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This is the introduction to TRANSIT 14.1's special section on the representation of borders and borderlands in the literary and cultural landscapes of Germany and Poland. We have brought together scholarship, excerpts from an essayistic historical study, a creative essay, a poem, and two translated chapters from a Polish novel that explore past and present German and Polish borderlands through the lensof their entangled history. Focusing on works from different time periods, ranging from the end of the Second World War until today, the contributions examine past and present German-Polish borderlands from diverse angles, situating them historically while also underlining their significance within a global future.

State-promoted biodiversity conservation can either align with or diverge from Indigenous Peoples’ priorities, knowledge, and self-determined development paths. Drawing on fieldwork at the Amazon borders of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, this paper examines Indigenous organizations’ efforts to uphold territorial rights and pursue planning with Indigenous values in landscapes earmarked for conservation. The key question centers on how ‘border configurations’ affect grassroots planning and conservation focusing on the experience of Peruvian Secoya (Siékopai) People. Using expert interviews and ethnographic methods, the paper finds that conservation agencies risk losing credibility without genuine efforts toward social equity and well-being, constrained by mandates that often neglect local needs. The success of Life Plans depends on solidarity networks that balance conservation with viable economic alternatives, equitable power dynamics, and access to services. Ultimately, the paper shows that Life Plans empower Indigenous organizations, offering meaningful options for political self-representation within Amazonian conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 Dance Research Matters (DRM) campaign led to the launch of the £500,000 AHRC-funded Dance Research Matters Network programme towards the end of 2022. The article discusses the challenging backdrop against which it was formed, and how it exemplifies the mutual aims that researchers and funding bodies can achieve by working together. It asks what 'resilience' and 'transformation' might mean for alternative systems (and ways of being) within and beyond the human domain, and also for models of socio-political organisation at the shifting borders of the dance research sector. Examples and issues arising from the aims and events of the five DRM Networks illustrate how crucial it is when taking an ecological approach to funding dance research, for funders, institutions, researchers, and the Creative Industries to have an awareness of the complex and multi-layered implications involved for individuals, dance-related communities and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geopolitical bordering practices affect not only migrants and refugees, but also non-human animals, environments, and Indigenous communities. But metaphorical borders also exist inside and are imposed on everyone. These include emotional, psychic, and cultural borders that limit freedoms. This article examines the potential solidarities for and multi-scalar politics of building an abolitionist praxis rooted in this expansive notion of borders and our collective struggles to cross or abolish them altogether. It examines US-based artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez's art exhibition BorderXer, first exhibited in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. in 2019, to develop a geographical analysis of 'borderXers' (border crossers) that operates at scales from the flesh, to body, to community, to the transnational. The artist uses photographic, installation, textual, and video works to connect audiences' own experiences of borders imposed on their bodies and psyches to the material geographies of the US/México borderlands. These borders limit both freedom of movement and freedom to be in relation and community with others. These works unsettle dominant and dominating notions of borders and reveal possibilities for the remaking of exclusionary border relationalities. I argue that the aesthetics of the exhibition develop an abolitionist perspective on borders that exceeds the artist's explicit calls for 'open borders'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our ethnographic fieldwork with Congolese and Zimbabwean economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and educational migrants reveals a complex narrative of exclusion and inclusion in South Africa. Frontier Africans – South African citizens and African transmigrants alike – initiate and maintain connections that create a vexing and entangled narrative of hard and soft borders. A deeper consideration of how South African citizens and African transmigrants subvert and transcend state-centric categorisation of citizen and migrant other, through amity, conviviality and mutuality – a process of humaning – harasses the alignment of political categorisation with analytical elucidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorizes and tests how different types of interstate conflict across borders affect trade between disputing parties and trade diversion with third parties. Building on theories of borders as institutions, we differentiate the effects of two types of international disputes – border disputes and escalated militarized disputes – and draw on 60 years of trade and conflict data to test the effects of these disputes on bilateral and third-party trade flows. We find that border disputes and militarized disputes each depress trade flows between the disputing countries. However, legal border disputes are associated with increased trade diversion with non-disputing countries, which may fully offset the forgone bilateral trade, whereas militarized disputes have the opposite effect. These results show that actors engaged in trade can offset bilateral trade losses from a border dispute by expanding trade with third parties not involved in the dispute, but the same cannot be said of offsetting the losses from militarized disputes. The fact that border disputes and militarized disputes have opposite effects on trade diversion highlights the importance of examining both the type of dispute and the type of trade flows that are affected when studying conflict and trade and evaluating the potentially pacifying incentives of international trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of the barbarian at the border has long captured the imagination of ‘civilized’ communities. Drawing on C P Cavafy’s 1904 poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, and J M Coetzee’s 1980 novel of the same name, this article explores the Australian polity’s responses to the arrival of ‘boat people’, who embody the ‘barbarian Other’ in the Australian psyche. Examining the response to unauthorised boat arrivals on Australian Federal Election day in 2022, it situates those events as part of Australia’s performance of Waiting for the Barbarians. It then examines how ‘visible invisibility’ of ‘boat people’ is constructed visually, juridically