Borders in Globalization Review

Letter of Introduction

Michael J Carpenter — 2023-08-17

The long-awaited and much anticipated new issue of Borders in Globalization Review is here! This outstanding collection of scholarship and artwork enriches border studies and cultural reflections on (and against) borders ...

INTRODUCTION—Frontiers in Motion (Frontem): Comparative Perspectives on European Borders, Cross-Border Cooperation, and Integration

Birte Wassenberg — 2023-08-11

This special section, edited by the author, presents five articles developed from the Frontiers in Motion (Frontem) doctoral seminar held in Strasbourg, France, in October 2021, on “Borders in Motion: Borders, Cross-Border Cooperation and European Integration”. The event was organized within the framework of the Jean Monnet Network, “Frontières en mouvement: quels modèles pour l’Union Européenne (Frontem)?” (“Frontiers in Motion: what models for the EU?”), which aimed at fostering knowledge and practice exchanges on cross-border management models and various perceptions of borders across European (and North American) border regions. The diverse contributions illustrate the complexity of borders in Europe and that there has never been an abolition of all types and functions of borders in the European Union (EU). It therefore offers a critical reading of the “Europe without borders” model of the EU (Cooper 1989; Brunet-Jailly & Wassenberg 2020).
Note: The network Frontières en mouvement: quels modèles pour l’UE? (611115-EPP-1-2019-1-FR-EPPJMO-NETWORK) is a Jean-Monnet Network supported by the EU’s Erasmus+ program for the period between 2019 and 2023 under the leadership of the author.

Integrative Organized Hypocrisy? Normative Contentions within the EU and the Refugee Migrant Crisis

Claude Beaupré — 2023-08-11

In 2015 and 2016, 2.3 million individuals applied for asylum in Europe, the highest number since the creation of the EU. The unprecedented strain on the Common European Asylum policies (CEAS), along with the asymmetric pressure on external border countries and the lack of unified support for border controls, highlighted the tensions between member-state sovereignty and regional competence. According to Lavenex (2018), the Refugee and Migrant Crisis (RMC) was first and foremost a crisis of governance, expressing doubts about the EU’s ability to “fail forward” into further integration in the long-run because of “organised hypocrisy”, an unintended organisational strategy deployed to cope with otherwise irreconcilable differences between normative aspirations and real-life actions concerning asylum. This article revisits Lavenex’s premise of European governance and organised hypocrisy and argues for a more optimistic outlook on European integration. Using the infrastructural Europeanism framework as identified by Pelizza and Loschi (2023), this article argues that despite the legal and legislative gridlocks that surround important issues such as asylum, European integration in relation to asylum is ‘failing forward’ in no small part due to organised hypocrisy and not in spite of it.

Towards Norms and Sanctions: Interwar Franco–Belgian Border Conflict over the Insalubrity of French Factories

Yaël Gagnepain — 2023-08-11

Downstream from the industrial French cities of Roubaix and Tourcoing, it took more than a century of exceptional insalubrity in the cross-border Espierre valley for France and Belgium to move towards the idea of adopting sanitary norms and sanctions to be imposed on French manufacturers. We propose to focus on the interwar period to try to understand the path that was followed for the different actors to agree on this idea. By tracing the history of an environmental controversy that was among the first to end up before an international jurisdiction, we highlight the important place this question had in the construction of Franco–Belgian border relations during a period of great tensions in Europe.

Cross-Border Regional Languages: Picard and West Flemish at the Franco–Belgian Border

Nicolas Caput — 2023-08-11

This article investigates the role of the Franco–Belgian border in regional language activism in the Hauts-de-France region in northern France, as well as whether activists perceive it as a resource for or obstacle to the valorisation or revitalisation of regional languages. Hauts-de-France, which was recently formed after the merger of two former regions, now recognises two regional languages: Picard and West Flemish. Both are considered endangered by UNESCO and are cross-border, in that both languages have also been historically spoken in parts of Belgium. Based on a study of the institutional context and fieldwork carried out with activists who promote these languages, the aim of this contribution is to highlight how activists perceive the border. The Franco-Belgian border is sometimes seen as an obstacle, sometimes as a resource on the West Flemish side, and more often ignored on the Picard side. This article stands midway between cultural geography and political geography, because one of the challenges of studying representations of the border is to understand the role it can play in activists’ strategies.

