Borders in Globalization Review

Letter of Introduction

2024-12-20T23:27:22-08:00

It’s time for the new BIG_Review, presenting a special issue on border temporalities! Of course, space is well-trodden territory in border studies. But bordering happens in time as well. What are the tempos of life in borderlands? What are the marks and traces of borders across time? What is the enduring significance of human movement and exile throughout history? This innovative collection answers these questions from multiple academic and artistic perspectives.

Introduction: Border Temporalities in and Beyond Europe

2024-12-20T23:27:20-08:00

How are borders and time related? Are borders shifting state lines enshrined in history, the landscape, and cultural heritage? Are borders places where new understandings of time and space can be formed? Are temporalities of borders the material appearance, transformation, and disappearance of borders or the social practices which leave us with traces of times, tidelines, phantom, or ghost borders? Have we paid enough attention to the experiences of people from different ages passing borders? This special section of Borders in Globalization Review presents twelve articles developed from papers presented on the conference on “Borders in Flux and Border Temporalities in and beyond Europe”, which was organised by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), the Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN), and the Franco-German Jean Monnet Center of Excellence in cooperation with the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and Borders in Globalization (BIG) on 15 and 16 December 2022 in Belval, Luxembourg. The conference examined the temporal dimension of borders, borderlands, and border regions. The articles shed light on temporalities of borders by exploring the relationship between temporalities—in their broadest sense, understood as the way time is experienced and lived—on the one hand, and border practices, border discourses, and border regimes on the other. They focus on four approaches: the past, the present, the future and borders, diachronic studies of borders and border regions, age and borders, and new understandings of time and space at the border.

Keywords: borders; temporalities; border temporalities; Europe.

Border Temporalities of an Old Letter: A Hermeneutic Interpretation of Cross-Border Veteran Welfare

2025-02-26T15:40:52-08:00

The article uses the concept of border temporalities to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of an old letter containing a request from a cross-border female migrant from Luxembourg to access French welfare benefits. In doing so, it systematically unravels the way in which time was lived and experienced differently by borderland residents as opposed to French lawmakers. The alternative temporality characterizing the third space of the Luxembourgian–German–French borderlands clashed with the spatio-temporal hierarchy imposed by France in the period after the First World War to exclude the majority of people living abroad from access to social provision. The article concludes its hermeneutic circle with a reflection on how historical research on borders and borderlands is conditioned by the temporality of archives and the temporality of research funding.

Keywords: Luxembourg; France; Germany; hermeneutics; welfare; veterans; First World War.

Living in the Time of the State: Border Temporalities in the Northern Irish Borderlands

2024-12-20T23:27:15-08:00

In dialogue with Sarah Green’s concepts of “traces” and “tidemarks”, as well as a notion of “storytelling”, and Michel de Certeau’s allusion to “ghosts”, I revisit the Irish borderlands more than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement. I show how everyday life in these borderlands (still) locates in border temporalities articulated as the continual drawing of lines, deeply embedding what I call “the time of the state”. The lines of division and belonging narrate in relation to two periods of time: the Troubles and the island’s British imperial past, appearing materially in the landscape and cityscapes with an ever-present rearticulation of physical divisions by walls and fences and related symbolism, informing and ordering everyday practice. In these borderlands it is not just the popular storytelling about the conflicts that survives, but also a multiplicity of practices associated with them, dividing the population and turning the landscape ghostlike as supposedly past conflicts continue to haunt the everyday lives of people living there.

Keywords: Northern Ireland; traces of lines; tidemarks; ghostly traces; practice-oriented approach.

Expanding Border Temporalities: Toward an Analysis of Border Future Imaginations

2024-12-20T23:27:13-08:00

Even though questions about the future have played a central role in recent times of polycrisis, border studies have long been relatively silent about the future. Our article develops a research perspective through which the sensitization of border research for the temporal dimension of the future can be achieved. To this end, social and cultural studies’ perspectives on the future are mobilized to approach the interplay of borderwork and/as futurework. We develop a foundation for an analysis of what we call “border future imaginations”. In this way, this study expands our understanding of border temporalities with reference to the future orientation of contemporary societies.

Keywords: border temporalities; future; borderwork; futurework; sociology of time.

