Borderlands are often seen as zones of instability, uncertainty, marginality, and danger. Yet, they increasingly attract the attention of ethnographers as a unique lens through which to view the intersections of the national, transnational, and global forces that shape the securities and insecurities of our globalizing age. The contributors to this volume examine how different kinds of (in)security manifest and interconnect at state borders, encompassing the personal and the political, the social and the economic, in ways that reinforce or undermine the identities of those whose lives these borders frame. Drawing upon case studies from the Southern Cone, the U.S.-Mexico border, and borders in Greece, Ireland, and southeast Asia, the authors show that borders raise questions of security not just for those who live and cross them, including ethnographers, but also for the sustainability of the physical environments and wildlife disturbed by the passage, movement, and containment borders generate. Book jacket.

Second edition of Gloria Anzaldúa's major work, with a new critical introduction by Chicano Studies scholar and new reflections by Anzaldúa.

Throughout history, the functions and roles of borders have been continuously changing. They can only be understood in their context, shaped as they are by history, politics and power, as well as cultural and social issues. Borders are therefore complex spatial and social phenomena which are not static or invariable, but which are instead highly dynamic. This comprehensive volume brings together a multidisciplinary team of leading scholars to provide an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of all aspects of borders and border research. It is truly global in scope and, besides embracing the more traditional strands of the field including geopolitics, migration and territorial identities, it also takes in recently emerging topics such as the role of borders in a seemingly borderless world; creating neighbourhoods, and border enforcement in the post-9/11 era.

This timely book explores the central role that borders play in shaping the contemporary world. Building on a discussion of border thinking and making from antiquity to the present, Gabriel Popescu applies a critical eye to current border-making concepts, processes, and contexts. Throughout, he offers a balanced understanding of borders, explaining why and how interstate borders have emerged, whose interest they serve, who is involved in border making, and how border-making practices affect societies. Assessing the latest theoretical approaches to border studies, the author deftly incorporates a range of disciplinary perspectives, including geography, international relations, sociology, history, security studies, and anthropology. Popescu explores recent world events, discussing how current issues such as migration, terrorism, global warming, pandemics, the international human rights regime, outsourcing, the economic crisis, supranational integration, regionalization, and digital technology relate to borders and influence our lives. Written with a clear eye and voice, this book makes a complex subject accessible to a wide readership.

Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging, and control are shown in sharp relief. Through ethnographic and historical analysis, Jason Cons argues that these spaces are key locations for rethinking the production of territory in South Asia today. Sensitive Space examines the ways that these areas mark a range of anxieties over territory, land, and national survival and lead us to consider why certain places emerge as contentious, and often violent, spaces at the margins of nation and state. Offering lessons for the study of enclaves, lines of control, restricted areas, gray spaces, and other geographic anomalies, Sensitive Space develops frameworks for understanding the persistent confusions of land, community, and belonging in border zones. It further provides ways to think past the categories of sovereignty and identity to reimagine territory in South Asia and beyond.

Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia provides valuable new ethnographic insights into life along some of the most contentious borders in the world. The collected essays portray existence at different points across India's northern frontiers and, in one instance, along borders within India. Whether discussing Shi'i Muslims striving to be patriotic Indians in the Kashmiri district of Kargil or Bangladeshis living uneasily in an enclave surrounded by Indian territory, the contributors show that state borders in Northern South Asia are complex sites of contestation. India's borders with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma/Myanmar, China, and Nepal encompass radically different ways of life, a whole spectrum of relationships to the state, and many struggles with urgent identity issues. Taken together, the essays show how, by looking at state-making in diverse, border-related contexts, it is possible to comprehend Northern South Asia's various nation-state projects without relapsing into conventional nationalist accounts. Contributors. Jason Cons, Rosalind Evans, Nicholas Farrelly, David N. Gellner, Radhika Gupta, Sondra L. Hausner, Annu Jalais, Vibha Joshi, Nayanika Mathur, Deepak K. Mishra, Anastasia Piliavsky, Jeevan R. Sharma, Willem van Schendel