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Schengen integration has been home to different visions from the outset. In this vein, it owes much of its success to the fact that it has been both practical and symbolic in nature. However, this equilibrium of different visions has been upset following a series of crises. By prioritizing security considerations over alternative visions of Schengen, some Member States have reintroduced internal border controls on a quasi-permanent basis. Current reform proposals seek to address this situation but may be unable to revive the co-existence of the different visions underpinning the earlier phases of Schengen integration. Rather, as this investigation suggests, the reform that is currently being discussed would reaffirm the nature of Schengen integration as a pan-European security project. While this goes hand-in-hand with elements of supranational governance and coordination, it may impair the role of Schengen as an identity-creating project. This investigation analyzes the elements of the reforms discussed, presents them in the light of different visions of Schengen, and draws attention to possible constitutional limits of its reform.

AbstractValeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel Lost Children Archive records and reimagines visa-less migrant children’s encounters with hostile borders, while also challenging the logic and legality of border policy, a set of neocolonial practices that allows former colonial powers to continue their control over the mobility of bodies and epistemologies from the Global South. In an interview with The New Yorker about her novel, Luiselli commented on the role of narrative in conceptualizing and achieving justice when the law fails to deliver or denies justice: “Perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us.”1 Luiselli thus highlights not only the power of storytelling in delivering justice otherwise denied, but also its ability to generate a moral, emotional, and intellectual response in its audience. This paper analyzes how Luiselli employs “factional”2 narrative to “haunt and shame us,” question existing border policies, and grant authorial and narrative justice in the absence of institutional or legal justice through the extended metaphor of children on the move. I introduce the concept of “tripartite subjectivity” in analyzing how Luiselli’s factional children are, on the one hand, victims of and witnesses to the violence perpetrated by border laws, and, on the other hand, agents who challenge and reinterpret hostile borders, transforming the static border into a site of epistemic rupture. The tripartite subjectivity of Luiselli’s lost children provide a model via which characters who have been deprived of what Thomas Nail calls “socially determined status” (and thereby are rejected border access due to their inability to contribute to the state’s kinopolitical expansion) reclaim both fictional and epistemological borders through a reverse kinopolitics of what I term “bordered expansion by archive.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the multifaceted dimensions of landlockedness within the realm of international discourse, with a particular focus on its implications for managing global commons. Drawing from socio-legal literature and auto-ethnographic experiences during the recent intergovernmental negotiations for the BBNJ agreement under the 1982 Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as a case study, the paper prompts essential inquiries into the true essence of being landlocked in the face of global environmental challenges. Beyond traditional geographical definitions, the paper reveals the dynamic nature of landlockedness and underscores the intricate interplay of social, economic, cultural, geographical, and political factors in determining who has access to ocean space and resources and who does not. It emphasizes that landlockedness is not a static legal or physical characteristic but an ongoing process shaped by historical and political constructs. Expanding beyond the national level, the article illustrates how individuals, whether coastal or inland, experience isolation from the ocean, influencing their interactions with, perceptions of, and regulatory proposals for the ocean. This approach illuminates existing paradigms in the access, use, and management of space and resources. In conclusion, the article advocates for more inclusive and adaptable approaches in international policy debates. It calls for a departure from rigid classifications, urging for upholding collective action, recognising the intricate connections between geography, politics, law, and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of the 'hostile environment' on racialised migrant women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in England, arguing that the 'hostile environment' functions as a technology of 'stratified reproduction.' First coined by Shellee Colen, the concept of stratified reproduction describes the dynamic by which some individuals and groups may be supported in their reproductive activities, while others are disempowered and discouraged. This paper locates the stratified reproduction produced by the 'hostile environment' as intertwined with wider gendered and racialised discourses around British citizenship which have been 'designed to fail' racialised residents of the UK. Drawing on interviews with racialised migrant mothers in the north of England, this paper analyses how the proliferation and intensification of immigration controls interacts with gender, race, class, and other social regimes to differentially allocate the resources necessary for a safe and healthy pregnancy and childbirth, and how this is experienced materially by pregnant migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Border Crossings of the World (BCW) dataset explores state authority spatially by collecting information about infrastructure built where highways cross internationally recognized borders. This geolocated information is recorded using high-altitude imagery from 1993 to 2020. We describe how the data were collected, demonstrate