Soviet Legacies in Russian (B)order-Making and (B)order-Crossing

2024-12-20T23:27:11-08:00

This article explores discourses and practices that have shaped border regimes in different times at Russia’s western frontier, focusing on the interplay between state power, border management, and individual lives. Using a “comparative temporalities” approach, it analyses border control processes in the early Soviet period, during the Cold War, and during the Russian war on Ukraine. It assumes that current Russian border policy has visible parallels with systems dating back to 1920s Soviet border policy and to the Cold War (the adoption of police-style management of transborder mobility). It posits that the comparative temporalities approach reveals an alternation between ‘fluid’, ‘semi-transparent’ Russian borders and more impenetrable barriers. Stricter exit border controls are usually reintroduced after periods of border liberalization and laxity related to regime change, e.g., after the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and after the demise of the USSR in 1991. Initially, increasingly authoritarian and repressive control of citizens’ mobility was accompanied by confusion and an increasingly arbitrary application of new, ‘politicized’ markers as local border authorities strove to implement new restrictions under increased state pressure. Then, borders were once again hardened and placed under stricter control. This intensified repression and helped create zones of instability at the borders.

Contested Frontiers: Borders and Border Spaces in the South Caucasus from the Second Half of the 19th Century to the 1920s

2024-12-20T23:27:09-08:00

A closer look at the 19th century ethnographic maps of the Caucasus reveals the demographic diversity of the region at the crossroads of three empires: the Persian, the Ottoman, and the Russian. To consolidate their power in this peripheral region, these empires, and later the Soviet authorities, experimented with various scenarios of resettlement, making the region an imperial “laboratory” with massive border shifts. This article discusses the processes of border development in the South Caucasus, beginning with the integration of this region into the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century and continuing until Sovietization in the early 1920s. During this period, the borders in this region were particularly characterized by constant discourses, territorial claims, identity struggles, and ethnic divisions. The article considers the emergence and function of borders and border spaces from the perspective of their temporal evolution and analyses their mutability over time in an era marked by wars, revolutions, conflicts, and political upheavals. The aim is to provide a better understanding of why borders, whose meaning had diminished almost to insignificance during the Soviet period, became subjects of conflict again, turning them into sites of unpredictable aggression.

Keywords: Armenia; Azerbaijan; war; contested borders; conflict; territoriality.

Outline of a Temporality-Based Approach to Iberian Borderlands’ Cultural Heritage in Europe and South America

2024-12-20T23:27:07-08:00

Considering the Portuguese–Spanish border in the Guadiana River, as well as (with secondary relevance) the borderlands of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, this article aims to discuss some preliminary questions for the interpretation of border (in)tangible heritage in these territories from the point of view of Cultural Heritage Studies, Global History, and temporalities. A diachronic (historical) perspective is considered, as well as several topics that form part of temporality-based approaches to border dynamics, such as time perception of the different actors (insiders and outsiders, among them the states), individual and collective memories, and the use of cultural heritage as a potential resource for community-building in peripheral territories.

Keywords: Portuguese–Spanish border; Guadiana River; Uruguay River; global history; shared heritage; territory.

Border Temporalities of Early Childhood: Diverse Education and Care Arrangements of Cross-Border Commuting Parents

2024-12-31T14:24:53-08:00

Based on the distinction between times in childhood and times of childhood, this paper examines the border temporalities of early childhood education and care in the cross-border Greater Region, SaarLorLux. Using a practice-analytical approach to times and borders, and on the basis of qualitative interviews, two types of time-related practices are identified that parents with daily work commutes from Germany to Luxembourg carry out to set up and maintain their children’s education and care arrangements (ECAs): rhythmizing and navigating. How borders and childhood times interweave in these activities is presented along three contrastive patterns of ECAs, which demonstrate the different ‘border experiences’ that cross-border commuting parents make during their use of public services of early education and care (ECEC) in the Greater Region. This not only makes the field of ECEC its own arena of border (dis)integration, but also points to early childhood-specific border temporalities. Building on this, the findings point to the need to expand current inequality-oriented perspectives on border regions and border mobility to include the aspect of childhood and care-related border temporalities.

Keywords: borders; time; border temporalities; childhood; early childhood education and care; childcare; cross-border mobility; borderlands.

