Border-Making and its Consequences: A Global Overview
Machteld Venken, Astrid M. Fellner, Adriana Dorfman, Jussi Laine,
Daniel Meier, Laurie Trautman, Dhananjay Tripathi and Wolfgang Zeller*

Border-Making and its Consequences
This conference report reviews the open access digital publication of the Global Trackorganized within the framework of the Second World Conference of the Association for Borderlands
Studies in Vienna on July 10 and 11, 2018, with the aim to offer an overview of border studies
worldwide. The track consisted of nine ninety-minute conference sessions, of which eight were filmed
and seven were made available on YouTube. These seven sessions discussed border-making and its
consequences in Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin
America and North America. In this essay, the authors, who were either involved in the organization of
the track or followed its development closely, situate the global track within the context of borders andresearch on borders worldwide. Here we present the scientific contributions in the Global Track andreflect on its strengths and weaknesses.
Borders within and across Continents
State borders in Europe have for a long time received considerable attention. After the Treatyof Westphalia of 1648 established the territorial state as the basis of the modern state system, creatinginternational borders as legal territorial boundaries, European regimes expanded into the rest of theworld, exerting imperial power. The long-lasting era of imperial rule came to an end for inhabitants ofthe European continent following World War I, when the European continent was reshaped to becomea patchwork of individual nation-states, whereas colonial rule continued in Africa, Asia and the Middle
East. The European continent saw internal borders successively reshaped during and after the Second
World War, making Central and Eastern Europe stand out in a global comparison regarding thefrequency of border changes. In the period after World War II, the European unification process began
in Western Europe with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, a process triggered by a concern to* Corresponding author: Machteld Venken is Professor of Contemporary Transnational History at the Centre ofContemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg. She can be contacted at: machteld.venken@uni.lu;
www.machteldvenken.com. Co-authors: Astrid M. Fellner, Professor of North American Literary and Cultural
Studies, University of Saarbrücken; Adriana Dorfman, Associate Professor at Departomento de Geografia andPermanent Professor at Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geografia at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul;
Jussi Laine, Assistant Professor, University of Eastern Finland; Daniel Meier, Researcher, PACTE/Sciences to
Grenoble, University of Grenoble; Laurie Trautman, Director, Border Policy Research Institute, Western
Washington University; Dhananjay Tripathi, Assistant Professor, South Asian University, New Delhi; Wolfgang
Zeller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh.
DOI: 10.14943/ebr.10.1.59

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Eurasia Border Review < Conference Report >overcome, initially, economic borders and, later, political borders. During the Cold War years, the ideathat the Eastern and Western blocs had somehow achieved a state of permanence and immutability waspractically axiomatic. At the same time, decolonization fueled bordering processes in other parts of theworld. With the end of the Cold War order, military confrontation on the borders of the region eased,
but a new phase of unpredictability in great-power relations emerged that was less bound to the logics
of realist geostrategy. The period after the fall of the Iron Curtain has witnessed new opportunities forovercoming territorial borders and developing cross-border mobility within the European Union.
Profound changes were triggered by the enlargement of the EU, the Schengen zone, as well as NATO,all of which gave rise to specific problems of cohesion and cooperation between the “old” and “new”
member states, but especially between “new” members themselves. Systemic political and socioeconomic changes, together with institutional debordering and more extensive cross-bordercommunication, deeply transformed the significance of borders and borderlands within Europe.
As part of projects promoting integration and Europeanisation, broad accord appeared forlowering and softening borders and promoting the movement of people, money and goods. At the sametime, the collapse of communism revealed unfinished projects of democratization and nation-building,and new windows of opportunity opened for the renegotiation of state borders as a result of regimechange or claims for self-government ignored in the past. While the process of European integration
has been instrumental in transforming these “scars of history” into locomotives of economic
development and innovation, the recent waves of migration have changed the situation of borderlands
again and provoked the construction of new walls. These manifest as both physical and administrative
barriers. The latter may be less tangible and localized, but they nevertheless have a very noticeable
impact on the lives of migrants. The development of the EU external border, in particular, has beensusceptible to geopolitical processes and changing patterns of migration and mobility. In the postSoviet space, the shift of administrative internal borders to state borders has been accompanied by achange in perspective to a more nation-centered perception of borders. However, demarcating Europe
is not as easy as it may seem. Borders are not only geographical: ideas, intellectual heritage and culturalvalues are also bordered. The origins of Eurocentrism lie in the idea of Europe, which has emerged asa cultural idea associated with structures of power and identity projects.
In other regions of the world, borders and de/bordering processes have developed and evolved
in different ways. Whereas Europe has made its own borders over an extended period of time, withmultiple centers of power shaping the outcome, African borders were largely imposed by European
imperialist powers and developed over an extremely brief historical period, from the 1880s to the endof World War I. African borders are therefore typically considered to be a problematic legacy of theterritorial partitioning during European colonization and imperialism. However, while it has beenargued that the concept of borders was culturally alien to Africa before European incursion, this view
is not universally held. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the system of zones and border marches
existent in pre-colonial Africa, which served to delimit the territory of the continent’s kingdoms, aswell as some of the socio-political structures and institutions in operation at the time, can be said tohave performed a function similar to present-day borders. There is also evidence from across thecontinent that important details of African colonial territoriality and boundary demarcation were not60

