Placing subnational borders in border studies

Introduction

While it is true that the past three decades have seen the flourishing of border research and an upsurge in literature on borders in human geography and in social sciences more generally, the same cannot be said about subnational borders. Contemporary border research and debates tend to focus on international borders. By way of example, Doris Wastl-Walter’s edited volume, Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies which aims ‘to provide an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of current research in the multidisciplinary and global field of border studies’ (Wastl-Walter, 2016, p. 1) does not have a single chapter on subnational borders. A scan of both the theoretical and case study chapters (written by leading scholars on border studies) reveals that Wastl-Walter’s volume does little to incorporate the findings from research on borders within the state into the conceptualization and analyses of borders. The omission of these borders from such an authoritative text is not an exception. Chapter 8 in Martin Glassner’s Political Geography (1996) which is dedicated to the discussion on frontiers and borders focuses exclusively on international borders. The chapter conceptualizes boundaries as thin lines appearing on maps ‘marking the limit of sovereignty’ (Glassner, 1996, p. 84).

I highlight these omissions to argue for greater attention to the study of subnational borders by human geographers. I do not suggest that human geographers and other social scientists ignore borders at the subnational level completely, or that they have no interest in them. Attempts have been made to research subnational borders to understand their roles in territorial politics and elections (Johnston, Pattie, & Manley, 2017; Narsiah & Maharaj, 1999; Ramutsindela & Simon, 1999), to analyze local conflict (Penu & Essaw, 2019), and governance (Short, 1982). They have also been scrutinized through the prism of regionalism (Ramutsindela, 2013; Zimmerbauer & Paasi, 2013). The political scientist Malcolm Anderson (1996) devoted chapter 4 of his book, Frontiers, to boundaries within the state.

My argument in this paper is that research on borders at the subnational level is invisible in current debates on borders, and that there is no commitment among border scholars to include them into broader discussions and debates on borders. This state of border research reminds us that themes in border studies also delineate the field of study. Jones’ (2009, p. 181) remarks that ‘the term “boundary studies”, as with any category, operates as a container into which particular topics or research can be categorized as either boundary studies research or not’ are worth reflecting on here. Subnational borders fall within the scope of border studies and the level at which these borders exist and operate is seen by some non-geographers as the preserve of geography. This begs the question what value could subnational borders add to the broader conceptualization of borders and border research. Papers in this Special Section provide useful hints on this question. They reveal that subnational borders serve as an avenue for broadening understandings of borders in Africa, and also demonstrate the entanglement of these borders with local, national and global actions. Before we tease out insights from these papers, it might help to reflect on why subnational borders have not received adequate attention in border studies.

Borders on the margins of border studies

Answers to the question why subnational borders are marginal to border theorization are many but some general observations can be made. First, earlier texts on borders recognized subnational borders but remained focused on international borders. Border research targeted the geopolitical elite such as diplomats, lawyers, surveyors, and so on (Jones, 1943), who were more concerned with international borders that were seen as critical for international relations. This elitist perspective and the consequent international relation foci have since continued under different forms, and have been reanimated through the field of geopolitics. It comes as no surprise that the journal Geopolitics was Geopolitics and International Boundaries in name and content when it was first launched in 1996.

Second, borders feature strongly in literature on decolonization in the Global South but the debate is preoccupied with international borders as the relics of colonialism. Analysts, politicians, and civil society see changing international borders, almost literally, as a precondition for decolonization and the reconfiguration of the state, especially in Africa (Gakwandi, 1996; Mazrui, 1993). This view ignores the fact that most subnational borders were a colonial creation, they were instrumental for separating colonists from the native populations, and they also divided (or set the stage for dividing) native populations. Third, subnational borders are not a sexy topic among border scholars and are considered peripheral to discussions about the world and the main issues of the day. Fourth, they are seen as immaterial to conceptions of borders and are sometimes misunderstood as irrelevant to contexts beyond particular localities.¹

