Interdisciplinary Programmes Academic year 2018-2019
Borders and Borderlanders: Conflict and Integration
DE141 - Spring - 6 ECTS Course Description
This course explores contemporary dynamics of national borders and the people who live along and across them, subject to processes of regionalisation and regional integration, disintegration and conflict. Giving special attention to the example of Africa, the course also invites consideration of global trends, contrasting strategies, and comparative developments around the world. Across questions of politics and economics, identity and mobility, we examine the often contradictory interests and consequences of integration from 'above' and from 'below', between trade corridors and smuggling, military cooperation and marginal rebellion. Great regional crises draw attention to the intersections of these different scales, as regional integration appears as both the solution to and cause of conflict. Reflecting on the grand political dreams and failures of the past, as well as the pragmatic priorites and new pressures of the present, we will ask where we are going in an uncertain future for cooperation beyond and across borders, in Africa and the world.
PROFESSOR Aidan Russell
aidan.russell@graduateinstitute.ch
Office hours
ASSISTANT
Geoffroy Legentilhomme
geoffroy.legentilhomme@graduateinsti tute.ch
Office hours
Syllabus
The course is conducted in seminar format, with c. 3 articles or chapters for compulsory class reading to be discussed for each and every session except the final review. Reading these texts and contributing to their discussion (in class or on Moodle) will be assessed as 10% of the final grade.
In Part I, the seminars will be structured by a guided discussion led by the professor. In subsequent Parts, students will be required to augment the discussion with mini reports on cases and questions relevant to the theme of the week. Each student will compile one such report over the course of the semester, to be posted on Moodle by 18:00 the night before the relevant seminar, and will have approximately 5 minutes to present and summarise their main observations and arguments in class. All students must read each other’s reports before class and come prepared to discuss them. These reports should be around 2 pages long, and present their key information in an accessible form; they do not need to be full essays. Other formats (such as mind maps, diagrams, word clouds, ‘posters’, Prezi presentations or similar) may be used as appropriate. In whatever form the student chooses, therefore, the reports should (i) provide contextual details and select bibliographies for relevant cases that illuminate an aspect of the theme of the week; (ii) relate the chosen case to other required reading from the syllabus; (iii) raise questions and arguments for discussion in class. Together the report and its oral summary will be assessed as 20% of the final grade.
Finally, there will be two assessed essays. The first, a short paper of 2,000 words, should be selected from weekly questions provided at the start of term, and submitted by the second Sunday following the relevant class. The final term paper should be up to 5,000 words, exploring in detail any question or historical case study that explores the themes of the class.
Topics may be selected from the same suggested questions as the short paper, or discussed with the professor in advance. Chosen topics must be confirmed with the professor by 1 May 2019, at which point an outline, summary or partial draft may be submitted for feedback. Final submission will be midnight on 29 May 2019.
Students may choose to write either their short paper or their long paper on the same topic as their mini report, if they wish, but the two full papers should not substantially overlap in content.
Important dates:
- Report notes: 18:00 the day before the relevant class.
- Short paper submission: midnight on the second Sunday following the relevant class (i.e., eleven days following the Wednesday session from which the chosen question derives)
- Term paper topic confirmed: 1 May 2019
- Term paper submission: 29 May 2019, midnight Overall assessment:
- Term paper: 45%
- Short paper: 25%
- Report (notes and oral summary): 20%
- Class participation: 10%
A full reading list, further bibliography and sample essay questions will be distributed in the first class and available on Moodle. For background reading, see the following key texts:
Anderson, James and L O’Dowd. “Borders, Border Regions and Territoriality: Contradictory Meanings, Changing Significance.” Regional Studies 33, no. 7 (1999): 593–604.
Baud, Michiel and William van Schendel, ‘Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 211–42.
Das, Veena and Deborah Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Engel, Ulf and Paul Nugent, eds. Respacing Africa Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Gregory, Derek, Geographical Imaginations, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.
Levine, Daniel H. and Dawn Nagar, eds., Region-Building in Africa: Political and Economic Challenges, Springer, 2016.
Nugent, Paul and Anthony Asiwaju, eds., African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities, London: Pinter, 1993.
Sahlins, Peter, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1991.
Söderbaum, Fredrik and Ian Taylor, Afro-Regions : The Dynamics of Cross-Border Micro-Regionalism in Africa, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2008.
Warleigh-Lack, Alex. “Studying Regionalisation Comparatively: A Conceptual Framework,” In
Regionalisation and Global Governance: The Taming of Globalisation?, edited by Andrew F. Cooper, Christopher W. Hughes and Philippe De Lombaerde, 43–60. London: Routledge, 2008.
