From Sovereignty to Imperium: Borders,Frontiers and the Specter of Neo-Imperialism

Borders are changing in myriad and multifaceted ways. After 9/11, states redoubled efforts at shoring up their perimeters and building walls. But borders are not merely increasingly securitized, they are also becoming thicker and bi-national. This new ‘zonal’ border emerging worldwide radically shifts the debate about borders and sovereignty. If sovereignty is indivisible, unitary and final, how can it be shared between states at their mutual perimeters? Is this really evidence of sovereignty waning? In this article, I suggest we are stuck at this conceptual impasse because of two conflations. The first one involves two aspects of sovereignty: authority and control. Looking at borders as thin jurisdictional lines, we observe only their legal authority (de jure); instead, by examining changing modes of control, we can see how new securitized borders actually reinforce state strength. The second conflation revolves around the conceptual linking of borders, states and sovereignty. This article argues that as borders thicken, they start to resemble frontiers, and sovereignty starts to resemble imperium – a Roman designation for political authority that is territorially unbounded. This disrupts the border/state dyad and situates borders (lines) and frontiers (zones) on a continuum. In doing so, it reveals how sovereignty is not waning, but changing shape – a worrisome geopolitical conclusion given the possibilities of neo-Imperialism due to power asymmetries between neighbouring states.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Bordering the Middle East

ABSTRACT

Seven years after the beginning of the Syrian uprising and thirteen years after the transformation of Iraq into a federal state, one can notice the permanence of the nation state borders in the Middle East despite the worst prediction of a general breakdown of the colonial lines. But the Middle East, like no other region in the world, seems to face such a challenge to the state border system with the lasting internal fragmentations in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq. In reaction to this threat, governments erected sophisticated and costly fences at the edge of the states, transforming the regional landscape, raising issues of states’ sovereignty and regimes’ legitimacy; they are also highlighting the existence of the local communities (religious, ethnic or tribal) that are largely straddling across the international borders, defining alternative boundaries of belonging. This special issue intends to deal with two main questions: how do borders influence actors’ identity building? And how do identity politics at the local or national level re/define borders and boundaries? Six case studies stemming from intensive fieldwork research provide insights on state-community relationships through the lens of border issues in the Machreq and the Gulf areas thanks to different disciplinary approaches. Through IS territorialisation, Jordanian Bedouins, Kuwait’s national identity representations, Israel’s Lebanese residents, Oman’s construction of political sovereignty and representations of Gulf and Middle Eastern borders, authors highlight multi-scalar processes of identity building and representations through the bordering of the national, tribal or religious group.     

Borders and Spatial Imaginaries in the Kuwaiti Identity

ABSTRACT

The Iraqi claims on and invasion of Kuwait have focused most of the scholarly attention on the drawing and defining of the Kuwaiti border. Issues of material delineation between the two countries have mattered a great deal for asserting sovereignty, but also for the exploration of oil and access to Gulf deep waters. Yet, the identity dimensions of the Kuwaiti border have often been overlooked. Building on the literature that sees more to the border than just a dividing line but seeks to include individual and collective narrative and experiences of borders, this article proposes to investigate the social–cultural perception of the Kuwaiti border and explores the complex connection between border and identities in the Kuwaiti case. Borders, it has been argued, have often played a significant role in identity building processes. Yet in the case of Kuwait where the border, contested by powerful neighbours, cuts across empty desert and tribal territories, the border seems to have played a limited one in shaping the national identity. This article investigates the interplay between the bordering process asserting sovereignty, on the one hand and the notions of identity and sense of belonging, on the other, resulting from a complex mix of socio-cultural legacies inherited from the pre-national period (the hadhar/badû dichotomy) and processes of ordering and othering enacted by the state and its welfare policies. Based on the analysis of the spatial imaginary as constructed by the Nationality Law of 1959, it argues that the urban core of the port-city or the interaction with it have remained the main benchmark of Kuwaiti identity, while the desert periphery has been imagined as culturally distinct and economically backward in the oil era – a representation that nevertheless provides a reservoir of symbols and narratives ready to be reimagined or appropriated.     

Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders

The paper develops a non-state centric approach to the study of borders, building upon Balibar's ‘borders are everywhere’ thesis. It offers a critique of the assumption of consensus (mutual recognition of borders) in border studies. It is argued that borders do not have to be visible to all in order to be effective. The case for a multiperspectival border studies is then outlined: borders cannot be properly understood from a single privileged vantage point and bordering processes can be interpreted differently from different perspectives. A key dimension of a multiperspectival approach to border studies is examined in detail: borderwork, societal bordering activity undertaken by citizens. This is explored at several UK sites in order to demonstrate the ways in which borders are not always the project of the state, that they can exist for some (but not all), and can link people to the world beyond the ‘local’ border.     