Fifth, writings on the local state in human geography tackle the theme of governance but do not pay adequate attention to how that governance is constituted spatially through subnational borders. In other words, the literature under-scrutinizes the making of the local state and its spatial configuration. Sixth, as with most geographic themes and research agendas, border studies are predominantly North-centric and tend to focus on contexts relevant to the industrialized countries and their geopolitical actions, aspirations, and outlook. Renewed interest in border studies is in fact associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in literary and figurative terms; the expansion of the European Union (EU) and the subsequent allocation of resources for border studies in EU programmes; and the 9/11 attacks in the United States and consequent security concerns (Johnson et al., 2011; Wastl-Walter, 2016). Having sketched out some of the reasons for the marginalization of subnational borders, I provide a preliminary answer the pertinent question of what subnational borders could bring to our understanding of borders in the next section.

Appreciating subnational borders

The premise of this short introductory paper and the papers in this Special Section is that researching subnational borders yields themes that are productive for border studies. These borders provide intellectual space for understanding border-making processes in contexts that are often ignored in border research. Newnman (2008, p. 134) provided useful leads for thinking about subnational borders when he argued that ‘a deeper understanding of bounding process requires an integration of the different types and scales of boundaries into a hierarchical system in which the relative impact of these lines on people, groups, and nations can be conceptualized as a single process’. The challenge to such a possible intellectual project is that no one grand theory can be valid for all borders mainly because borders and the processes producing and shaping them are complex; borders manifest themselves in multiple ways; and they are inextricably linked with practices and institutions of the state (Paasi, 2016). It has been argued that ‘borders can be theorized reasonably only as part of wider production and reproduction of territoriality/territory, state power, and agency’ (Johnson et al., 2011, p. 62). Indeed, the framing of borders as a territorial question has characterized border research. That research together with literary geographies has animated the concept of territory (Elden, 2013).

Concepts and metaphors in subnational border politics

Borders of different kinds are tied to, but also reflect meanings of ‘territory’, ‘territoriality’, and the ‘territorial’ that are themselves unstable mainly because of shifts in the conceptualizations of these terms and the various contexts in which they are used (Elden, 2013). Territory is generally understood as a defining feature of the state, and the state is inconceivable without a territory over which it exercises its sovereignty (Gottmann, 1973). However, the conceptual basis for rules on legislative jurisdiction has been challenged by cross-border events that demand the deployment of territoriality and extraterritoriality as a legal construct through which sovereignty is expanded beyond the borders of the state (Buxbaum, 2009). It also does not reflect the existence of what is referred to as stateless nations (Minahan, 2016).

On reflecting on the conceptual neglect of territory in human geography, Elden (2010, p. 801) argued that ‘territory needs to be interrogated in relation to state and space, and that its political aspects need to be understood in an expanded sense of political-legal and political-technical issues’. The question relevant to the discussion in this paper is whether conceptions of territory and territoriality could aid our understanding of borders at various levels. Elden (2010, p. 811) has argued that understanding territory as a political technology forces us to see ‘boundaries not as a primary distinction that separates territory from other ways of understanding political control of land, but as a second-order problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space’.

Borders might not bind all territories as political space, but they are nonetheless a commonly understood marker of territories and the meaning of territory is reflected in relation to borders (Paasi, 2012). Antonsich (2011) suggests that the border takes a centre stage when we use the territorial as a point of departure in thinking about territory. The territorial, as expressed in land appropriation and control opens up avenues for reinserting subnational borders into theories of the border. This is possible because contestations over land take place at national and subnational levels, and also invoke all sorts of borders.

