Soft Borders

While sovereignty is increasingly contested within academic circles, most recent military conflicts have been over issues of sovereignty in some form. Focusing on Yugoslavia in the 1990s, this book explores the issues surrounding 'sovereignty' and calls for a radical rethinking of the notion and the institutions and practices that it grounds.

"Julie Mostov s book Soft Borders: Rethinking Sovereignty and Democracy encourages us to look at the key problems of the twenty first century from a novel perspective that is not only inspiring and theoretically interesting but also practically possible. This work is based on her extensive knowledge of ethnic conflicts in Southeastern Europe and the problems of citizens who find themselves trapped within the "hard borders" of ethnocratic states, as well as on her understanding of current trends in the West to build new fortresses against labor migration. Mostov does not offer easy solutions or call for the end of the state, but in the context of global integration, fragmentation, and new possibilities of communication she shows us a way to rethink the concepts of democracy, sovereignty, and citizenship and offers an innovative notion of multi-layered cooperation among transnational citizens in fluid and multiple soft border polities. " - Vesna Pe ic , senior scientific associate of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade University, human rights and peace activist, and Member of Serbian Parliament

"In Soft Borders, JulieMostovweaves apolitical theory of borders around their operative contingency andpervasive injustice in the world of globalization.Explaining why hard borders foster a violent, exclusionary, and repressive politics of ethnocracyby fixing and naturalizing difference and creating vulnerable "others" inside and outside national boundaries, she argues persuasively for a viable alternative,already in the making: "soft" border practices and institutions designedto securetransnational citizen rights in spaces of human mobility." - David Ludden, Professor of Political Economy and Globalization, History Department, New York University

JULIE MOSTOV is Professor of Political Science at Drexel University, Pennsylvania, USA. She is author of Powers, Process, and Popular Sovereignty (Temple University Press, 1992) and editor of (with Rada Ivekovic) From Gender to Nation (Longo Editore, 2002).