New Directions at the Post-Globalization Border

ABSTRACT

A framework for thinking about borders in post-globalization scaffolds insights of emerging theory exemplary of prevailing in-betweenness of the border world. Epistemological advances frame dissensus, power, belongingness, borderscapes and a-territoriality as ridges of knowledge above the collected and connected lore of border experience, yet this knowledge remains topographic and incomplete for understanding interstitial components of borders and bordering. At best, linked approaches employing multiple perspectives, engaging with borderlands, portraying borderscapes, and articulating agency and mobility have set the stage for recalibration of borders in globalization, and approximation of post-globalization borders. In a post-humanistic era, in which humans encountered limitations of nature and sparred with natural laws, states propped up borders and emphasized boundaries. The “border turn” is reactionary, and antithetical, a time when we need to be mindful of the branded border and anxious of our belongingness both within and beyond borders. New directions at the border are epitomized by the articles in this special issue: controlling “blue” (maritime) versus “green” (land) borders, border ethics, China’s energized borders, borders as magnets of activism and spectacle, seemingly distinct borders in dialogue, border approaches of effective temporality, and the re-engagement of borders and policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-globalization borders
• border philosophy
• border turn
• framework
• recalibration
• reactionary borders
• border
• antithesis
• branding
• spectacle
• mindfulness
• belonging
• dialogue
• policy

Introduction

With a cursory glance it may appear that the field of border studies is moving in multiple directions: exploring borders and various forms of bordering everywhere; deconstructing and analyzing multi-scalar and multifaceted border phenomena in a vast, interconnected world; linking bordered space and place legacies to colonialism, metropolitanism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization; situating humans at, on, and beyond multiple borders; and discovering borders are produced and sustained in ontological, ideological, and epistemological contexts. Clearly borders are increasingly relevant and reflect a significant extent of scholarly intellectual imagination and domain. Yet, I will argue that proliferation of scholarly attention to borders, and the extensive and diverse research activity associated with it, are actually constituents of a systematic re-calibration of the border studies framework. In a very brief time, this framework has advanced to encompass significant shifts in border thinking from a static, largely orthodox territorial concept to a mobile, a-territorial and multi-scalar human and natural imaginary (Newman 2006; Paasi 2011; Nail 2016). Both borders and border thinking have evolved in the multitude of processes coupled with globalization (Konrad and Brunet-Jailly 2019), and now, as the world is gripped in recidivism and pandemic, it appears we have entered a new or evolved era of post-globalization. Consequently, most state borders around the world are readily apparent and accountable, whereas thinking about borders conceived more broadly is now etched sharply, and opportunities exist to review, evaluate, and possibly resolve contradictions and redundancies.

This brief essay offers a lens for viewing and understanding an initiative to advance “New Directions at the Border” and suggests, for border theorists, researchers and practitioners alike, a framework for thinking about borders in a post-globalization context. This framework is dynamic, and therefore temporary, merely offering a preliminary structure much like the scaffolding that surrounds and contains the emerging edifice of border studies epistemology. As such, the structure features logical, ethical and metaphysical components of justified belief and knowledge about borders. The introduction begins with an assessment of border studies thought. Where are we in our thinking about borders? Then, the article engages with questions of what we need to scrutinize, re-evaluate, and re-calibrate in border research frameworks. Finally, the essay introduces a set of seven articles to form a representation of new directions at the border, and suggests where else we need to go in border studies.

Border Studies: Where Are We?

It is predictable, inevitable, and entirely appropriate for border scholars to be caught in an intellectual “in-between” space. For that is precisely where much of our work occurs. Quite simply, it is a space we occupy. Yet, although contemporary borders existing in a framework of globalization remain to be completely understood, we already find our thinking about borders entering new domains: new kinds of borders constituted in climate change and in the geography of the Anthropocene are envisioned (Dalby 2020), logics not previously associated with borders, such as mobility are addressed (Amilhat-Szary and Giraut 2015), while new bordered territories of the online world are discovered (Popescu 2011). In order to frame and establish new directions at the border, it is essential to assess what has been learned about borders in the past three decades, particularly since border studies have been thrust into epistemologies of the social sciences and humanities.

