Bounded spaces in question: x-raying the persistence of regions, territories and borders

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the special issue of Geografiska Annaler B, which includes revised and extended articles originally presented at the Vega Symposium in Stockholm in 2021. The symposium entitled Bounded Spaces in Question: X-raying the Persistence of Regions and Territories focused on the continuing importance and challenges of regions, territories and borders, both in geographical thinking and in different social (political, cultural and economic) practices. These keywords and their multiple concepts have become highly important in geographic and interdisciplinary literature since the 1990s. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring these categories into the same framework and to problematize the changing nature of bounded spaces and related power relations. The articles by Anssi Paasi, Alexander B. Murphy, Martin Jones and Linn Axelsson seek to transcend the ‘self-evident’ meanings of these categories and examine the related theoretical and practical challenges at different spatial scales. The authors examine the changing meanings of these keywords in an increasingly diverse political geographical landscape, characterized by globalization, various forms of mobility, the rise of populism and (right-wing) nationalism, and the simultaneous opening and closing of regional/territorial spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Region
• territory
• borders
• bordering
• mobility

Introduction

In 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, 1.5 billion tourists crossed international territorial borders. They were probably welcomed in most states and destinations, perhaps regions and places suffering from so-called ‘over-tourism’ as major exceptions (Paasi and Ferdoush 2022).

Crossing national borders had gradually become easier as tourism expanded. At the same time, in 2019, the number of immigrants in the world was over 270 million. For migrants, especially refugees and asylum seekers, the link between the state territory and the border has been much more challenging; the mobility of migrants has proven to be increasingly complex and selective. When new virus began to spread in the spring of 2020, several states restricted or banned movement across territorial borders. More than 90% of the world’s population lived in states where travel restrictions have been imposed, and about 3 billion people in states where borders were completely closed to non-citizens and non-residents (Connor 2020). In some regional cases, such as the province of Uusimaa surrounding the Helsinki metropolitan area, cross-border movement was strictly regulated. Numerous developed states mobilized state territoriality also in another way: by exercising ‘vaccine nationalism’, reserving vaccination doses merely to own citizens (Murphy 2022). Vaccine nationalism is still ongoing in early 2022. This is a revealing example of a global uneven development in which the poor suffer more than the rich, but which at the same time paves the way for the emergence of new virus variants that can spread rapidly across borders around the world.

Despite these very likely temporary control measures, tourism and migration across regional and territorial borders will continue and even accelerate in the future, although in the case of migration this is most likely to take place in increasingly discriminatory and irregular ways. According to various estimates, over 200 million people may have to cross regional borders over the next 30 years and relocate within their own states due to accelerating climate change, sea level rise, drought, floods, and lack of food and clean water (Clement et al. 2021). For those who must flee across national borders, ‘territorial sovereignty’, as we currently know it in state security rhetoric and practice, becomes, in fact, the main obstacle to their security (Dalby 2020). This development, together with the constant changes in geopolitical and geoeconomic landscapes, keeps territorial borders and bordering practices on agenda. Arguments drawing on the meanings of the territory and related border security are already being used in many states to keep migrants out and to feed populism and nationalism (Paasi et al. 2022). In fact, the vision of climate-migration as a major cross-border threat has been mainstream across political spectrum for decades (Tempus 2020).

In this context, not only state borders but also regional borders, socio-spatial dividing lines between and inside cities and the social and legal boundaries of rights matter, as well as the borders of labour market areas, welfare and citizenship that constantly and asymmetrically limit migrant’s full (political) participation in societies (cf. Pécoud and de Guchteneire 2007). Borders are thus used to organize social spaces and to structure and regulate social life at and across various scales. Hence borders are critical from local daily life to regions and states, from supra-state units to global geopolitical spaces (Paasi 2022). Borders and bordering processes connect different domains of socio-political and economic life. Correspondingly, the functions and meanings of borders and bordering vary. Borders are also actively mobilized to transform and redefine many key categories of social life, for example citizenship, belonging and identity (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019).

