Borders

Lorraine appears to be subject to continuous outer influences, from the patriotism of 1914 - 18 with its many victims, to the "copy and paste" mode that we see today. Unable to initiate endogenous development, too dependent on outer forces – Lorraine is not even an administrative region today. Lorraine is the victim of "territorialisation" under the neoliberal approach. It has degraded to nothing but a crumbling space, a suburb of Luxembourg and a place where nuclear wastes can be put in final storage. The politicians and elites in Lorraine want to retroactively legitimate and support this exogeneous development..

We, most of the time, look on border as simple artefacts on the ground serving a variety of practical reasons and that can be classified according to the purposes (political, social, economic, etc.) they serve and how they serve them. If they are necessary for all sorts of reasons, borders are also inherently problematic. Instead of adopting a rigid position about them, we need to consider them as movable structures that have advantages and disadvantages. Borders should define ‘dwelling’ rather than national spaces and motivate political responsibility for pursuit of a ‘decent life’ as not restricted to any particular state.

This article examines the concept of boundaries, by putting an emphasis on the utility of the concept for the study of relational processes. Literatures on collective and social identity; ethnic/racial, class, gender/sex inequality; knowledge, professions and science; as well as national identities, communities and spatial boundaries are discussed. The similarity of processes that are at work across different social worlds and locations as well as in a range of institutions are highlighted. Finally possible development paths for the future elaboration of the concept are proposed.

The focus of this text is the boundaries between disciplines, subjects, specialized fields of knowledge as well as epistemic and knowledge cultures. The author addresses differences in cross-border and integrative research with the term boundary work. Different methods of boundary work, such as exploring professional profiles and identities; conceptual work and boundary work with variables, indicators and thresholds, are presented.

This academic journal article discusses the two major dueling schools of thought on the significance of borders in contemporary politics and society, namely those who see an increasingly « borderless world » and those who see new meaning and contexts to studying borders. Here, borders are not only considered as phenomena located at the edges of territories, but rather everywhere in between in societal practices and discourses. In particular, Paasi explains the importance of theory in border studies and develops new conceptual perspectives in order to understand the persistence of bounded territorial spaces.

The special issue on “Regional Worlds,” edited by Martin Jones and Anssi Paasi, combines various current theoretical perspectives on the region and accompanies this with empirical examples from Europe, Africa, and North America. The issue attempts to address the still-current significance of the region in geography and breaks down old dichotomous conceptualizations of “region” as either territorial or relational, in order to unite the conceptualizations. The authors point out that regions are constructed according to various disciplinary perspectives on different scales (sub-national, national, supranational, cross-border). They contextualize regions in connection with globalization, border regions, agency/advocacy, social construction, and historical processes of development and change.