the dataset's utility, and offer advice and best practices regarding use of the data. These data present clear evidence of visible and long-term state investments in authoritative displays of states' intention to 'filter' entry into and exit out of their national jurisdiction. Researchers can use these data to test theories on the causes and consequences of border hardening for security outcomes, border management cooperation, political violence, terrorism, trade and migration flows, transnational crime patterns, and human rights conditions. Because the data are precisely geolocated, they are easy to combine with existing spatial datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2023, Niger experienced the latest in a long series of military coups. Now afflicted by climate change, the country continues to rank as one of the poorest in the world. Poverty and perceptions of corruption limit public confidence in democratic governance. Led by Nigeria, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) imposed sanctions on the new junta and threatened a military intervention, adding to the suffering of the population. But ECOWAS eventually backed down, while the junta moved to cut off antiterrorism cooperation with France and the United States, embracing Russia instead, following a trend set by other recent coups across the Sahel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why does brokerage become pivotal to guest work governance? While research on intermediaries in temporary migrant labor programs has proliferated in the last decade, there is limited analysis of the conditions that create regulatory roles for brokers and shape their policy and social impacts in host states. By analyzing the causes and consequences of documentation brokerage in Thailand's guest work formalization process, I link sociological work on brokerage with relational conceptions of state power. Drawing from 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, I argue that gaps in the state's regulatory infrastructure amid heightened coercive policy enforcement create profitable opportunities for brokers to act as intermediaries between migrants, employers, and state offices to facilitate policy implementation. The informality and opportunism of such brokerage, however, can also generate activities that undermine official policy, with varying consequences for state control. Comparing brokerage between two sites, I show that brokers in each location improve the state's capacity to formalize migrant labor, but the added social/regulatory dimension of the border in the second site creates brokerage opportunities that push the boundaries of official policy. In both sites, documentation brokerage imposes adverse economic effects on migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee‐migrants and Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations contrast with the Indian state's emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state‐subject relations. Though computer typists—who I am calling brokers—are essential mediators, their acts of mediation are underrecognized. Immigration officers' strategies of mediation, such as intermittently acknowledging typists, implicate brokerage as both part of and distinct from the everyday bureaucratic workings of the state. I argue that through their acts of mediation, brokers are essential to bureaucratic work and have come to embody the fuzziness surrounding where the state begins and ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to understand the global legacies of socialism in the present, this article proposes to unpack dimensions of postsocialism as method and critique. Postsocialism as method attends to how socialist legacies endure and are transformed in the present while holding together contradictions and ambivalences. Postsocialism as critique is oriented to transversal solidarities and the epistemic vocabularies that can undergird these struggles. To trace these dimensions of method and critique, the article is situated empirically within debates about borders and migration. Postsocialism is not intended to replace or displace other critical approaches but to pluralise our vocabularies and multiply political interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to the special issue (SI) lays out the agenda and key concepts of the SI 'COVID Capitalism: The Contested Logistics of Migrant Labour Supply Chains in the Double Crisis'. The contributions to the SI focus on the reconfiguration of the means and methods of the exploitation of migrant labour during the COVID-19 pandemic and the related reorganisation of contemporary border and migration regimes. They all focus, more or less explicitly, on the adaptation and reorganisation of migrant labour supply chains which were disrupted through the 'double crisis' of public health and existing border and mobility regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, the SI seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of COVID-capitalism, understood as a form of disaster capitalism, in which fractions of capital try to turn the multiple crises implicated by the pandemic into a source of profit. If and how they succeed with these endeavours is, however, not guaranteed from the outset but an empirical question. The study of migrant labour supply chains does thus not only help to develop a more nuanced understanding of disaster capitalism but also contributes to debates on the logistification of migration management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses differential inclusion as it relates to mobility in Europe through migrants' experiences of the closure of the European Union (EU) Schengen borders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on 36 comparative online interviews with three groups of migrants – Erasmus students, asylum seekers and seasonal workers – the article empirically investigates how differential inclusion is reflected in migrants' perceptions of border closures and the impact of border closures on international mobility. Drawing on the concept of differential inclusion, I examine the divergent border mobilities in a