Routledge Research Companion to Border Studies

Professor Doris Wastl-Walter, Director of the Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland

'Doris Wastl-Walter’s excellent volume The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies brings together contributions from numerous distinguished authors, making a comprehensive and welcomed companion to the interdisciplinary field of border studies...The publication of this volume certainly is a step forward to institutionalize border studies as a distinctive research field. More than just empirically showing how international borders are manifested in different geopolitical contexts, this book also reveals how theoretically rich and methodologically complex border studies are today.The articles mainly focus on formal and practical border drawing practices, whereas creative cultural and popular performances of the border are not discussed in depth.The selection of articles and themes has been successful, for although the book brings together different theoretical approaches and empirical cases, all papers share an understanding that borders and bordering entail material consequences and unequal power relations.The book will definitely attract a wide interdisciplinary readership of scholars, students and professionals.' Progress in Human Geography '...a timely and current overview to the state of border-related scholarship in geography and nearby disciplines. It does not merely retrace and reframe the existing foundation of literature on borders, but it expands, extrapolates, and offers fresh insights and new perspectives along multiple dimensions of borders.' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 'The Ashgate companion is a worthwhile, if heavy, volume, for its diverse mix of conceptually informed, empirical cases spreading across many parts of the world (Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa) and its fascinating themes (border management, identity politics, labour migration, gender and borders, neighbourhood politics, nature and environment)' . The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

• Contents: Introduction, Doris Wastl-Walter; Part I Theorizing Borders: Conceptual Aspects of Border Studies: A border theory: an unattainable dream or a realistic aim for border scholars?, Anssi Paasi; Contemporary research agendas in border studies: an overview, David Newman; The mask of the border, Henk van Houtum; Borders and memory, Tatiana Zhurzhenko; Border regions as neighbourhoods, Alan K. Henrikson; The border as method: towards an analysis of political subjectivities in transmigrant spaces, Stefanie Kron. Part II Geopolitics: State, Nation and Power Relations: Borders, border studies and EU enlargement, James Wesley Scott; The 'green line' of Cyprus: a contested boundary in flux, Nicos Peristianis and John C. Mavris; Post-Soviet boundaries: territoriality, identity, security, circulation, Vladimir Kolossov; Polar regions - comparing Arctic and Antarctic border debates, Lassi Heininen and Michele Zebich-Knos; Spaces, territorialities and ethnography on the Thai-, Sino- and Indo-Myanmar boundaries, Karin Dean. Part III Border Enforcement in the 21st Century: The emerging politics of border management: policy and research considerations, Jason Ackleson; Building borders the hard way: enforcing North American security post 9/11, Heather Nicol; Blurring boundaries/sharpening borders: analysing the US's use of military aviation technologies to secure international borders, 2001-2008, Alison J. Williams; A retrospective look at the nature of national borders in Latin America, Edgardo Manero; The inter-Korean border region - 'meta-border' of the Cold War and metamorphic frontier of the peninsula, Valérie Gelézeau. Part IV Borders and Territorial Identities: the Mechanisms of Exclusion and Inclusion: National minorities in European border regions, Jan D. Markusse; The borderland existence of the Mongolian Kazakhs: boundaries and the construction of territorial belonging, Alexander C. Diener; Borders and territorial identity: Persian identity makes Iran an empire