My goal in this brief contextual assessment is to scaffold insights about borders so an emerging theoretical framework of border studies is sufficiently evident to suggest new directions at the border. Clearly, a more comprehensive and cumulative engagement with border studies theory is called for after more than thirty years of extensive research, and recurrent appraisals of border thought. That project is an opportunity for fresh minds and emerging scholars in the field.

Amid the theoretical exploration of borders in the early post-9/11 era of the twenty-first century, assessments of the border studies trajectory by Kolossov (2005) and suggestions for a conceptual framework by Brunet-Jailly (2005), were followed by confirmation that borders did matter indeed in an increasingly “borderless world,” and that border studies needed to embrace new approaches and insights (Newman 2006). The equivocal and evolving nature of borders called for a re-framing of border thinking (Agnew 2008). More than a decade has passed, however, and the dynamic re-framing continues as border theorists explore and record more facets of border logics and ethics. What has not been revealed to date, however, is a general theory of borders based on the outcome of societies and states (Paasi 2009, 2011). Yet, numerous studies have engaged aspects of border theory, and particularly the politics of borders (Longo 2017). Meanwhile, Rumford (2012) has urged for a wider lens and multiperspectival study of borders. Inverting the framework, Nail (2016) envisions societies and states as products of bordering based on a movement-oriented theoretical framework of “kinopolitics,” and suggests that we need to critically examine borders through an inverse lens. Nail’s theory of the border is centered on the continual and constitutive movement of borders which organize and divide society in the first place. Situating agency then becomes of the utmost importance, and we need to consider if humans construct borders in the process of creating societies and states? One may also wonder if movement-oriented bordering created societies and states? Or, are both processes working concurrently, and are borders in globalization and in post-globalization contexts exemplary of the prevailing in-betweenness of the bordered world? A conceptual scaffold around the epistemological dilemma allows us to continue to explore theories of the border without compelling us to declare a central and fundamental logic or to abrogate such theory completely.

Before we proceed to examine the components of the border studies framework, we must clarify philosophical underpinnings. A philosophy of borders and bordering contains, like all philosophical constructs do, components of border logics, ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. Border logics govern the reasoning of border theory according to strict principles of validity. These logics may lead to abstract theory not necessarily based in border realities. Moral principles of border ethics govern human behavior. Together, these components may eventually and ideally constitute an epistemology of borders, a theory of border knowledge justified by belief over opinion. Until now, however, border logics and border ethics have led mainly to some metaphysical comprehension of multi-scalarity (Laine 2016), motion and rhythm (Konrad 2015; Nail 2016), structuration (Ferdoush 2018), agency (Brunet-Jailly 2005), paradox (Widdis 2015) and liminality (Donnan and Haller 2000). Epistemological advances in framing dissensus (Rancière 2015), power (Newman 2003; Paasi 2009; Pe˜na 2019), resource potential (Sohn 2014) and belongingness (Marsico 2013) associated with borders, and the nature of borderscapes (Brambilla 2015) and a-territoriality of borders (Konrad and Brunet-Jailly 2019) remain works in progress. The following discussion is a deconstruction and reconstruction of extant border thinking according to these philosophical underpinnings in order to clarify the current state in resolving issues inherent in border theory.

We begin with border logics. A fundamental logic of borders is their function of separating fundamentally different entities, or their differentiation between two sides of a relatively consistent entity. Although this immediate equivocation promotes ambiguity in understanding borders, the logics may be explained in topological reasoning through a theory of “parts and boundaries” or mereotopology (Smith 1996). Mereotopological principles differentiate interior parts of a space from boundaries, and allow for exterior and interior boundaries. Furthermore, connection relations in mereotopology extend to abutting, equality, and tangential relationships, and to overlaps that are proper, tangential, internal, and bounded (Cohn and Varzi 1998). However, it is implausible that a boundary of a region is never connected to the region’s interior, for every boundary is part of its own complement, and the interior of a region is always connected to its exterior (so boundaries make no difference). Natural axioms of classical mereology provide for ordering, composition, and decomposition of borders (Cotnoir and Varzi 2018), and these axioms are acknowledged in formative border theory (Van Houtum, Kramsch, and Zierhofer 2005). The binary spatial relationship occasioned by boundaries extends through space and time in expressions of scalar and temporal borders (Mezzandra and Neilson 2012). Boundaries may be fiat and bona fide (Smith and Varzi 2000). From these border logics we may also infer the following conditions occur: Borders may intersect. Borders are mobile. Borders may be scaled. Borders connect. Borders separate. Borders may change over time. Borders vary.

