English

Since the mid-2010s at the latest, there has been discussion of the border as a complex phenomenon, aimed at a more comprehensive and differentiated understanding of b/orderings. However, there seems to be an imprecise use of the term ‘complexity’ in the academic debate, and sometimes, still, an everyday understanding of complexity prevails. To sharpen the debate around a border’s complexity, in this comment, in a first step, I show what border scholars currently consider complex and question which analytical and conceptual developments in the wake of the bordering turn have encouraged the increasing talk of complex borders. In the second step, I suggest how border research can be inspired by complexity theories, in focusing on performative interrelations and their emergent dis/orders that become spatially and socially effective.

San Diego’s central neighborhoods are in the midst of a municipally and privately led redevelopment phase, which is gradually progressing from one neighborhood to the other and slowly transforming lower-income communities into ‘trendy’ places for affluent populations. This is particularly the case in the neighborhood of North Park, which has been redeveloped in the last decades and has recently begun to expand eastward across two inner-city highways into the large Hispanic and Asian American community of Mid-City. Particularly along the large commercial streets that link the two communities, previously produced and habituated differences are currently re-negotiated – socially and functionally but also economically, symbolically, and architecturally –, which provokes the emergence of a (temporal) hybrid in-between zone that is simultaneously part of the one and the other neighborhood. These changes are tied to municipal and private redevelopment efforts and are of significant everyday relevance for the residents of North Park and Mid-City alike. However, these processes have not yet undergone in-depth analysis. Our paper addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework of multi-dimensional b/ordering processes, which takes account of the multi-faceted complexity of this transitional and temporal borderland. On the basis of this framework, empirical results from a mixed-method research study (qualitative interviews and participatory observations among others), conducted between 2019 and 2022, will be used to trace how San Diego’s progressing redevelopment trend furthers the multi-dimensional shift, perforation, and re-negotiation of boundaries and thus the emergence of a hybrid urban borderland between North Park and Mid-City.

This collection of essays pays attention to the biopolitical intricacies surrounding borders, with a particular focus on the Global North, encompassing North America and Europe. It dwells on the growing importance of biopolitical perspectives in Cultural Border Studies and aims at re-thinking Europe and the Americas through the crises and challenges they pose. By scrutinizing biopolitics, the negotiation of crises, and the state of exception in literature, the arts, and political discourse, this thematic issue probes the multifaceted dimensions of biopolitical control, highlighting the interplay between state authority and the lives of those impacted by these regulations. Border biopolitics then emerges as a complex nexus of authority, surveillance, control, and management of human lives on, at, and across borders.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led not only to the shift of real and mental borders in Europe but has also driven profound changes of geopolitical visions of the contemporary world and its economic, political, and social future. In which ways is Russia’s war in Ukraine related to issues of borders and identity? This interview addresses the many geopolitical, social, and existential questions about borders and identity in the current war, also analyzing the role that academia plays in this war. Border scholars Astrid M. Fellner and Eva Nossem have talked to three Ukrainian researchers: Julia Buyskykh, Alina Mozolevska, and Oleksandr Pronkevich, who share their views on the entanglements of borders, identity, and the war, as they try to make sense of the new realities.