Living with Shifting Borders: Peripheralisation and the Production of Invisibility

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the experiences and material impacts of shifting borders in the historical case of Sri Lanka’s civil war and the contemporary case of the shifting border between Georgia and South Ossetia. The two cases point to some lesser known geopolitical practices in which border-shifts and strengthening of control in contested areas take place without much international attention, partly because the shifts are so minor and gradual that they do not reach the news headlines. Living with shifting borders creates a state of inbetweenness and losing of control, where forms of visibility and invisibility produce individual uncertainties and vulnerabilities in homeplaces and people’s everyday lives. By analysing the borderland and border-shifts from the perspective of the peripheral, the article emphasises the ways in which border practices become part of social action through a rescaling of the understanding of the border encouraged by feminist geopolitics. The article begins by discussing what borders may mean and how borders shift and may produce particular forms of visibility and invisibility. The contexts of the Sri Lankan and Georgian villages are introduced before the comparative methods applied are discussed. The article then analyses how the border-shifts create particular material and symbolic outcomes, an experience of displacement in place and the particular invisibilities produced on the ground in the two cases. The article concludes by reflecting on how border practices produce forms of visibility and invisibility that continue to render people in the borderlands peripheral.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to colleagues and friends in Georgia and Sri Lanka who have continued to include me in their work over the years. Thanks to Julia Kharashvili and Lika Margania of ‘Consent’ who introduced me to the Georgian Village; to the editors of the special issue for inviting me into this project; to Kathrin Hörschelmann and Matt Benwell for your productive comments; to three anonymous reviewers for the most generous and positive feedback and to Nicholas Van Hear for the space to write.

Notes

^1. Without borders.

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^3. Ibid.

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^5. G. Agamben, States of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2005); E.F. Isin and K. Rygiel. ‘Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps’, in E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (eds.), Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror (Houndmills: Palgrave 2007) pp. 181–203.

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^8. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1958).

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^12. P. Novak, ‘The Flexible Territoriality of Borders’, Geopolitics 16/4 (2011) pp. 741–67; C. Rumford, ‘Introduction: Theorizing Borders’, European Journal of Social Theory 9/2 (2006) 155–69.

^13. J. Williams and V. Massaro, ‘Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking (In)Security, Animating Social Change’, Geopolitics 18/4 (2013) pp. 751–58; Dowler and Sharp (note 6).

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^15. C. Brambilla, ‘Exploring The Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept’, Geopolitics 20/1 (2015) pp. 14–34.

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^17. J. Hyndman, ‘Feminist Geopolitics Revisited: Body Counts in Iraq’, The Professional Geographer 59/1 (2007) pp. 35–46; R. Pain and L. Staeheli, ‘Introduction: Intimacy-Geopolitics and Violence’, Area 46/4 (2014) pp. 344–60.

^18. E. Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. by James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2009); E. Brunet-Jailly, ‘Special Section: Borders, Borderlands and Theory: An Introduction’, Geopolitics 16/1 (2011) pp. 1–6; A. Mountz, ‘Border Politics: Spatial Provision and Geographical Precision, In Interventions On Rethinking ‘The Border’ In Border Studies’, Political Geography 30/2 (2011) pp. 61–69.

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^20. J. Hyndman and M. de Alwis, ‘Bodies, Shrines, and Roads: Violence (Im)Mobility and Displacement in Sri Lanka’, Gender, Place and Culture 11/4 (2004) pp. 535–57; P. Jeganathan, ‘Checkpoint: Anthropology, Identity and The State’, in V. Das and D. Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Oxford: James Curry 2004) pp. 67–80.

^21. V. Das, Life and Words: Violence and Descent into The Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007) p. 9: ‘It is not only violence experienced on one’s body in these cases, but also the sense that one’s access to context is lost that constitutes a sense of being violated. The fragility of the social becomes embedded in a temporality of anticipation since one ceases to trust that context is in place’.

^22. Ibid.

^23. Borren (note 7): I am not referring to a distinction between public and private worlds here, but rather the understanding of people’s social status and the feeling of security and insecurity in people’s homes. The distinction between public and private in Arendt’s work by having a public status, being recognised publicly, you also have private and individual rights of protection. See also P. Owens, ‘Distinctions, Distinctions: “Public” and “Private” Force?’, International Affairs 84/5 (2008) pp. 977–90.

^24. G. Ó Tuathail, ‘Dis/placing the Geo-Politics Which One Cannot Want’, Political Geography 19 (2000) pp. 385–96.

^25. A. Ingram, ‘Alexander Dugin: Geopolitics and Neo-Fascism in Post-Soviet Russia’, Political Geography 20/8 (2001) pp. 1029–51; Hyndman (note 6).

^26. C. Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004).

^27. A. Honneth, ‘Invisibility: On the Epistemology of “Recognition”’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 75 (2001) pp. 111–39.

^28. J. Migdal (ed.), Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004).

^29. M.C. Nussbaum, ‘Invisibility and Recognition: Sophocles’ Philocetes and Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Philosophy and Literature 23/2 (1999) pp. 257–83.

^30. D.T. Meyers, ‘The Victim Paradigm and the Problem of “Impure” Victims’, Humanity 2/2 (2011) pp 255–75; E.C. Dunn and J. Cons, ‘Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces’, Antipode 46/1 (2014) pp. 92–109.

^31. L. McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press 2015); Hyndman (note 17).

^32. F. Azmi, ‘To Go or not to Go: Struggle For Belonging Among Second Generation Muslim IDPs in Kalpitiya in Puttalam District in the Context of Post War Resettlement’, in D. Herath and K.T. Silva (eds.), Healing the Wounds of War (Sri Lanka: ICES 2012) pp.167–92; F. Azmi, ‘Impacts of Internal Displacement on Women’s Agency in Two Displacement Contexts in Sri Lanka’, in C. Brun, P. Blaikie, and M. Jones (eds.), Unravelling Marginalization, Voicing Change: Alternative Visions and Path of Development (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing 2014) pp. 243–57; R. Rotberg, (ed.) Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press 1999).

^33. C. Brun, ‘Women in the Local/Global Fields of War and Displacement’, Gender, Development and Technology 9/1 (2005) pp. 57–80.

^34. G. Ó Tuathail, ‘Russia’s Kosovo: A Critical Geopolitics of the August 2008 War Over South Ossetia’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 49/6 (2008) pp. 670–705.

^35. Ó Tuathail (note 34).

^36. IDMC, Georgia: New IDP Strategy Awaits Implementation (Geneva: IDMC 2007) available at <http://www.internal-displacement.org/assets/library/Europe/Georgia/pdf/Georgia-October-2007.pdf>, accessed 12 Oct. 2016.

^37. Ó Tuathail (note 34).

^38. G. Jasutis, ‘Forward-Looking Solutions for the Georgian and South Ossetian Conflict Towards Reconciliation’, Baltic Journal of Law & Politics 6/2 (2013) pp. 24–49.

^39. E.C. Dunn and M. Bobick, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: War Without War and Occupation Without Occupation in the Russian Sphere of Influence’, American Ethnologist 41/3 (2014) pp. 405–13.

^40. IDMC, Georgia: At Least 128,000 People Internally Displaced by Renewed Conflict (Geneva: IDMC 2008), available at <http://www.internal-displacement.org/assets/library/Europe/Georgia/pdf/Georgia-Overview-21Aug08.pdf>.

^41. Ó Tuathail (note 34).

^42. G. Tavadze, ‘New Russian Imperialism and Georgia: Violent Spatial Practices, Disrupted Places, and Destabilised Spaces’, European Scientific Journal 2 (2014) pp. 127–36.

^43. BBC, ‘EU Warning Over Russia “Land Grab” in South Ossetia Border Row’, 16 July 2015, available at <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33549462>, accessed 12 Oct. 2016.

^44. Ibid.

^45. M. Somers, ‘The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach’, Theory and Society 23 (1994) pp. 605–49.

