Abstract
Wherever there is violent conflict, boundaries and borders are taken seriously. As the quote above implies, boundaries play an ambiguous role, acting simultaneously as source of security and antagonism, inclusion and exclusion. Which boundaries become salient and on which side of the boundary one stands may make the difference between life and death. Both war fighting and peacebuilding are in essence collective action problems involving processes of ‘debordering’ and ‘rebordering’. Because they are perceived to be so important, the transition from war to peace involves complex and always conflictual bargaining about the nature of physical and social boundaries. Peace processes that are insensitive to boundary politics risk re-igniting conflict rather than consolidating the peace. In Sri Lanka, for instance, a bipolar model of negotiations, based on the assumption that there were two coherent conflicting parties — the Sri Lankan government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) controlling contiguous ‘real estate’ in the south and northeast respectively — failed to accommodate the complex intra-group divisions which ultimately tore the peace process apart.
Boundaries prevent people from stepping on things accidentally. And they’re the first thing you point out when someone steps on something intentionally.
Atom Egoyan, 2006
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abraham, Itty and Willem van Schendel, 2005, ‘Introduction. The Making of Illicitness’, in van Schendel and Abraham (eds), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Adamson, Fiona, 2006, ‘Crossing Borders. International Migration and National Security’, International Security, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 165–99.
Aggarwal, Ravina, 2004, Beyond Lines of Control. Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Lakakh, India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Andreas, Peter, 2003, ‘Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-first Century’, International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 78–111.
Appadurai, Arjun, 2006, Fear of Small Numbers. An essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Atzili, Boaz, 2007, ‘When Good Fences Make Bad Neighbours. Fixed Borders, State Weakness, and International Conflict’, International Security, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 139–73.
Banerjee, Mukulika, 2001, Pathan Unarmed, Oxford: James Currey.
Barfield, Thomas, 2004, ‘Problems in Establishing Legitimacy in Afghanistan’, Iranian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 263–93.
Baud, Michiel and Willem van Schendel, 1997, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 211–42.
Blanchard, Jean-Marc F., 2005, ‘Linking Borders Disputes and War: An Institutional-Statist Theory’, Geopolitics, Vol. 10, pp. 688–711.
Bornstein, Avram S., 2002, ‘Borders and the Utility of Violence. State Effects on the “Superexploitation” of West Bank Palestinians’, Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 201–20.
Colas, Alexandro, 2006, Empire, Cambridge: Polity.
Cullather, Nick, 2002, ‘Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State’, The Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 3, pp. 512–37.
Cunningham, Hilary, 2004, ‘Nations Rebound? Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 329–50.
Das, Veena and Deborah Poole (eds), 2004, Anthropology in the Margins of the State, Oxford: James Currey.
Donnan, Hastings and Wilson Thomas (1999), Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State, Oxford Berg.
Duffield, Mark, 2001, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed Books.
Duffield, Mark, 2005, ‘Getting Savages to Fight Barbarians: Development, Security and the Colonial Present’, Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 141–160.
Gallant, Thomas, 1999, ‘Brigandage, Piracy, Capitalism and State-Formation: Transnational Crime from a Historical World System Perspective’, in Josiah McC. Heyman (ed.), States and Illegal Practices, Oxford: Berg.
Geiger, Jeffrey and Danilo Petrovié, 2002, ‘Turner in the Tropics: The Frontier Concept Revisited’, paper at the workshop on ‘Dimensions, Dynamics and Transformation of Resource Conflicts between Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in Frontier Regions in South and Southeast Asia’, Mt.-Soleil St. Imier, Switzerland, 25–29 Sept.
Heyman, Josiah, 2004, ‘Ports of Entry as Nodes in the World System’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 11, pp. 303–27.
Hirst, Paul, 2005, Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture, Cambridge: Polity.
Jabri, Vivienne, 2007, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jackson, Stephen, 2006, ‘Borderlands and the Transformation of War Economies: Lessons from the DRC’, Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 6, No. 6, pp. 425–48.