Wilson, Thomas M and Hastings Donnan, eds., A Companion to Border Studies, John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
van Schendel, Willem. “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, no. 6 (2002): 647–68.
1. Introduction: Decentring Borders, Territories and Sovereignties
After an overview of the content and requirements of the course, our opening class takes the opportunity to think about the lenses we adopt and the perspectives we take in the interdisciplinary study of borders, integration and conflict. What can historical, geographical and anthropological perspectives contribute to political, legal or economic theory, and vice versa? How does changing our starting point change the conversation? How far can we see when we start from the ‘margins’?
PART I: Stages
2. Borders
Part I sets out the fundamental questions behind three conceptual ‘stages’ on which the themes of the course unfold. Firstly, we consider international borders as the premise and terminus of state sovereignty. Fundamental to state and non-state political and economic interests alike, they are also central to questions of identity and society, deeply felt by millions of people across the world - whether because they are held to mark a true divide that helps understand or express the difference and/or connection between Us and Them, or because they unjustly partition a living community. Examining different histories of border creation, practice and change, we explore the parameters that might structure possible typologies of borders and borderlands – including rural and urban borders, frontiers and fluid border zones, borders instigated from above and below, closed and open border regimes, and the relationship between international boundaries and the environment.
3. Spaces
Spatial perspectives force us to think at once about people and the (social, cultural, economic, political, legal, natural) landscapes in which they live, about imaginations and pragmatics, narratives and routes, fixities and fluctuations. This perspective takes us through the power of different ‘geographical imaginations’ to spaces defined by competing forms of knowledge, exchange, movement or connection. It helps us disrupt some of the assumptions we make about what constitutes a continent, a region, a ‘natural’ continuity or an unbridgeable gap.
Spaces may be delineated by the boundaries around them, or traced out by different kinds of movement through them. Crucially, they may have very little to do with the nation-states built across them. Do these other spaces and spatial practices therefore exist in competition with the political units we most often presume?
4. Regions
Finally in our opening set of fundamental questions, this class sets out the principles of regional integration as they are currently pursued around the world. Considering the theoretical heritage of ‘old’ and ‘new regionalisms’ and their attempts to explain or direct the different projects across international borders, it focusses on Africa as a laboratory of international policies and local developments, triangulated by parallels and contrasts with organisations like the EU, ASEAN and MERCOSUR. Bringing together the issues of regional integration with the premises of borders and space, it questions whether the study of regional integration is more productively approached from top-down or bottom-up perspectives, and what the benefit there may be of cross-regional comparisons across continents of vastly different contexts and priorities.
PART II: Actors
5. Borderlanders, Intermediaries and Brokers
In our second Part, we think about some key actors that mark out different boundaries and spaces, alternately central to and elided by regional integration projects. Firstly, we consider
‘borderlanders’ themselves, people who live along international borders and whose lives are, in one way or another, defined by this location. Some move specifically to the margins, to find work and opportunity or to escape other pressures; historically, many have found the margins come to them, as borders were laid down in their midst. Borderland identities may emerge where certain groups of people claim ‘ownership’ of a national divide, or define themselves by being divided, and these borderland identities shape experiences through intersection with gender, ethnicity, nationality and many other categories besides. Some borderlanders take up special positions as intermediaries for the movement of goods or people, finding special niches as brokers for others’ interests. But as such, they also have the most to lose when regional integration projects seek to break down these barriers, and ease the movement of goods and people without their help.
6. Elites, Authorities, Corporations
Who manages borders and makes new spaces, and for what interests? Borders in a neoliberal age do not lose their significance for the states they define, but are increasingly managed, enforced and altered by private interests. In turn, political and economic projects of integration are commonly associated above all with the national elites, technocrats and corporations that seem to profit most from – or operate the mechanisms and spaces of – ever greater union. But definitions of authority vary greatly – how do local governments relate to national ones,
‘traditional authorities’ to ‘democratic representatives’, or local businesses to multinationals and governments in between? And how do each relate to the borderlanders who live in the spaces they seek to manage and transform? Defining trade corridors and growth triangles, customs checks and immigration regimes, the interests of these top-down actors really matter, and not only for themselves.
7. Objects, Commodities and Contraband
Finally in our set of ‘actors’ comes the inanimate – objects and goods that are exchanged in different forms, and may be followed to see the spaces they create, the networks they connect, and the shifts in economic, legal, political or social value they undergo as they move from one space and from one set of hands to another. From foodstuffs to manufactured goods to contraband drugs and guns, the nature of the object matters – and changes. The definitions of differential legal regimes, or shifting valuations of the licit and the illicit, mark the hazy difference between trade and smuggling, both motivating and frustrating projects of regional integration; meanwhile, the circulation of certain kinds of objects suggest spatial configurations that may have a great deal more reality and consequence to them than some of the national or regional frameworks we tend to assume.