and geographically. It considers how the cultivation of fear, hostility, and forgetting enable the visible invisibility so constructed. Finally, it turns to the possibilities of resistance to the construction and devastating human effects of visible invisibility. To do this, it looks to those who are ‘visibly invisible’ for inspiration, exploring how documentary, literature, art, music, and artificial intelligence can be harnessed as powerful forms of non-violent resistance. As Cavafy and Coetzee do, the article serves as a reminder that the barbarian is within us as it ponders the possibility of ‘boat people’ offering ‘us’ a different kind of solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental phenomena shed light on the fiction that inter-state borders constitute on some level, and the limitations of state-based environmental governance. Transboundary watersheds, in particular, flow across borders of different kinds, evincing the interdependence of water bodies, both human and nonhuman. The lack of cross-border comprehensive environmental governance imposes regional forms of inequity and inefficient forms of water protection. In Central America, to address such problems, citizens have created a legal prototype for how transboundary watersheds could be governed as a commons going forward. This endeavour has been led by Salvadorans, concerned as they are by their country’s position as a lower co-riparian and their significant interdependence with transboundary water bodies. I argue that, in addition to destabilizing established approaches to environmental governance, the legal prototype opens avenues for forms of earthly politics and multispecies justice by placing the reproduction of life, human and nonhuman, side by side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of grassroots actors in regions of violent conflict where competing governance systems exists. Specifically, it focuses on those living in the borderlands of South America, where alternative forms of governance may be created in response to violence between state and criminal organizations. In this context, how can grassroots actors overcome protracted armed violence and establish new, legitimate forms of social governance? To explore this question, our methodology employs data triangulation, combining literature, news reports, and fieldwork data collected in two violence‐prone territories: the borderlands of Cúcuta (Colombia)/Táchira state (Venezuela) and Pedro Juan Caballero (Paraguay)/Ponta Porã (Brazil). We argue that grassroots actors can develop innovative and alternative governance structures that differ from those of the state and criminal groups. This research also contributes to the ongoing discussion about the agency of local actors in violent conflicts between nonstate actors and the state. The findings demonstrate that grassroots actors in violent border regions can actively transform conflicts and build peace, particularly in areas such as migration, security, health, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometric digital identity systems have been promoted as a solution for Africa's development challenges. By providing accurate and reliable identification of citizens, these systems are expected to enable better planning and resource allocation by states. However, this optimistic view overlooks the border logic embedded in the design and deployment of these systems. In this article, the author critically examines the assumptions and implications of biometric digital identity systems in Africa. By broadening the debate on the intersection of African 'mobilities', responsible innovation, and the deployment of biometric technology, the author attempt to pry open the 'black box' of national digital identity systems and contends that the diffusion of these systems in Africa is driven more by the Global North's border interests than by the local populations' development needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the social, political, and environmental conditions under which states engage in strategic agricultural development along desert borders and what these developments achieve for the state. We focus on how national governments employ state-led agricultural reclamation, expansion, or intensification in deserts to produce and territorialize borders and discuss how these projects fall short. We apply theories of state power and legibility to analyze three military agricultural sites on the China–Kazakhstan, Egypt–Sudan, and Israel–Egypt–Gaza borders, each of which exemplifies strategic desert borderland agricultural development. These sites have geopolitical significance due to their history of territorial disputes, potential for ethnic conflict, and access to strategically important natural resources. By drawing on commonalities between these sites, we find that these developments achieve multiple goals for states, including demarcating territorial boundaries, increasing legibility of peripheral borderlands, and demonstrating control over difficult terrains. We also outline how these projects fall short of totally remaking borderlands due to social, political, and environmental limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categorising certain forms of human movement as 'migration' and others as 'mobility' has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration–mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility: continuum (fluid mobilities transform into more stable forms of migration and vice versa), enablement (migration requires mobility, and mobility can trigger migration), hierarchy (migration and mobility are political categories that legitimise hierarchies of movement) and opposition (migration and mobility are pitted against each other). These interplays reveal the normative underpinnings of different categories, which we argue are too often implicit and unacknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report provides an overview of contemporary scholarship on the political geographies of oceans. While oceans were overlooked for many years as theories of sovereignty, territory, and borders focused on terrestrial politics, the significant impact of climate change resulted in a new focus on the role oceans place in global environmental and political systems. At the same time, the enclosure of over 40 percent of the oceans as territorial seas, exclusive economic zones, and extended continental shelves through the Convention on the Law of the Sea produced burgeoning literature on maritime borders and conflicts. The report proposes the concept of blue geopolitics to capture an oceanic turn in political geography theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this paper, I analyse the intersection of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and border violence by examining Cabecitas Blancas a project run by the Yucatecan government to reunite families divided by the US-Mexican border. A unique program in Mexico, Cabecitas Blancas helps elders who have not seen their children living in the United States for at least 10 years, due to their children’s precarious immigration status, reunite for a short period of time. I have developed the term tramitología to show the way the settler colonial state monitors and restrict Indigenous mobility by designating who is “worthy” of government support. I demonstrate how the flow of mostly Maya elders via Cabecitas Blancas between borders is facilitated only because they become state commodities that sustain racial capitalism via tourism and multicultural policies. Ultimately, I argue that reform programs such as Cabecitas Blancas enable and (re)produce exploitation, settler colonialism and border violence. