BIG Talk — What happens when closed borders reopen? Learning from a Central Asian example

with Dr. Nick Megoran (Visiting Fellow, Borders in Globalization) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | March 26, 2024

In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick Building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 12:00pm to 1:30pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.

Much recent work in border studies has focussed on the violence of border closures. In an age of right-wing populism and xenophobia this is important but reflects western-centric preoccupations. There are other processes taking place in other parts of the world that sometimes get missed. This paper tells one of them, based on over 25 years conducting fieldwork in a village on the Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan boundary. Dissected by new boundaries and borders in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with a change of political leadership since 2016 a gradual reopening of previously-closed crossings has occurred. This has happened without any of the damaging consequences that the politicians who closed the borders in the first place warned of. This seminar presents this story and asks what it says about our understanding of processes in an increasingly-bordered today.

Nick Megoran is a Visiting Fellow working with the Borders in Globalization program and the Centre for Global Studies and Professor of Political Geography at Newcastle University. His work focuses on nationalism and border dynamics in the Danish–German and Uzbek–Kyrgyz borderlands, which he has been researching for three decades. He has authored numerous articles and books on this topic, including Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary (Pittsburgh 2017).

BIG Talk — What happens when closed borders reopen? Learning from a Central Asian example

21st Century Borders in Japan — Early Career Researcher Writing Workshop

Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan | February 15–16, 2024

The International Research Center for Japanese Studies will be hosting an Early Career Writing Workshop titled “21st Century Borders in Japan” on February 15–16, 2024 at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. This workshop aims to develop academic articles and policy papers from early career researchers at both the graduate and postgraduate levels. More info can be found here.

21st Century Borders in Japan Writing Workshop

15 & 16 February, 9:30am–5pm

Room W302, Humanities and Social Sciences Building

Pre-Workshop Seminar

14 February, 4:30pm–6pm

“Quantifying Borders: Border Dyads and OSCE Disputes”

Prof. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (University of Victoria, Borders in Globalization Coordinator)

Co-Sponsored by the SRC (UBRJ/EES)

Slavic-Eurasia Research Center, Room 401 (Fourth floor)

21st Century Borders in Japan Writing Workshop

15 & 16 February

Room W302, Humanities and Social Sciences Building

21st Century Borders in Japan — Early Career Researcher Writing Workshop

BIG Talk — From Border Perplexity to Border Renaissance: A Cultural Rebirth of Borders

with Dr. Astrid Fellner (Head of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, Saarland University) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | February 27, 2024

In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick Building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 12:00pm to 1:30pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.

Borders are once again at the center of attention. With the many bloody conflicts in the world, violence at borders and border traumas connected with the crossings of borders have increased in recent times. Particularly over the last decade, the increasing focus of Western policies on controlling migration and discipling mobility has led to a high-technologization of the border regime and a multiplication of border infrastructures, leading to a new age of borderization—a downright border renaissance—that has been exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, during which the proliferation of new and renewed borders has reached unequaled heights. This talk will focus on the current resurgence in the importance and vitality of borders, showing that the current border renaissance has also led to a rebirth in border literature, border arts, and border theories, which offer fresh ways of conceiving borders.

Astrid M. Fellner is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Germany, where she is Head of the “University of the Greater Region Center for Border Studies.” She is co-editor of a trilingual Border Glossary and a handbook of key terms in Border Studies, and she has published on the US/Canada as well as US/Mexican border. She has been involved in research and teaching projects in Border Studies with Ukrainian universities and has worked on the BMBF-project “Linking Borderlands,” for which she studies border films and industrial culture of the Greater Region in comparison with the German/Polish border.

BIG Talk — From Border Perplexity to Border Renaissance: A Cultural Rebirth of Borders

Borders, Politics and Policies: Using Data to Power Border Research

Strasbourg, France | June 3–4, 2024

In collaboration with the Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN, Kehl, Germany) and the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po Strasbourg, University of Strasbourg, France), Borders in Globalization is hosting an academic conference entitled ‘Borders, Politics, and Policies: Using Data to Power Border Research.’

The conference will be held in Strasbourg, France, on June 3rd and 4th, 2024. Conference Registration will be available at the end of March 2024.

We invite proposals for individual papers from academics across disciplines, which are utilizing innovative data to address the policy challenges shaping Europe’s internal and peripheral border policies through a comparative perspective. More information on how to apply can be found here.

