SOAS Research Online

Abstract

What is a border? Who is a migrant? The paper uses these questions to distinguish between constructivist, Marxist and postcolonial answers provided by critical border scholarship, with three aims. First, identifying common concerns and interrogating divergent trajectories, the paper suggests that the conversation between various positions is stifled and offers a practical invitation to dialogue. Second, it evidences how critical border scholarship follows a social-to-spatial analytical trajectory to answer these questions: borders and migration function as a spatial confirmation of a pre-defined ontology of the social. As this is deemed unsatisfactory, third, the paper proposes turning this analytical trajectory on its head by going back to borders, i.e. studying the spatial manifestations of borders and migration to investigate how the social is heterogeneously configured in place-specific and embodied settings. The paper argues that What is left after these debates is the need to focus on actual social hierarchies, as opposed to epistemological ones.