Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to be enriched and mutated for the specific historical and geographical context and con-
tingency of a certain border production. What is more, the internalisation of and sub-
jection to a certain border regime, through which the border regime gains or sustains its
power, will be different over time, space, and people.
The first dimension of the border-production process, bordering, implies the continu-
ous (search for the) legitimisation and justification of the location and demarcation of
a border, which is seen as a manifestation of one's own claimed, distinct, and exclusive
territory/identity/sovereignty. In doing so, the spatial containerisation and unification of
the people, and hence implicitly the silencing of the internal differences, are reproduced
(see also Sibley 1995). This is not a once-and-for-all event. Critical for border produc-
tion is that all possible social and spatial dynamics that might occur are given mean-
ing and a vision by looking through the eyes of the self-defined territory/identity/sover-
eignty.
In this production of meaning and vision the second dimension, ordering, is crucially
important (cf. Schmitt's Ortung und Ordnung 1950). The process of making and remak-
ing a sociospatial order, the ordering, implies that in its beginning the socio spatial con-
tainer is emptied and purified from its past despotic codes and occupants and, to use
the words of Deleuze and Guattari ([1980]2004), despotically recoded with the codes
and people of the now owner. If not militarily, this is done symbolically through the
production of belonging and nostalgia through the selective invention and narration of
communality and tradition via common rituals, memories, and history. In doing so, the
self-constructed sociospatial code and order is normalised, it becomes the norm against
which exceptions and aberrations are defined. The process of normalisation involves
suchmechanisms asinternalisation, subjection,andthetamingofresistance throughthe
use of, for example, language politics, education politics, and labour politics, which are
all territorially defined and demarcated as the norm (e.g., Foucault 1975). Moreover,
what further characterises this process of ordering is the statistical biopolitical registra-
tion and territorial surveillance of the population in terms of the birth, skills, ethnicity,
age, health, fertility, productivity, and death of every body into the machinery of the
Order (Deleuze and Guattari 2004; Foucault 2007; Salter 2006).
The third dimension of border production that I distinguish here is the making of
borders via the making of others, othering. This implies the production of categorical
difference between ours and theirs, here and there, and natives versus nonnatives, so
important for the realist topological thinking still. It involves the now so often critic-
ally engaged and, in academic circles, so often deconstructed dichotomous and antag-
onising production of socioeconomic and sociocultural competition, for which thinkers
like Jacques Derrida and Edward Said have become dominant and well-known sources
of academic inspiration. The discrimination between what is imagined to be ours in