moment of crisis. In the interviews, migrants' reflections on borders are informed either by their own perception of borders, their surprise at the lack of awareness of borders for other migrants, or the realisation that closed borders are crossed for capitalist economic demands under high health risks. Taking this as its basis, the article makes two arguments. First, that preexisting differential inclusion exacerbated during border closures in a global health emergency. Second, that borders are not concrete but flexible in (im)mobilising people according to capitalist economic demands. In this way, the article contributes to an understanding of the process of rebordering that took place during COVID-19 and in which borders remained spaces of differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The soviet social theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin developed the theory of the carnivalesque as a logic of exaggeration, inversion and irony. Beyond carnival events themselves, Bakhtin proposed this logic as a creative instance to foresee openings within an assumed normality. The conceptual gaze of the 'carnivalesque' helps to rethink the reconfiguration of actors and practices around mobility, borders and migration during the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. This impasse worked as a corona-carnival in the midst of the current mobility regime. The use of 'carnivalesque' in this article is not related to the playful aspects of carnival as a parade, but to the potential of the carnivalesque impasse for envisioning alternatives, which are not necessarily emancipatory but deeply ambivalent, grotesque and unfinished. That carnivalesque momentum, marked by social norms placed on pause, is captured in artistic and linguistic production, acting as a collective legacy for imagining futures otherwise. This paper compiles some keywords which emerged during the corona-carnival impasse, each holding hopeful and dystopian glimpses of possible alterations to the status-quo. These linguistic productions question assumed notions and practices of migration management, opening the social imagination to other ways of engaging with human mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borders and mobilities have played key roles in the transformations of capitalism that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. We attempt to distinguish novel developments in the control of movements of bodies, labour, and capital from processes of renationalisation, financialisation, and platformisation that were in train before the outbreak. Focusing on logistical techniques and technologies that govern the global circulation of people and things, this article explores the spatial shifts and ruptures that have marked the capitalist crisis occasioned by the pandemic. We give empirical attention to movements and struggles of migration in China, India, the Americas, and the Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Memorias is the property of Fundacion Universidad del Norte and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Schengen integration has been home to different visions from the outset. In this vein, it owes much of its success to the fact that it has been both practical and symbolic in nature. However, this equilibrium of different visions has been upset following a series of crises. By prioritizing security considerations over alternative visions of Schengen, some Member States have reintroduced internal border controls on a quasi-permanent basis. Current reform proposals seek to address this situation but may be unable to revive the co-existence of the different visions underpinning the earlier phases of Schengen integration. Rather, as this investigation suggests, the reform that is currently being discussed would reaffirm the nature of Schengen integration as a pan-European security project. While this goes hand-in-hand with elements of supranational governance and coordination, it may impair the role of Schengen as an identity-creating project. This investigation analyzes the elements of the reforms discussed, presents them in the light of different visions of Schengen, and draws attention to possible constitutional limits of its reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have radically turned away from the notion of 'natural borders' dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are 'artificial' human constructs. However, there is a need to revisit environmental determinism in its nuances. We analyse the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern-period eastern Low Countries. For humans, bog landscapes in these periods functioned as both barriers and passageways through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive agency to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales from the late Middle Ages. Diplomatic risk calculation and path dependency explain the spatial concurrence and long persistence respectively of bog boundaries between successive polities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article frames Brexit as the consequence of social and demographic fissures running through the United Kingdom, thereby arguing that Britain's exit from the European Union is symptomatic of a specifically English rather than British crisis of national identification. It shows how such internal faultlines within the UK's society intersect with the evocation and employment of various kinds of border imagery and border discourses in the run-up to the Brexit Referendum in 2016. For the main part of the analysis, the article sets out to broaden the by now well-established genre of "BrexLit" (Shaw, Everitt) by focusing on what could be called "Pre-BrexLit," that is, novels written well before Brexit became a term, let alone political reality. By way of three exemplary texts—Julian Barnes's England, England (1998), Tony Saint's Refusal Shoes (2003), and Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom (2005)—the analysis retraces how literary accounts of how to establish, maintain and control borders—both real and metaphorical, mental and physical, external and internal—prefigure