Yet, borders in the human orbit, unlike boundaries in nature, are largely constructed through social processes (Paasi 1996). This means, or should mean, that moral principles govern behavior surrounding borders. Ethics enter perceptions, reasoning, thought, and actions related to borders. A basic ethical position is that a border divides two entities which are potentially equal, and it follows that these entities hold or share equal rights and resources. Yet, this ideal is not apparent, and borders characteristically separate different and unequal entities such as countries, social classes, races and more. Bordering (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019), by its very nature, is othering (Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002). Others are considered not to belong (Clegg 2006). To define outside from inside is to render the outside exogenous, and to confirm the outside as unequal. With inequality established, bordering may be used to alienate Indigenous, hybrid, racially different and other distinct human populations. Critical border studies aim to re-center ethical principles enshrined in social justice and civil society to question and assail bordering thought and practices that render precarious vast human populations (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2016; Salter 2012). Critical border studies are also a work in progress, and they reflect more new directions at the border.

Although abstract theories of borders and bordering have been derived from border logics, these metaphysical constructs relate primarily to boundaries in nature. The abstract theories, however, have in some cases been forwarded and applied to human constructed borders and bordering. A primary example is liminality which has been derived in ecology and applied to characterization of the layered gradation of borderlands (Agier 2016). Liminality suggests that human and non-human agents are at work in bordering, may be intertwined and leave us with a partial capacity to understand borders if our approaches are anthropogenic (Nail 2019). Also, abstract theory of borders in motion and rhythm derives from scientific principles and theory grounded in nature (Konrad 2015). Moreover, the multi-scalar nature of borders may be abstracted (Laine 2016). Furthermore, it may be useful to derive abstract theories of paradox (Widdis 2015) and agency (Brunet-Jailly 2005) to better understand the nuance of borders.

Our knowledge of borders is consequently ridged with epistemologies that are clearer and more defined above the collected and connected lore of acquired experience with borders that remains to be systematized and verified. One of the epistemological ridges evident is the role of power in articulating borders and shaping borderlands (Newman 2003; Paasi 2009). Another is the very conceptualization of borderlands: spaces and places that are at once marginal and integral (Anzaldúa 1987). Here, dissensus prevails over consensus to enable an extended engagement with space and place (Rancière 2015). Here, de-territorialization and re-territorialization operate in a space in-between (Dear 2013), one that extends to and accommodates a-territorial borders, some marked on bodies and others established through difference (Wilson 2017). Here, cultural, social and political identities are more fluid and belongingness may be plural (Marsico 2016; Konrad 2020). Our knowledge of borders, then, remains topographic – situated by epistemological ridges of awareness, yet incomplete in understanding of the interstitial components that, when combined with the prominences, will offer a framework for understanding borders more completely and effectively.

At least now we do understand that knowing borders requires several, preferably linked approaches. First, as Chris Rumford (2011, 2012) urged, we must see like a border, and do so with multiple perspectives. This vision needs to be extensive to move beyond the territorial trap (Agnew 1994) and engage with borderlands, and the multifaceted complexities of borderscapes (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007; Brambilla et al. 2015). Cross-border governance is articulated and accomplished in “fields” (Fligstein and McAdam 2012) where agents operate within defined structures (Dupeyron, Noferini, and Payan 2020) but also within mobile contexts (Amilhat-Szary and Giraut 2015). We know that motion is a condition of borders (Konrad 2015) and it may well be a formative component to create borders (Nail 2016). Nevertheless, borders are fundamental in the “motion turn” of understanding human constructs (Urry 2016). Also, this border motion is relational and conveyed as multiple faceted processes (Ptak et al. 2020). Persistently, we encounter multiplicity, variety, complexity, scalarity, and other forms of plurality that contradict the binary imaginary of the border. My argument, at this point, is that we need to re-calibrate the border studies framework. This argument is based on our emerging knowledge of a multiplicity of borders in globalization (Konrad and Brunet-Jailly 2019), and with these new understandings of borders as well as with an approximation of post-globalization borders. The following discussion offers some twenty-first-century insights to help advance, or at least start, this re-calibration.

