Description
This panel acknowledges and emerges from critical border thinking and asks what knowledges are opened up by poststructural thinking that is situated in the big-ticket global border issues of today. The panel sets off on a number of trajectories which coalesce around the idea that resolving borders enacts a historical narrative that is resisted and rewritten by critical thought; we propose that this historical and deeply cyclical approach, in which the border failures of the past are used as the principal tool to resolve the struggles of present border issues, re/produces a failing sovereign order.
We consider three big-ticket issues: the Irish border after Brexit, human trafficking in and beyond Nepal, and the relationality of climate change and human migration. We ask what happens when we stretch beyond the dominant IR accounts of border, risk and resolution? Who or what is excluded by the statist and anthropocentric focus of such accounts? What is rendered possible by the knowledges produced by poststructuralism in the context of today’s border issues? What do we learn about living from people in their border communities as well as non-human mobilities that resist and reform borders through daily practices? This panel argues that a restructuring of border thought opens new ways not only to rethink how policy is formulated, but also how humans might be partners in the post-Anthropocene world, by re-examining critical border studies through new and evolving lenses of poststructuralism.