Liberal constitutionalism,constitutional liberalism and democracy

The tension that is often seen to exist between the ideals of liberalism and of democracy is examined in this paper in light of the distinction between two liberal outlooks at constitutional regimes, namely, on the one side, a liberal constitutionalism that focuses on the need to provide institutional safeguards of individual liberty as private autonomy and, on the other hand, a constitutional liberalism that focuses on the need to respect the freedom of individuals to choose the constitutional environment in which they wish to live. It is argued that a liberalism that consistently extends its fundamental ideal of individual sovereignty to the level of constitutional choice can be reconciled with the basic democratic ideal of citizen sovereignty.     

Sloterdijk in the House! Dwelling in the Borderscape of Germany and The Netherlands

1. The order of the authors is alphabetical. It is almost a truism to say that people increasingly dwell in a transnational context, that is, in-between societal systems and together with multiple nationalities. Increasingly, people are living in a different nation in which they were born. The nation-states people dwell in cannot be equated with territorial container-boxes anymore, if this ever could. The uniform and straight lines in the sand, that borders once were thought to be, are now better understood as a complex choreography of border lines in multiplied lived spaces. This article zooms in on a specific kind of dwelling with multiple borders. It tries to get a conceptual hold of contemporary dwelling places of short-distance migrants across a EU inner border, in this case the Dutch-German border. In recent years, much facilitated by EU cross-border cohesion policies, a substantial number of Dutch people have bought or built a house just across the border in Germany. This has created an interesting new phenomenon of cross-border dwelling, in which the new location of the house is just across the border and the living largely still goes on in the country of origin. This living in two nations at the same time at such a short distance is what we wish to understand better conceptually in this article. We argue that two fundamentally opposed philosophical dwelling conceptualisations could be distinguished. On the one hand one could distinguish a philosophical view in which dwelling is a form of a Heideggerian nest, where people open a space of being, an intimate and secure bordered place, sheltering themselves for the outside world. On the other hand then, a philosophical view could be distinguished in which dwelling is driven by a Deleuzian need to free oneself from a binding b/order of home, through a constant be-coming and estrangement, hence by constantly othering oneself. We argue that in order to understand the borderscape dwellings of Dutch migrants in German borderlands, there is a need to relate these two ends of the dwelling continuum. The argument that we bring forward is that a borderline necessarily moves between total (self-)imprisonment and total escapist openness, making borders in an ontological sense intrinsicially and unavoidably always a shifting line in the sand. In our view, Peter Sloterdijk's imaginative Sphären (Spheres) trilogy could help as a conceptual stimulus to create that much needed bridge between the bordering efforts of nesting and the debordering desire to escape from it. Using Sloterdijk's spherical concepts, the dwelling can be seen as a place which is constantly changing from a secure bubble-like place into a multidimensional foam-like place and back again. With this spherical understanding of the house we argue that this conceptual ‘spheric’ stimulus could help to rethink the complex and ambivalent character of cross-border dwelling places in an increasingly transnational world.     

‘Sovereignty Entrepreneurs’ and the Production of State Power in Two Central African Borderlands

This article advances a subaltern geopolitics of sovereignty production at the borders of the DR Congo – the supposedly most fragile – and South Sudan – the youngest state in Africa. Moving beyond critiques of representing postcolonial statehood and sovereignty in terms of ‘lack’ and ‘failure’, we localise and ground analysis by drawing on Butler’s figure of the ‘petty sovereign’‘ to analyse the agency of border officials at the DR Congo/Rwanda and the South Sudan/Uganda border who we refer to as ‘sovereignty entrepreneurs’: officials who, tasked with managing and controlling the border, in constant face-to-face negotiations and closely linked to resource competition prescribe, set and decide on the terms and conditions of border crossing. It is argued that in the context of the DR Congo and South Sudan, where the states’ claims to territorial sovereignty face similar internal and external challenges, the border work of sovereignty entrepreneurs, characterised by the ability to tax, threaten and discipline with impunity, represents a form of sovereign power that renders the state’s capacity to act excessively visible at its borders.     