Vega Symposium 2021 theme and invited speakers

The aim of this essay is to introduce and contextualize this Special Issue of Geografiska Annaler B, which consists of revised and extended versions of articles originally presented at the Vega Symposium. The rationale for the symposium theme ‘Bounded Spaces in Question: X-raying the Persistence of Regions and Territories’ arose from the dynamic and contradictory terrain discussed above. In this context, regions, territories and borders, all keywords that have long motivated the work of human geographers, have been challenged both in theory and in practice. The Vega Symposium, organized in Stockholm in September 2021, provided a great opportunity to bring together scholars who have focused on spatial concepts and practices in their research but who also have certain differences in their approaches, for example, in scalar issues or in understanding how we should approach the spatial categories under discussion. Speakers Alec Murphy, Martin Jones, and Linn Axelsson were invited to consider issues such as: how can we best understand the current functions and ongoing appeal of regions and territories in an increasingly dynamic world? How best to theorize regions, territories, and borders/bordering, and their dynamism and contextual nature? How could topological thinking help us understanding the changing spatialities?

My opening keynote lecture problematized generally the evolution and challenges of regional and territorial concepts and the multiple roles of borders as material and ideological devices, processes, and symbols as such and as they manifest in region/territory and identity building. Similarly, Jones and Murphy focused on the varying roles and meanings of bounded spaces, Jones on regions and Murphy on territories/territorialities, while Axelsson emphasized the need to explore borders by conceptualizing them as fragmented timespaces, especially in the context of the regulation of labour migration. All speakers share an interest in topological approaches and while finding inspiration, for example, from Allen’s (2003, 2011, 2016) innovative works in geography, they utilized topological thinking in different ways.

Why ‘X-raying’? Isn’t this something that belongs to the sophisticated techniques utilized in medicine to produce images of the insides of bodies or in materials science and physics to investigate the qualities and strength of materials? However, this notion can also be usefully understood in a metaphoric sense, that is ‘seeing below the surface’. Indeed, such understanding has a long history in urban design and planning, as a method to scrutinize how human time–space relations can be organized and planned. Already in 1946 Ernest Fooks offered in his book X-Ray the City! new ideas of urban planning, the complexities urban futures, regionalities and borders. He compared his method to an X-ray of the human body, in which individual maps formed part of the ‘anatomical atlas of an urban entity’ (Pert and Goad 2016, 10). He also addressed the arbitrariness of urban boundaries and noted that municipal and administrative entities rarely correspond to realized urban areas, an observation that has been significant in both the history of urbanism and (regional) geographic thinking and is constantly relevant in strategic spatial planning, where hard and soft spaces, mergers, and fuzzy borders have become important themes (cf. Murphy et al. 2015; Zimmerbauer and Paasi 2020).

Regions, territories and borders thus mediate and are involved in many contemporary socio-spatial processes at and across different scales; they are not merely backdrops for such processes. All symposium speakers tried to bring together their expertise to go ‘below and beyond’ the surface of the traditional conceptualizations of regions, territories and borders in order to scrutinize both their dynamism and inert ‘qualities and strength’.

Alexander Murphy was among the first geographers who combined the perspectives of constructionist regional geography and political geography when developing his ideas of regions and territories as social, cultural, and historical constructs (Murphy 1991). He has later looked at how and by what mechanisms territories constantly appeal to the general public, and reflected, for example, the tangible and perceptual inertia inherent in the modernist territorial system and practices through which territory and territoriality are reproduced (Murphy 2013, 2022). This question is increasingly significant in the present world where not only the tensions between many state governments but also between different factions inside states are rising in many hotspots, most recently in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Martin Jones represents a new generation among British geographers who has energetically explored new avenues for critical thinking regarding regions. Further, Jones has, at times with sociologists, pushed further socio-spatial theory (Jones 2009; Macleod and Jones 2001; Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008). His discussion of phase space provided a critical booster to the prevailing debate on relationality (Jones 2009). His conceptualization of this space represented moderate relationalism but at the same acknowledged the constrained, at times inertial, but always context-specific nature of geography.

