BORDERS:
IMAGINATION, GOVERNANCE, NEGOTIATION AND CONTESTATION
A half-day workshop organised by the Critical Global Politics Research Group,
School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies,
University of East Anglia (UEA)
Wednesday 3 December, Arts 2.06, 12.30pm-5pm.
Borders – geographic, political, social, or economic - are imminently significant in the
contemporary world. Globalization and neoliberal global governance are often understood to
represent the breaking-down or eradication of territorial and cultural borders to allow for a
flow of capital, good, services, technologies, and ideas. Conversely, research in critical global
politics contends that borders are as pronounced as ever and take on a variety of
manifestations. Borders can be understood as embodied rather than exclusively territorial.
Borders might be socio-economic, familial, cultural, gender-based, religious, racial, ethnic,
health-based or age-based. New technologies – such as biometrics – plays a central role in the
transformation of borders and of their embodiment.
This workshop presents an attempt to take stock of recent and ongoing research
around the imagination, management, transformation and contestation of borders, understood
broadly. Drawing on cutting edge work within Political Theory, International Relations and
Political Sociology, it asks how borders are instituted and negotiated by their creators and
subjects. Papers draw on a range of methodologies including autoethnography and discourse
analysis, with case studies including the UK, Nigeria and beyond.
Provisional programme
12.30pm: Buffet lunch
12.50-1pm: Welcome and introductions: Professor Lee Marsden
1-2pm: Panel 1 – Dr. Alexandria Innes and Dr. Elizabeth Cobbett, Chaired by Tim Reeder.
2-2.20pm: Break
2.20-3.20: Panel 2 – Dr. Ayse Zarakol and Dr. Michael Skey, Chaired by Michael Kyriacou.
3.20-3.40: Break
3.40-4.40: Panel 3: Dr. Joshua Kassner and Dr. Lee Jarvis, Chaired by Stephen Mcgrath.
4.40-5pm: Conclusions and Ways Forward: Professor Alan Finlayson
5.30: Drinks
Speakers and titles
Dr. Elizabeth Cobbett (UEA) MasterCard in Nigeria: Global Assemblages through
Biometrics
Dr. Andri Innes (UEA) Race and Refugees: Protection at the borders, bordering protection
Dr. Lee Jarvis (UEA) Legislating for Otherness: Parliament, Proscription and Identity
Dr. Joshua Kassner (Baltimore/UEA) Political Borders and Non-Domination
Dr. Michael Skey (UEA) Boundaries and belonging: Dominant ethnicity and the place of the
nation in a globalizing world
Dr. Ayse Zarakol (Cambridge) Ontological Security and Spatial Variation in Manifestations
of Anxiety
Abstracts
Elizabeth Cobbett: MasterCard in Nigeria: Global Assemblages through Biometrics
Nigeria has launched a national electronic identity card which all Nigerians will need if they
want to vote in upcoming elections. The new biometric-based verification eID card will also
be a MasterCard-branded identity card with electronic payments capacity. In sub-Saharan
Africa (SSA), financial inclusion relies on information and communication technology and
digitalisation to expand banking and financial services to untapped mass markets of the
unbanked. The Nigerian state’s decision to contract MasterCard to extend electronic financial
networks through the new citizenship smart card is an unprecedented step in financialisation.
I am arguing that the MasterCard ID card highlights emergent global assemblages of
governance and authority taking place through the financialisation of the everyday.
Theoretically, we need an analytical framework that overcomes the macro – micro divide of
borders and governance in order to better analyse the multi-scaled character of authority and
governance being developed in the heart of nation-states.
Alexandria Innes: Race and Refugees: Protection at the borders, bordering protection
This research considers the tendency to differentiate between economic migrants and forced
migrants, which has had a restrictive effect on the number of people recognized as having the
right to protection. I demonstrate that the differentiation of economic and forced migrants
has had a disproportionate effect on migrants of colour who are often preconceived as
economic migrants. Economic need undermines asylum claims that require migration to be
proven as forced, thus constituting an additional burden of proof to be held by the migrant at
the border. I draw on literature that examines the global and state governance of transit
migration and refugee camps. I argue that an examination of the governance of refugee
practices uncovers structural racist biases within the refugee definition that privilege liberal
understandings of civil and political rights and property rights over economic, social and
cultural rights. These biases manifest themselves in outcomes that undermine the perceived
legitimacy of claims for refugee status.