M. Venken, A.M. Fellner, A. Dorfman, J. Laine, D. Meier, L. Trautman, D. Tripathi and W. Zeller

simply imposed but intensely negotiated between European agents and indigenous leaders as part ofthe extended colonial encounter.
It is undisputed that African borders play a significant role in perpetuating conflict andcontinue to affect the continent’s social, economic and political development to this day. Even at the
territorial center of African states, political and administrative control are often weak and unstable.
Projecting state power into Africa’s borderlands is typically a futile, temporary and localized affair. The
largely unchanged territorial outlines of the African postcolony are like a poorly tailored suit that
African leaders and their societies inherited upon independence, but which does not fit in many places.
Over the past several decades, the suit has been slowly worn in. Today African boundaries sustain the
livelihoods of many Africans, such as the state officials in an often bloated and inefficient bureaucratic
apparatus, traders, currency exchangers and other border workers. The former colonial boundaries havein many ways become part of the landscape and a resource which some can (ab-)use to sustain theireveryday life. While normative assessments of the legacy and present status of African boundaries arelargely negative, the scholarly gaze is drawn towards African borderlands owing to their relevance as
highly productive margins – sites of intense political, social and economic experimentation andinnovation.
The socioeconomic innovation prevalent in many African borderlands has also not goneunnoticed by policy-makers seeking to foster African regional integration “from below” as a way toheal colonial scars. Often guided by principles (and funding) from the European Union, the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the East African Community (EAC), the Southern
African Development Community (SADC) and several other overlapping projects for African regionaland continental integration seek to overcome partition and barriers to commerce and everyday
interaction. Although these organizations can justly boast of certain achievements, their actions havealso resulted in unintended outcomes and these are often most visible in the borderlands. For example,
the early twenty-first century has seen an unprecedented and ongoing boom of long-distance transportand border infrastructure expansion, largely but not exclusively driven by Asian demand and Chinese
Belt and Road activity. So-called Transport Corridors, One Stop Border Posts and Export Processing
Zones are designed to increase connectivity for selected commodities and high-value areas. But at mostAfrican border crossings, the throngs of traders, truckers, officials, sex workers and migrants, allbustling side-by-side in search of opportunities, is evidence of Africans’ continuing struggles to makea living in a world that is definitely not borderless.
In the Middle East, borders were also shaped by Western powers—in this case, mainly Franceand Great Britain in the aftermath of the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. Founded on the basis ofthese European powers’ zones of influence thanks to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), these
new state boundaries were largely imposed upon local populations, dividing local communities(religious, ethnic or tribal) and subjugating them to Western rulers or their local surrogates. Moreover,these borders marginalized ethnic or national groups, such as the Kurds and Palestinians, with direconsequence to this day. As is the case in Africa, the colonial borders have shown great resiliencebeyond the independence era and through various authoritarian regimes. For local inhabitants, crossing