some of the divisive issues around which the Brexit struggle would revolve, while at the same time avoiding the necessarily contentious and biased labels attached to post-fact Brexit literature. (WF) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses Benjamin Netanyahu's border discourse in the context of radical right-wing populism. It discusses how, in the speeches and statements appearing in his official government website, Netanyahu construes groups located spatially outside Israel's borders, mainly terrorists and migrants (the "wild beasts" and the "infiltrators"), as existential threats to Israel. The aim is to prove that, in legitimizing the militarization of borders through "security fences", so that the "other" can be excluded from the nation, Netanyahu uses the same power geometries and discursive strategies, i.e. Proximization (Cap 2013) and dehumanizing metaphors (Santa Ana 1999, Musolff 2015, Taylor 2021), typically used by right-wing populist parties and leaders. By appealing to both populism and certain interpretations of Zionism, his ethnonationalist view of borders is based on the normalization of the discourse of delegitimation and exclusion of those groups considered as a threat to the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship has underlined how radical right-wing populism (RRWP) emphasizes border control aiming to protect the "people". Although increasing attention is being paid to the discursive dimensions of border construction, the complexity of the phenomenon suggests the need for further analysis in an interdisciplinary perspective and with an emphasis on the geometry of spatial powers (Massey 1999, 2005). Understanding power dynamics in space is all the more important now that radical right-wing populism (RRWP) is becoming a key political phenomenon. The use of the border in right-wing populist narratives draws on the representation of power struggles in space concerning the management of flows (people, goods, services, capital, ideas, values, etc.). The scope of the introduction to this special issue is to address the connection between radical right-wing populism, borders, and spaces of power, and to present the research articles investigating this link through a series of different case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of radical right-wing populist (RRWP) parties is based on discourses displaying "power geometries" (Massey 1993, 1999). These involve the representation of power relations, with on one side a globalized elite, boosting the mobility of human beings, goods and capital across borders, and on the other side, a territorially embedded people subject to this borderless mobility. Power geometries can also be used to approach the chameleonic behavior of RRWP politicians and their allies in the political space. The article uses this concept to interpret the attitude of the Trieste City Executive and the reactions to it when it commemorated a past connected to Italian fascism. The results show that the power geometries involving the RRWP and their allies in European borderlands can lead to discursive ambivalence in two overlapping spaces: the territorial and state-bordered space of representative democracy, and the topological and cross-border space of para-diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to research of the concepts about the Ukrainian domain boundaries in early modern Muscovy. The aim is to examine the reaction of the Muscovite elites and both the early modern Ukrainian elites -- traditional (princes and noblemen) as well as the "Cossack nation" of the Hetmanshchyna to the "symbolic geography". The conceptual strategy is based on the historicism principle, contextual analysis, and comparative methods. The main results. It was figured out that the concepts of early modern Muscovite elites regarding the borders of the Ukrainian spatial resonated with the fundamental ideas of the Ukrainian elites. Moreover, on the official documentation level (tsar and Senate acts, diplomatic correspondence), the Muscovites accepted the concepts of noblemen and Cossacks related to the Ukrainian spatial boundaries in most directions. Muscovy openly signaled that it recognized the Northern Black Sea coast as a natural border of the Zaporozhian Lower Host. Pidliashshia and the ethnographic Polish-Ukrainian boundary were accepted as a western border. The Muscovite diplomatic correspondence considered the Northern Dnipro region apart from the Smolensk region as a northern border. Tsar's and Senate acts legitimated the colonization of the left bank of the Don River (up to the rivers of Tulushivka and Pidhirna) by Sloboda Cossacks, and the border between Zaporozhian Lower Host and Don Host was defined by the Kalmius River. Even though this border cut off a considerable part of the Zaporozhzhia, it reflected the Cossacks' territorial gains. The results of the research are not only important for the intensification of further research on the Ukrainian space and the related problems. They also make it possible to revise existing stereotypes concerning Ukrainian spatial boundaries as well as the civilizational nature of a number of historic regions and to disprove a conception regarding of the alleged historical motivation of contemporary Russian territorial claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought urgency to Russia's reorienting of its key international trade corridors. Shifts in trade flows had been developing for some time before the invasion, in particular the 'turn to the East' of 2012. But they have been more dramatic since the invasion. The article describes these new developments, covering trade in all directions: the ports of the north-west, in circumstances of a dramatic decline in trade with Europe; the Northern Sea Route; the overtaxed East, including the Eastern rail network (the polygon), the ports of the Russian Far East, and the land border with China; and southern routes, through Turkey and Iran, that have suddenly received new importance. Although not a full-blown policy analysis, the article makes some points relevant to our understanding of the Russian policy process, in