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with government officials as well as YouTube videos and online news articles depicting different stages of the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ukraine's border regions have been long associated with the country's cultural and linguistic diversity, but also with political cleavages and alternative geopolitical orientations. The annexation of Crimea by Russia and the military conflict in Donbas violently reshaped Ukraine's eastern borderlands and led to alienation between the two countries. At the same time, the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement and visa-free regime facilitated the growing reorientation of Ukrainian society toward Europe. The 2022 Russian invasion, occupation of further Ukrainian territories and mass displacement intensified these trends. While the war is forging the country together, it is experienced in very different ways in its regions, and these collective experiences will matter for postwar Ukrainian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I open a discussion on internal bordering practices, starting from an unexpected space: the home. I delve into instances where newly arrived migrants, despite living in the city center, effectively reside (at) the border. My aim is to comprehend borders both as regimes and as technologies of power that manufacture everyday life, even within ostensibly "private" and "secure" spaces. I begin by examining four distinct "homes" of newly arrived migrants in Athens, each representing different configurations of border regimes over the past two decades. However, anchoring the analysis in these different homes does not confine the focus solely to the local or micro scale. Rather, I contend that these "humblest" spaces of everyday life serve as entry points for analyzing bordering practices, power relations, subjugation and subversion across multiple and intertwined sociospatial scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the member states imposed unilateral restrictions on the cross-border movement of persons and goods in their initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU appeared to relapse into the 'politics trap' of earlier integration crises. However, our analysis of entry restrictions for persons in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland from the end of 2019 to the summer of 2022 shows no systematic relationship between domestic politicisation and national border closures. Rather, border closures followed the course of the pandemic as well as EU recommendations. Our findings suggest that the EU was able to escape the 'politics trap' thanks to the exogenous and symmetrical nature of the crisis and effective EU-level policy coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the reversed aspects of borders as constructed and constructing discourses in Leila Aboulela's the Translator while tracing the configurations of Stuart Hall's concept of 'cultural identification' and numerous 'border' experiences as pinpointed by Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe. The paper demonstrates that practicing cultural identification depends on experiencing borders. It unravels the recurring alterations of postcolonial subjectivity to demonstrate both the invalidity of cultural identity in addressing the postcolonial subject and the necessity of cultural identification as a continuous transforming process of subjectivity. By focusing on symbolic borders, the paper goes throughout Aboulela's novel of The Translator to map how these borders are manifested and deployed within the experiences of exile, displacement, and ambivalence. Since the novel dramatizes the postcolonial era, the paper brings to view Bill Ashcroft's concept of 'the transnation' to underpin the certainty of openness, complexity, potentiality, and multiplicity, which constitute, not only 'the transnation', but also Hall's cultural identification and Schimanski and Wolfe's theory of borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2005-2013, migrants travelled through Egypt’s Sinai Desert to cross into Israel in search of asylum. The first were Sudanese people escaping conflict in Darfur, with Eritreans arriving subsequently. With no established legal framework for processing asylum claims, Israel’s government prevented these migrants from making formal asylum applications, granting temporary collective protection, and began to use language of infiltration and policies of detention and deportation. In response, irregularised Africans organized a protest movement, claiming the right to a fair asylum process, the contours of which illustrated the complex entanglements of collective affects that were central to making a new political subject. The article asks how experiences of Israel’s border regime disclosed a particular world, how the border was felt in affective encounters and relations through which migrants were hailed as infiltrators. The violence of bordering led to despair, stuckness, and dissipating hopes, but migrants’ shared suffering also produced inter-connection and solidarity in ways that reflected the valuing of established identities as well as being together in difference. Positive and negative affects coexisted, the latter leading not to political inaction but demonstrating the generative potential of loss when it shapes shared affective spaces and expressions of collectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the nature and main characteristics of the discourse on borderlands and border local communities during the process of delimiting the Spanish–Portuguese boundary that took place in the middle third of the nineteenth century. It examines how both local and state actors represented conflicts and violence in border areas and how these discourses played a crucial role not only in securing the involvement of central state agencies in local conflicts but also in legitimizing state intervention in border disputes. Beyond the case studied here, this research contributes to a comparative perspective across different geographical and historical contexts on how border regions and their inhabitants have been frequently represented as problematic spaces and societies. In this regard, the article provides a critical understanding of the border-delimitation process undertaken by the Spanish and Portuguese liberal states as part of a broader national and territorial building process that, among other objectives, sought to control, normalize, discipline and integrate peripheral regions and their populations. Drawing on some of the main concepts coined by Said’s Orientalism and the contributions of Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic as well, it proposes the term borderism to describe the