The Jean Monnet Network ‘Human to Military Security Policies’ project takes as its premise that the ongoing migration crisis in Europe is the worst humanitarian crisis in decades and is forcing Europeans to face past and future issues about borders and security. The policy decisions being made now will have a long-standing impact on the European Union and are not only reshaping Europe’s internal and peripheral borders, but also Europe’s values of integration. Moreover, in this era of globalization, much of the policy process around humanitarian aid, migration, and security involve collaboration and cooperation across borders.

In light of this clear need for comparative, cross-border research, the Jean Monnet Network ‘Human to Military Security Policies’ project has been building a database, with the goal of collecting systematic and comprehensive data on European Integration across each internal and external border dyad from the perspective of human to military security in the EU. The database includes over 160 dyad pairs, where either one or both dyad countries is an EU member state. Data on a wide range of indicators and variables on the dyads covering all aspects of the human to security continuum, from defense spending to infrastructure continuity to tourism and trade.

More information on the databases projects is available here.

Borders, Politics and Policies: Using Data to Power Border Research

BIG Talk – Blowing Smoke: Pyromania in a Climate-Disrupted and Bordered World

with Dr. Simon Dalby (Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | November 28, 2023

In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick Building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 12:00pm to 1:30pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.

Wildfire has been widespread in recent months, generating more than double the number of evacuees in Canada than in any previous year. Climate change is aggravating fires, but ironically is also being caused by humans making too many fires, because that is what burning fossil fuels is actually doing. Global climate change crosses borders in numerous ways, but attempting to tackle climate change has so far repeatedly run into jurisdictional issues related to bordering practices. In this talk, Dr. Simon Dalby will explore how scholars and activists might now grapple with these new circumstances caused by the overabundance of firepower in its various forms.

Dr. Simon Dalby is a Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Victoria and he holds a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University. His published research deals with climate change, environmental security and geopolitics. He is the author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World (Agenda Publishing 2023), Rethinking Environmental Security (Edward Elgar 2022), Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (University of Ottawa Press 2020), and Security and Environmental Change (Polity 2009).

BIG Talk – Blowing Smoke: Pyromania in a Climate-Disrupted and Bordered World

CFGS Global Talk — Whatever happened to our borderless world? An anarchist rethinking of the ‘open borders’ debate

with Dr. Nick Megoran (Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Global Studies and Borders in Globalization, University of Victoria) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | November 8, 2023

In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 10:30am to 12pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, some writers declared that humanity was on the verge of a ‘borderless world.’ Yet three decades later, the world is more fenced and bordered than ever. In response, many scholars and activists have restated the moral and political case for ‘Open Borders.’ How persuasive are these arguments, and do they help us think through what better borderlands might look like? This talk will draw on anarchist traditions in political theology, as well as the author’s own research in various borderlands, to open a broader discussion of borders in the world today.

Dr. Nick Megoran is a Professor of Political Geography at Newcastle University, England. His research considers what it means to value human life in sites as diverse as international borderlands and the neoliberal workplace. He has studied the Uzbek-Kyrgyz and Danish-German borderlands for nearly three decades, and is interested in how critical geopolitical theory and African-American political theology can help us think through how borders can become places in which human life thrives. His publications include Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary (Pittsburgh, 2017) and Big Questions in An Age of Global Crises (Wipf & Stock, 2022).

CFGS Global Talk — Whatever happened to our borderless world? An anarchist rethinking of the ‘open borders’ debate

BIG Talk — The Seascape Unites Us: Tribal Journeys and Coastal Indigenous Relationality

with Dr. Rachel yacaaʔał George (Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Victoria) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | October 31, 2023

In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 12:00pm to 1:30pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.

Generations of settler colonial policies have sought to sever Indigenous peoples from each other and their homelands and waters. Despite recent commitments to reconciliation, many of these harmful policies continue and are evidenced in the ongoing removal of Indigenous children, and the pushing through of various extractive industry projects. These moves attempt to erase understandings of justice and self-determination that explore the intimate connection between lands, waters, and bodies. As coastal Indigenous nations—as nuučaańuł and Coast Salish peoples—we are intimately connected to our waters. We endure, guided by our kinship and deeply embedded in our relationality, responsibilities, and reciprocity. Drawing on two summers traveling with Kwumut Lelum during Tribal Journeys, this talk centers Indigenous youth experiences and voices on the annual canoe journey bringing together nations along the Pacific. Through their reflections and personal experience, this talk explores how we resist colonial violence and erasure by honouring and renewing our relationality to each other and the water that sustains us.