Keen, David, 2000, ‘War and Peace: What’s the Difference?’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 1–22.
Kolossov, Vladimir, 2005, ‘Theorizing Borders. Border Studies: Changing Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches’, Geopolitics, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 606–32.
Lund, Christian, 2006, ‘Twilight Institutions: An Introduction’, Development and Change, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 673–84.
Martinez, Oscar, 1994, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
McCoy, Alfred, 1999, ‘Requiem for a Drug Lord: State and Commodity in the Career of Khun Sa’, in Josiah Heyman (ed.), States and Illegal Practices, Oxford: Berg, pp. 129–67.
Megoran, Nick, Gael Raballand and Jerome Bouyou, 2005, ‘Performance, Representation and the Economics of Border Control in Uzbekistan’, Geopolitics, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 712–40.
Mendel, Yonatan, 2007, ‘Imagined Territories’, London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 15, 2 August, pp. 13–14.
Migdal, Joel, 2004, Boundaries and Belonging. States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Migdal, Joel, 2004a, ‘Statebuilding and the Non-Nation State’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 17–46.
Moraya, A., 2003, ‘Rethinking the State from the Frontier’, Millennium: Journal of International, Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 267–92.
Newman, David and Anssi Paasi, 1998, ‘Fences and Neighbours in the Post Modern World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 186–207.
Nichols, Robert, 2001, Settling the Frontier. Land, Law and Society in the Peshawar Valley, 1500–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pugh, Michael and Neil Cooper with Jonathan Goodhand, 2004, War Economies in a Regional Context: The Challenge of Transformation, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Reno, William, 2000, ‘Shadow States and the Political Economy of Civil Wars’, in Mats Berdal and David Malone (eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 43–68.
Reyntjens, Filip, 2005, ‘The Privatization and Criminalization of Public Space in the Geopolitics of the Great Lakes Region’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 43, pp. 587–607.
Richards, Paul, 2005, ‘New War and Ethnographic Approach’, in Richards (ed.), No Peace No War. An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, Oxford: James Currey, pp. 1–21.
Ron, James, 2003, Frontiers and Ghettos. State Violence in Serbia and Israel, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Salehyan, Idean, 2007, ‘Transnational Rebels: Neighbouring States as a Sanctuary for Rebel Groups’, World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 217–42.
Scott, James C., 2000, ‘Hill and Valley in Southeast Asia … or Why the State is the Enemy of People who Move Around … or … Why Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills’, paper at symposium on ‘Development and the Nation State’, Washington University, St. Louis, Feb.
Scott, James C., 2007, ‘Introduction’, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (orig. 1976 ), New Haven: CT, Yale University Press.
Tagliacozza, Eric, 2005, Secret Trades, Porous Borders. Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Thangarajah, Yuvi, 2003, ‘Ethnicization of the Devolution Debate and the Militarization of Civil Society in North-Eastern Sri Lanka’, in Markus Mayer, Dirini Rajasingham-Senanayake and Yuvi Thangarajah (eds), Building Local Capacities for Peace: Rethinking Conflict and Development in Sri Lanka, New Delhi: Macmillan.
Tilly, Charles, 2003, The Politics of Collective Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turton, David, 2005, ‘The Meaning of Place in a World of Movement: Lessons from Long-term Field Research in Southern Ethiopia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 258–80.
van Houtum, Henk, 2002, ‘Borders of Comfort: Spatial Economic Bordering Processes in the European Union’, Regional and Federal Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 35–58.
van Schendel, Willem, 2005, ‘Spaces of Engagement: How Borderlands, Illegal Flows, and Territorial States Interlock’, in van Schendel and Itty Abraham (eds), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Jonathan Goodhand
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Goodhand, J. (2008). War, Peace and the Places in Between: Why Borderlands are Central. In: Pugh, M., Cooper, N., Turner, M. (eds) Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding. New Security Challenges Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230228740_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230228740_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-28561-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-22874-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)