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Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders

Borderities and Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders, edited by Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary and Frédéric Giraut, clearly demonstrates that the discipline of border studies is growing, developing and enjoying robust health. Simply put, the book, which is based on papers presented at the 2011 Border Regions in Transition (BRIT) conference, is an invitation to rethink and problematize the very concept of border. It sheds light on some of the most poignant contemporary border debates providing a useful overview of a multiplicity of phenomena related to borders such as eco-frontiers, extraterritorial concessions, embodied borders and externalization strategies. If the book could be summarized in a sentence, it would probably be along these lines: “borders are complex phenomena and we should acknowledge and understand such complexity not oversimplify it.” Regardless of how tempting such oversimplifications may be. With the aim of deconstructing preconceived ideas about borders, the book (or rather the introductory chapter) suggests a neologism and a hypothesis. The neologism—borderity— emanates an unmistakably Foucauldian flavor to the extent that to claim that the term borderity derives from Foucault’s notion of governmentality would be an understatement. The editors use Foucault’s governmentality definition, word by word, to conceptualize the newly born concept acknowledging that “borderity could be defined as the governmentality of territorial limits” (p. 8). The use of Foucault in studies scrutinizing borders is neither novel nor surprising since, as Gabriel Popescu asserts, the French philosopher provides insightful analytical tools “to understand the impacts that border securitization practices have on social relations” (p. 114). In this case, the Foucauldian conceptual and theoretical background works exquisitely well, arguably constituting one of the main virtues of the book. In combination with the notion of borderity, the book uses the mobile border hypothesis as a common denominator that is present throughout the manuscript. In this case, the inspiration stems from Étienne Balibar and his idea of ubiquitous borders which, as Brambilla conveniently reminds us in Chapter 8,