borders has always been a thorny issue, presenting them with a number of obstacles to cooperation and61Eurasia Border Review < Conference Report >open markets: most prominently, dividing ideological lines, arbitrary rules and refugee crises, as wellas the no-go area of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel, which was boycotted by all Arabstates until the Camp David Agreement of 1978. The recent offshore resource findings and thesubsequent EEZ delineation in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea are opening new perspectives, although
once again rivalries and political tensions are slowing down the social benefits of such resources.
Since the emergence of the Islamic State movement with its dramatic “mise en scène” of the
breakdown of the Iraqi-Syrian border, some analysts raise the scenario of a general breakdown of“colonial lines” in reference to the Sykes-Picot agreement. No other region in the world seems to befacing such a challenge to the state border system as the Middle East. In reaction to this threat,
governments stoke fear and try to protect their state sovereignty from outsiders of all sorts – be they
foreign workers, illegal immigrants or terrorists – through a border walling process. Erections ofsophisticated and costly fences at state borders have transformed the regional landscape and are raising
issues of state sovereignty and regime legitimacy; they are also highlighting the existence of local
communities that are largely straddling international borders, resulting in alternative boundaries ofbelonging. In other words, questioning borders in the Middle East in the context of the post-Arabuprisings reveals the importance of history in national trajectories to explain the emergence of a new
jihadist movement seizing swaths of land across international borders as well as the transformation of
the state and the militarization of its elites in some cases.
In Asia, borders primarily reflect the security anxieties of a state. This security-centeredapproach to borders is partly due to Asia’s colonial legacy but also indicates the existence of serious
current political divides. Moreover, there are regionally specific issues in Asia that make border studies
more challenging. In South Asia, the two nuclear powers of India and Pakistan remain deadlocked andrefuse to bridge the partition of 1947. In Central Asia, economic imperatives are now posing questions
about the utility of national borders. In East and South-East Asia, various maritime border issues arecomplicating the regional security situation. In West Asia, political instability and religious
fundamentalism are making border issues intractable. Asian borders are also complex and interestingin a number of ways. Asia is a region with abundant natural resources and immense economic potential.
By improving border connectivity, commercial possibilities hold out the promise of realizing the dreamof an Asian century. Asia is also a crucible of different cultures, undefined by territorial limits, andwhich defy all sorts of borders and boundaries. There are sensitive questions connected to societal
limits that find themselves manifested in patriarchy, class discrimination, religious fundamentalism andterrorism. There are also critical issues such as migration, refugees and environmental degradation, thesolutions to which require cross-border cooperation. Interestingly, while there is apprehension andanxiety towards borders in Asia, it is an economically growing region. This economic growth entails
that Asian countries rethink their borders as a catalyst for expanding trade and business.
In the Americas, there is an array of diversity in the formation and meanings of borders, whichspan from Argentina north through Latin America and to the northern Arctic. These borders share somesimilarities in their historical formation and cultural contexts but are largely defined by their differences,which are rooted in both physical and political structures that shape sovereignty and territory. In Latin
America, borders and frontiers sometimes overlap in space and in meaning. In both Spanish and62