Territory as a site of everyday life and as a vehicle for making claims do not only enable us to understand the affects elicited by borders but also opens up possibilities for interrogating the reconfiguration of state space (Reeves, 2011). The trend in recent literature is to scrutinize the rupturing and reconfiguring of that space from the perspectives of cross-border events and processes. But the rupturing of the state also results from internal political dynamics as evident in the collapse of the Somalian state (Samatar, in this issue). Border disputes in Somalia have national and internal dynamics. At the national level, the country has been involved in border disputes with Ethiopia over the Ogaden and with Kenya over the maritime border.² Somalia has also experienced the mobilization of internal borders that has fundamentally transformed the state. Samatar (in this issue) has shown that political ethnicity in one of Africa’s most homogenous nation-state induced new internal borders that tore the state apart. These new internal borders emerged from the collapse of the national government in 1991 and were inspired by the sectarian elite’s imagination of their constituencies that ‘turned the original political dream of Somalia inside out and created internal borders leading to the formation of a new “tribal federalism”.’ In other words, federalism in Somalia was enabled by the demarcation of new internal borders. This demarcation process was also linked to contested forms of governance in that country that reified the colonial system in which most African states were established. Accordingly, Samatar (in this issue) argues that ‘African elite’s self-serving political-economic behaviour has reified the colonial system of governance and consequently produced acrimonious internal divisions that appear to be even more destructive than those artificial international borders’. This case of Somalia highlights the need to pay attention to the process of demarcation at national and subnational levels.

In both its technical and non-technical sense, demarcation is a necessary step in bounding and border-producing processes. From a technical perspective, demarcation is associated with the actual drawing of physical lines. With the exception of the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU) at Durham University in the United Kingdom, contemporary border research eschews issues of demarcation on the grounds that the processes of demarcation of physical borders impose severe limitations on our conceptualization of borders and how various types of borders emerge and function in society. Demarcation is understood as more a technical procedure than a process amenable to theoretical discussions. Thus, the focus on demarcation is seen as imposing the pre-scientific view of borders that has been highly criticized for accentuating the physicality of borders at the expense of other important types of borders. With a few exceptions, the demarcation process is relegated to the ‘old-fashioned’ border research of the 1950s in which the evolution of borders was understood in technical terms, i.e. delimitation and demarcation.

The decline in research on the demarcation of physical borders could be ascribed to the spatial fixities that characterize most international borders. That is to say, most international borders were demarcated a long time ago and have remained at the same geographical location despite changes brought about by, say, decolonization and cross-border regions. Even the borders of Eastern Europe that experienced ruptures at the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s did not generate substantial or sustained interest in the demarcation process because the new borders had largely existed as regional borders. This rupture was not only accompanied by the upsurge of national identities but also spurred the creation of national bounded spaces from existing subnational entities. These examples are often viewed through the lens of domestic politics when they, in fact, emerge from, or are spurred by the fusion of local, national and global politics.

My point here is that the production of subnational borders need not be limited to political dynamics at the local levels as the changes in these borders might reflect power dynamics between global and national actors. A case in point is the reconfiguration of borders in Selous Game Reserve that is also a world heritage property. Noe (in this issue) invokes the metaphor of the Berlin Curse to argue that, as in colonial times, Africa’s borders are being influenced by external forces, namely Western states working through international institutions and agencies. While African(ist) border scholars have documented and debated the impact as well as the implications of the Berlin-inspired colonial borders, little or no attention has been paid to how external actors are still involved in the production of African borders, especially at the subnational level. Noe’s message is that international conservation organizations and institutions have used their power and influence to determine the demarcation of the internal borders of the Selous Game Reserve. They were able to contest the power of the Tanzanian state over the borders of the reserve because the reserve is a World Heritage that belong to ‘all the peoples of the world irrespective of the territory on which they are located’ (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Online, 2019). It is this internationalization of natural resources that enable international organizations and powerful actors to influence the demarcation of internal borders.

If the mistakes of earlier writings were about over-emphasizing the demarcation of physical borders, those of contemporary writings are about under-scrutinizing demarcation as a process through which we could deepen our understanding of the complexity of border politics. Expressed differently, the delimitation and demarcation of borders need not be limited to technical knowledge and expertise as these processes are shaped by, and contribute to particular kinds of politics. Narsiah’s paper (in this issue) provides a good example of how the demarcation of a subnational border became central to local struggles while also linking these struggles to party politics at the regional and national levels. He shows that the demarcation of Matatiele and its relocation from the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa was crucial for the formation of the African Independent Congress that challenged the ruling African National Congress in the local government elections in 2006 as well as in the 2019 national elections. Thus, subnational borders are signifiers of power, i.e. they give spatial expression of desires and ambitions of those in power and also feed into national and local politics. This begs the question how borders functioning at various levels could be brought together into an analytical frame.

