Border

Background

In a world that is frequently claimed “borderless”, state borders remain one of the fundamental features of the international system. Borders play a crucial role in demarcating, connecting, and shaping the adjoining regions’ societies, economies, and ecologies. Border regions are situated at the intersection of influence spheres of on the one hand porous borders and cross-border flows, and on the other hand the state consolidation of and maneuver over its territory.

Retaining approximately 22,000 km land boundary, China has one of the most diversified and complicated border regions in the world. With China’s opening-up and the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, border regions have become one of the frontiers where China’s international exchanges occur, attracting flows of people, goods, and others from both sides of the border. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic and other geopolitical tensions also pose challenges to border governance and revive border control.

Border control under the COVID-19 pandemic

Liu, X., Bennett, M. M. 2020. Viral borders: COVID-19’s effects on securitization, surveillance, and identity in mainland China and Hong Kong. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(2), 158-163. Link

One of the most salient responses to the COVID-19 outbreak was the widespread closure of territorial borders. More unconventional bordering practices have materialized, from the scale of countries to communities and homes. Conceptualizing borders as processes through which power works, this article reflects upon three emergency bordering practices, critiquing how ‘viral borders’ are securitizing the global supply chains of medical products, disciplining citizens, and reterritorializing communities.

Liu, X., Bennett, M. M. Hotels as border infrastructure: Quarantine filtration and violence along China’s edges. Incoming

Governments set up quarantine infrastructure under the pretence of securing public health. Yet such temporary border infrastructure reveals and reproduces socioeconomic hierarchies and inequalities, too.

China’s southwest border

incoming