Reece Jones

Categories, borders and boundaries

In recent years, categories have been a topic of substantial research in the social sciences and humanities. Although many problematic categories such as culture, gender and scale have been criticized, moving beyond them has proved to be surprisingly difficult. This paper attributes this difficulty to what is termed the paradox of categories and argues that the key problems with categories emerge from the contradictory ways their boundaries are intellectually and cognitively understood. By integrating poststructural insights into the role categories play in ordering modern society with research from cognitive science on the role categories play as containers in cognitive processes, this paper argues that the boundaries of categories should be understood as always inchoate — only partially formed and incomplete. The paper concludes that research into categories and boundaries is unnecessarily fragmented across a wide range of disciplines and proposes expanding boundary studies in geography to be the field that investigates the bounding processes that result in all types of categories.

Agents of Exception: Border Security and the Marginalization of Muslims in India

The narratives of fear and uncertainty from the discourse of the ‘global war on terror’ have been used by many governments to expand securitization processes. As more aggressive security tactics have been deployed, scholars have sought to understand the changing relationship between individual rights and the authority of sovereign states by drawing on Giorgio Agambens insights into the state of exception. In this paper I argue that borderlands are a key site for investigating the connections between the state of exception and securitization processes because political borders are the symbolic markers of the limits of a sovereigns authority. I trace the securitization of the borderlands between India and Bangladesh and I describe the increasingly exceptional measures employed by Indian border security forces in order to prevent terrorist threats from entering India. At the intersection of the state of exception in the borderlands and the securitization narratives and practices of the global war on terror, Muslims in both India and Bangladesh are marginalized in the affairs of the state and targeted in state-sanctioned violence. I conclude that borderlands, as an explicitly spatial example of the state of exception, are a crucial site for locating and understanding the decision on the exception.

Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border

This article investigates local actions that transgress, subvert, and ignore the imposition of sovereign authority at the borders of sovereign states. It describes the creation and gradual securitization of the 4,096-km border between India and Bangladesh, which has culminated with the construction of roads, floodlights, and fences on the majority of the previously open and lightly guarded border. Then, by drawing on interviews with borderland residents, it analyzes the ways that people interact with, talk about, and cross the border in their daily lives. The motives and consequences of these cross-border connections are not precisely captured by the literature on sovereign power and the state of exception, which identifies very little space for resistance, or the literature on dominance–resistance in power relations, which understands most actions as political resistance in a broad milieu of power. To reconcile these conflicting views on resistance, this article proposes spaces of refusal to understand a range of activities that are not overt political resistance but nevertheless refuse to abide by the binary framing of state territorial and identity categories.

Whose Homeland? Territoriality and Religious Nationalism in Pre-Partition Bengal

Scholarly inquiries into communalism in South Asia have often exclusively focused on politically constructed religious and ethnic identity categories. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that territoriality and the designation of homelands played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in developing social and political boundaries in the region. By analyzing the writings of Bipin Chandra Pal during the Swadeshi period, this article points to the territorialization of a Hindu-based version of the national homeland as a key process in the development of communal difference in Bengal and South Asia more generally. It is concluded that the Hindu-dominated rhetoric of the early nationalist movement implicitly marked Hindus as the only true members of the nation. By implicitly excluding all other forms of social affiliations from the narrative of the homeland, it is argued that the stage was set for the contestation of territorial identity categories that played out through the 20th century in Bengal.

Dreaming of a Golden Bengal: Discontinuities of Place and Identity in South Asia

Abstract This article analyses five different representations of the homeland category “Bengal”. The region of Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century and imagined in a multitude of forms at different historical moments. The article describes the conditions that allowed different territories and peoples to crystallise as “Bengal” and “the Bengalis”, and investigates why some versions of the Bengali homeland proved durable as others faded away. Rather than asking who is the real Bengali and where is the real Bengal, it investigates how particular identity categories become popularly practised and why particular images of the homeland come to be perceived as true, legitimate and authentic. It concludes that homeland categories are never fixed and finalised, but are rather always in a process of becoming, and are contested, reimagined and redefined as socio-political contexts change.

Searching for the greatest Bengali: The BBC and shifting identity categories in South Asia

Drawing on debates generated by the BBC Bengali Language Services naming of the greatest Bengali of all time, this article investigates the shifting boundaries between group identity categories in our ‘globalising’ world. First, the controversy over the meaning of the term ‘Bengali’, which emerged in contemporary Bangladesh and India in response to the BBCs list, is investigated. Then writings and speeches of several of the individuals who were honoured as the greatest Bengalis are analysed in order to draw out the multiple ways they approached their own Bengali identities. In the conclusion, it is argued that rather than imagining the end of place-based identity categories through the process of globalisation, it is more useful to conceptualise shifting categories that continue to incorporate a place-based aspect, but in hybrid and contradictory ways.

The biopolitics and geopolitics of border enforcement in Melilla

ABSTRACT The biopolitics and geopolitics of border enforcement in Melilla. Territory, Politics, Governance. This article uses the multiple and contradictory realities of Melilla, a pene-enclave and -exclave of Spain in North Africa, to draw out the contemporary practice of Spanish, European Union, and Moroccan immigration enforcement policies. The city is many things at once: a piece of Europe in North Africa and a symbol of Spain’s colonial history; an example of the contemporary narrative of a cosmopolitan and multicultural Europe; a place where extraterritorial and intraterritorial dynamics demonstrate territory’s continuing allure despite the security challenges and the lack of economic or strategic value; a metaphorical island of contrasting geopolitical and biopolitical practices; and a place of regional flows and cross-border cooperation between Spain, the EU, and Morocco. It is a border where the immunitary logic of sovereign territorial spaces is exposed through the biopolitical practices of the state to ‘protect’ the community from outsiders. In light of the hardening of borders throughout European and North African space in recent years, this article offers a rich case study of our persistently territorial world.

The West Bank Wall

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue sets out to bring some clarity and organization to the diverse bodies of literature on the construction, lived experience, and consequences of the West Bank Wall. We review the literature on the Wall and identify three broad themes: the significance of the Wall in the context of political negotiations, its disruption of daily life in the West Bank, and its role as a symbol in broader debates about sovereignty, territory, and the state in border studies.

The false premise of partition

Partitions are based on two fundamental assumptions: identity groups exist that can be located, named and categorized, and these categories are attached to distinct territories. Drawing on the Partition of British India, this paper analyses how the differences between the categories “Hindu” and “Muslim” were developed through narratives and events such as the creation of maps and censuses, the emergence of religious revivalist movements, and the use of violence. The article argues that the perception of sharp boundaries between what are termed “territorial groups of meaning” is the result of these events and narratives, not the cause of them.

Building Walls and Dissolving Borders: The Challenges of Alterity, Community, and Securitizing Space

Despite the title, this book is not about border walls per se, or even international political borders. While many of the chapters look at specific case studies, the purpose of the book is to think theoretically about the meaning of walls both within a landscape and as a manifestation of the abstract idea of social difference. Stephenson and Zanotti see walls as “social constructs establishing symbolic differences” and “boundary objects that reflect the discernible logistics evoking the social imaginaries that create them” (p. 5). The introduction and conclusion by the editors are both strong. They do a good job of laying out the purpose of the book and the theoretical arguments. They write: