenges that relational thinking and the mobility paradigm have posed to the study of political borders, by insisting that place and territory no longer matter in the making of politics and identity. He concludes that the juxtaposition between territoriality and networks can be overcome when borders are understood as a complex set of social institutions and symbols that materialize through various spatial scales. Chapter 2, by David Newman, identifies bordering themes that are common to all border scholars, putting forward his argument that, although a single border theory is not possible, or even desirable, it would be important to create a common language for border scholars. These first articles also provide a general overview to both traditional and emerging research approaches in the field, especially from the standpoint of human geography.
Current geographical research emphasizes that borders are not fixed and static lines but continuously socially produced and reproduced in and through bordering practices: ‘A border is a verb’, as Henk van Houtum puts it. The sophisticated analysis by van Houtum regarding how borders are continuously reproduced through discourses and performances of national belonging, in international sports, for example, helps us to understand why borders persist even in the context of the European Union’s ‘internal’ border areas. Such deeply rooted cultural and everyday borders are also contemplated by Tatiana Zhurzhenko, who discusses the significance of borders in collective memory and examines how borders are manifested in material and symbolic landscapes. Zhurzhenko’s disciplinary background is in political science, whereas the three first chapters are written by geographers.
In Chapter 5, Alan K. Henrikson, from the field of diplomatic studies, represents a theoretical scheme of border regions as neighbourhoods. Complex transnational relations in the processes of creating neighbourhoods are also critically examined in the European context in Part VII. In Chapter 6, a sociologist Stefanie Kron represents a methodological framework for the analysis of political subjectivities. To provide understanding of what border crossing means, for example from the perspective of transnational migrants, Kron traces the literature of ‘border feminism’, in which the emphasis is on a very specific symbolic and psychological meaning of borders as transit zones.
Part II, ‘Geopolitics: state, nation and power relations’, introduces articles that deal with rather different topics, yet the thematic organization of the book works generally well. Lassi Heininen and Michele Zebich-Knos scrutinize border policy in the context of polar regions and Karin Dean introduces an ethnographical study on the Thai-, Sino- and Indo-Myanmar boundaries, for instance. Part III is devoted to border enforcement, a theme that has been of particular interest to border scholars in the 21st century. The contemporary border management and security practices along North American borders is the main focus, which is of course, not very surprising in the light of post-9/11 developments; however, it would have been interesting to read more about the European Union and Schengen borders as well. Part IV examines the relationship between borders and territorial identity, a theme that has been highly popular in border research in Europe during the last two decades.
One of the key questions in border research today is how transnational migrants are confronted with international borders. Several articles in Parts V and VI trace the meaning of borders in the lives of immigrants, illustrating how across the world borders have become highly exclusive, so that people have unequal territorial access depending on their nationality, ethnicity, religion, wealth, professional skills, etc. In Part V the emphasis is more on institutional frameworks that simultaneously enable and restrict mobility, whereas Part VI exposes the potentially tragic consequences created by the criminalization of border crossing and migration. Stories told by Eunyoung Christina Choi about undocumented North Korean border-crossers, in particular, powerfully depict how dehumanized, criminalized bodies become the object of state violence. It is not only political conflicts that have an effect on migration, however, but also environmental changes, crop failure and famine. In the last part of the volume, titled ‘Nature and environment’, the complex policy of governing through environmental protection is highlighted, the empirical focus being on transnational parks and maritime boundaries.
The publication of this volume certainly is a step forward to institutionalize border studies as a distinctive research field. More than just empirically showing how international borders are manifested in different geopolitical contexts, this book also reveals how theoretically rich and methodologically complex border studies are today. The articles mainly focus on formal and practical border drawing practices, whereas creative cultural and popular performances of the border are not discussed in depth. The selection of articles and themes has been successful, for although the book brings together different theoretical approaches and empirical cases, all papers share an understanding that borders and bordering entail material consequences and unequal power relations. The book will definitely attract a wide interdisciplinary readership of scholars, students and professionals.