Lee Jarvis: Legislating for Otherness: Parliament, Proscription and Identity
This article offers a discursive analysis of Parliamentary debates around the proposed
proscription of specific terrorist organisations that took place in the United Kingdom between
2002 and 2014. It argues that such debates - and the power of proscription that is their
outcome - play in an important constitutive role in the (re)production of national self and
terrorist other that has been largely overlooked in existing work on this counter-terrorism
mechanism. The article begins with an overview of this literature, arguing that it tends
overwhelmingly toward questions of efficacy or ethics. While important, this focus has
concentrated academic attention on the causal question of what proscription does, rather than
the constitutive question of what is made possible by proscription. The article’s second
section situates our analysis within discursive work in International Relations and Security
Studies, upon which we turn to three pervasive themes in these Parliamentary debates: (i)
constructions of groups targeted for proscription; (ii) generalised constructions of terrorism
and its threat; (iii) explicit and implicit constructions of the UK. We argue that these debates
serve to institute a familiar binary distinction between the UK and international terrorist
actors: a distinction that is, importantly, reproduced by critics of proscription powers as much
as their advocates.
Joshua Kassner: Political Borders and Non-Domination
Employing a basic commitment of republicanism, I will critically assess the legitimacy of the
political borders of sovereign states. For contemporary republicans the legitimacy of political
institutions is dependent on the degree to which the institution in question protects against
domination. In the end, I argue that the territorial nature of states – as defined by their
political borders – when combined with contemporary understandings of sovereignty within
the normative framework of international relations give rise to illicit patterns of domination.
Ultimately, I conclude that without significant reform the current system is illegitimate.
Having demonstrated that the political borders of sovereign states are illegitimate I consider
various alternative reforms. The argument in support of this conclusion unfolds in four steps.
First, I explicate the republican commitment to non-domination. Second, I identify and
discuss the unique characteristics of the political borders of sovereign states, paying
particular attention to the fact that sovereign states claim exclusive and supreme authority
over their territory and inhabitants. Third, I evaluate the legitimacy of the borders of
sovereign states by assessing the degree to which such boundaries protect against or promote
domination. Fourth, I develop and consider various alternative reforms arguing that a system
of open-borders is both practically and morally preferable.
Michael Skey: Boundaries and belonging: Dominant ethnicity and the place of the nation in
a globalizing world
Established ways of theorising place and identity have been subject to growing scrutiny as a
result of intensifying global flows. In this paper, I look to (re)place the nation at the heart of
these debates, by examining its ongoing significance, as a bounded, familiar and ‘homely’
space, for those established national groups, who articulate a more secure sense of belonging
and entitlement. In the first section, the hierarchies of belonging that exist within a given
nation are addressed. These discussions are then connected with the wider literature on place
and identity, exploring, in particular, the ways in which the dominant groups look to assert
their status, and hence generate a sense of comfort and security, through the management of
bounded space. In the second, I draw on data from a series of interviews with members of the
Anglo-white majority in England, relating to both their own and others mobility. Debates
around immigration demonstrate the importance of territorial limits in being able to
effectively identify and then manage potential threats to the nation. Conversely, when
discussing their experiences of travel, the nation is often seen to represent a secure base from
which to proceed from and, crucially, return to.
Ayse Zarakol: Ontological Security and Spatial Variation in Manifestations of Anxiety
This paper discussing the spatial differences in the ways ontological insecurity is experienced
in the modern international order by exploring the link between anxiety and shame on the one
hand and anxiety and guilt on the other hand. In the contemporary psychology literature guilt
is often associated with agency whereas shame is an emotion associated with lack of agency
and structural position (Subotic and Zarakol 2013). Past generations of anthropologists such
as Ruth Benedict (1946) distinguished between ‘guilt cultures’ (e.g. the U.S) and ‘shame
cultures’ (e.g. Japan). Though such schemas have long been abandoned, partly due to
criticisms about Eurocentrism and reductionism, they are helpful in pointing us towards an
initial recognition that some experiences of anxiety (long recognised to be a thoroughly
‘modern’ state of being, at least in terms of its prevalence) may vary culturally (and therefore
geographically) based on whether anxiety stems from guilt (as an expression of
individualised agentic rationality) or shame (as an expression of internalised social values and
a preoccupation with social stature). I argue in this paper that what seems to be cultural
differences in approaches to ontological security problems in international affairs are at least
partly attributable to spatial differences in the manifestations of anxiety in the international
system and the varied ways different regions have been incorporated into the modern order.
Proximity to the normative core of the international system individualises ontological
security dilemmas whereas distance turns them into communal attributes, thus rendering
conflicts stemming from ontological insecurity much more intractable. [cf. ‘Madness is
something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages, it is the rule.’ Nietzsche,
BGE, aphorism 156].
Organising Committee:
Elizabeth Cobbett, Alexandria Innes and Lee Jarvis