Re-Calibration of the Border Studies Framework: Toward an Approximation of Post-Globalization Borders

Post-globalization borders imply a recognition and acknowledgement that borders and border studies have entered a post-humanistic era. According to Deleuze and others (Stivale 2005), post-humanism constitutes an understanding that the anthropogenic thrust of bordering has encountered limitations of nature and sparred with natural laws. The hubris of territorially anchored nation-states is revealed as more people, goods and information cross their borders through processes linked to globalization. Also, territorial borders cannot contain the impacts of wildfires, chemical pollution, ozone depletion, and most decidedly pandemics. States have responded by propping up their borders and emphasizing their boundaries (Radil, Castan Pinos, and Ptak 2020). Border walls, surveillance and other mechanisms of insulation all speak to this “border orientation” (Kenwick and Simmons 2020). The following brief discussion explores what may be termed the “border turn” of the beginning of the twenty-first century.

During the past 20 years, border studies have grappled with the growing realization that borders and bordering practices were expanding at the same time that borders were being crossed by increasing amounts and diversity of goods, information, and selection of people (Rosière and Jones 2012; Vallet 2014; Bissonnette and Vallet 2020). A growing majority of people around the world were at once provided with the incentives and means for mobility but denied privileges that come with crossing boundaries. Contrary to the ethos and message of globalization which promised access with mobility, nation-states and various agents of authority have engaged reactionary borders and bordering to retain power and control. Fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints are liminological constructs invoked to accomplish these objectives (Nail 2016). Reactionary borders and bordering have then occasioned a return to the constant of boundaries that was symbolically destroyed with the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The border turn has also seen the bolstering and re-enactment of borders on a global scale, ranging from walled and gated communities worldwide to the European Union’s Shengen enclosure (Scott 2011; Laine 2020a).

Borders have become antithetical in several ways. In the twenty-first century, borders have emerged as fundamentally different. They look different with their security trappings. They feel different with their imposition of heightened security protocols and infrastructure. They serve various and expanded purposes of filtering, expediting, and interdicting increased flows of people, goods and ideas. Borders in the twenty-first century epitomize contraposition; they are more finite and decisively bounded. Also, borders appear to have gained currency in their contrariety. In North America, for example, both the U.S.–Mexico border and the U.S.–Canada border have turned into more explicit arbiters of difference and otherness rather than conduits of exchange (Correa-Cabrera and Konrad 2020). The trope of the border in North America and elsewhere has expanded profusely as a metaphor, allegory, and even parable of antithesis. The disjunction of the border is an embellishment and a flourish in political rhetoric, and it has become an ornament of the political right in their euphemistic articulation of antithesis.

The resultant branding of the border as reactionary and antithetical has attracted all manner of activism and spectacle to borders. Border stations, fences, walls, and a variety of other installations have become sites of confrontation, surveillance, violence, and death. Here, proponents of more vigorous bordering have clashed with those who would reduce the impact of boundaries. Also, borders have become sites of artistic production to display the reaction and protest. Paintings and graffiti on the wall between the Palestinian West Bank and the rest of Israel illustrate the feelings of frustration, alienation, despair, guilt and much more (Rokem 2011). Border branding has proliferated in media representations such as popular television programs, while extending into the cybernetic realm through pornography (Casaglia 2020) and online gaming. In all of these instances, spectacle prevails.

Consequently, we cannot avoid “minding” borders for they are ubiquitous in our contemporary world. Furthermore, we cannot avoid being influenced by borders. The current pandemic has revealed emphatically that the response to pandemic is a form of border politics (Kenwick and Simmons 2020). This border orientation is expressed as state efforts to control borders through symbols and structures because public opinion (often shaped by the state) and pre-existing commitments demand it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments chose to contain the virus by externalizing it beyond state borders instead of engaging more costly – but ultimately more effective – domestic mitigation measures. Moreover, Kenwick and Simmons (2020, 1) argue that “pervasive use of external border controls in the face of the coronavirus reflects growing anxieties about border security in the modern international system.” Laine (2020b) adds that the pandemic has exacerbated insecurities already inherent in contemporary European society.