Demand for cigarettes in the United States: effects of prices in bordering states and contiguity with Mexico and Canada

Based on a cross-section of US states for 2004, this article estimates a demand function for cigarettes after including a proxy for prices in the bordering states and simple proxies for contiguity with Mexico and Canada and for being a major tobacco producer. One major point seems to be that the negative elasticity for within-state price is similar in magnitude to the positive elasticity for the (lowest) price in bordering states. Several additional points also seem noteworthy. First, having a border with Mexico lowers sales in the state sizably. Second, the share of Hispanic/Latino population in the state also lowers sales significantly. Third, contiguity with Canada appears to have no significant effect. Fourth, partial impact of the state being a major tobacco producer appears minor even though consumption in these states is considerably higher. Fifth, education shows the expected negative association with cigarette consumption, but its statistical significance is low. Last, income carries a weak negative parameter, perhaps reflecting the lower prevalence of smoking in higher-income households.     

How Much Common Belief Is Necessary for a Convention?

We study Bayesian coordination games in which players choose actions conditional on the realization of their respective signals. Due to differential information, the players do not have common knowledge that a particular game is being played. However, they do have common beliefs with specified probabilities concerning their environment. In our framework, any equilibrium set of rules must be simple enough so that the actions of all players are common belief with probability 1 at every state. Common belief with probability close to 1 will not do.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, D82.     

Competing Para-Sovereignties in the Borderlands of Europe

This article is broadly concerned with how we conceptualise the geography of the tensions between the nominally stable orders of the modern state system against the turbulence of the past few decades in relation to that order, especially in the realm of border controls. Specifically, it considers the rescaling and relocation of border enforcement in the European Union in relation to state sovereignty. The article argues that existing “soft” conceptualisations of the EU’s relationship to sovereignty and bordering—“shared,” “joint,” “multi-level,” “consociational”—are inadequate to understand the transformations of exercises of sovereign power in European borderlands. Instead, we are witnessing the emergence of competing para-sovereignties acting within the same spaces, with both traditional states and the incipient state-like EU fulfilling particular bit roles in realms that were traditionally viewed as the exclusive responsibilities of modern, sovereign, territorial states. This dynamic is made visible in recent years in observing individual humans negotiate and subvert the fluid political geographies of European border space. Examples are taken from the activities of the EU border agency Frontex in southeastern Europe.     

Political Commodities and Sovereignty Management: Cigarette Smuggling across Brazil’s Southern Borders

Cigarette smuggling across Brazil’s borders with Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina involves large amounts of merchandise and money. The public in Brazil associates this activity with images of war, contamination and other threats to state sovereignty. This article assesses the political meaning and uses of smuggling in order to challenge the assumption that smuggling threatens the sovereignty of the Brazilian state. With the help of a literature review, fieldwork at the border, interviews with practitioners, a cartographic analysis of news coverage of seizures, the tobacco production and consumption, the market and its regulation, actors, routes and networks were mapped and analysed. In the Southern Cone of South America, an integrated transborder territory emerges where tobacco is cultivated, prepared and distributed, and cigarettes are manufactured, transported, sold and smoked. These flows cross distinct legal framings and lead to an increase in danger and profit. Thus, the market is segmented between national legal products and imported cigarettes that are cheaper and illegal but easily obtainable. The concepts of political commodities understood as the acts of powerful agents who barter advantages related to their authority and sovereignty management, understood as the use of legal (state-managed) structures according to private interests at different scale levels, provide useful theoretical tools to examine the territorialisation of the cigarette smuggling and its control by the state and private agents. We conclude that tobacco production and trade, as well as cigarette smuggling, are connected via agents who use the border to build the legal market and, consequently, to increase the trade value of national tobacco. Cigarette smuggling across the state borders of the Southern Cone combines networks and places in such a way that is integrated into the legal economy and the national territories, and it does not defy state’s sovereignty.     

Unsafe sex,AIDS and development

The AIDS-fighting communities have spent their limited resource on improving people’s awareness of the risk of contracting AIDS, and yet these programs have not resulted in sustained behavior change. This paper offers a possible explanation of why agents in poor countries choose to engage in more unsafe sexual activities when they are perfectly cognizant of the risk involved. It is shown that agents may rationally choose to do so when they are poor, since future is not attractive due to poverty and agents care more about current-period utility. Our results indicate that safe sexual practice is essentially a “normal good” and that development may be key to reduce the HIV infectivity by modifying agents’ sexual behavior. The model is then extended to consider the role of public health expenditure. We find that the relationship between protected sexual activity and development is no longer monotonic: unsafe sexual activity may increase slightly after a critical level of development has been reached. Finally, we examine the impacts of AIDS on development by considering individual’s saving decision. It is shown that agents tend to save more and accumulate more capital when economy grows.     