Linn Axelsson (2022) represents a new generation in the field of border studies. She has developed border thinking from a topological viewpoint. This has been of critical importance since she has linked border issues to mobility, particularly in the context of the regulation of labour migration (see also Allen and Axelsson 2019). Border-mobility nexus has become the latest stage in border research over the last couple of decades (Paasi 2022). For her, time and space not only complement each other, but act together as timespaces.

Contributions

Special issue is opened by Anssi Paasi, whose article provides a broad context and conceptual background for the symposium themes and for the papers of Murphy (2022) on territory, Jones (2022) on regions/regionality, and Axelsson (2022) on (topological) borders of space-times. Paasi first examines the recent resurgence of the region and territory, traces the intentions behind this recovery, and examines the politicization of regional spaces. He then considers the changing roles and meanings of regional and territorial borders. Next, the focus shifts to forms of violence embedded in state borders, which is present in conflicting tendencies of de- and re-bordering. The article then considers why borders are seen as such enduring tools of sovereignty and nationalism, looking at their roles as part of landscapes of social power and control on the one hand, and their attractiveness as symbolic structures related to memory and nationalist ideologies and sacrifices, on the other. Paasi concludes his article by discussing what progress could be in geographical research and especially in critical research focusing on bounded spaces and borders.

The focus of Alec Murphy’s article ‘Taking territory seriously in a fluid, topologically varied world: reflections in the wake of the populist turn and the COVID-19 pandemic’, is on the persistence of the territorial model of thinking and acting. The relations between national (territorial) and international are critical in his contribution. Murphy frames his discussion with two highly topical phenomena, the wake of the populist turns in politics and societal debates, and the COVID-19 pandemic, and uses these as prisms through which he scrutinizes the ceaseless significance and the solidification of the territorial ideal in contemporary states. Such ideal seems to endure in social life despite the globalizing, fast changing, diverse, interconnected, segmented and ever more uneven and polarized world of the twenty-first century. He considers the features of the modernist political-territorial system and sees the increasing polarization inside states, a fragmentation of communication and information flows, and the incapability of the states to satisfy the basic demands traditionally expected from them, as processes fostering the erosion of state-territory-people triangle. Traditionally identified trends, such as border porosity and other extra-territorial developments, therefore, need to be considered in relation to previous processes. Taking for granted the ideas of fluidity, topological complexity or changing sovereignty arrangements, Murphy argues, risks disregarding the major powers shaping the current world. Territory’s structural stickiness and its sentimental and ontological hold, as well as its embeddedness in ideological and other social practices are constantly critical forces among such powers and significant practical and theoretical challenges for political geographic research. We have still many socio-spatial features that cannot be written off: material practices like border-making and bordering, territorial-ideological representations mobilized in national(ist) mapping as well as the lived meanings and emotional and affective loyalties to territorial communities (Paasi 2011a). Finally, Murphy provides a set of questions related to nationalist-territorial ideas and ideals that deserve scholarly attention in the future. Some of them are without doubt interdisciplinary and might provide nourishment for the cooperation of scholars representing different academic fields.

If Murphy’s article provides a versatile analysis of the significance of territory and territoriality in the topological and relational world, Martin Jones turns the attention to another critical keyword of geography, region. The key focus in Jones’ article ‘For a new new regional geography: plastic regions and more-than-relational regionality’, is to x-ray the conceptual terrain related to regions and to go beyond the apparent surface of current debates. Hence his theoretical article strives to contribute to the ongoing debates on regions. He starts with the development of regional geography and moves towards ‘new, new regional geography’ and then takes this idea one step further. His discussion does not focus on any particular scale but looks at regions from a more general conceptual perspective. Recent geographical debates have suggested ways forward by interpreting regions as ‘assembled temporary permanencies’, reflecting how regions are constructed and how they continue to be present despite the conditions of eternal change. Inspired by John Allen’s (2012) idea of ‘a more-than-relational geography’, which asks what kind of territorial entities are created and maintained, Jones suggests that the concept of ‘plastic space’ could be useful in advancing arguments beyond a more-than relational geography of regions. The term plastic space appeared in the geographical literature as early as the 1970s but has largely been left out of the theoretical discussion (Forer 1978). Plastic regions, as Jones understands them, take us to a broader discussion about spatialities and they are not just about adding relational things together in a mindful topological descriptive exercise but rather demand thoughtful conceptualization of the entities being assembled, mobilized and connected, as well as specifying their interrelationships for forming regions as ‘temporary permanencies’. Respectively, Jones suggests, plasticity renders possible to understand regions not as discrete entities but as multidimensional, contingent, and relationally implicated and entwined plastic surfaces, also giving to temporality a substantial role.

