The extent to which ordinary people can construct, shift, and dismantle borders is seriously neglected in the existing literature. The book explores the ability of citizens to participate in the making of borders, and the empowerment that can result from this bordering and debordering activity. ‘Borderwork’ is the name given to the ways in which ordinary people can make and unmake borders. Borderwork is no longer only the business of nation-states, it is also the business of citizens (and indeed non-citizens).
This study of ‘borderwork’ extends the recent interest in forms of bordering which do not necessarily occur at the state’s external borders. However, the changing nature of borders cannot be reduced to a shift from the edges to the interior of a polity. To date little research has been conducted on the role of ordinary people in envisioning, constructing, maintaining, shifting, and erasing borders; creating borders which facilitate mobility for some while creating barriers to mobility for others; appropriating the political resources which bordering offers; contesting the legitimacy of or undermining the borders imposed by others. This book makes an original contribution to the literature and stands to set the agenda for a new dimension of border studies.
This book was published as a special issue of Space and Polity.
1. Introduction: citizens and borderwork in Europe Chris Rumford 2. Border crossings and "border business": the everyday construction of Finnish-Swedish border Anssi Paasi and Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola 3. "T.H. Marshall at the limit: hiding out in Maas-Rhein Euregio" Olivier Thomas Kramsch and Bohdana Dimitrovova 4. Reconfiguring spaces of conflict: Northern Ireland and the impact of European integration Thomas Diez and Katy Hayward 5. Borderwork beyond inside/outside? Frontex, the citizen-detective and the war on terror Nick Vaughan-Williams 6. Fluid boundaries - British binge drinking and European civility: alcohol and the production and consumption of public space Mark Jayne, Gill Valentine, and Sarah L. Holloway 7. Rebordering the city for new Security challenges: from counter-terrorism to community resilience Jon Coaffee and Peter Rogers 8. Towards social Europeanization and the neutralization of territorial and cultural borders through micro-relationships: a case study of skilled EU migrants in Manchester Paul Kennedy 9. CittàSlow: producing slowness against the fast life Mara Meile
Biography
Chris Rumford is Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London where he is also co-director of the Centre for Global and Transnational Politics. He is the author of European Cohesion: Contradictions in EU Integration (Palgrave, 2000), The European Union: A Political Sociology (Blackwell, 2002), co-author (with Gerard Delanty) of Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (Routledge, 2005), and editor of Cosmopolitanism and Europe (Liverpool University Press, 2007).