Temporary Lives: Border Temporalities and Retirement Mobilities in a Turkish Tourism Hot Spot

2024-12-20T23:26:30-08:00

The recognition that state borders operate not only through a production and ordering of space but also of time has recently led to a more concerted interest in the temporal dimensions of borders. In the fields of migration and border studies, researchers have suggested that borders are implicated in the creation and transformation of particular “time-spaces” that hierarchically order space and time. These b/ordering practices tend to be examined in relation to states and state forces, often neglecting the importance of economic dimensions. This article contributes to analysing border temporalities in their hierarchical aspects by focusing on the complex relationship between political (state) borders and the frontiers of capital. This relationship is examined empirically through a focus on the lives of German retirement migrants in Turkey. While retirement migration is motivated by the search for a “good life” that is free from the temporal constraints of wage labour biographies, it will be shown that German retirement migrants are highly vulnerable to the temporal bordering processes produced by both state policies and transnational capitalist profit-seeking in the tourism and real estate sectors.

Keywords: international retirement migration; time-space compression; tourism; political economy

Border-Crossing and “Temporal Otherness” in the Greater Region SaarLorLux: Residential Migrants’ Experiences of Divergence

2024-12-20T23:26:28-08:00

This article deals with border-crossing and the experiences of “temporal otherness” of residential migrants who move their home from Luxembourg to the German side of the River Moselle. Research on temporal borders is highly influenced by a particular spatio-political relation: the West creating its underdeveloped other and coping with this other by controlling border-crossing, which in turn results in maintaining the idea of the other’s temporal remoteness. The Luxembourgish–German border region offers a complement to this perspective; here, one encounters migrants who move in the opposite temporal direction and appreciate certain forms of “being behind” in their new place of residence. These migrants must cope with divergences, i.e., with the fact that economic and socio-cultural conditions within their new socio-spatial universe, the cross-border region, have evolved differently. This article argues that the analysis of migrants’ memories is illuminating with respect to the question of the moral legitimacy of moving, and thus regarding the conception and everyday construction of cross-border communities. It sheds light on the fact that borderland research—by focusing on national differences and related conceptions of cross-border mobility and exchange—tends to ignore borderlanders’ notions of (regional) unity and related claims for convergence.

Keywords: cross-border residential mobility; divergence and convergence; temporal otherness; moral economy of belonging.

Temporalities in 3D: Speeds, Intersections, and Time Sequentialities at the Portuguese Border

2024-12-20T23:26:26-08:00

This article addresses the Portuguese border control regime by looking into the relationship dynamics between inspectors and foreign citizens at the first line of inspection. Through the lens of temporality, I consider how the presence or absence of certain bureaucratic records presented by travellers functions as a control device that produces three temporal dimensions which intersect with each other during the check, as exercised by inspectors. The way in which certain documents result in different speeds of document control (microtemporalities—advances, retreats, and hesitation); subsequently, I reflect on the elasticity of time, looking at the intersection between the past, present, and future; finally, I analyse how inspectors shift their gaze from the documents to the details they are composed of, thus introducing a sequential dimension to their assessment. This article argues that the uncertainty experienced by travellers reflects the instability and inconsistency of the state, caused by the contingency that permeates their encounters at the border where time operates as a technique of power. The study is based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2021 and 2022, centred on the daily life of the inspectors of the Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service at an airport in mainland Portugal.

Keywords: anthropology of the state; external border; temporalities of migration; control devices.

Struggling for Time on Lesvos: The Impact of EU and National Legislation and Procedures on Refugee Temporalities

2024-12-20T23:26:24-08:00

Since the summer of 2015, the Greek island of Lesvos has been centre stage of the so-called refugee crisis and one of the sites where new EU policies for migration control have been tested and implemented. This combined study of jurisprudence with ethnographic fieldwork aims to understand the impact of the asylum regime on the experience of time for refugee applicants on Lesvos. Indeed, different national and EU laws and regulations affect people on the move and their ability to continue their journeys through Europe, forcing them to remain on Lesvos for variable amounts of time waiting for their asylum procedure while experiencing a legal limbo. Long, indefinite waits and abrupt accelerations of the procedure are both part of the temporality of control imposed on refugee subjectivities. Through testimonies collected during ethnographic fieldwork, time is here analysed both in its productivity in terms of humanitarian and labour economies, and in its effects on subjectivities. Different forms of temporal and economic oppression are highlighted, as well as the resulting resistance against these conditions enacted by the refugee population.