‘I'm Still Not Crossing That’: Borders,Dispossession, and Sovereignty in Frozen River (2008)

This paper considers the film Frozen River (2008) for the purpose of considering how the US-Canadian border is dramatised within the context of two women caught up in a illicit trading of migrants via a Native American Reservation. Re-calibrating more mainstream Hollywood's fascination with the United States' southern border, Frozen River usefully focuses attention on two areas that deserve further reflection namely the materiality of borders and border crossings and biopolitics. The paper concludes with some reflections on how borders, biopolitics, dispossession and sovereignty need further theorization by political geographers and other scholars.     

Geopolitics and the Screen: War,the Body and Violence

The paper investigates the promise of Carl Schmitt's concept of ‘nomos’ for developing new spatial imaginaries apposite to the study of ‘the border’ in contemporary political life, as per the aims of the ‘Lines in the Sand’ research agenda. Schmitt introduced the idea of a ‘nomos of the earth’ to refer to the fundamental relation between space and political order. There have been various historical expressions of the nomos, from the Respublica Christiana, to the jus publicum Europaeum, to a post–World War II (dis)order yet to be adequately theorised. We aim to explore the relatively overlooked spatial ontology of Schmitt's work and suggest ways in which it might prompt alternative ways of thinking about borders and bordering practices as representative of broader dynamics in the relation between space and political order.     

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’.     

Is there an economic system based on sovereignty of each consumer?

Conclusion One could add to these examples and show that systems based on consumer sovereignty can range from some historical realizations oflaissez-faire all the way to certain conceivable forms of (Lange) socialism. In every case an analysis of the individual incentive systems that fuel and of the welfare rationale that shapes the economic and political structures would be required before actual systems could be classified in a welfare relevant sense.Pareto optimality and actual or planner-simulated perfect competition certainly cannot be mandatory if systems based on consumer sovereignty are to exist. Freedom of consumers as a group regarding their choice of political and economic constitution and freedom of action for each individual who is protected by the Pareto criterion within some statistical confidence interval under each constitution suffice for consumer sovereignty. As long as the government remains demonstrably representative of the qualified majority in constitutional questions and respectful of all voters in its parliamentary processes, the consumer-predilected scope of government activities may differ from case to case, but the welfare basis is the same.In a second-best world, consumers and their representatives may even choose to delegate many or most allocative decisions to the executive branch of government, if they see no superior and feasible alternative. Extreme caution is justified if it is feared that such voluntary delegation of powers may prove irreversible; yet systems based on consumer sovereignty can take varying forms. In general, ideological labels, or terms based on characteristic details, institutional parameters, or formal organization are therefore insufficient for systems classification on the welfare basis which may well be regarded as the single most important respect in which economic systems can differ.     

Why peg? The role of capital mobility and financial intermediation

Many economists argue that the growth of international capital mobility has made the maintenance of pegged exchange rates more costly, forcing developing states to choose alternative arrangements. But some states do not simply abandon pegged exchange rates as their exposure to capital mobility rises. Some states abandon pegs long before a crisis can erupt, while others maintain pegs until the speculative pressures became unbearable. Why, in an environment of growing capital mobility, do some states maintain pegs longer than others do? One reason is that the more that bank lending dominates investment in a country, the more likely that state is to hold on to a pegged exchange rate. When banks have accumulated significant amounts of foreign debt they lobby for exchange rate stability. In a bank‐dominated financial system, a concentrated banking sector can organize easily and use its crucial role in the economy to exert influence over economic policy. This article presents new evidence from statistical tests on 61 developing countries that confirm that states with deeper banking systems are more likely to peg their exchange rates, in spite of growing capital mobility.     

A positive theory of social security

In this paper I make two points. First, I argue that social security programs around the world link public pensions to retirement: people do not lose their pensions if they make a million dollars a year in the stock market, but they do confront marginal tax rates of up to 100 percent if they choose to work. Second, after arguing that most existing theories cannot explain this fact, I construct a positive theory that is consistent with it. The main idea is that pensions are a means to induce retirement—that is, to buy the elderly out of the labor force because aggregate output is higher if the elderly do not work. This is modeled through positive externalities in the average stock of human capital: because skills depreciate with age, the elderly have lower-than-average skill and, as a result, have a negative effect on the productivity of the young. When the difference between the skill level of the young and that of the old is large enough, aggregate output in an economy where the elderly do not work is higher. Retirement is desirable in this case, and social security transfers are the means by which such retirement is induced. The theory developed in this paper is also shown to be consistent with a number of other regularities documented in Section 1.