Comparing Public Sector Innovation in Cross- Border Cooperation: A Set-Theoretic Approach

Tobias Heyduk — 2023-08-11

This article analyses innovation by developing and empirically applying the concept of public sector innovation in cross-border cooperation. The focus on intra- as well as inter-institutional characteristics provides a conceptual framework for identifying empirical differences and shared characteristics revealing different types of innovation. The proposed typology is operationalised with six dimensions and empirically applied to 24 cases in the two border regions on the island of Ireland and on the Upper Rhine. On an organisational level, four ideal types are developed, i.e. (1) managers of the status quo, (2) relational innovators, (3) organisational innovators, and (4) public sector innovators in cross-border cooperation. The results reveal empirical diversity of public sector innovation in cross-border cooperation and can be regarded as a starting point for the development of a systematic and generalisable description of public sector innovation in cross-border cooperation

‘Europe of the Regions’: From Slogan to Effects on European Union Borders and Regions

Morgane Chovet — 2023-08-11

This article shows that the integrationist trend of ‘a Europe of the regions’ shapes the way the different scales of territories in the European Union are considered. Due to this trend, European institutions evolved their processes of legislation within the EU. Institutions are now able to promote cohesion between all scales of territory composing the European continent, including cross-border territories. Thus, this trend participates in the promotion of European integration by erasing or blurring the state borders that exist between these territories. However, a Europe of the regions is not the ultimate goal of the European Union, and the results of this trend can be mitigated. This article’s analysis is mainly structured around European law, including both primary and secondary law but also case law of the European Union Court of Justice. In order to strengthen its approach, the article also draws from other disciplines such as history and political science.

Mapping the Wound: Feminine Gestures of Empathy and Healing

Ariane Littman — 2023-08-17

The Chief Editor’s Choice Portfolio features a curated collection of performance art and multimedia sculpture by an Israeli artist grappling with the wounds of settled land and settled bodies.

Four Poems on Borders

Sotirios Pastakas — 2023-08-17

The poems presented here are part of the collection Learning to Breathe, written between 1983 and 1990, after the poet returned to Greece from medical studies in Rome, translated into English from the original Greek by Yannis Goumas.

Borders

Dvora Levin — 2023-08-17

This previously unpublished poem emerged after meeting a scholar of border studies at breakfast in the spring of 2023. I was amazed that so many academic careers could be defined by one word: Borders. I began to list all the borders and non-borders that came to mind and found I had written this list poem, embracing many of my own experiences.

Embarked Lives

Enrique Ramírez — 2023-07-21

This selection for BIG_Review focuses on exile, but it is also linked to the idea of destiny. What marks a life? Irregularities and meaning. To the shipwrecked is induced a loss but also a reconstruction that can be significant to the immigrants but not only. In this way, Ramírez’s work can vibrate within us with its humanistic and poetic vision. — Elisa Ganivet, Art & Borders Editor. All images copyright the artist, Enrique Ramírez. No reproductions without authorization.

One Hundred Years of US–Mexico Border Film

Michael Dear — 2023-08-17

This essay examines the structure, content, and evolution of an emerging Border Film Genre derived from an examination of over one hundred years of film concerned with the US–Mexico borderlands and originating from both sides of the border. The task of this particular essay is to demonstrate how film themes change and evolve over time, based on evidence from the film catalogue. The essay examines examples of transition pertaining to: the changing representations of women in film; the difference between Mexican and American filmmakers’ portrayals of undocumented migration; generational shifts in bordertown racisms; and the catastrophic consequences of law enforcement’s loss of the war against drug cartels, including the ‘domestication’ of violence and the decay of communities occupied by cartels.

