Geopolitics of the Northern Dimension: A Critical View on Security Borders

The Cold War geopolitical order has crumbled. As a consequence questions related to security, borders and identity have gained momentum in European politics as well as throughout the world. This article reflects the concept of security border both in the light of critical geopolitics and ideas of 'critical security thought', i.e. post-positivist security thinking (critical and postmodern orientations). The post-Cold War era means that the capability of the state to control security political space, and new border transgressing threats, is uncertain. Security borders are therefore becoming ever harder to define and draw. The empirical dimension of the article is the policy and process of creating the European Union's Northern Dimension (ND). The ND process is analysed, and particular attention is paid to the concept and practices of security borders. Critical geopolitics and 'critical security thought' serve as a theoretical framework. They provide a theoretical context and basis for the notion of security border. In this article critical geopolitics and post-positivist security thought constitute both an ontological and epistemological foundation for the study, while the notion of security border functions as an analytical tool for studying the ND. This article claims that the ND is an ambivalent (security) process. Second, it argues that the concept of security border is a useful analytical tool for geopolitical investigation.     

An Incorporating Geopolitics: Frontex and the Geopolitical Rationalities of the European Border

This paper develops a critique of the emergence of the new European Border Agency, Frontex, specifically its operations along Europe's maritime borders with North Africa. Rather than account for Frontex in terms of securitising and neoliberalising processes, as has become common, I focus instead on the underlying geopolitical rationalities that guide Frontex operations. These reflections then set up the further argument of the paper: that what Frontex itself sheds light upon is a novel geopolitics of the border, what can be thought of as an ‘incorporating geopolitics’. Through investigation of the policies and practices of Frontex, such an incorporating geopolitics can be shown to be replacing the much-discussed paradox of contemporary border regimes – that between trade freedoms and security restrictions – with a more fundamental contradiction: that the more border controls address more than just borders, the more they may themselves undermine the societies they purport to protect.     

Geopolitics of the Cosmopolis

Through an analysis of a speech held by Finnish Minister of Defence Jyri Häkämies at CSIS in Washington in 2007, the article scrutinizes the new emergence of “geopolitics” in international politics. Although its novelty is debatable, in this new geopolitical discourse the main focus is not related to the spatial borders of a nation state but instead to securing territory beyond these borders. It seems that “common values”, basically undefined but allegedly including such ideas like democracy, are related to this new form of “geopolitics”. In contrast to traditional geopolitics and identity politics, the global or cosmopolitical “us” defending common values seems to be a changing coalition and other countries appear only as objects of its operations. Only Russia, waking from its decade-long hibernation, emerges as a potential challenge to “us”. Curiously enough, its awakening also brings geopolitics back. The analysis of the speech reveals that the “new situation” requires choosing friends and enemies that are not clearly defined in the classical geopolitical sense. Even in the traditional sense of protecting the borders etc., the geopolitical security of Finland is best protected through acting for the geopolitical security of the whole world, no matter where or when that might require our presence. But from where does, for instance, the legitimacy of the operations of “us” derive? In the speech of minister Häkämies, many of the classical themes of political theory reappear, though in a new form. It is guided by geopolitical concerns, but the geopolitics it entails is rather different from the traditional way of thinking about it. This also creates a need to rethink some central concerns of political theory.     

From Smart Borders to Perimeter Security: The Expansion of Digital Surveillance at the Canadian Borders

Since 2001, border security policy between Canada and the US has morphed from “smart borders” to the present “beyond the border” (perimeter security) agreement resulting in the expansion of new techniques of border surveillance including pre-emptive profiling of travellers and biometric data sharing. In this paper, we argue that these border agreements have increasingly resulted in a changing experience of sovereign power for those crossing the border. This is demonstrated through a discussion of: the major border policies between Canada and the US since 11 September 2001, developed under the influence of US hegemony; how these policies perpetrate a generalised state of exception; and how these policies affect refugees, migrants, and citizens. Reading Agamben’s insights from a sociological perspective, we argue that the presumption of security-through-surveillance erodes border crossers’ human rights, and that some people – those from disadvantaged race/class backgrounds – are more affected than others by the implementation of the evolving border regime. We also emphasise the contingencies and unintended consequences of the ongoing projects. The conclusion offers brief comments on the consequences of these developments on Canadian identity and points out the directions for future research in this domain.     