M. Venken, A.M. Fellner, A. Dorfman, J. Laine, D. Meier, L. Trautman, D. Tripathi and W. Zeller

Portuguese, the word “frontera” (or “fronteira”) carries an ambiguous sense, meaning both territorial
sovereignty and expansion of control and exploitation of land. Successive waves of exploitation saw
the appropriation and plunder of the economic resources (such as water, fuel, land and labor) of theseregions. Furthermore, discontinuities linked to social divisions are strongly marked in the landscape.
In Latin America, most present-day boundary lines are the legacy of the formation of nation-states
during the nineteenth century. Besides the internal tensions and conflicts, external factors involving the
break with Iberian colonialism in the region greatly influenced this process. The peopling orcolonization of these borders is related to the demarcation of state territories. As a result, twin cities arescattered over many of these lines. Colonial relations are still found in some parts of the continent, as
in French Guiana (an ultramarine department of France), and in the Falkland Islands (British territorystrongly contested by Argentina) and several islands in the Caribbean Sea. Overall, South America
demonstrates the strong permanence of geopolitical territorialities expressed by the will of sovereignstate control over nationalized borders.
The most discussed border in the Americas is the U.S.-Mexican border. The product of the1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, the U.S.-Mexican border
is 3,145 kilometers (1,954 mi) long and has become the site of countless illegal border crossings. The
subject of a great deal of media attention, this border has become heavily militarized in the twenty-first
century, culminating in the recent plans of President Trump to build a border wall to control
immigration. By contrast, the Canada-U.S. border has often been described as the most peaceful landborder in the world. The border spans nearly 9,000 kilometers and crosses both dense urban networks
and vast stretches of land and marine wilderness. This geographical feature alone means that much of
the border remains unmonitored, delineated only by small concrete markers. In addition, 90 percent of
the Canadian population lives within 150 kilometers of the border. In contrast, less than 20 percent of
the U.S. population lives in states that share a border with Canada. This asymmetry, combined with the
population differentials between the two countries and a large U.S. consumer market, drives large crossborder flows in both directions. Canada and the United States have many strong ties spanning trade andsecurity. They share an integrated supply chain, particularly in the automobile sector. Arrangements
such as NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and Preclearance operations
function as a joint partnership between both countries, with Canadians operating on U.S. soil and viceversa. Additionally, the U.S. and Canada not only share the same language and standard of living, butmany families span the border and a number of dual citizens exist in both countries. The Canada-U.S.
border is generally less politicized and problematized when compared to the U.S. southern border with
Mexico.
Research on Borders
In recent years, the approach to borders as bordering processes has become prevalent, viewing
borders as results of social processes, which has opened the way to a broad spectrum of researchinterests, especially for cross-border everyday life issues. Because of increasing globalization, borderregions have become a focus of intense research, ranging from political cross-border cooperation,