^46. F. Azmi, C. Brun, and R. Lund, ‘Young People’s Everyday Politics in Post-Conflict Sri Lanka’, Space and Polity 17/1 (2013) pp. 106–22.

^47. C. Katz, ‘On The Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement’, Signs 26/4 (2001) pp. 1213–34.

^48. J. Robinson, ‘Thinking Cities Through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for A More Global Urban Studies’, Progress in Human Geography 40/1 (2016) pp. 3–29.

^49. N. Tiruchelvam, ‘The Politics of Federalism and Diversity in Sri Lanka’, in Y. Ghai (ed.), Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiation Competing Claims in Multi-Ethnic States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000) pp. 197–218.

^50. P. Kabachnik, ‘Wounds that Won’t Heal: Cartographic Anxieties and the Quest for Territorial Integrity in Georgia’, Central Asian Survey 31/1 (2012) pp. 45–60.

^51. L. Hammond, ‘Strategies of Invisibilization: How Ethiopia’s Resettlement Programme Hides the Poorest of the Poor’, Journal of Refugee Studies 21/4 (2008) pp. 517–36; Ingram (note 25).

^52. Group interview in December 2015, Georgian village.

^53. Interview in March 2009, Sri Lankan village.

^54. C. Brun, ‘Birds of Freedom: Young People, LTTE and Representations of Gender, Nationalism and Governance in Northern Sri Lanka’, Critical Asian Studies 40/3 (2008) pp. 399–422; N. Van Hear and C. Brun, ‘Between the Local and the Diasporic: The Shifting Centre of Gravity in War-Torn Sri Lanka’s Transnational Politics’, Contemporary South Asia 20/1 (2012) pp. 61–75.

^55. Williams and Massaro (note 13).

^56. Hyndman and de Alwis (note 20).

^57. Dunn and Cons (note 30).

^58. A. Bammer, ‘Introduction’, in A. Bammer (ed.), Displacements. Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1994) p. xii.

^59. S.C. Lubkeman, ‘Involuntary Immobility: On a Theoretical Invisibility of Forced Migration Studies’, Journal of Refugee Studies 21/4 (2008) pp. 454–75.

^60. Ó Tuathail (note 34).

^61. The people who were displaced in the 1990s from South Ossetia and Abkhazia and still live with the status as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

^62. Group interview Georgian Village December 2015.

^63. E.C. Dunn, ‘Notes Towards an Anthropology of Nothing: Humanitarianism and the Void in the Republic of Georgia’, Slavic Review 73/2 (2014) pp. 287–306.

^64. Interview in December 2015, Georgian village.

^65. J. Goodhand, ‘Frontiers and Wars: The Opium Economy of Afghanistan’, Journal of Agrarian Change 5/2 (2005) pp. 191–216; U. Hannerz, Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology, WPTC-2K-02 Department of Anthropology (Stockholm: Stockholm University 2002).

^66. Ibid., p. 12.

^67. T. Polzer and L. Hammond, ‘Invisible Displacement’, Journal of Refugee Studies 21/4 (2008) pp. 417–31.

^68. Hyndman and de Alwis (note 20).

^69. S. Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment and The Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology 16/2 (2001) pp. 202–36; J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press 1985).

^70. An example of this deprivation of voice was the LTTE’s prevention of people to vote in general elections, such as the presidential elections of 2005.

^71. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ‘Crossroad’, available at <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crossroad>, accessed 2 Feb. 2017.

^72. Oxford Dictionary, ‘crossroads’, available at <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crossroads>, accessed 2 Feb. 2017.

^73. U.H. Meinhof, ‘Migrating Borders: An Introduction to European Identity Construction in Process’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29 (2003) pp. 781–96.

^74. Dunn and Bobick (note 39) p. 204.

^75. Dunn and Cons (note 30).

^76. Anzaldua (note 2).

^77. Arendt (note 8); Owens (note 23).

^78. Hyndman (note 17).

^79. Arendt (note 8); Owens (note 23).