Published in Borderlands
This article is an edited version of a conversation that took place on 4 August 2019 at the State Library of Queensland located on the traditional lands of the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples. This article is part of a series of published conversations between Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian, author and translator (one instalment also includes inte...
Published in Borderlands
State sovereignty is customarily connected to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which it is argued established the ideal of political authority being tied to static geographical containers. While academic scholarship has demonstrated that this ideal fails to account for performative and fluid modes of political power, Westphalian sovereignty remains an...
Published in Borderlands
Colonialism left numerous borders in its wake that subsequently became contested. These colonial borders have often been discussed as artificial, dividing communities, people or ethnicities that otherwise would belong together. Such an interpretation of colonial borders, I argue in this article, overlooks another important aspect of colonial bounda...
Published in Borderlands
Antarctica is arguably the only geographical territory left on Earth without political borders. Narratives of peace, science and environmental protection in the Antarctic Treaty System drive a collective governance system that avoids border discourse even though physical boundaries exist. This article fills a gap in Antarctic research by exploring ...
Published in Borderlands
Materially and symbolically manifest, borders are shaped by history, politics and power. This second special issue of a two-part series brings together an international collective of authors who presented their papers at a conference on Technologies of Bordering convened by the editors at the University of Melbourne, Australia in July 2019. We invi...
Published in Borderlands
Notions of human rights and the technologies deploying those notions, legally, institutionally, in advocacy and social discourse, enact a tangled knot of contesting and asserting borders. Universalist assertions of human rights seek to transcend national borders, appealing to a wider grasp of the human, but the formal pursuit of rights establishes ...
Published in Borderlands
In the context of the refugee crisis, seascapes are taking on new dimensions with borders shifting from the shoreline to being redrawn in the water itself. As such, refugees are now crossing waters that have become extended sovereign borders. This is manifest in increased maritime surveillance to prevent refugees arriving by boat and landing on Eur...
Published in Borderlands
The border bifurcating the island of Timor was arbitrarily created in the late nineteenth century by the Portuguese and the Dutch. It is a border that has divided and separated the people of the ancient kingdoms of Koba Lima ever since, constraining relationships with their ancestral sacred sites, lands and waters. Timor’s wild animals, plants and ...
Published in Borderlands
Policy regarding people arriving by boat in order to seek asylum was a key focus of political discourse during the 2013 Australian Federal Election campaign. Evening television news reports on the unfolding election revealed a bipartisan push for increasingly punitive approaches to the treatment of people seeking asylum. As such borders and the pro...
Published in Borderlands
This article proposes an analysis of Wim Wenders’ Il volo (2010), which could be translated as Flight. This short documentary film shows how 300 immigrants, who had debarked on the Ionic side of Italy, were welcomed by the local Calabrian communities of the so-called ghost towns or shrinking cities in the Locride. Contrary to what the topic of Wend...