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Eurasia Border Review < Conference Report >cross-border spatial planning to regional development. As a result, border studies have become a multiand interdisciplinary field that concerns itself with a wide range of multifarious mechanisms behindthese bordering, de-bordering and re-bordering processes, including geopolitical, everyday life and/or
artistic issues, which they approach from a critical perspective.
In Europe, much of the research on borders has sought to provide a nuanced and criticalunderstanding of borders as resources in terms of the exercise of power, the management of conflict,cross-border co-operation, and the everyday negotiation of borders within the broader frame offundamental social, economic, cultural and geopolitical transformations that have affected thecontinent. Various research projects funded by the European Union (such as the Interreg and Frame
programs) have highlighted how state borders reflect tensions as well as points of connection withinintercultural and interstate relations. State borders have remained as an important frame of referencewith many of the studies emphasizing the social significance and subjectivities of state borders whilecritically interrogating “objective” categories of state territoriality and international relations.
On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union, global economic fluctuations, the recent
debates over migration and refugees and security concerns have contributed to an increase in researchon borders and the branching out of border studies into new disciplines, which have created the needto study borders beyond their understandings as geopolitical divisions. Hence, in addition to stateborders, border studies in Europe focuses on cultural, symbolic and other types of social boundaries.
This has made the field increasingly interdisciplinary, with critical examination of border and identity
understandings becoming part of political and everyday discourses. Central research focuses oncomparative historical and sociological state building, geographical perspective on changing meaningsof borders, critical geopolitics, markets and regional development, as well as the daily life and identities
in borderlands. Border regions (or “borderlands”) reflect many of these aspects as they are themselvesdefined by historical memories of life at borders as well as by the active engagement of borderlanders
with changing border symbolisms and functions. Although formal state boundaries often serve as
reference points in discussions of territory, identity and Europe, it is not just the physical border itself
but its various representations that are at issue.
Border studies, through a cultural studies lens, focuses especially on the symbolic and social
dimensions of borders and border regions in a critical perspective, analyzing borders bothsynchronically and diachronically as a result of complex spatial, temporal, social and cultural
phenomena which are not static, but mobile, dynamic and mutable. Borders are thereby unmasked ascontingent social and cultural productions and as instruments of power, which determine and often also
substantiate our perception of the world.
During the 1980s/90s pioneering work in the field of African boundary studies was conductedlargely by historians and scholars of politics/IR such as Anthony Asiwaju (Ibadan), Paul Nugent(Edinburgh) and William Miles (Boston). A workshop in Edinburgh in 2007 led to the founding of theAfrican Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE). The choice of name reflected the growing interestof Africanists – in particular, social anthropologists, historians and political geographers – to study thepast and present day-to-day realities of life with the continent’s boundaries. A consensus emerged that
African borderlands, though often geographically peripheral, were relevant or even central to processes64M. Venken, A.M. Fellner, A. Dorfman, J. Laine, D. Meier, L. Trautman, D. Tripathi and W. Zellerof social, economic and political transformation on the continent, and that a sustained collaborative
effort should be made to study them.
In the Middle East, there has been a long tradition of adhering to a classical definition of stateborders with a limited debate on the wall built by Israel in the West Bank and maritime issues in the
Gulf area between Iran and the Arab monarchies of the peninsula. A major change occurred in the last
decade with a growing number of researchers addressing the issue of borders from various angles. In
contrast to the previous period, borders have remained at the heart of some researcher projects that shed
more light on classical topics such as refugees and migrants crossing borders (Palestinians, Syrians,
Iraqi as well as foreign workers in the Gulf and African migrants crossing the Maghreb states), thus
raising other aspects, such as the identity and status of such actors. While borders have provided a moreinterdisciplinary perspective to the discourse, most of the research carried out has remained within thesphere of disciplinary knowledge. From this point of view, it is interesting to see how anthropologists
have started to problematize more significantly the border as a proper object of research, a technologicaldevice shaping behaviors in aa specific environment. In political science and international relations,the border – along with its components (borderlands, border towns, border defense shields andweaponry) and actors (smugglers, tribes, military, international organizations, jihadists) – has beenbrought back to the center of questioning following the Arab uprisings. For their part, geographers andhistorians have been reflecting for a longer period on borders. Following the growing interest andinternational focus on them, borders came to be understood by researchers carrying out fieldwork as
key elements in understanding and reading historical shifts and regional, urban or communal changes.
However, it remains true that few of these researchers relied on the conceptual toolkit of border studies.
In South Asia, border studies are still not accepted as a separate academic field. Border
creation in colonial South Asia was done for administrative convenience and also to defend thelegitimacy of British rule. Post-colonial South Asia in this regard is also a post-partition region and allof these partitions involved large-scale violence that shapes present-day understandings of borders. It
is also important to mention that India and Pakistan fought three and a half wars and continue to havehostile relations. As a result, borders continue to be viewed as a matter of high security, a discourse
also reflected in academic research. Although there is some interesting work on themes related toborders and borderlands, these studies are viewed from the lens of politics, geopolitics, political science,
international relations/security studies and economics (related to cross-border trade). Nevertheless,there are exemplary works on women in the Indian borderlands and on how borderland inhabitants
experienced the India–Pakistan partition. Similarly, the stories of torture, violence and hate are part of
Bangladesh’s liberation.
Recurrent keywords in Latin American border studies are territories, identities, security,
frontiers, twin cities, the Amazon, migration, memories, integration, culture and work, mirroring themain topics of the disciplines working on border studies: geography, history, literature and linguistics,
political science, international relations, anthropology and education. Some of these keywords refer torelevant features of the region, be they environmental or social, such as the Amazon, frontiers or twincities. These three topics have been central in the understanding of the region as a whole, in different
ways. The study of the Amazon and its internal frontiers offers insights on the environmental and social