The Trans-Political Nature of Southwest China’s Energy Conduit,Yunnan Province

Transboundary flows of energy across Yunnan Province in China and to Southeast Asian states provide insight into the changing nature of borders and border areas. Rather than monolithic symbols of state sovereignty, China’s southwest borders in Yunnan can be more accurately characterised as zones of connectivity and exchange, serving a range of local, national and regional objectives. Energy production and distribution in and across Yunnan can be understood as functioning in a set of dynamic transnational processes that serve as economic and political bridges – increasing interaction and deepening regional integration – while also working to mitigate risk to China’s energy demands. In this article, energy projects in Yunnan and Southeast Asia demonstrate the ways border regions can respond to increasing globalisation, simultaneously strengthening national energy security while promoting regional interconnection and diplomacy. Thus, connections to and through a once peripheral region present an apparent contradiction: once rigid territorial borders are increasingly characterised by transboundary infrastructure development and exchanges of energy, capital and diplomacy, while promoting broader, diversified national energy security objectives – essentially strengthening national security through transnational energy projects. This article investigates how energy development works to shape Yunnan’s role as an “energy conduit,” while advancing both transnational and national geopolitical objectives, and thus, suggesting that these projects can be understood as trans-political in nature.     

A Geopolitics of the Horse in Finland

The disregard of animal subjectivity in geopolitics is challenged as outdated and arrogant in light of the growing interdisciplinary understanding of the relational, dispersed, and co-evolving nature of agency. First, the war horse is examined by joining the instrumental approach of military history with the emphasis on emotion in animal studies. Knowledge about animal subjectivity is expanded by demonstrating how the horse itself has co-produced the Finnish experience in World War II and the national narrative about this conflict. Calculable territory, biopolitical state intervention, the political ecology of war, affect, and the body build connections between the horse’s war and theory, methodology, and concepts in political geography and geopolitics. Equine labour and response to the state’s geopolitically motivated breeding exercises during peace then bridge animal studies and critical geopolitics, showing how the horse has supported the formation of Finnishness. Finally, a look at contemporary mobility, geopolitics of disease, and biometric bordering exemplifies how the horse continues to adapt to new roles in Finnish society and contribute to human institutions and governance. The examination demonstrates the importance of other-than-human beings in the making of Finland as a political space and place. Suggestions for further studies and data point to opportunity. The article serves those who question rigid categorisations and segmentation of research and pedagogy into intellectually self-contained islands.     

Borders of Peace in Policy and Practice: National and Local Perspectives of Israel-Jordan Border Management

Border-management policies are designed to balance national interests of border control with the costs of monitored cross-border interaction. These policies, formulated by national authorities, are often based on constructed definitions and interests of national security rather than wider understandings of the components of human security. This is especially evident in post-conflict borders where local initiatives of economic, social and environmental cross-border interaction are posed to contribute to regional stability and security. This article analyzes civilian cross-border cooperation in the southern section of the Israel-Jordan border region, distinguishing between local and national perspectives regarding border management. Focusing mainly on Israel's policies the article demonstrates how despite the vision of good neighbourly relations and their potential contribution towards regional prosperity and stability, local cross-border initiatives have been inhibited in the name of national security. The case study demonstrates the mechanisms and ramifications of exclusive securitisation policies of post-conflict border management.     

