Borderland studies, frontierization, and the Middle East’s in-between spaces

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a conclusion to a special issue of Mediterranean Politics that has sought to promote critical approaches for a better understanding of spatial process in some of the Middle East region’s most prominent in-between spaces. Following recent efforts to observe bordering processes in and around the region, this collection develops the possibility that a subtly different process of territorialization is taking place in those spaces where state power is most challenged, compromised, and uncertain – frontierization. In assessing its possibilities, this paper highlights the significant record of past geographical approaches to borderlands but also selectively explores the established phenomenon of in-betweenness in the evolution of the regional territorial framework. It concludes by suggesting that any fresh consideration of contemporary spatial process should engage with geography’s long tradition of studying borderlands as cooperative features and more recent multidisciplinary coverage that tends to view them today as spaces of insecurity in state margins beyond the reach of state authority. Any reinvigorated borderland studies – to which the idea of frontierization might well have something to say – needs to be multidisciplinary but also would do well to further develop agendas for exploring these regions that have been around for some time.

KEYWORDS:

• Borderlands
• borderscapes
• Arabian in-between space
• frontier
• frontierization

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. As noted in Zinovia Foka’s paper in this special issue: (Foka, 2020).

2. From different vantage points in boundary/border studies, one traditional and one more critical, Prescott (1999) and Nick Megoran (2012) have both urged that geographers continue to focus on the evolution of individual territorial limits as one of the best contributions we can make to better understanding their operation and dynamics.

3. Personal communication with Victor Konrad, Beer Sheva, December 2014.

4. Carl Grundy-Warr (National University of Singapore) and I had the misfortune to be pitched against him in a parallel session at the 1991 ABS annual meeting in Reno – the room Oscar was speaking to could have been filled four times over, while the number speaking on our panel easily outnumbered the assembled audience.

5. Enmanuel Brunet-Jailly has recently tried to breathe more critical, contemporary life into Prescott’s vintage scheme for characterizing international boundary disputes – not generally a concern that critical border studies has shown much taste for engaging with. Witness his plenary address at an IGU-supported conference, ‘Borders at the Interface: bordering Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Ben Gurion University of the Negev’, Beer Sheva, 7–14 December 2014.

6. This forms the basis of a well-received lecture Julian delivers each year to the Masters programme in Geopolitics, Territory and Security in the Department of Geography at King’s College, London.

7. Comments by Petra Ramsauer at a panel discussion: ‘The Middle East between Disintegration and Realignment’, Austrian Institute of International Affairs, Vienna, 5 December 2017.

8. This was the underlying theme of BRISMES’s 2018 annual conference at King’s College, London whose title was New Approaches to Studying the Middle East.

9. See ‘Borderlines and storylines: using the narrative form to reinvigorate geography’s study of international boundaries’, a paper delivered by Peter Waring to the ‘Approaching the geographies and spatialities of Middle Eastern border politics’ panel, BRISMES Annual Conference 2018, King’s College London (June 2018) and his paper (‘Colonial border legacies in the Middle East: the decade before Sykes-Picot’), delivered to the fourth convention of the London International Boundaries Conference, King’s College, London (April 2019).

10. Before Yemen laid down a traditional boundary claim in the mid-1990s to reflect, at least partially, the extent of Historic Yemen, a traditional Arabian geopolitical region, some three hundred years previously, there seemed to be a small wedge of desert territory east of the Yemeni mashriq that had not been the subject of Saudi and British claims made during its stay in Aden until 1967. In the end, it was no more than an interesting cartographic anecdote and meant nothing on the ground but the wedge did coincide with the tribal territories of the Seiar tribal federation, who had always been known for their fierce independence and resistance to the overtures of central authority in Aden, Sana’a, and Riyadh (Schofield).

11. Address entitled ‘Thinking beyond the territorial box: peace with borders in Israel/Palestine?’ to the fourth convention of the London International Boundary Conference, King’s College, London, April 2019.