Rethinking Authority in China’s Border Regime

In the 21st century, governments around the globe are faced with the question on how to tackle new migratory mobilities. Governments increasingly become aware of irregular immigration and are forced to re-negotiate the dilemma of open but secure borders. Rethinking Authority in China’s Border Regime: Regulating the Irregular investigates the Chinese government’s response to this phenomenon. Hence, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese border regime. It explores the regulatory framework of border mobility in China by analysing laws, institutions, and discourses as part of an ethnographic border regime analysis. It argues that the Chinese state deliberately creates ‘zones of exception’ along its border. In these zones, local governments function as ‘scalar managers’ that establish cross-border relations to facilitate cross-border mobility and create local migration systems that build on their own notion of legality by issuing locally valid border documents. The book presents an empirically rich story of how border politics are implemented and theoretically contributes to debates on territoriality and sovereignty as well as to the question of how authority is exerted through border management. Empirically, the analysis builds on two case studies at the Sino-Myanmar and Sino-North Korean borders to illustrate how local practices are embedded in multiscalar mobility regulation including regional organizations such as the Greater Mekong Subregion and the Greater Tumen Initiative.

Bayeh, Jumana – Oleinikova, Olga (eds.): Democracy, Diaspora, Territory: Europe and Cross-Border Politics

This volume offers a profoundly new interpretation of the impact of modern diasporas on democracy, challenging the orthodox understanding that ties these two concepts to a bounded form of territory. Considering democracy and diaspora through a deterritorialised lens, it takes the post-Euromaidan Ukraine as a central case study to show how modern diasporas are actively involved in shaping democracy from a distance, and through their political activity are becoming increasingly democratised themselves. An examination of how power-sharing democracies function beyond the territorial state, Democracy, Diaspora, Territory: Europe and Cross-Border Politics compels us to reassess what we mean by democracy and diaspora today, and why we need to focus on the deterritorialised dimensions of these phenomena if we are to adequately address the crises confronting numerous democracies. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in migration and diaspora, political theory, citizenship and democracy.

Populist and ‘Post-Truth’ Border Politics

Chapter 3 investigates the role of populist and ‘post-truth’ narratives of migration and border crises propagated by governmental and non-governmental elites in fuelling widespread notions of a ‘loss of control’, despite the intensification of walling and deterrent security measures. In order to contextualize findings in subsequent chapters, a significant proportion of the discussion is devoted to the five national political and cultural contexts in which focus groups were held (Germany, Greece, Hungary, Spain, United Kingdom). First, a close examination of the methodologies used to produce several prominent opinion poll findings on migration reveals that they were produced by surveys whose design often worked within and thereby reproduced the dominant securitizing frame. Second, with reference to populist discursive and visual representations of mobile populations and a loss of control over border security, it is shown how the rise of ‘post-truth’ communication over the same timeframe produced multiple competing realities of the situation in the EU, which simultaneously entrenched the crisis narrative and deprived audiences of detailed and reliable information. Third, it is demonstrated how leading opinion polls, used by governmental elites as ‘evidence’ of EU citizens’ pro-border and anti-immigration stance, were unable to grasp the performativity of their own role in perpetuating the dynamics of crisis that they purported merely to capture. Alternative modes of engaging with the politics of ‘public opinion’ are thus urgently required. A vernacular approach offers a series of disruptive counter-points to existing sources of elite knowledge and understanding about EU citizens’ views on migration and border security.

The Racial Politics of Emotion: Teaching an Interdisciplinary Border Institute in the Midwest

The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalization of immigrants and migrants, and humanitarian emergency surrounding the border has negatively impacted students and schools. Responding to the impact of U.S. border politics on education, we taught a week-long institute for local teachers to learn about the histories and lived experiences connecting the Central American, Mexican, and U.S. borders. During the institute we asked participants—who were predominantly white K-12 teachers—to reflect on their learning experiences in personal journals. The aim of this study was to investigate the racial politics of emotion when confronting border issues in a classroom setting. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to our analysis, we conducted qualitative content analysis and close readings of twenty-one teacher’s journals to determine patterns in the emotional response’s teachers had to the histories, testimonies, audio, and visual accounts to which they were exposed through readings and seminars. The results of our analysis reveal that emotions were used by participants to maintain racial boundaries and reinforce race-based notions of national belonging, but also to challenge injustice both in and beyond classroom settings. The findings have significant implications about the impact that ethnic studies programs and critical race theory curriculum may have on teacher education.