Sovereignty as a Resource: Performing Securitised Borders in Tajikistan’s Pamirs

This paper scrutinises the translation of sovereignty into daily actions at the border. The Soviet Union established a heavily securitised and sealed border, which was perpetuated in post-Soviet, civil war-stricken Tajikistan by assigning the task to the Russian Federation’s border forces. After having taken over the task of guarding the border, the slowly recovering post-conflict state tried hard to maintain its own border control. Drawing on interviews with borderland people, this article discusses the convergence of Tajikistan’s strong claim but weak support for sovereignty, with the daily life of the borderland people. It will show how – given the Pamirs’ special status as a border district – far-reaching sovereign authority of state agents, aiming to provide security at the border, has been translated into arbitrary actions ensuring individual benefits and has been hidden by intransparency. The article argues that the lack of adequate support from the central government encourages state representatives at the border to reinterpret the sovereign power assigned to them in order to serve their own individual benefits and purposes. Instead of being used to maintain the state territory, the sovereignty’s power is diverted to serve individual interests, in the end serving to destabilize the border, the opposite of the intended purpose.     

The Value of Territory: Towards a Marxist Geopolitics

The article argues for a Marxist geopolitics that moves beyond both critical geopolitics and the discredited classical geopolitics. It underlines the valorisation of territory by capital across three levels of abstraction: that of social infrastructure, class conflict and ground-rent proper. The recent Russian-Ukrainian gas wars are briefly analysed by way of illustrating the application of this distinctive approach to geopolitics.     

‘Everyone Creates One's Own Borders’: The Dutch–German Borderland as Representation

When examining the internal borders of the European Union in the context of their purportedly official demise following European integration, structural obstacles to cross-border interaction are normally taken into consideration while ignoring borders in people's minds. Approaching this lacuna, the author proposes to understand borders as being constituted by imaginations and representations, and as undergoing a constant reconfiguring through social relations. This article explores the meanings of the Dutch–German border expressed in popular representations that commonly employ national stereotypes. Against the background of ‘popular geopolitics’, and applying semiotics as methodology, the author presents a theatre play on the Dutch–German border as a complex but popular representation. Analysis of the theatre play also focuses on its audiences and the reception of the play by children. This permits to address people's readings of popular representations in order to approach the question of why borders persist in people's lives.     

A Geopolitical Analysis of Popular Songs in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, 1983–2013

Based on the notions of ‘popular geopolitics’ and ‘practical geopolitics’, this article explores how China’s geopolitical strategies are represented and reproduced by the popular songs in the CCTV (China Central Television) Spring Festival Gala during the past thirty years (1983–2013). Drawing on the (con)textual and visual analysis of 539 popular songs, how geopolitical knowledges are represented and reproduced by these songs and how these songs are involved with China’s geopolitical strategies are analysed. The main argument of this article indicates that the official regulated popular songs in the annual Gala can be considered as important constitutions of China’s state apparatus which aim at propagandising and legitimating the official geopolitical strategies on both internal and international affairs. As research of the geopolitical engagements of China’s popular music, this article might also be read as a contribution to wider literatures on popular and practical geopolitics from a non-Western perspective.     

缅甸的女儿:跨境女性移工在瑞丽的汇款实践与情感连接

边境地区的跨国人口流动,是一种特殊的迁徙形式。本文聚焦缅甸女性移工作为原生家庭女儿的身份,考察她们在中国边城瑞丽的汇款实践,发现具有政策弹性和地理连接性的边境空间,为其提供了在地与跨国资源,使未婚与已婚女性都与留守家庭保持着紧密的经济和情感往来,构成独特的汇款图景。汇款使低收入女性面临更大的生存压力,她们借助跨国的原乡社会、族群、亲属和家庭网络,以及便利的出入境行动来应对日常困境,并通过手机联络家人,获取情感支持。伴随汇款的生产与传递,还产生了边境社会的多维互动,连接着跨境女性与原乡社会、在地移民群体,以及当地中国人,促进了两国民众的相互理解和情感交流。透过汇款,不仅可以认识跨境女性在跨国社会中的贡献,更能观察到中国边境地区的发展给毗邻国家带来的积极影响。     

