on physical borders:

Sometimes, physical borders are constructed out of the need to stop violent acts. Then they become 'concrete' evidences of social, ethnic and cultural differences which they project to the future. In this way physical borders have more than just material or real effects on city life. Although they do block real time, physical connections (exchanges, trade, meetings, movement, views) transforming public space in an absolute way, in the course of time they become manifestations of a deeper problem: the loss of the ability to communicate. Their presence affects not only the present and the futrue of the city, but it can shape also the past. Understood as representations of the loss of collective memory they end up momuments of the absence of a community history, the absence of a history of everyday-life.

At the same time openings on the borders, may seem to provide the possibility of contact and construct passages-bridges to the other, but seen differently they can be points of control; another way to complete seperation, to stabilize and make the border official.

How can we utilize the instability of the presence condition and the transitional time before the next transformation takes place, to learn and to propose alternative scenarios, alternative conditions of meeting and exchange?

The lines that continue to separate us

The study of borders has undergone a renaissance during the past decade. This is reflected in an impressive list of conferences, workshops and scholarly publications. This renaissance has been partly due to the emergence of a counternarrative to the borderless and deterritorialized world discourse which has accompanied much of globalization theory. The study of borders has moved beyond the limited confines of the political geography discourse, crossing its own disciplinary boundaries, to include sociologists, political scientists, historians, international lawyers and scholars of international relations. But this meeting of disciplines has not yet been successful in creating a common language or glossary of terms which is relevant to all scholars of borders. Central to the contemporary study of borders are notions such as ‘borders are institutions’, the process of ‘bordering’ as a dynamic in its own right, and the border terminologies which focus on the binary distinctions between the ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘included’ and the ‘excluded’. Borders should be studied not only from a top-down perspective, but also from the bottom up, with a focus on the individual border narratives and experiences, reflecting the ways in which borders impact upon the daily life practices of people living in and around the borderland and transboundary transition zones. In positing an agenda for the next generation of border-related research, borders should be seen for their potential to constitute bridges and points of contact, as much as they have traditionally constituted barriers to movement and communication.

From: David Newmann (2006), The lines that continue to separate us: borders in our ‘borderless’ world, Progress in Human Geography 30, 2, pp. 1–19

*David Newman is a professor at Department of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheba, Israel

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