imaginative geographies that legitimized this kind of border-delimitation processes, not only in the Iberian context but also in other similar cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the advancement of fantasy policy solutions to irregular migration, drawing on the case study of the UK/French border. In 2018 people began to cross the English Channel in significant numbers to seek asylum. This led to much commentary and a raft of new legislation seeking to criminalise people crossing the Channel and end rights to seek asylum in the UK. In this article, we explore the interaction between two sets of fantasies that are advanced by politicians and mainstream political parties in the UK. That is: the liberal technocratic fantasy – that this phenomenon can be efficiently 'fixed' through interventions in policing and multilateral cooperation with neighbouring EU states; and the illiberal fantasy that extreme and performative punishments can solve it. These fantasies intersect and break at different points in time, and involve many of the same policy solutions which are represented in different terms. Importantly, both of these fantasies reproduce racialised and colonial logics and ultimately serve border imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the differential effect of the US-Mexico border on the lived experience of children exposed to flooding risk in an urbanized transborder watershed. The central argument is that this geopolitical border is an institution generative of social and spatial processes that create and thrive on differences and expose children on both sides of the border to high but unequal hazard levels. We pose that children’s bifurcated experiences with rain evince the border’s structuring power as a supra institution producing a socio-spatial regime that enables environmental inequities producing disparate representations of place. Understanding children’s lived experiences is critical to reducing their vulnerability in a highly integrated cross-border urbanization. Framed as a case study based on qualitative data obtained through narratives and visual elicitation techniques, the analysis reveals children’s experiences with flooding and associated hazards that have not been exposed in prior border research and have important implications for integrated disaster management, environmental justice, and resilience in border regions and cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delves into the intricate mechanisms by which states employ a complex network of competing and intersecting borders—both real and imagined—to delineate and perpetuate the image of Syrian refugees as security risks. Drawing upon insights from border studies, securitization theory, and framing analysis, we explore the nuanced processes of mental mapping and bordering within the context of the Syrian crisis. By scrutinizing the construction of these borders and mental maps, we highlight the deliberate state‐driven narrative that portrays Syrians as threats, emphasizing that such perceptions are not inherent but rather intentionally crafted. Our investigation sheds light on the state's agency in framing Syrians as threats, a narrative rarely challenged despite the multifaceted nature of the refugee crisis. Through an expanded discussion on historical, geopolitical, and socio‐cultural dimensions, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the intricate dynamics underlying the portrayal of Syrian refugees as perennial security concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the meaning that refugee solidarity activists supporting people on the move across the Western Balkans migratory route and at the Italian–French border attribute to the notion of 'care', which they use to define their solidarity practices, particularly in the aftermath of the global pandemic. By means of a content analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of grassroots solidarity groups, the article demonstrates that 'care' is conceived of as having a political character, as it responds to both the crisis of health care and the restrictions on freedom of movement; a non-hierarchical connotation, which informs in- and out-group relationships; and a transformative orientation, as acts of care prefigure a society in which freedom of movement and health rights are granted to all, in contrast to the existing model of migration governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the 100 million refugees and displaced persons in 2022, the category of "climate refugees" has become more salient, yet countries still do not know how to handle it. Two aspects of climate refugees also remain understudied; how climate refugees are perceived, since they are viewed through the dual lenses of climate risks and migratory flows and how these perceptions impact policies. Climate refugees are thus doubly impacted by the spill-over effect of securitization processes in the fields of climate change and immigration. This paper analyzes how climate- and migration-security legislation in a resource-constrained nation conceptualizes climate refugees, and how their diverse conceptual categories spill over into policymaking and create a mutually beneficial and humanitarian approach for host and migrant populations. This paper uses India as a case study based on its historical practice of refugee protection despite significant resource constraints, high risk of inbound climate refugees, participation in key global agreements, and domestic discourse over climate and immigration securitization. Using policy analysis and expert interviews, this study demonstrates that India successfully exemplifies a broadly humanitarian climate mobility regime in the South Asian region through relocations, Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief operations, and ad hoc legal protection. Despite crucial structural limitations, India illustrates a democratic global south template implicitly recognizing migrants' vulnerability to climate change and attempts to minimize risk, with potential for replication in other developing and developed nations. This normative policy framework, notwithstanding its limitations, presents an alternative to the threat-centric and unsustainable securitization of climate migration practiced in the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having a strong attachment to Europe might be crucial in understanding support for policies affecting ethnic minorities and migrants arriving in Europe. However, research examining this link is limited. In 4 out of 5 studies (N = 1,469), including correlational and experimental data, we found that greater European attachment was associated with support for restrictive policies such as border closures or increased security. These relationships were consistently explained by higher perceptions of realistic threat. European attachment did not show a significant association with support for inclusive policies such as those promoting the integration of cultural diversity or granting rights to minorities, in 4 out of 5 studies. However, meta-analytical integration of the data revealed a significant averaged indirect relationship: European attachment was associated with less support for inclusive policies via