China’s Contingencies: Critical Geopolitics,Chinese Exceptionalism and the Uses of History

This paper examines the intimate relationship between narratives emanating from China and their uses of Chinese history, and how such perspectives inform China’s geopolitical positioning and practices in lieu of its purported ‘rise’. Taking inspiration from the deconstructive impetus of critical geopolitics, this article contends that these historical claims to China’s rise constitute deterministic accounts, hinging on the notion of Chinese exceptionalism to provide discursive backing for a Sinocentric geopolitical order in the coming decades. This in turn downplays ‘alternative’ historiographies that can shed light on how the nature of China’s emergence may be more dependent on and shaped by the external environment than previously acknowledged. Building on the historical-geographical expositions related to the idea of contingency, this article demonstrates how China (whether it be in the past or present) cannot be seen as operating in a vacuum but has to constantly negotiate and adjust its strategy of engagements/interactions based on the specific demands imposed by world politics. Specifically, by elucidating these dimensions through cross-strait relations between China and Taiwan, it is argued that understanding China’s contingencies can raise important questions for us to critically appreciate the contextual actors, processes and relationships that differentially impact on China’s engagements in the world.     

Images and Imaginings of Palestine: Territory and Everyday Geopolitics for Palestinian Jordanians

In this paper, I delve into the complex ways in which Palestine is conceptualised as both a concrete and amorphous territory through an examination of the everyday practices of displaying images and imagining Palestine. Building from fieldwork conducted with Palestinian Jordanians, I analyse and contextualise images and maps of Palestine that they display in their homes and communities. I complicate what these images seem to represent with insights from interviews I conducted about how they spatially imagine Palestine. Throughout the paper I show that images and imaginings of Palestine are quite diverse and have various territorial meanings. Yet, as varied and seemingly different as these images and imaginings may be, they are nevertheless intimately linked through territorial discourses of displacement and rootedness, as well as through the everyday practices of remembering and resistance. Thus, I contribute to recent scholarship within geopolitics by highlighting (1) the value of examining images and imaginings of everyday geopolitics in tandem with one another, (2) the complex and fluid ways in which territory configures into everyday geopolitics, and (3) that amorphous notions of territory need to be integrated into work on territory more broadly.     

The Frontiers of the European Union: A Geostrategic Perspective

While state borders remain the pre-eminent frontiers within geopolitics, regional blocs are also acquiring frontier characteristics. How might we understand the function and identity of such frontiers? Taking the European Union as its focus, this article offers answers to these questions by developing the idea of geostrategy. Four geostrategies are identified: networked (non)borders, march, colonial frontiers and limes. Each corresponds with a particular way of territorialising the space of the border, as well as a certain idea of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and of the risks and problems that the border is to govern. A geostrategic perspective uses contemporary social forms (such as networks) but also historical forms of borders (march, limes) in order to enhance the intelligibility of the frontiers of the EU. As such, this approach seeks to capture the multiplicity and plurality of borders.     

Missing from the Map: Chinese Exceptionalism,Sovereignty Regimes and the Belt Road Initiative

ABSTRACT

Historical and conventional international relations (IR) frameworks describe the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) as representing a newly ambitious Chinese drive into global politics that positions China as moving away from its long-time reticence towards foreign entanglements. This raises a contradiction of China being at one and the same time both a defender of its own territorial sovereignty while also being engaged in various projects, particularly the BRI and the associated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), that point in completely different directions. This paper seeks to build upon and move beyond conventional framings to understand how the BRI represents a conflict over the workings of state sovereignty that such frameworks have trouble addressing. We argue that the absence of an official Chinese government BRI map promotes a ‘useful fuzziness’ with regards to China being open to crafting a new as of yet undefined geopolitical identity. In light of the absence of such a map, this work considers key ideas relating to China’s geopolitical expansion via the BRI in terms of so-called sovereignty regimes – the idea that various practices of authority and control emanating originally from states take different geographical shapes. Conflicts arise when a state, such as China, finds itself caught between the operational imperatives of multiple regimes. By identifying the current sovereignty dynamics raised by the BRI in light of the relevant, yet distinctive historical experience of the Marshall Plan, this work can be used as a model for understanding how China’s current leadership is managing the debate of simultaneously protecting ‘strong borders’ yet also promoting a policy of ‘going out’.     