Keywords: asylum; time; waiting; border regime; temporalities.

Of Being Stuck or Moving On: Border Temporalities Along the EU’s External Border in the Western Balkans

2024-12-20T23:26:22-08:00

This article focuses on two temporal dimensions of borders in an entangled perspective: first, the temporal dimension according to which borders may establish a temporal taxonomy by marking those living across the border as being more or less advanced or backward, and second, borders in the function of channelling mobility, accelerating or slowing down movements, or even bringing them to a standstill. Referring to social anthropological case studies at the EU external border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, this article shows the entanglements of the different border temporalities and their impacts on migrants’ and locals’ self-perceptions. It argues that it is not only migrants from the Global South who dwell in a liminal time-space due to the increasing fortification of the border, but also that parts of the native population feel stuck due to the impossibility of imagining a future and of moving forward in life in their home region. This is reinforced by the movements of others leaving or transiting the region, a situation that has become symptomatic for the Western Balkans.

Keywords: border temporalities; spatio-temporal hierarchies; EU-external border; mobility; transit; liminality; Western Balkans.

Six Sides of Migration

2025-03-18T17:00:49-07:00

This photo collection consists of six color prints showing a visual representation of six sides of the international migration experience. Want to stay. Want to leave. Want to return. Forced to stay. Forced to leave. Forced to return. The different experiences of immigrants inform their information-seeking behaviors and practices before, during, and after the process of migration. The work is based on digitally transformed self-portraits of migrants at the US–Mexico border, and informed by research on their experience, trajectories, fears, goals, and aspirations.

Four Bilingual Poems

2024-12-20T23:25:47-08:00

Ming Di is a Chinese poet and translator, born in Wuhan, currently living between Beijing and California. She shares four original border poems.

Exile and Art in Time: An Interview with Dominique de Font-Réaulx

2025-01-03T14:49:48-08:00

Explore exile from the perspective of artists who have experienced displacement. A landmark exhibition at the Louvre-Lens, France—Exiles: Artist Perspectives—examines how exile has shaped creativity, spanning history and genre, from ancient myth to modern art. It puts into relief the human experience of exile through nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and texts. Personal testimonies from Lens residents enrich the show with intimate and communal dimensions; this dynamic interplay between art and narrative invites visitors to reflect on shared human experiences across time and space. In this interview, Art & Borders Editor Elisa Ganivet meets with Curator Dominique de Font-Réaulx to reflect on themes of departure, uprooting, and the role of encounter and hospitality, highlighting exile as a universal human condition and how artistic expression helps to understand it.

Cross-border Tobacco Smuggling: Case Study of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Region of Greece

2024-12-20T23:25:45-08:00

This policy article examines tobacco smuggling as a manifestation of cross-border crime in the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace region of Greece. It explores the socio-economic and legal factors contributing to the phenomenon and provides insights from case studies and data analysis. Findings indicate that enhanced regional cooperation and stricter law enforcement measures are critical for combating this issue. The article suggests that a holistic, technology-driven, and collaborative approach is critical to combating this lucrative cross-border crime.

Rugged Paths, Challenging Borders: A Time for Drunken Horses

2024-12-20T23:25:42-08:00

A review of Bahman Ghobadi's 2000 film dramatizing the precarious life of smuggling in Kurdish borderlands.

Bridging African Boundaries: Four Reviews of Professor Asiwaju’s Compendium

2025-02-28T01:57:44-08:00

Last October, a box arrived at the office of Borders in Globalization Research Laboratory containing the nearly 1,000-page tome, Bridging African Boundaries: Cross-Border Areas and Regional Integration in Comparative History and Policy Advocacy, by Professor Emeritus Anthony I. Asiwaju (Pan-African University Press, 2021). The book is a compendium of three seminal works by the author, representing a lifetime of labor and outstanding achievement. BIG_Review invited border scholars to provide short and to-the-point commentaries on this important publication, and we are pleased to share the following four reviews.