Border anxiety emerged in the European Union as more than a million migrants and asylum-seekers crossed EU borders in recent years (Almond 2016; Laine 2020b). Ethical choices split opinion between those who advocate strict control of frontiers and those who demand a sympathetic response to the plight of refugees. Almond (2016, 463) argues that

a broader appraisal of the issues must take account of matters of culture and identity, partiality and preference, and also of some rather more arcane questions about the ethics of ownership, the notion of belonging, and the legitimacy of preferring your “own,” whether at a global, national, or personal level.

I would argue the questions regarding ethics of ownership and the notion of belonging are no longer arcane but rather immediate and central in the study of post-globalization borders. A sense of what is ours at the border, and how this sense contributes to belonging, lie at the very heart of establishing a reconstruction of the post-humanistic border, and a twenty-first-century recalibration of the border studies framework.

Finally, and more practically, border studies need to be in tune with rapidly evolving regimes of border policy worldwide – in the European Union and with its neighbors, in China and its engagements with the rest of Asia, in the global south, in Polar regions, in North America, and even in the seemingly isolated Antipodes. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the immediate adjustment of border policies worldwide (Radil, Castan Pinos, and Ptak 2020). Border studies specialists have responded with numerous surveys, research projects, re-articulations of research, and rapidly published articles to address the situation, and try to understand the consequences. Yet, in most instances this work will not be ready for or useful to the policy making community dealing with borders, because the need for informed border policy is immediate. In the rapidly evolving bordered world of the early twenty-first century, an additional and crucial re-calibration of the border studies framework must address the more effective alignment of border research and border policy.

A re-calibration of the border studies framework then requires attention to reactionary borders so they may be identified and acknowledged for what they are in a world of multi-scalar borders and bordering. To a degree, the antithetical nature of many borders and the branding of these boundaries already draw attention to these constructs. Yet, there needs to be a mindfulness of borders to recognize and measure the degree of border orientation that influences our thinking about borders and how they operate. Moreover, this mindfulness of borders needs to engage more fully with complex and admittedly opaque dimensions of identity, belonging, ownership, and other facets of border culture.

The re-calibration of the border studies framework is necessary to accommodate and convey new directions at the border. Among these new directions is the projection of borders and border control into the maritime realm. This issue immediately raises ethical concerns, so the second new direction is the consideration of the ethics of territorial borders and border regimes. Then, we shift to a focal lens to consider the dynamics of bordering in one of the most rapidly changing regions of China, and illustrate how borders operate in relational motion within and beyond the nation-state in China’s bid to advance multiple objectives across Southeast Asia and beyond. At this point we re-focus again, this time on political theatre and border spectacle in recent border events in the United States to show borders as magnets for activism. The following article asks the question: Can borders speak to each other? It illustrates the enhanced understanding of borders possible from the dialogue between two volatile regions. The next article draws from experiences at the Canada–U.S. border to argue for a more effective connection and alignment of border studies and border policy implementation. The final article calls for a paradigm shift in border studies and offers a gauge of the effective temporality of border constructs. This is an eloquent argument for the historical geographical perspective on new directions at the border.

New Directions at the Border

Maritime Migration Controls

In our effort to theorize borders most emphasis has been focused on territorial borders on land. The first article is offered as a contribution to rebalance the analysis, and to engage with the post-humanistic border where we must acknowledge that the natural environment is an important factor. Borders across seas and other bodies of water are usually viewed as merely extensions of land-based boundaries despite the fact that lines in maritime space are registered in different ways, and require conceptualization of a distinctly accessible (or inaccessible) and mobile environmental regime. Derek Lutterbeck explores maritime borders, and specifically maritime border and migration controls and their differences to border enforcement on land. “Blue” (maritime) and “green” (land) borders are viewed as distinct in classical approaches to political geography because the sea is out of reach and more adverse for humans, the maritime domain is vast and interconnected, the sea is without clear demarcations of sovereignties, and, ultimately, the sea has been of secondary relevance in bordering compared to land. In the Mediterranean, argues Lutterbeck, controlling blue versus green borders illustrates the following differences: sea borders are more heavily militarized; an inherent nexus is portrayed between border enforcement and migrant safety in the dangerous sea; private commercial actors play a more important role at sea; the nature of maritime space is more “interstitial” resulting in more contention and uncertainty about state’s rights and duties in dealing with maritime migration; the generally “secondary” (less essential) nature of maritime border controls.