China,India and the US Rebalance to the Asia Pacific: The Geopolitics of Rising Identities

The US rebalance to the Asia Pacific is consistently interpreted as a response to China’s material rise. While not entirely incorrect, this assumption – derived from an overriding faith in the explanatory significance of relative state capabilities – fails to explain why rapidly rising others, most notably India, remain absent from regional US security discourse, and why a heavy US presence in Asia predates China’s ascent of the 1970s onwards. To address these problems and offer an improved explanation of what the rebalance is, how and why it has come about, and what it is designed to achieve within the context of China’s rise, this analysis draws from critical geopolitics and postcolonial theory. It argues that the rebalance is best conceived as the (re)articulation of historical discourses which construct certain foreign Others like China as challenges to the ontological American self, making the rebalance an attempt to pacify a particular rising identity as much as a rising state actor. The analysis is motivated in part by the question of how the rebalance is enabled in its current form. From here, the article addresses an increasing yet regressive tendency of International Relations theory to deny studies of the ‘how possible’ explanatory value, encouraging their marginalisation in favour of examinations into ‘why’ political decisions are made.     

The changing US–China investment relationship

The United States and China are at a turning point in their investment relationship. China’s previous investments in the United States were predominantly in government securities, while other holdings were negligible. Recently, the accumulation of treasury securities has slowed and direct investments by Chinese firms have risen steeply, with Beijing signaling greater support for portfolio investment outflows as well. This article describes the nascent shift in patterns of Chinese investment in the United States and uses the case of direct investment to examine the implications for US–China relations. We discuss current and future policy issues presented by Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States, including national security, market access, and antitrust.     

Geopolitics,Eurasianism and Russian Foreign Policy Under Putin

This article interprets the strategies that have been associated with the war on terror against the backdrop of historical geographies of colonial violence and dispossession. It joins those who argue that wider anxieties about the sources of danger, criminality, violence and terror have become intertwined. These reveal as much about sensibilities of race, class and ‘security’ as they do objective dangers. Thus the article considers how, drawing on the British case, detentions and deportations marked by race are connected with and form part of an overlapping regime of ‘security’, ‘immigration’ and asylum. This is exemplified via an account of the trajectory British sovereign territory of Diego Garcia, leading to wider reflections on contemporary forms of sovereignty and the operation of ‘race’ in geopolitics.     

From geopolitics to geoeconomics: Transnational state effects in the borderlands

This article reads Ohmae's arguments about ‘the end of the nation‐state’ against the arguments of Luttwak about the centrality of ‘geoeconomics’ in the new world order. By exploring the limits of both their arguments, the article develops a much more critical account of geoeconomics, suggesting that it can be used by scholars of boundaries and geopolitics to come to terms with the development of cross‐border regionalism and associated transnational state effects (i.e. transnational governance imperatives) in the context of free trade. Geoeconomics is thus argued to describe the localised changes in governance imperatives implicated in a series of economically‐driven and quite quotidian challenges to national borders on the ground in both North America and Europe. The article outlines how an examination of localised strategies to create cross‐border regions in the context of globalised economic interdependencies offers a research window onto processes currently challenging the nation‐state from the ground up. As such, it is argued that the case studies discussed here also offer a way of empirically evaluating the geoeconomic influence of discourses about ‘the end of the nation‐state’ promoted by writers such as Ohmae.