Rachel yacaaʔał George is nuučaańuł of Ahousaht and Ehattesaht First Nations and grew up in the Metro Vancouver area of British Columbia on the territories of the Qayqayt, Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She holds a BA in History and English from the University of Victoria, an MA in Genocide Studies from the University of Amsterdam, and a PhD in Indigenous Governance from the University of Victoria. She specializes in Indigenous politics—particularly on Indigenous conceptions of justice and their intersections with projects of reconciliation. Her current areas of research include coastal Indigenous governance, relationality, resurgence, and storytelling.

BIG Talk — The Seascape Unites Us: Tribal Journeys and Coastal Indigenous Relationality

BIG Talk – It’s more than just the zipcode: It’s about how one’s access to reproductive services is impacted by various levels of border walls

with Dr. Andréanne Bissonnette (Postdoctoral Fellow, Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | September 26, 2023

In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 12:00PM to 1:30PM PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.

Along the US-Mexico border, how one perceives their access to reproductive health services is often impacted by the various levels of border walls. Women’s position along the border will impact the level of controls implemented by states, and in turn the availability of services. However, identity markers such as immigration status and ethnicity intersect with geographical positioning to impact perceptions and experiences of access to reproductive care. This presentation offers an analysis of Latinas’ perceptions and experiences of access to reproductive health services in two border states (California and Texas). Based on extensive fieldwork (observation, survey and interviews), it demonstrates how immigration status and ethnicity influences how public health policies are lived along the border.

Dr. Andréanne Bissonnette is a postdoctoral fellow at the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University, where she is part of the binational research team focused on the equity of Canada – US border measures during the pandemic. Her research focuses on reproductive health access in the United States, with a focus on the intersections of ethnicity, immigration status, and geographical position. Born along the US-Canada border, her research has brought her to the US-Mexico border several times through the years, including for a research fellowship at the University of Texas at El Paso (2019). She has published her work on reproductive healthcare and health and borders in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Quebec in Montreal.

BIG Talk – It's more than just the zipcode: It’s about how one’s access to reproductive services is impacted by various levels of border walls

BIG Talk – What are we all about?

Victoria, BC & Zoom | September 19, 2023

In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. This event will take place from 12:30PM to 1:30PM PST.

Register in advance for this event here.

Join us to learn all about BIG activities and discover how to get involved with us.

BIG Talk – What are we all about?

Contesting 21st Century B/Orders

European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany | September 6–8, 2023

A little more than two decades into the 21st century, state borders have once more moved to the center of today’s geopolitical tensions. Russia’s war against Ukraine has brought a renewed focus on border contestations, not only in Central Europe. However, at stake in the contestation of borders is not only a territorial political order or the sovereignty of particular states. The relationship of borders to orders is also crucial in determining regulations and norms that govern different forms of inclusion, recognition and exclusion of social groups within states.

Thus, societal orders require drawing borders, whether they mark nation-state or trans-state associations or mark the contested boundaries of symbolic classifications. With migration and mobility, borders not only function as filters that selectively open or close but also as “hierarchizing machines” that produce different status categories. Territorial and material borders, as well as social, symbolic and discursive boundaries and their instantiation, play an essential role in practices of power, practices through which processes of inclusion and exclusion are legitimised and hierarchically structured. Societal orders, for example, set boundaries of belonging to national communities and European or Western civilization. Both within the territorial borders of states and transnationally, they define racially and ethnically defined boundaries and mobilise hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality. At the same time, borders and societal orders, whether economic, legal, social, or cultural, are anything but stable. It is thus crucial to investigate how borders and orders are reproduced, contested, and transformed.

At the international conference “Contesting 21st Century B/Orders“, the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION, in cooperation with the international research networks “Borders in Globalization”– 21st Century borders (BIG) and “Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network” (TEIN), aims to discuss how societal orders in the 21st century are changing through new forms of the border and boundary drawing and to investigate how the borders of the contemporary world are shaped.

The Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION invites you to Frankfurt (Oder) on the German-Polish border to engage in vivid discussions on this highly relevant and debated subject. From September 06-08, 2023, a range of border and order concepts will be put up for discussion: What processes of inclusion and exclusion do they condition? What grey zones and liminal spaces are created by them to what effects? Building on the aspects of marking (durability), permeability, and the formation of border zones (liminality) highlighted by the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION in its founding phase, we focus on the interplay of multidimensional – social, symbolic, and material – border demarcations and their significance for societal orders. Thus, we contribute to scholarly debates in which borders are described in their complexity and multiformity and conceptualized as assemblages, borderscapes, interfaces, or border textures.

A full program can be viewed on the Borders in Motion website or in PDF.

Contesting 21st Century B/Orders