Bordering Colonial Uncertainty

The border is not a fixed, impervious limit; nor is it a continuous line. It is an apparatus that facilitates, regulates, stigmatizes, and criminalizes movements in space and time. Critical scholars of the border have pointed to the border’s porosity for some time (Chang and Aoki 1997; Mitropoulos 2001, 2008). Today, border control authorities echo a similar observation. As the Australian Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Michael Pezzullo (2013), put it more recently: “Borders are no longer these days seen as a barrier; they are more a space where sovereign political units control the flow of people and goods in to and out of their dominion.” It is, he added, “not a wall … which completely seals off nations, states and peoples.” Rather, the “design of these points, systems and processes can add to economic competitiveness and productivity, by fostering rapid movement and border entry or exit.”

Read the rest at the Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Topology of the border (Sam Wallman, Javed, Mitropoulos)

One thought on “Bordering Colonial Uncertainty”

  1. I didn’t read the whole article, but borders also legitimize, MPower, comfort, allow for communication, all the while imposing rule of order upon what is otherwise chaos, and so doing also criminalizes and all those bad things.

    Like I said I didn’t read the whole article but we should be careful about saying that or implying that borders are bad or wrong or incorrect. Borders are just like grass, or open space, or that copse of woods. Borders are how we define what is good and bad. They are ultimately neutral until we put them into operation to bring about an identity that is naturally oppositional to whatever it’s trying to disburse.

    2.2 and item or an operational such as “colonialism“ is to deny that aspect is functioning in myself to gather myself toward political identity. This is not an argument to say that colonialism is good or bad but that colonialism is used as an ethical border by which to establish my “goodness“ as opposed to your “badness“. We can use any terms in anyways and to say that some particular group or some sort of abstract system accompanies a particular use of any term is merely to identify myself in a particular matter within that system or with in that abstraction.

    We might find a better resolution by pulling ourselves out of such scaffoldings of identity and really look at what’s going on in ourselves when we create the partition when we create the boundary the border that lies between myself and the rest of the world.

    Anyways… what do i know?



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