Jones’ article is based on a diverse geographical, philosophical, and psychological literature. Particularly important sources of inspiration are the works of the French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Her research on plasticity is inspired by several sources: Hegel, medicine, neuroscience, and political philosophy. Jones suggests that plastic space as plasticity serves to complicate the ‘plastic object’s narrative of time and space, rendering it, not rigid and determined, but instead always contingent upon the context within which it unfolds, and thus always evolving and becoming’. In this approach, the regions are flexible but not completely arbitrary. They would continue to be constrained by different contextual realities formed in and through time as the plasticity of institutional combinations. Thus, in addition to relations, plasticity emphasizes how such relationships combine, by looking at processes, practices, and contextual realities such as boundedness, inertia, power, or cultural constraints.

Linn Axelsson’s article, ‘Border timespaces: understanding the regulation of international mobility and migration’, focuses on the manifestations and ambiguities of borders in the contemporary world characterized by intense mobilities. She notes how the currently dominant bordering practices challenge many conventional perspectives on the relationship between state, borders and territory. Motivated by recent viewpoints in border research that accentuate the necessity to focus on the temporalizing effects of border regimes and inspired by the long continuum of geographic research that puts emphasis on time, Axelsson aims to push these ideas further in the context of labour migration. She notes that it is not enough to simply move the focus from spatial arrangements to temporal or simply to add a temporal dimension to spatial analyses of border. Instead, it is necessary to consider time and space together and how they work together. Respectively she speaks about border timespaces that are ever more fragmented. This entails paying attention to the subtler registers of power involved in the management of the other, routine forms of international mobility in the analysis. Correspondingly the major task is to advance and expand current understanding of borders by seeing them as devices which selectively contract and expand the distance between internal and external spaces by modifying the speed of migrant’s movement. Her approach is, compared with other contributions, accentuating more the ‘transnational’. Axelsson concludes that focusing on dynamic, fragmented and ephemeral border timespaces may provide more nuanced horizons for making sense of how the cross-border mobilities of migrants are regulated today.

Epilogue

The presentations at the Vega Symposium and the articles of this Special Issue reaffirm how the terms region, territory, and border have been among the key categories in the development of geographic thinking and research practice, but also how they are critically inspiring and guiding new research and steps toward conceptual progress in geography. These terms have witnessed a resurgence in many fields since the 1980s–1990s, often echoing the changing power-relations in governance, increased mobilities and transforming spatialities, and the rise/revival of relational and topological thinking which both have questioned the taken for granted character of bounded spaces at various scales as well as the static and fixed identities and ideologies associated with such spaces. The three terms region, territory and border have all a long trajectory particularly in regional and political geography. The seemingly more general notions of space and place have partially overshadowed the region since the 1960s (Paasi 2011b; Entrikin 2018) but the region has upheld its position among the keywords of geography, probably because of its critical significance to multiple social practices. The world is increasingly often understood and categorized through overlapping regional/territorial types below and above states, such as supra-state regions (EU, etc.), governmental sub-areas of such macro-regions (e.g. the Europe of regions) or nonstandard cross-border regions. The rise of such forms of regionalization has been paralleled with an emphasis on connections, interactions and networks that have questioned region- and state-centric outlooks towards the world (Jones 2009; Paasi 2009; Jessop 2018).