increased realistic threat. We discuss these findings while considering the sociopolitical context and the practical implications for Europe's commitment to human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's war on Ukraine has generated a new chain of insecurities in Europe: energy and food crises, new migration flows from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, military threats sharpened by Russia's invasion are triggering a spatial and territorial reshuffling of Europe's Eastern flank. In this context, regional dynamics within and across the Eastern frontiers of Europe have undergone a succession of path-breaking transformations ranging from overt support to the Ukrainian war effort to decoupling from the Russian economy and an unprecedented boost to expanding the European Union's security architecture. However, one of the most important effects of the war is the growing gap between two regional models which might be dubbed normative (Europeanization within the EU- and NATO-led European normative space) and post-colonial (exemplified by different Russia-centric projects within the post-Soviet space). The original contribution of this special issue is to address the conceptual connections between security, borders and national identity to discuss the evolving European landscape. While we do not explore the military side of the war, we focus on the nexus of (in)security and bordering practices to capture how a combination of geopolitical changes, economic dynamics and human dimensions of war has created new borders and reshaped existing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The buzzword "smart borders" captures the latest instantiation of media technologies constituting state bordering. This article traces historical techniques of knowledge-production and decision-making at the border, in the case of Ellis Island immigration station, New York City (1892–1954). State bordering has long been enabled by media technologies, engulfed with imaginaries of neutral, unambiguous, efficient sorting between desired and undesired migrants—promises central to today's "smart border" projects. Specifically, the use of "proxies" for decision-making is traced historically, for example, biometric or biographic data, collected as seemingly authentic and neutral stand-ins for the migrant. Techniques of selecting, storing, and correlating proxies through media technologies demonstrate how public health anxieties, eugenics, and scientific technocracy of the Progressive Era formed the context of proxies being entrusted to enable decision-making. This pre-digital history of automation reveals how the logics and politics of proxification endure in contemporary border regimes and automated media at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief article dedicates a few subjective considerations to the versatility and afterlives of Paasi's conceptual thinking, enriching the way we perceive spaces and borders in highly differentiated environments and times. I will confess my uneasiness with bounded spaces and explore the origins of that unease. I draw inspiration from feminist geography, which embraces subjectivity, dispelling the myth of objectivity. Although not explicitly referenced by Paasi himself, Paasi's article implicitly poses similar feminist questions: Who gains? Who is overlooked and who loses within bounded spaces and 'borderless' orders? For whom are spatial and territorial borders beneficial, and whom do they oppress? I will further examine how the ideas of spaces, borders and boundaries have evolved in my specific interpretation of Paasi's writing. The text will be interspersed with insights into lived experiences of regions, products, brands and people's consciousness, or, as in my case, awkward embodied experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executive Summary: US political discourse characterizes the US-Mexico border as a site of threat and, of necessity, exclusion. This frame ignores the importance of borders to economies, families, and culture in our increasingly interconnected world. Moreover, it leads to policies that place people at risk of victimization and death. In conceiving of the border solely in terms of exclusion, nations forego the opportunity to strengthen relationships across borders. This paper argues that the politics of humane migration require a vision of borders as sites of encounter, engagement, and relationship, rather than solely exclusion. This reconceptualization of the US-Mexico border, in particular, would strengthen relationships across borders, and prioritize cooperation between Latin America/the Caribbean and the United States, starting with regulated legal flows. It would also respond to the shared contexts of migration, including contraband in arms and drugs, criminal violence, and climate change. It articulates an alternative vision of borders as a "commons" in which mutual needs can be addressed (a commons is an issue or resource in which every one has access and involvement). Migration itself provides a perfect example of such a need. It takes place in a political climate partially but powerfully shaped by racism and classism. Thus, it has become a polarized "issue" that appears insolvable. In fact, it may not be a problem at all. Rather, in our current demographic-economic situation, as well as for our cultural well-being, migration should be treated as an asset. Insofar as it needs to be addressed, this paper delineates many possibilities. The options are not perfect and magical — the challenges are hard and diverse — but they an advance a vision of a shared cross-border space on migration. That might be a crucial move, not only for migration, but along a path that recognizes relationships and commitments of many kinds across the hemisphere and world. Recognition is not enough; real change in resources and power needs to follow. But a vision of connection rather than exclusion provides the political starting point needed for change to happen. In every political instance in which borders are used to frame migration in terms of who, how, and how much to exclude, connectedness loses ground. A politics of humane migration can only emerge if rooted in a positive vision of borders as sites of engagement and encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing levels of mobility, driven by political, economic, technological, and cultural factors, mobility regimes are established to facilitate and control both internal and cross-border travel. Still, the degree to which individuals are mobile is a function of multiple factors, including power, citizenship, ethnicity, income, education, culture, networks, and technology. We advance the concept of "Mobility Spaces" as a way to identify the implications of politically induced changes in mobility regimes for individuals. In particular, we show how politically induced shifts in such regimes affect the mobility options of different groups. Mobility spaces are defined as the area to which a person belonging to a certain group can possibly travel, in a regulated but unimpeded or in a partially impeded fashion. The restrictions limiting mobility spaces can be divided into three thematic hierarchies, domestic, international and for