Home, by the River down that Valley, beyond that Fence

Malvika Sharma — 2023-08-17

This documentary fiction builds on lived experiences in the borderland district of Poonch, in the contested region of Jammu and Kashmir, administered by India along the contested border with Pakistan. The short story draws on fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020 as part of my PhD thesis and for an article published in this journal. The characters and events in the essay are fictional but inspired by real-life people and history, based on informal conversations, unused data collection, and other reflections from the field that did not make it into my academic work. An inspiration for this approach is the writing of Gloria Anzaldua on the US–Mexico border. Her reflections demonstrate that lived experiences need not always fit established academic and disciplinary boundaries. Subjective narratives around partition and separation cannot be contained by any one disciplinary framework. The trauma, yearning, and loss within these experiences are so multifaceted that they can be expressed through various writing styles. It is time, I believe, that borderland studies encourage interpersonal accounts in disciplinary inquiries, following some of the steps taken in sociology and social anthropology.

‘Nudging’ Voluntary Compliance in Border Customs

Veasna Yong — 2023-08-17

Legal and regulatory compliance can be voluntarily motivated or enforced by authorities. The World Customs Organization Voluntary Compliance Frameworks (WCO VCF) is adopting a reward and punishment system, responsive to economic constraints of compliance. However, psychological elements do not appear to be incorporated. The WCO VCF could employ ‘norm nudge’ and ‘deterrence nudge’ as supplementary tools in responding to different client risk types, analogous to the effective application of nudge incentivization in taxation compliance. Similarly, it could help improve voluntary self-declaration of goods at the border crossing.

This policy report was developed from a paper for the 2022 BIG Summer Institute, Trade & Customs Borders in the 21st Century, made possible by funding from the Korea Customs Service and support from the World Customs Organization.

Trade Facilitation at the Peru–Chile Land Border: Policy Impact of Digital Importation and Prearrival Declarations

Mary Isabel Delgado-Caceres — 2023-08-17

This policy report examines the impact of the Peruvian Foreign Trade Public Policy implemented at the Santa Rosa Centre of Compliance (CAFSR) at the land border between Peru and Chile, presenting original research and quantitative analysis of statistics from the CAFSR at the Peruvian border collected by the National Superintendency of Customs and Tax Administration (SUNAT) from 2019 to 2022. The results show that customs compliance controls have been expedited, simplified, and modernised by both the digital importation process and mandatory prearrival customs declarations. However, the analysis calls for two further risk assessment strategies to be adopted by customs administrations in both countries. First, applying additional filters to identify fraud in prearrival customs declarations could expedite the release of low-risk consignments and help to ensure higher-risk consignments are subject to additional border restrictions. This paper suggests implementing an innovative blockchain technology that allows for the timely and accurate sharing of encrypted customs declarations to administrations in Peru and Chile. Second, upgrading infrastructure and logistics at the CAFSR could increase the capacity of the border post to facilitate increased binational trade.

Erasing the Line: Mapping Indigenous Community across the US–Canada Border

Guntram Herb — 2023-07-21

North American settler colonialism is not a historical event, but an ongoing process that strives to silence the continued presence of the original Indigenous inhabitants in the United States and Canada. The map, Erasing the Line, attempts to challenge the primacy of existing sovereign states by showing contiguous Indigenous community across the US–Canada border. This subversive visualization is inspired by nationalist maps and uses official census data to challenge the settler state narrative from within.

A 'Shadow Game' is Haunting Europe

Şeyma Saylak — 2023-08-07

A review of the film Shadow Game (2021).

The Swimmers: Reflecting on Displacement, Migration, and the Politics of Exclusion

Natasha Sofia Martinez — 2023-08-07

This film review reflects on displacement, migration, and the politics of exclusion within the biographical film The Swimmers, by Sally El Hosaini. This film effectively showcases the various temporalities of forced displacement, drawing attention to the various obstacles that Sara and Yusra Mardini experience prior to, during, and following their forced migration from Syria.

Movements of Freedom in Stierl’s Migrant Resistance

Michael J Carpenter — 2023-08-17

A book review of Maurice Stierl's Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe, published by Routledge, 2019.

Navigating the Medicine Line: A Review of Hogue’s Métis Borderlanders

Molly-Ann P. Taylor — 2023-08-17

A book review of Michael Hogue's Métis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People, published by University of Regina Press, 2015.