Abstract
Nancy Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez’s wonderful edited volume shows that taking a stance on the border has become a key feature of contemporary political identity. These stances can be literal or figurative, from members of the Minutemen militia discussed by Jennifer Johnson in Chapter Two, who literally position themselves on the United States/Mexico border, to the indigenous peoples of Australia examined by Sarah Maddison in Chapter Six, who figuratively position themselves in opposition to the colonial borders imposed on them. At times borders are the physical sites of political action; at other times the symbolic focus of group ideology.
With an international group of contributors, each of the chapters in the book takes us to a different border and political movement. Indeed, by focusing on cases ranging from India and South Africa to Slovenia and Ukraine, the greatest strength of this volume is that it does not simply give a token nod to the non-American cases—it organizes its knowledge around them. A wide variation in the ideological motivations of the movements discussed complements this international scope: some of the groups we meet seek to dismantle borders, others to further militarize them; some are hyper nationalistic, others search for cosmopolitanism.
Although at times jargony, the introductory chapter by Naples and Mendez does a good job of outlining the extent to which globalization has entailed a renewed significance for borders. They remind us that while technological changes and financial deregulations have increased certain kinds of mobility, for each new institution meant to enable movement there seems to be one meant to prohibit it; for every NAFTA, a Border Patrol; for every Schengen, a Frontex. Moreover, the editors provide a helpful road map for the skillfully organized volume, which includes three discrete but well-connected parts: the first focuses on the relationship between gender politics and border politics, the second on how groups define their boundaries in relation to recent global changes, and the third on the potentials and limitations for cross-border political activism.
The primary emphasis in the four chapters that make up the first part of the book is on the role of women and the discourses of femininity and motherhood within border politics. In particular, the authors explore the complicated ways in which these identities and the discourses that surround them are used to either support or contest border militarization initiatives. Although each of the chapters has something to contribute, Meera Sehgal’s examination of the participation of a group of women at a right-wing Hindu paramilitary camp and Duncan McDuie-Ra’s chapter on the role of women in the politics of two neighboring communities on the India-Myanmar borderlands stand apart from the rest. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic data, what is especially compelling about both chapters is that neither provides an account of women’s participation that is politically or morally clear-cut. Instead, each suggests that women can and do participate in border politics in ways that are at once supportive and critical of borders, offering a kind of double-edged political sword for the project of bordering. At times they can contest or at least suspend national and ethnic divisions through a larger trans-border notion of membership, while at other times (and indeed often simultaneously) they can act as a powerful exclusionary force for the hardening of divisions.
While gender and territorial borders are still present, in the second section of the book greater attention is given to other kinds of group identity—race, class, sexuality—and other kinds of borders—the symbolic ones that constitute group membership. In fact, one of the strengths of this section is that each of its chapters nicely connects recent transformations in territorial borders and national sovereignty with accompanying transformations in the symbolic boundaries of group membership. An important analytic link that connects the chapters is the idea that the boundaries of membership are relational and temporal. Rather than hard and ahistorical features of our world, each of the chapters shows that the ways groups define themselves, and in turn, get defined by others, change over time.
At times, as with the case of the American Tea Party movement examined by Deana Rohlinger and her colleagues, political groups strategically amend their membership boundaries in order to differentiate themselves from other groups that may have emerged or because they have attained new political power that leads to new possibilities and constraints. At other times, often among the marginalized, group identity changes as a result of larger geo-political changes in which borders often get imposed on groups from above in ways that do not necessarily align with the groups’ own sense of their boundaries. This is the case in Sarah Maddison’s chapter on indigenous groups in Australia, Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik’s chapter on migrant workers in the former Yugoslavia, and in Phillip Ayoub and David Paternotte’s chapter on LGBT activists across the European Union.
The third and concluding part of the book contains three case studies examining recent political movements that have been attempting to mobilize across national borders. In the first chapter, where Yvonne Braun and Michael Dreiling examine resistance to a dam-building project in Lesotho, the second chapter, in which Renata Blumberg and Raphi Rechitsky examine “no border” activists in Ukraine, as well as the final chapter, in which Michelle Téllez and Christina Sanidad examine labor activists along the San Diego-Tijuana border region, we are presented with the potentials and the pitfalls of forming cross-border political alliances and solidarities. At times, groups are able to effectively mobilize as a trans-border initiative, cutting across multiple lines ofpotential difference. At other times, they are overwhelmed by the organizational and ideological challenges. Furthermore, as poignantly expressed in Blumberg and Rechistky’s epilogue, for all its efforts, the politics of inclusion are being outpaced by the politics of exclusion.
The dominant strength of the 11 substantive chapters that make up the heart of this volume is their rich data and diversity. Those looking for a more theoretical intervention into how borders have come to influence political movements will find the editors’ concluding chapter a great starting point, offering analytic reflection on the preceding cases as well as pointing toward new lines of research. Given all that this volume has to offer, it stands as a terrific resource for those teaching undergraduate as well as graduate classes on borders, social movements, and globalization more broadly. After reading this book one is left with an unshakable recognition of just how profound the discourse and infrastructure of borders and border militarization are around the world. The border is truly everywhere, and everywhere people are organizing their politics around it.