65Eurasia Border Review < Conference Report >contradictions of the development models which directed (or legitimated) the occupation of the region.
Research on twin cities has been central in defying the territorial trap presented by official discourse
and in identifying and promoting bottom-up solutions in border management.
Border studies have by now a long history in the U.S. with fields such as Chicano/a Studies,
especially anthropology and literature, being interested in the study of the U.S. borders since the 1960s.
Since the 1990s the U.S.–Mexican borderlands have witnessed growing immigration from Latin
America, the relocation of industries under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), andthe paradoxical situation of the free flow of goods and capital and the simultaneous reinforcement andsecuritization of the border. Various centers and institutes for border studies at U.S.-American
universities, particularly in the Southwest, offer multidisciplinary research focusing on issues of free
trade, undocumented migration, the drug trade, border securitization, the militarization of policing, thestruggles for environmental justice, and the cultural and linguistic particularities of the U.S.–Mexican
borderlands.
Research on borders and borderlands in the Canada–U.S. context spans a number ofdisciplines and is primarily rooted in geography, political science, history, economics, anthropology,
and literature. This research ranges from quantitative analyses of the Canada–U.S. trade relationship to
cultural issues, such as the mobility of indigenous groups bifurcated by the border. The Canada–U.S.
border security relationship is also the focus of much research, particularly in the post-9/11 context, as
is transboundary environmental cooperation.
The Global Track
The first session was titled “Migration, Trafficking and Borders: Contemporary Global
Challenges”. At a time when states within Europe were attempting to make it more difficult for migrants
to cross their borders, the panelists representing the International Organization of Migration, theInternational Centre for Migration Policy Development, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimeand the International Anti-Corruption Academy unanimously supported the statement that closing aborder merely displaces migration flows and puts migrants at risk. In order to reduce migrants' risks on
the route and improve supporting systems, they argued that, in addition to responsible government
policy, civil society has to be on board.
Providing a space for explorative investigation of potential approaches for cultural borderstudies, the session “Border Textures: Interwoven Practices and Discursive Fabrics of Borders”
presented theoretical tools that helped reveal border (re)production processes in Western-Europe byfocusing on their complexities and multi-layeredness. The concept of bordertextures goes beyond theestablished bordering approaches or multidimensional approaches, which consider different
dimensions in an isolated manner. Bordertextures conceptualize the border as a complex / relational
formation of interwoven practices, discourses, bodies, and knowledges from a performative perspective.
“Eastern Dimension of EU Actorness” offered a more reflective understanding of actorness inconceptualizing EU geopolitical agency as political innovation, i.e. as something deeply engaged in,and sensitive to, very different political, social and cultural practices. Such a reflective geopolitics

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involves the elaboration and implementation of a cooperation philosophy that understands global
agency as a learning and adaptation process and that eschews static metanarratives of civilizational
antagonism, “national interest” and geographical determinism. “Neighborhood”, for example, signifies
more than proximity and should be seen not in terms of normative “spheres of influence” but rather as
possible spaces of broader cooperation.
“Africa: From Barriers to Bridges: The Evolution of African Borders and Borderlands Since
the First World War” was scheduled, but none of the presenters managed to travel to Vienna, citing
problems with their Schengen visa procedures. Panel organizer Dr. Willie Eselebor was required toremain in Nigeria and focus his attention on preparations for the Border Regions in Transition
conference, which his institution in Ibadan was preparing to host in October 2018, and in particular,
the complicated immigration procedures for overseas participants. This episode is not an isolated case.
In the context of ever more muscular regulation and policing of overseas travel from Africa to Europe(particularly the UK) and the U.S., the already costly and time-consuming visa clearance procedures
have in recent years become noticeably more difficult to navigate for Africa-based colleagues. Viceversa, the many practical problems faced by organizers of international conferences held on African
soil have for years hampered, though not stopped, efforts to convene the border studies community
there.
“Rethinking Borders and Territory in the Middle East” took the opportunity of current
transformations in Middle Eastern politics to address contemporary issues – from the way local
inhabitants, tribes and smugglers are managing the border on a daily basis in Libya after the fall of the
Qaddafi regime, to highlighting how the outsourcing of security control to private companies usingsophisticated technical measures in the Occupied Palestinian Territories risks dehumanizing Palestiniancrossers, to the different effect of borders on the Druze community; whereas Druze became part of thefabric of the Israeli state, with some serving as high-ranking officers in the army, they are marginalized
in Lebanon and Syria.
“Borders and Boundaries in Asia: Borders in South Asia” foregrounded a region that is rarely
the focus of border research. It took the discussion beyond the conventional narrative of borders aslines of permanent division between territories, and showed how borders are also drawn in the mindsof people. A reading of India–Pakistan textbooks, for example, provokes the realization that crossing
borders in South Asia is not just physically tough, but also requires mental openness.
The session on Latin America was supposed to present the ambiguous relationship between
economic and political integration projects and environmental geopolitics on the basis of local scalestudies of border culture and practices in the Bolivia–Brazil–Peru border region, South American
peripheral border regions and the U.S.–Mexican border. However, only Andrew Tirrell’s presentation,
which highlighted the need to bring together issues and agents in order to tackle the environmental
effects of border-making, took place.
The session on the Canada–U.S. border highlighted the innovative cross-border relationships
in different regions of the borderlands, as well as the barriers that inhibit greater integration and mobility.
More specifically, it focused on cross-border collaboration at the regional scale, which is a criticalchallenge in conceptualizing international borders as a homogenous place. The session’s focus on