particular the relevance of commercial considerations in a policy area with national security implications, the role of Putin as alternatively a decisive and diffident leader, and the place of bureaucratic politics, including the role within it of official and business champions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special collection examines how immigration and asylum policies have evolved since Britain left the European Union. The referendum was won on the promise of 'taking back control', yet, since Brexit, immigration has increased to record levels and the nationalities of people coming to the UK have become more diverse. The increase in immigration was driven by a liberalisation of work and study visas and the creation of new humanitarian schemes. Although some aspects of immigration policy have evolved in a liberal direction, others have become increasingly restrictive. The Conservative government has pursued a draconian agenda on asylum, borders and irregular migration, including a scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and legislation that effectively abolishes the right to seek asylum in the UK. This introduction argues that recent immigration and asylum policies reflect the ambivalent, unstable and unresolved meanings of Brexit itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw attention to the border and border governance as key mechanisms of class and 'race-making' in the context of an increasingly hostile immigration environment. Focusing on the life story narratives of migrants experiencing homelessness, we extend the reach of analysis beyond the experiences of asylum seekers to gain a stronger understanding of migrant experiences more broadly. In our analysis, we reveal the temporal continuum of suffering endured, ranging from the 'slow violence' of the everyday, rooted in precarity and restricted access to the labour market and support services, to moments of rupture where there is a swift decline in circumstances, leading to homelessness. When, at last, the tempo of suffering slows again, these individuals are increasingly excluded from meaningful calendars of activity as they spend their time waiting, often in vain, for an outcome of a Home Office application or for the possibility of some longer-term accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are we to understand and research health law under devolution in the UK? Building on work in law and geography, we argue that the figure of the border is key to the production and implementation of devolved health law and the variety of forms that this takes. The utility of border thinking in this context is shown through a review of thematic areas, including infectious disease control, access to health care, and abortion, each instantiating a distinct bordering process. In each, we consider recent developments in policy and legislation, framed with reference to constitutional change, and the politics of devolution in the UK. Taking Wales as an exemplary site, we argue that health law produces borders in traditional and non-traditional places. It creates and blurs territories. It is equally constituted by pluralistic bordering practices. On the basis of this theoretically informed review, we conclude by proposing a cross-disciplinary legal, ethical, and socio-legal research agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday lives at the borders have lately been of interest in academic research. Drawing on visual elicitation interviews, this study analyses how ethnic Lithuanians living on the Polish borderland interpret images of the landscape which they inhabit. The aim of this analysis is to understand how these borderlanders position themselves vis-à-vis socio-spatial borderland realities, and how visual materials can instigate extensive plotted narratives. The results demonstrate that the Lithuanian minority in Poland not only challenges or accepts the public narratives, but that they also use them as props to create a unified narrative about their identification and belonging, which transgresses time, place and situated events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores questions of positionality in relation to the gaze towards migrants; it is centred on an analysis of three films produced in Europe in the wake of public discussions on migration. It argues that each of these films shows an affinity with one of three possible theoretical approaches in migration research: Fuocoammare is interpreted as corresponding to the mainstream scientific gaze and the humanitarian gesture; Les Sauteurs is considered in relation to the 'autonomy of migration' paradigm followed in much critical migration research; and Those who feel the fire burning is analysed through the haunting paradigm or 'spectral turn' that has been incipiently explored with regards to migration. I develop parallels between the films' conceptual and visual positioning and these research approaches, formulating questions of relationality towards migrants before European audiences. Rather than presenting an analysis of the films for their formal or aesthetic qualities, they are taken as a point of entry to reflect on our own positionality and choices as scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Certain states in the Global North have responded to refugees seeking safety on their territories through harmful practices of border violence, detention, encampment and containment that serve to prevent and deter refugee arrivals. These practices are ostensibly justified through an appeal to a right to control borders. This paper therefore assesses whether these harmful practices can indeed be morally justified by a state's right to control borders. It analyses whether Christopher Heath Wellman's account of a state's right to freedom of association, which represents the most restrictive account of a state's right to control borders available in the literature, can extend to justify current harmful practices against refugees. If not, then no available justification will be able to do so, and thus contemporary harmful practices used against refugees cannot be justified by a state's right to control borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borders and frontiers are often problematized in Agnieszka Dale's Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), where mental borders seem to be more divisive than spatial boundaries. Many of these narratives feature Polish immigrants in Britain who struggle with their displaced condition in various ways. As some of the stories in the collection reveal, the scenario of post-Brexit Britain compromises conviviality amongst different groups, including the Polish community. Special attention is placed upon how several narratives in the volume underscore the prevalence in British society of Polish stereotypes as the crystallisation of the still widespread animosity against non-Europeans. Homi Bhabha's notions regarding the formation and dynamics of stereotypes will be helpful in understanding the mechanisms beneath such constructions. Likewise, some of the major tenets of social theory, as well as Edward Said's notion of 'Orientalism', will contribute to shedding light upon this resentment towards the Polish minority, occasionally adopted too by already established immigrants against their former compatriots. This article will ultimately intend to draw attention to the cautionary nature of Dale's collection as a call for harmony and the appreciation of difference among nations, thus preventing the gloomy perspectives the dystopian futures of some of these stories forecast upon Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the secrecies of border spirits within 20th century Finnish belief narratives. The aim is to explore how and in which contexts the imaginary aspects of border spirit narratives link to the idea of the "power of storytelling". The following study touches on areas such as the suspension of the fantasy and sociopolitical aspects within the narratives. The folklore materials focus mainly on the Finnish heartland and partly on the national borders. Especially, narrative research methods were used to analyse what is heard and seen of the border spirits and what contexts these narratives involve. Moreover, the results touch on the dynamics of belief narratives without limiting them to the territorial aspects of borders. Hence, the study also explores interpretative bridges between folklore and border studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Philip Huynh's short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of affiliation of their members. First, the Canadian reaffirmation of a discourse of national benevolence is contextualised to later draw on how the collection is nurtured by boundary-crossing ethics that interrogates any sequential relation between past and present, Vietnam and Canada, which usually structures refugee narratives. It is argued then that disruptive and productive time/space interconnections delegitimate any simplistic representations of easily assimilated grateful refugees, fracturing the convenient narration of Canada as a benefactor concerned with old and new international humanitarian causes. The newness of Huynh's stories relies on their mobilisation of the discourse of state citizenship through exceptional migrancy and its disruptive border nature. In contrast to premises of birth and geographical territory, which lose ground as backbones of any affiliation, citizenship appears incomplete and processual. The stories use the precarious performativity of collective homogeneity expected of a former settler colony, like Canada, to launch agency and resistance to state homogenisation, and de-institutionalise the refugee subject to critically intervene sovereignty and political subjectivity. Finally, the stories evince that Canada's social spectrum is ideal to explore the threshold opened by the adjacency of sameness and otherness embodied by Huynh's protagonists. Their condition as diasporic refugee subjects augments the transformative potential of new refugee narratives, in which literal and metaphorical polymorphous borders unveil the bases of the contemporary Canadian socio-political community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Academic Inquiries / Akademik Incelemeler Dergisi is the property of Akademik Incelemeler Dergisi (Journal of Academic Inquiries) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article draws from ethnographic and oral history research to explore the intersection of cigarette smuggling and tribal relationships in Cizre, a Kurdish city located near Turkey's border with Syria and Iraq. Cigarette smuggling serves as a primary source of income for the city's tribal communities, operating beyond the state's oversight and outside the 'secure' networks of the regulated market. This informal economy necessitates active collaboration amongst participants to effectively avoid state surveillance, and establish partnerships and substitute networks for coordinating the transfer of cigarettes, as well as for securing credit – all rooted in their tribal affiliations. I suggest that due to its significant reliance on tribal networks, the cigarette smuggling industry has allowed the Kurdish tribes to preserve their influence within an urban setting, even after their detachment from their pastoral economy and fragmentation as a result of enforced migration. I argue that the prominent role played by tribes in orchestrating the cigarette smuggling economy is indicative of the redistributive function that these institutions have increasingly assumed for their constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Larq Journal for Philosophy, Linguistics & Social Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Contested borders raise the question of how to provide security without provoking a stronger neighbor. Using novel survey data from Georgia, we investigate how proximity to disputed borderlines and variation in the nature of borderlines shape security perceptions and foreign policy preferences. People near the ambiguous border to South Ossetia are substantially more likely to worry about border insecurity than those near the fortified borderline to Abkhazia. Yet those near South Ossetia are least likely to demand a stronger