Ethics

Recent drastic events around the world – the COVID-19 pandemic and the global refugee crisis as leading examples – have underscored the role and function of borders as barriers to undesirable influences and perceived threats. These influences and threats have been depicted as external and foreign, and borders have been utilized to “re-in-state” nationalist agendas. In his essay on Bordering the Crisis, Jussi Laine addresses “the links between border politics, bordering practices, and their ethical concerns in seeking to fashion more sustainable modes of governance and more inclusive societies.” He stresses that topographical modes of jurisdiction and reasoning fail to address topological modes of activity where broader (and often global) scope and indirect consequences are what matter. Yet, high moral value continues to be assigned to national borders and state sovereignty in a world where transnational interaction and networking are the norm. How do we balance the calls for the freedom of movement against the right to freedom of association? Laine tackles this central question by evaluating the ethics of territorial borders and border regimes, and addressing the issue of whose rights are most important – citizens or humans.

China

During the twenty-first century, China’s rise has been meteoric, and its presence and influence has literally transcended its borders. If we are to understand borders in the twenty-first century, it follows that we need to comprehend the dynamic evolution of China’s borders from the orthodox strategy that prevailed at the beginning of the millennium through the rapid shift of the last decade. Tom Ptak and Victor Konrad illustrate how the international borders of vast Yunnan province were subject to experimental policies that resulted in changes of infrastructure and expanded range of functions. The transformation of Yunnan province is detailed through four distinct temporal periods to show phases of development and strategies of border dynamics. This approach reflects how territory has progressively radiated towards a central role in macro-scale strategies, becoming ever more important to China’s expansive goals, and how energy resources are leveraged as key components of domestic, regional and global initiatives. This is one of the most rapidly changing and interconnected spaces in the world, an evolving space where borders play an integral role in the process of change, and where insights advance border theory and knowledge. This is also one of the world’s most challenging terrains for human expansion and development, and, consequently, it is a fitting laboratory for exploring the emerging post-humanistic and post-globalization border.

Activism and Spectacle

Political theatre is drawn increasingly to borders because borders are sites of propaganda and contestation, and magnets for activism. National border crossings in China’s Yunnan province characteristically convey government messages on huge video billboards and showcase border spectacle such as the morning rush of Vietnamese day workers into the booming border city of Hekou. In North America, activists employ propaganda techniques such as internal subjective control and the use of legitimizing narratives. In a highly original work that advances new directions at the border, William Yaworsky, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, and Cindy Azucena Gómez-Schempp identify key actors and explain the strategies that they utilize in two recent border events: the protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, and the migrant caravans originating in Central America and bound for the United States. The work demonstrates the devastating effects of standard propaganda techniques combined with new technologies and media platforms in an era of hyper-partisanship that both undermine humane political reforms and effective social scientific research.

Borders in Dialogue

Violent and sensitive borders around the world often produce elements of a typical story. By juxtaposing local narratives of the Spain-Morocco border in Melilla with the India-Bangladesh border in Assam, Dina Krichker and Jasnea Sarma argue for understanding borders as infrastructures. These infrastructures foreground local narratives and place them in dialogue to show how locally lived experiences become globalized in their patterns and impacts, and thus provide for a conversation across border research sites. The approach reckons with the gap between the socially and spatially contingent nature of borders, and the violent impact that they produce globally. The juxtaposition of dialogue allows researchers to overcome the limitations of single case studies and the critique of external validity. According to Krichker and Sarma,

“through this conversation, the paper explores how state designed infrastructures are lived, experienced, patrolled, naturalized and subverted across scales and locations, becoming part of a global story of violence.” … “By letting borders ‘speak to each other’ as an analytical and methodological intervention, scholars can potentially bridge gaps between bordering practices worldwide and people’s everyday strategies locally. Such dialogues can also enhance our understanding of the convergent histories of proliferating border infrastructures and movement around and across them.”

