Presents a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of borders in the study of International Relations. It turns from the current debate regarding the presence or absence of borders to ...consider the fundamental change that is occurring in the concept of the border in contemporary political life.
Notes from the Balkans Green, Sarah F
2016, 2005., 20160926, 2005, 2005-01-01, 20050101, Letnik:
20
eBook
Maps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps"--places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book ...explores an iconic example of this in the contemporary Western imagination: the Balkans. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research around the Greek-Albanian border, Sarah Green focuses her groundbreaking analysis on the ambiguities of never quite resolving where or what places are. One consequence for some Greek peoples in this border area is a seeming lack of distinction--but in a distinctly "Balkan" way. In gaps (which are never empty), marginality is, in contrast with conventional understandings, not a matter of difference and separation--it is a lack thereof.
Notes from the Balkans represents the first ethnographic approach to exploring "the Balkans" as an ideological concept. Green argues that, rather than representing a tension between "West" and "East," the Balkans makes such oppositions ambiguous. This kind of marginality means that such places and peoples can hardly engage with "multiculturalism." Moreover, the region's ambiguity threatens clear, modernist distinctions. The violence so closely associated with the region can therefore be seen as part of continual attempts to resolve the ambiguities by imposing fixed separations. And every time this fails, the region is once again defined as a place that will continually proliferate such dangerous ambiguity, and could spread it somewhere else.
This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and
narratives in different borderscapes. Written by experienced
scholars in the field, Border images, border narratives
provides fresh ...insight into how borders, borderscapes, and
migration are imagined and narrated in public and private spheres.
Offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the
border and its ambiguities, this volume makes a valuable
contribution to the methodological renewal of border studies and
presents ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and
related processes. Influenced by the thinking of philosopher
Jacques Rancière, this timely volume argues that narrated and
mediated images of borders and borderscapes are central to the
political process, as they contribute to the public negotiation of
borders and address issues such as the in/visiblity of migrants and
the formation of alternative borderscapes. The contributions
analyse narratives and images in literary texts, political and
popular imagery, surveillance data, border art, and documentaries,
as well as problems related to borderland identities, migration,
and trauma. The case studies provide a highly comparative range of
geographical contexts ranging from Northern Europe and Britain, via
Mediterranean and Mexican-USA borderlands, to Chinese borderlands
from the perspectives of critical theory, literary studies, social
anthropology, media studies, and political geography.
Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, ...British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.
As China emerges as an international economic and military power, the world waits to see how the nation will assert itself globally. Yet, as M. Taylor Fravel shows inStrong Borders, Secure Nation, ...concerns that China might be prone to violent conflict over territory are overstated. The first comprehensive study of China's territorial disputes,Strong Borders, Secure Nationcontends that China over the past sixty years has been more likely to compromise in these conflicts with its Asian neighbors and less likely to use force than many scholars or analysts might expect.
By developing theories of cooperation and escalation in territorial disputes, Fravel explains China's willingness to either compromise or use force. When faced with internal threats to regime security, especially ethnic rebellion, China has been willing to offer concessions in exchange for assistance that strengthens the state's control over its territory and people. By contrast, China has used force to halt or reverse decline in its bargaining power in disputes with its militarily most powerful neighbors or in disputes where it has controlled none of the land being contested. Drawing on a rich array of previously unexamined Chinese language sources,Strong Borders, Secure Nationoffers a compelling account of China's foreign policy on one of the most volatile issues in international relations.
This innovative book documents border porosities that have
developed and persisted between Greece and North Macedonia over
different temporalities and at different localities. By drawing on
geology's ...approaches to studying porosity, Dimova argues that
similar to rocks and minerals that only appear solid and
impermeable, seemingly impenetrable borders are inevitably
traversed by different forms of passage. The rich ethnographic case
studies, from the history of railroads in the southern Balkans,
border town beauty tourism, child refugees during the Greek Civil
War, mining and environmental activism, and the urban renovation
project in Skopje, show that the political borders between states
do not only restrict or regulate the movement of people and things,
but are also always permeable in ways that exceed state
governmentality.
A timely and provocative challenge to the foundations of our global order: why should national borders be unchangeable? The inviolability of national borders is an unquestioned pillar of the ...post-World War II international order. Fixed borders are believed to encourage stability, promote pluralism, and discourage nationalism and intolerance. But do they? What if fixed borders create more problems than they solve, and what if permitting borders to change would create more stability and produce more just societies? Legal scholar Timothy Waters examines this possibility, showing how we arrived at a system of rigidly bordered states and how the real danger to peace is not the desire of people to form new states but the capacity of existing states to resist that desire, even with violence. He proposes a practical, democratically legitimate alternative: a right of secession. With crises ongoing in the United Kingdom, Spain, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and many other regions, this reassessment of the foundations of our international order is more relevant than ever.
Until the late nineteenth century, the Chinese-Korean Tumen River border was one of the oldest, and perhaps most stable, state boundaries in the world. Spurred by severe food scarcity following a ...succession of natural disasters, from the 1860s, countless Korean refugees crossed the Tumen River border into Qing-China's Manchuria, triggering a decades-long territorial dispute between China, Korea, and Japan. This major new study of a multilateral and multiethnic frontier highlights the competing state- and nation-building projects in the fraught period that witnessed the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War. The power-plays over land and people simultaneously promoted China's frontier-building endeavours, motivated Korea's nationalist imagination, and stimulated Japan's colonialist enterprise, setting East Asia on an intricate trajectory from the late-imperial to a situation that, Song argues, we call modern.
Drawing on a growing interest in the theoretical concept of boundaries, the contributors to this volume seek to understand the process of drawing boundaries, both real and imagined, and the ...consequences of these processes in the history of the Low Countries.