refugees. The mobility spaces implications of changes in mobility regimes resulting from political shifts are exemplified along the first two hierarchies for the Israeli-Palestinian and German-European cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an epilogue to a special edition of articles employing a temporal lens to examine the politics of European asylum and reception systems. From camps to courts to casework, the papers explore a range of temporal matters arising in relation to attempts to manage human mobility. In this epilogue, I identify three temporal themes that arise across the different papers and that are dominant in contemporary Euro-American migration governance. These are: 1) the tempos (the strategic, often contradictory, employment of fast and slow speeds); 2) synchronicity (the multiplicity of times in European migration systems, and the alienation caused by disharmony); and 3) the tenses (from thwarted and inaccessible individual futures, to political representations of the past and future, and the enduring reverberations of past events). The prologue goes on to argue the importance of avoiding allochronism and identifies ways the authors avoid temporally 'othering' people, including by recognising people's autonomy in acts of timing and in reclaiming and recalibrating their own timelines and rhythms. The paper ends with a call for the migration sector to 'widen our gaze' and to draw out the underlying colonial and capitalist temporalities so as to situate migration governance in broader temporal bordering and dispossession. After all, themes of limbo, impermanence, insecurity, temporal poverty, negated futures, temporal dissonance, and other temporal governance mechanisms that hierarchise, marginalise and discipline us, are increasingly evident across the globe, whether or not we cross a border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gambian's migration towards Europe, mainly constituted by young men, substantially increased since 2010. Arriving mainly through the Central Mediterranean Route because of the extremely scarce possibility to obtain a visa, most Gambians applied for asylum in Italy, the first arrival country according to the Dublin regulation. The administrative and juridical system largely rejected their asylum requests, leaving most undocumented, in legal limbo, and deportable. The paper focuses on the different trajectories of Gambians in Italy in their post-asylum phase, discussing how existential precariousness heavily shapes their lives and how this condition compromises future building along different but entangled temporalities. In particular, the contribution wants to reflect on the various intertwined timelines that people on the move forge and inhabit, showing how they are always multiple and articulated through spatial, social, cultural, economic, and personal dimensions. In so doing, I analyze temporal dispossession as a continuous process that Gambians on the move experience prior to, during, and after their trip to Europe and which they actively struggle to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how claims to predictable borders via data science techniques are crafted in bureaucratic institutions. Through a case study of testing algorithmic systems at a transnational agency, we examine how humanitarian organizations reconcile the risks of predictive technologies with the benefits they claim to receive. Drawing on a content analysis of policy documents and interviews with humanitarian technologists, we identify three organizational strategies to justify working toward predictability: constantly seeking novel variables and data, maintaining ambiguity, and shifting models to adapt to changing circumstances. These strategies, we argue, sustain the claim that a predictable border is possible even when the technical reality of machine learning models does not live up to bureaucratic imaginaries. The so-called success of a predictable border does not solely derive from its technical capacity to estimate human mobility accurately but from creating a semblance of a predictable border inside an organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of subjectivity are increasingly key to critical studies of migration, which highlight the production of subjectivities as one of the central functions of borders. Yet the question of how borders operate at a psychic level is rarely considered. Drawing inspiration from Gail Lewis's psychosocial approach to the racial formation of subjects and focusing on the UK asylum system, this article examines how borders shape and are navigated within psychic reality over time. Through close analysis of ethnographic material, I propose the concept of "psychic holds" to understand some of the ways in which borders impinge upon the psychic mobility of those they target over time. This term captures a dual process, invoking both the subjective chokeholds and deep attachments that may be involved in the bordering of subjectivities. These psychic holds, I argue, operate in the long durée, often far outlasting the temporary legal categories created by migration regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background The ethnobotanical analysis of two bordering areas allows for the in-depth understanding of the dynamics of Local Ecological Knowledge, which mirrors the naturalistic, historical, and sociopolitical features of each area. As part of the Interreg Italy-Switzerland B-ICE&Heritage and GEMME projects, this work is an ethnobotanical comparative study of two neighboring Alpine territories: Valmalenco (Italy) and Valposchiavo (Switzerland). Methods A total of 471 informants were interviewed on different fields of use (medicinal, food, veterinary, etc.). All data were organized in Excel™ spreadsheets. Informant Consensus Factor was calculated for the pathologies reported. Jaccard’s similarity indices were calculated to compare the Valmalenco and Valposchiavo areas. Subsequently, another comparison between Valmalenco/Valposchiavo and Italian/Swiss Alpine neighboring areas was carried out. Results The number of taxa for Valmalenco was 227 (77 families) and 226 in Valposchiavo (65). Out of the 10 most cited species, 7 were mentioned in both. Arnica montana L. was the most cited in Valmalenco, and Sambucus nigra L. in Valposchiavo. The 5 most cited families were the same. Regarding the medicinal and food fields, the similarity indices were fairly low (0.31 and 0.34 for the species; 0.22 and 0.31 for the uses). Concerning the comparison with Italian and Swiss Alps, similarity values were slightly higher with Italy (Valmalenco food species: 0.38 with Italy and 0.26 with Switzerland, medicinal: 0.26 IT and 0.14 SW; Valposchiavo food species: 0.36 with IT and 0.26 with SW, medicinal: 0.21 IT and 0.14 SW). Conclusion Although Valmalenco and Valposchiavo partly share natural environment, language, history, and culture, they had low similarity indices. They both seemed to have more similarities with Italy than Switzerland, maintaining low values with the surrounding territories too. They showed a common core of Local Ecological Knowledge with several divergent branches possibly due to pivotal historical happenings, as well as more modern external influences.