Border Policy

The following article changes the focus from academic research to advance understanding and theory, to applied border research and analysis to advance both theory and practice. Laurie Trautman draws from the current COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on borders to relate how borders have become policy tools used to protect the health, well-being, and safety of a country’s citizens, and how this pandemic will require new ways of communicating between border scholars and policy makers. In the article, Trautman takes stock of the structural connections (and lack thereof) between border studies and border policy, and uses a hybrid lens – academic and applied – to suggest ways to advance border studies, expand border knowledge, and help develop effective contributions to border policy. She argues that the emergence of more and more compelling border issues such as the pandemic call for a combined approach of border studies and border policy. With examples drawn from the Canada–U.S. border, and specifically from the border region of Cascadia, Trautman offers an effective approach based in frameworks of policy theory – advocacy coalition framework, social construction framework, and narrative policy framework – to align academic and applied work at the border.

Effective Temporality

The final study in this set of articles on new directions at the border could be situated either first or last in the series because it spans and links the range of inquiry. Randy Widdis takes what may be termed the long view. His essay aims to illustrate what borders have been, how they have been viewed, and where they are headed. This goal complements my approach in this introduction and offers another engagement with border theory to document the paradigm shift in border studies. But Widdis also has a second goal and that is to argue for a more effective temporality and a sustained historical geographical perspective for understanding borders in a post-global world. According to Widdis, any consideration of new directions at the border must unravel the entanglements that connect globalization and borders. He enshrines the concept of borderlands as the “idea that returns the symbol of the border to the fact of place.” Borders, he argues must be viewed in relation to the borderlands in which they are situated, even if these borders are becoming increasingly a-territorial in our contemporary world. Widdis acknowledges the challenges inherent in theorizing borders, yet he clarifies and establishes components of a spatial grammar of borders to develop a context for a framework for border studies theory.

A Framework for Border Studies

In this introductory essay, I have argued that a new framework for border studies is emerging as scholars and practitioners focus on understanding events such as the current pandemic and its relationship with borders. The pandemic has provided an opportunity to border studies specialists to engage in the study of borders impacted simultaneously and worldwide. Yet, this opportunity is also a challenge to assess borders in the pandemic within a framework that acknowledges and applies what we know about borders generally, and what we have learned recently about post-globalization borders. Furthermore, this knowledge about borders needs to be framed within the philosophical discipline of border logics, ethics, metaphysics and epistemologies. The scaffolding for the framework sustains established theory of borders and encompasses new directions at the border. The value and importance of this loose alignment of theoretical strands are demonstrated in the malleability and adaptability of the theory as it extends from borders before modern times to borders in globalization, and now into an era of post-globalization.

It is enticing, at this point in the theorization of post-globalization borders, to unveil a well-articulated framework for border studies complete with an architecture to be viewed and approved or disapproved. Yet, I believe that it is more valuable to discuss and debate the ideas forwarded in this introductory essay, and in the articles that follow. Some components of the new framework for post-globalization border studies are evident. First, we need to do much more to understand the emergence and development of borders and border theory. Call it effective temporality or call it something else, but borders need to be understood in historical context. Next, a consistent and pervasive engagement with border ethics is required. Every contribution in this special issue engages with some aspect of border ethics, and one article focuses on the topic. Another strand of the framework emphasizes the constant and recurrent resonance of the global perspective in all of our attention to borders. Once again, this is underlined in the impact of COVID-19 on borders. Also, consistent in the framework are places, countries and regions where new border insights and advancement of border theory derive. In this set of papers we focus only on several examples, but there are many “bellweather” states and regions in the development of border concepts and theory. A time/space mapping of this progression of place-based thought about borders would be revealing. Another strand in the framework situates and evaluates perception, ownership and control of borders and links these to expressions of identity and belonging. Here border studies need to engage more effectively with social and cultural psychology. And, finally, at least for now, the academic-policy boundary needs to be bridged more effectively to extend, contribute and validate our work. Border policy needs to be recognized as part of the framework in order to link theory with practice, and to insure a comprehensive and ethical border studies.

Disclosure Statement

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