If Borders Did Not Exist, Euroscepticism Would Have Invented Them Or, on Post-Communist Re/De/Re/Bordering in Bulgaria

The mainstreaming of “vulgar territory” and popular visions of hyper‐bordered and feminized territory

“…Third, vulgar territory calls our attention to the boundary between state territorial practice and “grassroots” understandings of territory. The distinction is not always absolute: as Krasteva (2017) argues, “[e]veryday othering/bordering is not an alternative to but in unison with power, they are a ‘translation’ of the fence into a body, of national security into identity, of bordering into othering.” Vulgar territory especially highlights the territorial thinking of actors who, in Fregonese's (2012) terms, “are not the state but resemble it, collaborate with it, or overpower it” (661). They may or may not realize their territorial visions, but we can recognize them in the way that they exaggerate existing forms of state territoriality or wax utopian in their territorial desires.…”

“…Vulgar territorial perspectives require not only territorial habits but also a fetishization of territory and its capacity to mark space and bodies (cf. Krasteva, 2017). This glorification of territory and borders requires more visceral elements to cement its increasingly widespread appeal.…”

Resilient cross-border regional innovation systems for sustainability? A systematic review of drivers and constraints

“…It implicitly assumes that advancing from one stage to another is an inherently positive step without accounting for the possibility of nonlinear development. For example, in relation to the accessibility dimension, as noted by Kratseva (2020) and Durand and Perrin (2018), border effects are reduced at times (for example, due to the Schengen Agreement) leading to increased permeability of the border, and at times they are reinforced or reinstated leading to a decrease in border permeability (for example, due to hardening border control in the EU due to the contemporary immigrant issue, in the US due to 9/11, and at the US-Mexico border due to the US presidential election in 2016, or due to EU-Russia sanctions, Brexit, or Covid-19 pandemic). However, a 'resilient' CBRIS would possess capacity to respond to such shocks (or trends thereof) and to reshape its structures and processes, so that neither internal nor external changes result in undesirable instability but rather in desirable renewal.…”

Changing geographies of the state: themes, challenges and futures

“…We should also be attuned to situations in which non-state actors attempt to ape state mechanisms for reproducing its territory and enforce a politics of exclusion. Vigilante territorial policing is one form of this, found in settings such as the United States (Williams and Boyce 2013), Bulgaria (Krasteva 2017) or Lebanon (Sanyal 2018). Such acts depend on existing mechanisms and technologies of state territory, but take their exclusionary potential to a logical extreme.…”