This paper examines how everyday practices of ‘bordering’, as conceived by Yuval- Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2019) as the ongoing proliferation of border sites where migrants are assessed to be fit for inclusion or exclusion, may violate moral respect by subjecting migrants to a wide array of discriminatory treatment, leading to what I call ‘status-harms’. Section II begins by providing an overview of bordering and the various forms it has taken, such as internal immigration checkpoints or even online visa application processes. Section III develops an account of comparative and non-comparative status-harms and why they constitute violations of moral respect. There, I pay special attention to comparative status-harms by proposing three conditions under which a comparative status-harm can be said to have occurred: (a) if an individual or group is singled out for disadvantageous treatment that others are not subjected to on the basis of a socially salient attribute, (b) if the attribute marks them out as inferior relative to those who are not affected thus, and (c) ascriptions of inferior status occur within a morally objectionable social hierarchy where they are targeted by hostile norms and practices centred around that attribute. I then consider how discriminatory practices of bordering routinely imposes status-harms on migrants. Section IV draws a distinction between two types of discrimination that migrants may be subjected to at border sites, which I term policy-based discrimination and procedure-based discrimination, and explores their relationship to the comparative and non-comparative status-harms suffered by migrants. I conclude in Section V.

The Altai Region with its enormous reserves of minerals, timber, and fossil fuels played a major role in the Civil War in Russia. The article describes its administrative and territorial division after the February Revolution of 1917. The author used unpublished archival documents and newspaper publications to reconstruct the process of disintegration that the Altai economic and territorial complex underwent in 1917–1919. The historical-genetic and historical-systemic methods made it possible to describe how the forest and mining territories dwindled during the abovementioned period. Although the first division plans dated back to the autumn of 1917, the actual transfer of forestry and lease areas to the neighboring provinces began as late as in the spring of 1918 and was completed in late 1919. As a result, one third of the administrative and economic units of the former Altai Region went to the neighboring departments of agriculture and state property, and the boundaries of the Altai mining district shrank significantly. Despite the fact that the region changed hands several times during the Civil War, every new government followed the same course on reducing the subordinate area in order to converge the economic and administrative boundaries of the provinces. However, the changes in power, partisan war, and rural disturbances slowed this process down. The transformations depended mainly on local initiatives while the central government was aware of the real situation in the districts.

The gradual digitization of EU migration policies is turning external borders into AI-driven filters that limit access to fundamental rights for people from third countries according to risk indicators. An unshakeable confidence in the reliability of technological devices and their ability to predict the future behaviour of incoming foreigners is leading towards the datafication of EU external frontiers. What happens if the supposedly infallible algorithms are wrong? The article aims to understand the consequences of algorithmic errors on the lives of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the European Union. This contribution investigates the socio-political implications of deploying data-driven solutions at the borders in an attempt to problematize the techno-solutionist approach of EU migratory policies and its fundamental rights impact on affected individuals.

Background: The ethnobotanical analysis of two bordering areas allows for the in-depth understanding of the dynamics of Local Ecological Knowledge, which mirrors the naturalistic, historical, and sociopolitical features of each area. As part of the Interreg Italy-Switzerland B-ICE&Heritage and GEMME projects, this work is an ethnobotanical comparative study of two neighboring Alpine territories: Valmalenco (Italy) and Valposchiavo (Switzerland). Methods: A total of 471 informants were interviewed on different fields of use (medicinal, food, veterinary, etc.). All data were organized in Excel™ spreadsheets. Informant Consensus Factor was calculated for the pathologies reported. Jaccard's similarity indices were calculated to compare the Valmalenco and Valposchiavo areas. Subsequently, another comparison between Valmalenco/Valposchiavo and Italian/Swiss Alpine neighboring areas was carried out. Results: The number of taxa for Valmalenco was 227 (77 families) and 226 in Valposchiavo (65). Out of the 10 most cited species, 7 were mentioned in both. Arnica montana L. was the most cited in Valmalenco, and Sambucus nigra L. in Valposchiavo. The 5 most cited families were the same. Regarding the medicinal and food fields, the similarity indices were fairly low (0.31 and 0.34 for the species; 0.22 and 0.31 for the uses). Concerning the comparison with Italian and Swiss Alps, similarity values were slightly higher with Italy (Valmalenco food species: 0.38 with Italy and 0.26 with Switzerland, medicinal: 0.26 IT and 0.14 SW; Valposchiavo food species: 0.36 with IT and 0.26 with SW, medicinal: 0.21 IT and 0.14 SW). Conclusion: Although Valmalenco and Valposchiavo partly share natural environment, language, history, and culture, they had low similarity indices. They both seemed to have more similarities with Italy than Switzerland, maintaining low values with the surrounding territories too. They showed a common core of Local Ecological Knowledge with several divergent branches possibly due to pivotal historical happenings, as well as more modern external influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the teaching of art in Higher Educational Institutions is inherently paradoxical. Informed by the transgressive and interdisciplinary qualities of contemporary artistic practices, education nevertheless is often made to fit into a reductionist, outcome‐oriented and individualistic discourse. Taking a weeklong workshop at the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania as a practical axis for its reflections on the fluid nature of art education, the paper discusses possibilities of extending beyond pedagogical, political, human/nonhuman and other borders and treating 'noise' and other 'interferences' as opportunities for transgression