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The State, Transborder Movements, and Deterritorialised Identity in South Asia

  • Nasir UddinEmail author
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Abstract

The state, border and people’s mobility have an intimate but a complex relation in globalised world because the states’ roles become catalysts in making people mobile across borders. The states produce borders as much as borders reproduce the states in terms of territoriality, while “deterritorialisation” features the contemporary globalised world. Therefore, transborder movement, that denotes mobility of people across borders, has become an inescapable part of modern state system as “the notion of intensification of globalization,” as borders both separate and connect states. Borders are dynamic and dyadic in the interface of state and non-state actors involved in border making and in its operations. The transborder movement becomes a complex web when the states deal with the mobility as an issue of national/regional security, legal/illegal trades, growing militancy, terrorisation of regions and the questions of citizenship. The chapter discusses growing trends of transborder mobility in this region since South Asian states could be ideal cases to understand such dynamic and dialectical relations between transborder movements and the states. It unfolds that transborder movement is also deeply entangled with the retaining, regaining and transforming identity in deterritorialised global landscape. Therefore, the nexus between transborder movements and deterritorialised identity demands serious academic attentions and the deep analysis with empirically grounded and contextually rooted cases.

This chapter intends to focus the ways how borders and transborder movements are dealt with from strategic and diplomatic points of view in South Asian states; how borders become spaces for people to move from one state to another in search of a better fortune (economic migrants), escaping persecution (refugees) and finding a disaster-free living place (climate migrants); how the states in South Asia address transborder movements at both policy level and practical fields; how borders are used for illegal trades and informal economy in South Asian states; how refugee issues, illegal migrations, citizenship issues and camp/stranded people are dealt with in South Asian states as consequences of transborder movement; and how the notions of territoriality of statehood become blurred due to the increasing transborder movements in South Asia. Its lens also flashes out on the dynamics of identity in the interface of territoriality, deterritoriality and mobility of people across borders particularly in South Asia.

Keywords

(Trans)Border State Mobility Identity Deterritoriality South Asia 
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© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of AnthropologyUniversity of ChittagongChittagongBangladesh

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