67Eurasia Border Review < Conference Report >applied research, case studies and policy development complements more academically based research.
Panelists agreed that empowering subnational governments and stakeholders can serve as acounterbalance to the ebb and flow of federal policy; however, the ability of subnational stakeholders
to exhibit effective leadership varies at different regions of the Canada–U.S. border owing togeographical distance, political culture, institutional set-ups and different histories and settlement
patterns.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The Global Track was sponsored by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (German
Federal Centre for Political Education), whose definition of global as “let others speak” was supported
by a track proposal organised along a territorial division of the world, including scholars from thedifferent world regions as session organizers, and which ensured gender parity among them. Somecriticism of these conditions is not entirely unwarranted. First, cultural border studies do have astronghold in Europe, whereas the topic of border security is more prevalent in research on borders in
Asia. Second, the grant only offered lump sums to speakers regardless of origins, which may explain
why some of speakers from distant countries could not attend.
The authors acknowledge the first attempt to bridge research efforts scattered around the globe
within one track. In offering a wide variety of border issues and approaches by border scholars fromall over the world, the track provides a useful open access overview of the state of the art in the fieldof border studies globally. The track allowed for a showcasing of the strengths of regionally specificwork, such as the work on border theory in the session on Western Europe, and the bottom-up approachtaken in research on the North American border, while at the same time providing an arena ofexpression for border research on less studied regions, such as South Asia. While the goal of enabling
indigenous authors to speak was intended to be the central appeal of the track, this goal was not entirely
realized owing to last-minute cancellations. Gender equality, on the other hand, could be guaranteedon the organizational level (with female and male scholars each taking responsibility for over half ofthe sessions), but not on the level of speakers, where we encountered twelve male and eight female
speakers, and all of the female speakers participated in sessions on the Western world. The importanceof the Global Track will be assessed in the coming years. Already during the conference, the track
kicked off a productive dialogue among participants, of which this essay also constitutes proof. On
YouTube, the videos generated 512 clicks within their first three-month period online.
Most authors questioned the benefit of having a predefined geographical categorization inpanels, which reinforces a territorialized view of borders (also referred to as the territorial trap), as well
as differences between these categories. Because border scholars working on a specific region (e.g.
European Studies, African Studies, etc) are used to interacting and debating with each other on the very
lively academic conference circuit, the added value of an Association for Borderlands World
Conference lies in the opportunity to participate in mixed panels with scholars working on similar
topics in other world regions. This would highlight similarities in border processes throughout theworld. While acknowledging the decentralized organizational structure of the Global Track, the authors68

M. Venken, A.M. Fellner, A. Dorfman, J. Laine, D. Meier, L. Trautman, D. Tripathi and W. Zeller

are of the opinion that a closer coordination between the sessions could have led to a more systematic
approach to addressing several common issues, which would also have facilitated the comparison.
Asked about the appropriateness of the open access movies of the Global Track, participants in an
online evaluation survey seemed broadly positive: “A start – a small step – but a good one.” However,some voices were eager to point to the inadequacy of the initiative: “Not good enough. Watching amovie is not equal to participating.”
The authors highly recommend continuing on the path of a Global Track during the next world
meeting of the Association for Borderlands Studies. Inter-regional comparison could be achieved byasking Global Track panelists to address a set of guiding questions or topical points in each session,
and/or aiming to include panel discussants with expertise on regions other than the one prioritized by
the session they are discussing. Interesting insights might emerge from a dialogue between experts
working on different formerly colonized regions (e.g. Africa and Asia), regions with substantial
interaction through cross-regional migration (North and Latin America or Europe and the Middle East),or specific themes, such as border security or migration. This would highlight how similar borderprocesses can be found throughout the world and could aim at developing (1) a globally comparative
border studies framework and (2) a synthesis of established approaches and theoretical/methodologicalneeds. Including an expert from outside the area of focus in a panel or a roundtable conversation withrepresentatives from each panel of a track are also possibilities. These changes could result in a great
deal of insight and knowledge on both the state of border studies globally and opportunities for crosspollination. Conference participants proposed including live streaming, podcasts and internet
conversations so that those not fortunate enough to attend Global Tracks in the future can also be heard
and contribute to the debates.

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