stance against Russian-supported creeping borderization and are not consistently more in favor of a stronger alliance with NATO. This exploratory study points to important within-country variation and that those most affect by instability do not necessarily favor more hawkish foreign policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced border changes and population transfers have affected many nation-states. However, memories of these events are usually described as part of a "unique" national memory of cartographic violence, "lost" territories, and victimhood. In popular representations, often reinforced by the personal memories of the wartime resettled, the territories ceded from Poland (Kresy) and Finland (Karelia) to the Soviet Union after World War II are remembered and imagined as "timeless" places which preserve and encapsulate "Polishness" and "Finnishness." "Territorial phantom pains" is a central framing idea for us. We understand phantom pains as a social emotion related to memories and postmemories that tells members of a community that the body of their nation is not complete without the detached territories. Phantom pains are nostalgic, romanticizing, but also exclusive keeping memories of the territorial loss as not (only) memories of personal loss of home and heimat, but of a national loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have shown how borders rely on the enactment of state power and violence to reinforce territorial integrity and sovereign authority, or even perpetuate the destruction of nature. Moving away from an emphasis on violence, in this paper, I take an approach to borders and bordering that emphasises the opportunities of the border when it is also a river to understand borders as a resource and site of engagement with the state by a range of actors, including variants of care. To illustrate this, I draw on longstanding research along the Salween River, the 120 km stretch where the river forms the Thai–Myanmar (Burma) border, to reveal the ways in which borders as rivers can provide new insights into socio‐natural bordering processes. In particular, I illustrate a range of ways local residents are caring for a river‐border, and how even an ‘exploding’ or ‘hungry’ river‐border can be a fragile space for care and for non‐state actors to enact the border ‘differently’ in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chadian-Sudanese relations are ancient relations. Sudan and Chad share common tribal and ethnic ties throughout the two countries, to the point that it is almost difficult to differentiate between who is Chadian and who is Sudanese, due to the similarity of features between the two peoples. Despite this, Chad's relations with Sudan have gone through many periods of tension and barrenness. It oscillated between the exchange of benefits, hostility and war, through harboring and supporting the opposing movements in each, in light of the absence of the strategic dimension of common interests between N'Djamena and Khartoum in many cases, and being affected by tribal issues and overlapping borders. The security of the borders between Chad and Sudan remains one of the most important and prominent concerns between the two countries. It is considered one of the most passionate issues in the region due to its connection to the political, economic and social conditions in the two countries. The subject of the research, which is entitled: Contemporary Chadian-Sudanese relations, refers to the problem raised by the research into these relations in the recent years that preceded the establishment of the joint forces. Conflicts and security chaos allowed arms smugglers to wreak havoc in that border region. Hence the idea of establishing joint security forces between the two countries. What is the impact of the agreements in securing the border between Chad and Sudan on the security situation? The study's approach is based on the analysis of these relationships as the result of a group of factors directly related to both parties on the one hand, and to the environment surrounding these relationships on the other hand. Moreover, the analysis used the historical method in the belief that it is impossible to understand contemporary relations separate from their historical roots. History is a continuous chain of links in which the results are interconnected with the premises in a way that helps understand the present and predict the future. The research also reached results, the most important of which are:  The study revealed that Chad is greatly affected by the political, economic, social, security and military conditions in Sudan and vice versa, by virtue of the geographical situation, the length of the common border, and the close connection between the tribes in the border areas.  The study also revealed that the influx of refugees led to the entry of large quantities of weapons, which were popular among the Sudanese tribes to acquire for the purpose of defending themselves or property, confronting armed insurgency, and the absence of a strategic dimension for the two countries with regard to common interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Derrida's and Ricoeur's theories of language and hospitality, the author takes up the problem of the hostility embedded in the discourses of welcome when it comes to migrants' experiences of border regimes and border practices. "Broken English," in this context, represents a site of conflict: a vehicular language to be avoided or overcome, a "language of refuge," even a means of forming a community. To explore language as alternative terrain to be policed or an opening to be exploited, the author considers how civil-society art projects involving immigrants and refugees might enable new civic relationships. Focusing on the Shoe Project, a storytelling and performance workshop for immigrant and refugee women, the author asks to what extent the project is about helping the stranger speak like "us" and to what extent it can open space for a different kind of immigration story from those imposed by the legal languages of immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]