Youth geographies of urban estrangement in the Canadian city: risk management,race relations and the ‘sacrificial stranger’

This paper explores the impact of urban social divisions and changing race relations on the experiences of disadvantaged youth living on the periphery of two Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto. We analyze a cross-national subsample of 60 disadvantaged youths’ perceptions of urban social conflict and changing race relations in their city and school. We raise the larger question of how and why economically disadvantaged young people might embody particular understandings of safety, race, the other and security in different spatial registers of the city. We utilize an ethnographic methodology drawing from diverse but interrelated fields: border studies, the phenomenology of estrangement and a materialist version of critical race studies [(Ahmed, S. 1999. “Home and Away Narratives of Migration and Strangeness.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–347, Ahmed, S. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Ahmed, S. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge; Kearney, R., and V. E. Taylor. 2005. “A Conversation with Richard Kearney.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6 (2): 17–26)].     

Gendered mobilities and border-crossings: from Elbasan to Athens

The study of migratory movements, with all their changing features in the context of post-1989 political, economic and geographical restructurings, offers a prime site for reflection on the gendered meaning/s and content of mobilities and borders. Particularly in human geography, new questions and different approaches to established themes in migration research are elaborated in this ‘era of globalisation’. Negotiations of geographical and social borders and boundaries, the speed and ease of movement, but also gender inequalities in choice and cases of immobility and/or enclosure, emphasis on agency and the importance of space and place are some such themes and questions. This article is based on research with migrant women in Athens; it follows the trajectories of an Albanian woman from Elbasan to Athens as a starting point for the discussion of gendered practices and perceptions of migration, (im)mobility and border-crossings. In these trajectories, space is involved, in its material aspects but also in terms of representations and codings. Notions of place, local/global relations and gender identities are re-worked in the efforts to set up bearable everyday lives ‘here’, while maintaining links ‘there’. At the same time, ‘here’ (in Athens) and ‘there’ (in Elbasan) come out as open and temporary while borders are (re)produced, negotiated and challenged in multiple ways and at various spatial scales.     

Civilized Borders: A Study of Israel's New Crossing Administration

Abstract: At Israel's new border crossings with the West Bank, modernization has become the buzz‐word: not only referring to modernized mechanical means—a Wall, newly designed crossings, and micro‐mechanics such as turnstiles, signs, and fences—but also to new and sophisticated scientific technologies, such as sensor machines and scanners, and to modernized means of identification, such as advanced computer systems and biometric cards. This paper considers the transformation of the Israel–West Bank border to be a result of four major processes: reterritorialization, bureaucratization, neoliberalization, and de‐humanization. I utilize in‐depth interviews with top military and state officials and with human rights activists as well as a series of participatory observations to explore the on‐the‐ground implications of the borders’ transformation.     

Knowledge production and border nationalism in northern Mexico

ABSTRACT. This article examines the transformations in the cultural sphere of Tijuana, one of Mexico's largest and fastest growing cities, in order to emphasise the border as a crucial site of nation‐building in northern Mexico. I propose that cultural and intellectual actors, through particular sites, are changing the way the city is positioned in relation to the national political space of Mexico. Two institutions are considered specifically, both of which are integral to the propagation of an array of representations of Tijuana. In looking to articulations of nationhood and practices of knowledge production, this article delineates how urban identities reclaim and reconfigure key aspects of national identity in a region heretofore unrecognised as central to the creation of a national imaginary.     

Cosmopolitics,border crossings and the complex museum

Collections documentation systems are powerful frameworks for organising, producing and controlling cultural knowledge. Drawing on the findings from the Australian Research Council Linkage project Reconceptualising Heritage Collections (University of Western Sydney and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia) and research undertaken using the museum’s Palestinian collections through wikis and focus groups with constituencies in Australia, Israel and Palestine, we illustrate the highly political and fluid nature of the meanings and values existent around objects; and how now, in a networked complex world, non-linear interactions are occurring across transnational borders. These interactions sit uneasily with conventional museum practice. The collections became visible mechanisms to confront the complex relations and politics of borders between the museum and everyday life. ‘Cosmopolitics’, in terms of its political, ethical, cosmological and transnational outlook along with cultural complexity, enables an exploration of the dynamics and the shifting borders of an emerging complex museum. Ideas for the future imaginary of these interactions are further explored through the pathway of chaos theory.     