The articles also show that the current and future status and functions of regions, territories and borders have been crucial not only in geography but also among the primary concerns in social and political sciences wherein the constant attention being paid to historically contingent ‘assemblages’ of space and power resonate with the processes of globalization (Paasi and Ferdoush 2022). Another background has been the disturbances in the international system of states since the end of the Cold War (Kahler and Walter 2006; Agnew 2005; Paasi 2009). Interest in global complexity, the supposed retreat or hollowing out of the state, the strengthening of various kinds of mobilities (people, capital, etc.) and shifts towards the increasing economic integration and interdependence of national, regional, and local economies soon gave rise to fancy imageries suggesting that the world is moving towards a borderless, post-national situation (e.g. Urry 2003; Ohmae 1990; Strange 1995; Appadurai 1996). This has not happened. Quite the opposite: borders and border controls have become harder. At the same time, the questions of spatial scales have begun to proliferate in the debates on space and power (for a summary see Herod 2011). With the global trends mentioned above and the new regionalist response, many states underwent a process of re-scaling in which they both formed international alliances and decentralized some of their power to sub-state regions (Brenner 2004). The construction of such areas shows that regionalism and the dynamics of place and space, as well as the power relations associated with local and global relations, are all changing, making the uneven geographical development of the physical, social, cultural and political-economic conditions increasingly important objects of regional geographic research and knowledge.

Likewise, as Murphy (2022) and Paasi (2022) and the authors of the recent intervention in journal Political Geography (Paasi et al. 2022) summarize, also territory and territoriality remain strictly part of not only the ways in which states/governments look at the world but also of the conceptual arsenal of political geography. The focus on territory has also helped geographers to build up conceptual bridges with political science and international relations studies. While the state and sovereignty-centric emphasis on territory is still predominant, thinking on territory is expanding towards other scales, ultimately human bodies, experiences, emotions, and the everyday. Similarly, the political geographical studies of banal forms of nationalism have opened up many opportunities to understand not only nationalism but also territory, nation, state, memory, and identity more broadly and contextually (Billig 1995; cf. Koch and Paasi 2016).

It is precisely this territory, state, and nation -trio that turns attention to the third keyword investigated in the symposium, the border. Border has been often understood as a given, at times as an inert entity, but it is always a critical element in the geo-historical production of regions and territories and in the politicization of bounded spaces. As the contributions demonstrate, much of the interdisciplinary theoretical literature published during the last two-three decades on both state territory and the region has questioned the self-evident status given to bounded spaces and thus borders. One common theoretical background for such critiques have been various forms of relational thinking, which have provided important prisms through which the taken-for-granted notions of regions and territories can be problematized.

Likewise, one of the topics of the Vega Symposium was to scrutinize the potential of topological thinking in opening the straight jacket of territory and to make sense of the possible new configurations of political and power relations and their stretching in space. Relational and topological thinking have long roots in social sciences (cf. Paasi 2011a) but recent social theoretical debates in geography have raised these ideas on agenda once again. This had encouraged scholars to consider the complexities of spatial power from various perspectives. For example, Allen (2003) has situated power in multifaceted relational ‘topologies’ related to actors’ dispersed social relations, whereas John Agnew (2005) and Richard Peet (2007) have endeavoured to set power in space that is structured along certain socio-spatial principles, focusing attention on the concentration of power and related economic and political processes that produce uneven development.

Relational thinking and the subsequent ideas of topology have offered useful conceptual tools to question the apparent fixity of spatialities (manifesting as regions, territories, scales, etc.) in both theory and concrete research (Amin 2002; Ek 2012; Shields 2013; Martin and Secor 2014; Allen 2016; Allen and Axelsson 2019; Axelsson 2022). Moreover, as Richard Ek (2012) points out, the topological understanding of spatial systems is always political. Similarly, the articles in this special issue demonstrate that regional and political geographies are increasingly two sides of the same coin.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography for awarding me the prestigious Vega Medal in Human Geography. I wish to thank Professor Thomas Lunden for his role in the nomination process, as well as all the other scholars who supported nomination. I am very pleased that Alec Murphy, Martin Jones, and Linn Axelsson agreed to speak at the Vega Symposium and also made this Special Issue of Geografiska Annaler B possible. I am also very grateful to Richard Ek for his support and help in preparing this edited collection. I also wish to thank numerous colleagues and friends in both Finland and abroad who have supported and encouraged my work in recent decades.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).