Towards an integrated framework: methodological challenges

I acknowledge that conceptualizing international and subnational borders as a singular object of inquiry presents methodological challenges. One of the key challenges relates to how points of intersections could be created to facilitate the dialogue on distinct borders that also function at different levels. In other words, how do we arrive at the epistemology of borders necessary for the development of an inclusive border theory in scalar terms? It is suggested here that the first step towards weaving together borders of different kinds into an object of inquiry is to generate cross-cutting themes relevant to, or derived from borders in question. The vastness of the literature, together with language barriers, makes the compilation of a complete list of themes on borders impossible. That task is also challenging because borders are hardly static or fixed, and they also appear in various forms. However, these challenges cannot be an excuse for holding back the project of an inclusive discussion of borders. The next step is to create categories of the main themes through a process of clustering that resembles stratified sampling in social science research. The purpose of these categories is to identify the main themes that are crucial for the dialogue on borders at the international and subnational levels.

For the purpose of our discussion, I note that the commonalities between international and subnational borders are that, first, ‘state borders are related in complex ways to local, regional, state-bound and supranational processes’ (Johnson et al., 2011, p. 62). This means that subnational borders are integral to the state which is at the centre of most border studies. In fact, subnational borders can graduate into state borders as the cases of Northern Ireland (Anderson, 1996) and South Africa (Ramutsindela, 2013) show. Second, though some borders appear at the subnational scale, the processes by which they emerge are sometimes indistinguishable from those of borders at other levels. Third, as with international borders, subnational borders reflect and influence the distribution of power in the state, and mark both ‘old’ and ‘new’ political identities (Anderson, 1996). Subnational borders are at the core of, and reflect territorial politics in tangible ways. Fourth, much of border research under-scrutinize the effects of borders on ordinary people. Where such effects are entertained, the discussions tend to focus on international borders as evidenced by studies on migration, asylum, and international security (Carter & Poast, 2017; Fassin, 2011; Vallet, 2016). We need to know how ordinary people, who have nowhere to go, and whose everyday life and access to resources and power are either enhanced or constrained by borders within the state.

Conclusion

This introductory paper referred to the literature on borders to call for attention to subnational borders. I used evidence from papers in this Special Section to argue for greater attention to subnational borders as an avenue through which border research could be advanced and also deepened. The main points from this paper are, first, subnational borders are not only useful for understanding why borders matter, but they also reopen some of the ‘traditional’ border concepts and practices such as demarcation. Second, while it makes sense to conceive of borderlands and border communities as integral to international borders, the affects elicited by borders and boundedness can also be understood through the lens of subnational borders. It is at, and through, subnational borders that the affects elicited by borders are deep and intense. Third, the papers in this Special Section demonstrate that subnational borders provide a productive platform on which we might engage the politics of the border. Fourth, subnational borders challenge the general approach to borders in Africa that confines coloniality to international borders. The metaphor of the Berlin Curse is useful for unmasking the workings of colonial-era strategies and tactics, and for evaluating the production of borders in various contexts and levels.

The broader question at hand is: in what ways are borders different or similar at all scales? The simplistic answer could be to compare borders through the lens of scale or to look at the functions to arrive at the distinction between state and subnational borders. A more helpful approach is to create a dialogue on borders by delineating themes that could be scrutinized at more than one level. This short paper is an attempt to move in this direction with the goal of bringing subnational borders into the main discussions and debates about borders. Integrating subnational borders into those debates is a necessary condition for theory building in border studies.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the National Research Foundation (Grant No. 107804) for supporting the workshop from which this paper and the Special Section draw theoretical insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This perception was made clear to me at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Boston in 2008, where I presented a paper on the intersections of regions and borders to one of the sessions on ‘Regional World/s’ organized by Martin Jones and Anssi Paasi. One of the participants raised the concern that my work on sub-national regions and borders in South Africa does not seem to mean anything to other places.

2. The maritime border dispute between Somalia and Kenya is in the International Court of Justice and the hearing will take place in September 2019.