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Unsustainable Borders: Globalization in a Climate-Disrupted World
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Climate change and the responses to it reveal starkly different assumptions about borders, security and the ethical communities for whom politicians and activists speak. Starting with the contrasting perspectives of international activist Greta Thunberg and United States President Donald Trump on climate change this essay highlights the diverse political assumptions implicit in debates about contemporary globalization. Rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly severe climate change impacts and accelerating extinctions are the new context for scholarly work in the Anthropocene. Incorporating insights from earth system sciences and the emerging perspectives of planetary politics suggests a novel contextualization for contemporary social science which now needs to take non-stationarity and mobility as the appropriate context for investigating contemporary transformations. The challenge for social scientists and borders scholars is to think through how to link politics, ethics and bordering practices in ways that facilitate sustainability, while taking seriously the urgency of dealing with the rapidly changing material context that globalization has wrought
Borders, Citizenship, and the Local: Everyday Life in Three Districts of West Bengal
No full textBorders have been considered essential to understanding the self and the other, with identities on either side established through functions of exclusion and inclusion. These processes, initially considered to be the preserve of the state as exercised through its policies of border management, also exist in tandem or in an asynchronous manner at the local level. Constituted of processes of identification and networks of interdependences, localized construals of the borderland and subsequently positioned engagements, comes to shape notions of accessibility and restriction as well as perceptions of the “other”. These engagements are not always reflective of statist positions on the border which are often uniform in the conceptualization of its capacity to contain. They subsequently come to reflect the variations of divergent historical and locational realities. There is a need to further extend the analysis of borderlands beyond statist framings as passive recipients of policy as well as recognize the critical positioning of local adaptive processes as antithetical to state demarcations of territoriality and sovereign authority. Based on a survey of three districts in the state of West Bengal, India, this study posits an analysis of the multiple perceptions both within and outside of statist framings of borderland identity and territoriality, which color its inhabitants’ understanding of the border and perceptions surrounding and interactions with the communities that lie beyond it
Borders & Personal Mythologies: An Interview with Emeric Lhuisset
No full textOn February 18, 2021, Elisa Ganivet interviewed the photographer Emeric Lhuisset, known for his immersion in conflict zones. Discussing his art projects, the conversation cross-examined the concepts of border and territory in visual art. Portions of the interview are reproduced here, in English translation from the original French, alongside photos of the artist’s work. (The French-language version will be published in the next issue of BIG_Review.
Storying an interconnected web of relationships in Indigenous language reclamation work and scholarship
No full textSpecial Section – New Border Studies in South Asia: Introduction
No full textIn this special section, New Border Studies in South Asia, BIG_Review Board Member and regional specialist Dhananjay Tripathi edits a collection by emerging scholars of the Indian subcontinent. Through new research and fieldwork, themes explored include identity formation, postcoloniality, forced displacement, and looking beyond the human-centric world in border governance 
From Destruction to Deliverance: Shifting Allied Policies for the Occupation of Germany 1944-1955
No full textIn the wake of the Second World War the nations of the world wished to tear down and destroy Germany and its industrial capacity, dividing the nation up and imposing harsh policies upon it in an attempt to ‘denazify’ the country and to prevent it from ever achieving power again. Due to the destructive nature of these policies and rising tensions during the Cold War, Allied policy shifted to recovery and rehabilitation. By examining the division of Germany and the policies both proposed and imposed by the Allies, this paper seeks to examine the shift in Western Allied occupation policy from the demilitarization and denazification of Germany to policies of support and partnership. Moreover, the paper looks to analyze the extent to which harsh Western Allied occupation policies forced the Allies to eventually turn back on those policies and support the German economy to undo the damage which they had caused