Geopolitical boundary narratives, the global war on terror and border fencing in India

This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the 'global war on terror' by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the 'enemy other' in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from previous geopolitical boundary narratives. First, the enemy other is described as not only being violent but also as outside the boundaries of modernity. Second, the enemy other is represented as posing a global and interconnected threat that is no longer limited by geography. These two shifts are used to justify the new preventative responses of pre-emptive military action abroad and the securitisation of the borders of the state. This article argues that in India the good and evil framing of the global war on terror was mapped onto longstanding communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. In the process, Pakistan, Bangladesh and increasingly Muslims generally are described as violent, irrational and a threat to the security of the Indian state. These changes led to a profound shift in the borderlands of the Indian state of West Bengal, where fencing and securitising the border with Bangladesh was previously resisted, but now is deemed essential. The article concludes that the framing of the war on terror as a global and interconnected problem has allowed sovereign states to consolidate power and move substantially closer to the territorial ideal of a closed and bounded container of an orderly population by attempting to lock down political borders.     

Outlaw Capital: Accumulation by Transgression on the Paraguay–Brazil Border

Outlaw economies are a key, but under-appreciated, feature of late capitalism. With an ethnography of what one journalist called “the largest illicit economy in the Western Hemisphere” on the Paraguay–Brazil border, this article contributes empirical findings about the production of space for extralegal economies. Contributing to debates about geographies of the illicit, I theorise outlaw capital, a form of capital that negotiates profits and distributes rents through situated forms of deals, bribes, and schemes. Outlaw capital zones particular places as sites of useful transgression. Powerful spatial imaginaries then cast them out of thought, despite their connections to spaces of authorised economic practice. Outlaw capital’s diverse, flexible spatio-economic forms benefit from explicit and tacit state support. As an example of theory building from the South, outlaw capital can help us think broadly about the power and politics of accumulation by transgression as a key logic of outlaw capital.     

Evictability and the Biopolitical Bordering of Europe

Migration and border scholars have argued that the Europeanization and securitization of borders and migration have led to forms of population regulation that constitute a questionable divide between EU and non‐EU groups, as well as between different non‐EU groups. This paper argues that these processes have impacted not only centrifugally, on non‐EU populations, but also centripetally, on the “intra‐EU” divide regarding minorities such as Europe's Muslims and Roma. I explain how a de‐nationalization of the concepts and methods of migration and border studies—beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism—sheds light on the under‐researched impact of the EU's external border regime on minoritized EU citizens. I introduce the notion of “evictability” to articulate this de‐nationalization and discuss the case study of Europe's Romani minority to show how contemporary forms of securitization further divide Europe bio‐politically along intra‐European lines.     

Funder and facilitator: Swedish development aid aimed at cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1995–2008

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates the relationship between the Swedish development agency Sida and Cultural Heritage without Borders (CHwB), a facilitating organisation in the field of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) following the Bosnia War. From 1995 to 2008 CHwB was the only NGO in BiH working to preserve cultural heritage, and was almost exclusively funded by Sida. From having been an organisation focusing on the restoration of historic monuments, CHwB transformed into becoming an NGO facilitating social and economic development. The paper suggests that CHwB gradually changed from having a very particular position of working with the preservation of an ethnically diverse cultural heritage with the aim of promoting reconciliation, to one where it needed to focus on reconstruction and its implications for economic development. By analysing a large number of key documents using Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis this change is interpreted in relation to changes taking place within the landscape of international aid and post-conflict recovery.