PART III: Actions
8. Living, Working, Moving
Our third Part shifts to a selection of prominent borderland actions that shape out, substantiate, or break apart emerging regions and their interests. Firstly, we think about the heritage and practice of labour movement as a motivating and defining factor of border creation and management. Borders have been laid down specifically to control, direct, limit or even facilitate labour migration, while freedom of movement policies offer such liberty as a means of individual advancement, corporate interest or compensation for other depredations.
Through the lens of different kinds of work, therefore, we can consider how ‘borders mean business’, how the economic and political interests of border regimes intersect with social transformations, and the continual pull between the border as a means of integration and its tool as a continuing means of division, the symbol of economic mobility as hope and as existential threat.
9. Warfighting and Peacemaking
Is regional integration the cause of, product of or solution to regional conflict? Can struggles between states, or marginal rebellions and separatist movements, be eased by changing the meaning and nature of borders, or by lending power to different spatial practices? Great regional conflagrations may arise from ongoing processes of cross-border integration, infiltration and exchange, and simultaneously both obstruct and demand new formal integration efforts to ease or end them. If the border was among the most painful symbols and sites of the Troubles, for example, European institutions are, or were, among the principle guarantors of peace in Northern Ireland; meanwhile, ‘peace parks’ are created in African border zones that seek to use trans-border nature reserves to promote inter-state sharing, tourism and peaceful cooperation. Are borders inevitably conflictual?
10. Building Walls
Walls are back in style. Berlin’s may have fallen, but Israel’s is going strong; the Sand Wall around Western Sahara marks out ‘Africa’s last colony’, while Kenya looks to wall off the troubles of its neighbour Somalia. And, of course, certain politicians elsewhere dream of big, beautiful walls being erected across whole continents. Are we right to group all these projects together? How do they relate to issues of control or sentiments of xenophobia in places that lack such monumental edifices? What does the physical delineation of national boundaries mean for those nations on either side? What is it like to live in the shadow of these walls? Why are they so appealing – especially, it seems, today? Are they just the latest manifestation of globalisation – the globalising of ideas and discourses structuring a global backlash to unequal flows of people, capital and both structural and acute violence? And, dare we ask, can they do any good?
PART IV: Narratives
11. Failure
In our final Part, we look to some of the trajectories and grand narratives that group together
imaginaries. Firstly, we look to the negative: what happens when political integration projects fail? Why do they fail – elite rivalry, borderland resistance, national self-interest, secessionism, separatism? Too little integration, too much or too fast? Are borders and the sovereignty they represent too ingrained in the state system to ever fade for long? When projects fail, what traces do they leave? Some regions have seen repeated attempts to change their respective political, economic and social spaces, in which some forms of integration look like solutions to the failures of others. Meanwhile, ‘model’ processes get extrapolated across the globe even as they seem to stumble at home. Are we learning anything from these faltering projects?
12. Securitisation
From the Mediterranean Sea and North Africa to North America and South East Asia, securitisation discourses and policies dominate the contemporary practice of borders and regional space. Is security the primary motivating factor behind contemporary regional integration efforts? What does having a securitised approach to regional space mean? How do regional security structures relate to political decision-making? Borders seem to attract particularly intense forms of securitisation – what consequences do these other practices and discourses have for such ever-intensifying boundaries? What consequences does it have for the people crossing them, or living within them? How does securitisation transform the meaning of sovereignty, and the place of its performance? Does the relaxation of border controls within a region necessitate this external intensification? And in times of anxiety and change, is it possible to offer any alternative to securitisation as policy and narrative?
13. Enrichment
Who benefits from a world of regions? What happens to borderlanders when borders diminish in economic or political consequence? Has regional integration worked to promote peace, prosperity and unity? If so, for whom? With these questions, we rifle all the way through Pandora’s box. The differential, competing, sometimes complementary interests of borderlanders and (national or international) elites, of corporations and criminals, of small states, large states and superpowers, are what make the transformations of political, economic and social spaces so significant in the contemporary world. At the same time, regional
integration and the changing meaning of borders become the principle targets of resentment and protest for those who believe themselves to be missing out, or directly suffering, from their promises. Amid all their complexities, problems and controversies, can borderland integration and spatial transformation still offer hope in the end?
14. Retrospective/Prospective
In our final class, we reflect on the discussions we have had over the course, consider unanswered questions, and ask where we see the issues of borderlanders, borders and integration going in the years and decades to come.