and dialogue. This workshop with students from the Vilnius Academy of Arts took place in September 2022, at a time characterised by the Russia–Ukraine war. Nida's proximity to Russia's exclave Kaliningrad, its location on the narrow Curonian Spit, and its immediate environment characterised by woods and sand dunes provide this paper with a setting for a discussion about a variety of borders: territorial borders, border pedagogies, perceived borders between human and nonhuman entities, between land and sea, and so on. Borders are described as dominant indicators of power and distinction, while educational standards and instruments of measurement often replicate similar distinctions between the known and the unfamiliar. Yet, borders can also be shifted while new connections and dialogues across real and conceptual borders can be forged in a porous process that is predisposed towards flexible scenarios characterised by the 'not‐yet'. The surrounding forest and wetlands and huge drifting sand dunes in Nida become analogies for the changing structure of the workshop, silently yet overpoweringly advocating for a mutable pedagogy. Analysed through the work of various contemporary artists, this nonhuman intrusion into a pedagogical and creative experience is both undefined and vulnerable, unlike the preordained structures of attainment targets often associated with contemporary schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates how US Border Patrol agents and Dutch Military and Border Police officers explain racialized border control outcomes, through colourblind ideologies. These ideologies—legalism, criminalization and securitization—function as euphemisms that allow border agents to downplay the importance of immigrants' race/ethnicity in their decision making and behaviour. Yet, underlying these colourblind ideologies are racialized immigration laws and social constructions that continue to produce group-based inequalities in who is questioned, arrested, detained and removed by border guards. We call for cross-national comparisons of how race/ethnicity is both manifested and concealed in border control. We also suggest the existence of supranational racial frames that protect the status quo in western immigration policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In bio-/necropolitical accounts, the border penetrates and insists on, that is, transforms, the bodies of people on the move, marking the constitutive violence of sovereignty-based hospitality or hostility. What is largely conceptually neglected in such accounts, however, is the subversive and risky activity of people on the move who themselves are insisting on the border by outsmarting and transgressing it. Extensions of bio-/necropolitics focusing on the debilitating aspects of state violence show how the border extends beyond a liminal status that reproduces binaries – such as exclusion/inclusion, (non-)citizenship, and (il-)legality) – thereby enabling a recentring of people on the move as agents. This paper seeks to (re-)formulate the idea of a 'border-as-assemblage' by offering a somatechnical reading of border transgression. The body on the move forms part of this assemblage as it challenges and reproduces the border across different technoscapes. In particular, I focus on the scene of the forensic examination room where people on the move must prove their deservingness by exposing their bodies to a medicalising-moralising gaze. This scene forms the entrance point to a consideration of the somatechnical entanglements giving shape to the assemblage of the migrant body. I reflect also on how somatechnics could be mobilised to think the body as a potential site of struggle against this (physically and epistemically) violent objectification and, in so doing, offer new perspectives on border resistance through refusal and as claim to opacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term vulnerability has become increasingly integral to humanitarian legislation, policies, discourse, and procedures in contexts of displacement. While people categorized as "vulnerable persons" are ostensibly entitled to specialized care, this categorization is widely used to divide people into those "legitimate" and "illegitimate" to receive basic rights and care. Critical feminist scholarship has highlighted how gender is the dominant lens through which vulnerability is constructed and recognized. This affects all people during displacement. However, here we address the implications of this framework for men's experiences of displacement, exploring as a case study the issue of housing for displaced people in Greece. Drawing on our independent fieldwork and interviews with humanitarians and displaced men, we demonstrate how gendered conceptions of vulnerability are not only integrated into institutionalized immigration apparatuses but also circulate in the everyday discourses, practices, and affective economies that constitute the Greek care regime. The result is that a form of necropolitics is exercised against men, forcing them to reside in conditions of slow violence and permanent injury. We address the gendered nature of this necropolitics as well as the gender-specific consequences for men at Europe's borders. Plain Language Summary: Vulnerability shapes responses to and experiences of displacement in Greece, especially access to housing. This article reveals how gender biases are integrated into institutionalized uses of the term, as well as the everyday discourses, practices, and emotions of multiple actors. This highlights the role of masculinities in necropolitics and bordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceuta and Melilla are considered exemplary models of the border spectacle. The fences of these cities typify the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’ and impel the emotional engagement of the inhabitants with migration control policies. This article focuses on the experiences of local activists who have resisted migration containment policies. Through a close examination of the emotional geographies of activism in border areas, and the effect of migration policies on the everyday, this article aims to uncover the civic emotions underlying the lived realities of activists. Furthermore, by addressing the methodological challenges of investigating social emotions, this study integrates visual elicitation methods into ethnographic research. The evocative power of cinema allows films to act as visual stimuli that convey the intimate narratives of activists, which encompass compassion, outrage, or fatigue in the context of pro-migrant mobilization. By drawing on the mundane experiences of borders, this article delves into the intersection of emotions, activism, and borders to elucidate experiences against migration control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]