ANDERSON J. and O'DOWD L. (1999) Borders, border regions and territoriality: contradictory meanings, changing significance, Reg. Studies 33 , 593-604. The meaning and significance of state borders, as well as their geographical location, can change drastically over space and time. Along with their associated regions, they have competing and contradictory meanings, both material and symbolic. Their particularities require localized study but also wider contextualization. As a general response to peripherality, borders tend to generate questionable arbitrage activities, and their significance ultimately derives from territoriality as a general organizing principle of political and social life, one which changes over time. Borders and border regions are thus particularly revealing places for social research, especially in the present era of accelerated globalization, the end of the 'Cold War' and the growth of supra-state regions such as the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). Much of the research literature suggests that bounded territorial units are declining in significance given the increased flows of capital, commodities, information and people across state borders. The key claims of states to control exit and entry and to monopolize the means of violence within fixed borders seem to be under threat. Social and communal boundaries are seen to be increasingly de-linked from territorial borders. Such propositions raise a series of questions concerning how and to what extent state borders and border regions are being re-made, re-negotiated and managed or mismanaged. The paper sketches this changing context for studies and comparisons of particular borders and border regions. ANDERSON J. et O'DOWD L. (1999) Les frontieres, les regions frontalieres et la notion de territoire: des significations contradictoires et une importance en pleine evolution, Reg. Studies 33 , 593-604. La signification et l'importance des frontieres d'Etat, aussi bien que leur situation geographique, peuvent evoluer sensiblement sur l'espace et avec le temps. Conjointement avec leurs regions annexes, les frontieres ont des significations a la fois opposees et contradictoires, et materielles et symboliques. Leurs particularites necessitent non seulement que l'on les etudie sur le plan local, mais aussi que l'on les relativise a plus grande echelle. Pour repondre de facon generale a la notion de peripherie, les frontieres ont tendance a engendrer des activites d'arbitrage douteuses, et, au bout du compte, leur importance provient de la notion de territoire comme un fondement de la vie politique et sociale qui evolue avec le temps. Il s'ensuit que les frontieres et les regions frontalieres sont revelatrices dans le domaine de la recherche sociale, notamment a l'heure de la mondialisation, de la fin de la guerre froide et de l'essor des regions supranationales, telles l'Union europeenne (l'Ue) et la zone de libre-echange nord-americaine (la NAFTA). Une grande partie de la recherche laisse supposer que l'importance d...
The first part of the paper explores some of the reasons why contemporary border studies understate the full significance of state borders and their global primacy. It is argued that this failing is rooted in a much wider lack of historical reflexivity—a reluctance to acknowledge the historical positioning (the ‘where and when’) of contemporary border studies themselves. This reluctance encourages a form of pseudohistory, or ‘epochal thinking’, which disfigures perspective on the present. Among the consequences are (a) exaggerated claims of the novelty of contemporary border change, propped up by poorly substantiated benchmarks in the past; (b) an incapacity to recognise the ‘past in the present’ as in the various historical deposits of state formation processes; and (c) a failure to recognise the distinctiveness of contemporary state borders and how they differ from other borders in their complexity and globality. The second part of the paper argues for a recalibration of border studies aimed at balancing their spatial emphases with a much greater, and more critical, historical sensitivity. It insists that ‘boundedness’, and state boundedness in particular, is a variable that must be understood historically. This is illustrated by arguing that a better analysis of contemporary border change means rethinking the crude periodisation which distinguishes the age of empire from the age of nation-states and, in turn, from some putative contemporary era ‘beyond nation-states’ and their borders.
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