Henk van Houtum

Now, 20 years after our article “Bordering, Ordering and Othering”, the editorial team of TESG has asked me to look back on its formation, and to comment on the appraisals of its continued relevance and influence offered by Anssi Paasi, Bastian Vollmer, James Scott and Chiara Brambilla in this Forum. To this end, I will first explain what the inspiration was for our essay and will shortly revisit the geopolitical triadic frame that we proposed; then, I will discuss the reflections of the commentators while briefly analyzing how the field of border studies has developed; and lastly, I will look ahead and offer, also using their reflections, a brief research agenda to address present and upcoming b/ordering and othering challenges.

What we critically ascertain in this essay is how the modern university is increasingly drifting away from the key ambitions of its own mission statement, and largely by its own doing. Although the typical university in its mission statement claims to aspire outstanding quality, academic freedom, and to contribute to society, in its daily organization, the modern university has normalized and internalized a neoliberal metrical governmentality, in which quality, freedom, and societal benefit risk being exchanged for quantity, managerial control, and status benefit. In this essay, we stand up against this worrying self-harming protection strategy, what we term-following Jacques Derrida-the autoimmunity of the university. To structure our argument, we will discern the main worrying autoimmune paradoxes of this university policy in the hope to further the debate and potentially remedy the university of this self-inflicted harm.

In this article we argue that the EU suffers from autoimmunity: a self-harming protection strategy. Drawing on Derrida’s political understanding of autoimmunity, we contend that the root of this malfunction lies in the EU’s own b/ordering and othering policies, which are intended to immunise the foundational ethos of the EU. For this purpose, we dissect the EU border regime into three linked b/ordering mechanisms: the pre-borders of paper documents that regulate from afar the mobility of the people from visa-obliged countries; the actual land borders often consisting of iron gates and fences regulating mobility on the spot; and the post-border in the form of waiting/detention camps that segregate and enclose the undocumented migrants after entry. We make clear how this discriminatory b/ordering and othering regime has led to a recurrent drawing of ever less porous, inhumane and deadlier borders. Such thanatopolitics finds itself at odds with the humanist values that the EU is supposed to uphold, particularly cross-border solidarity, openness, non-discrimination and human rights. We argue that the EU b/ordering regime has turned fear of the non-EUropean into an increasingly unquestioned – even ‘commonsensical’ – anxiety that has become politically profitable to exploit by extreme nationalistic and EUrosceptic parties. The core of the EU’s autoimmunity that we want to expose lies within this irony: in its attempt to protect what it considers meaningful, the EU has unleashed an autoimmune disorder that has turned the EU into its own most formidable threat.

How is undocumented migration typically mapped in contemporary cartography? To answer this question, we conduct an iconological dissection of what could be seen as the epitome of the cartography on undocumented migration, the map made by Frontex – the EU’s border agency. We find that, rather than a scientific depiction of a migratory phenomenon, its cartography peddles a crude distortion of undocumented migration that smoothly splices into the xenophobic tradition of propaganda cartography – and stands in full confrontation with contemporary geographical scholarship. We conclude with an urgent appeal for more scientifically robust, critical and decidedly more creative cartographies of migration.

Cyprus has been divided for more than four decades by a cease fire line known as " the Green Line ". This long-standing partition has made the island infamous for the seemingly unsolvable antagonism between its " Turkish " and " Greek " inhabitants. In this article, we argue that, in order to better understand why this division has remained obstinately meaningful for Cypriots, we need to " delo-calise " the Green Line that separates them. We contend that the foundation upon which the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots has been built—and consequently also the location of the Green Line keeping them apart—does not lie in an indigenous hostility between the Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking communities of Cyprus. Instead, we argue that this is the result of imperial puppeteering: Cyprus' Greco-Turkish enmity is largely based on perceptions of space, heritage and identification that were first introduced during the British colonisation and have been persistently—if not always deliberately—reinforced by chronic external intrusions and counter-productive conflict-resolution initiatives. We claim that a succession of British imperialism, Hellenic irredentism, Turkish nationalism, Cold-War geopolitics, UN conflict resolution and EU expansion have created, inculcated and reinforced cartographically organized perceptions of space, history and culture—a cartopolitics—that have invented the Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots as identitary categories and perpetuated their antagonism. Thus, rather than an essentially local and binary play, the Cypriot conflict should be regarded as a glocal drama in which outside actors have been pulling the strings of the island's politics. The readjustment of the historiogra-phical and geographical limitations to which the Cypriot conflict has been confined so far has decisive implications for the island's reunification: merely to zoom in on the hostile dichotomy at work is insufficient. Rather, to understand the persistence of the Green Line fracturing the island we need to zoom out from Cyprus. To walk alongside Nicosia's Green Line today implies walking along a lingering past that uncannily refuses to fade away. A succession of sandbags, dilapidated

(2017). The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia. Fennia 195: 1, pp. 85–101. ISSN 1798-5617. In this article we carry out a geopolitical analysis of the turbulent breeze driving the EU into uncharted extremes. To do this we zoom in on three cases that we deem both a response to political extremism and a source of political extremism in themselves: France's state of emergency, Brexit and the pyrrhic victory over the far-right in the Dutch elections of 2017. Our analysis suggests that even though the political forces behind these events have praised their policies or electoral victories as bulwarks to keep extremism in check, the sort of extremism that they try to keep at bay is not as worrying as the counter-productive realpolitik of the traditional establishment they represent. By surreptitiously adopting precisely the kind of extremist political preferences that they claim to set themselves against, these politics show how the establishment in the EU is normalising the extreme geopolitics of exclusion that are structurally undermining the very principles of rule of law, liberal democracy and overall openness on which the EU is based. The result: what used to be easily dismissed as irrational or evil has become the everyday normal. The extremism we so much fear has become the new normality.

2 De-politicizing labour market indifference and immobility in the European Union1 Martin van der Velde and Henk van Houtum2 Some constitutive rules, like exclusive territoriality, are so deeply sedimented or reified that actors no longer think of them as rules at all. (Ruggie ...

Abstract: This introductory chapter discusses the relationship between state governance and specific forms of policy making in the light of three major kind of changes, in governmentality, territoriality and governance itself. Our basic assertion is that policy-specific ...

The number of geographical studies on borders and border regions has increased over the last few decades due to the process of globalization. The European Union (EU) integration process in particular has created demand for such studies of its internal borders and the changing views about them. This research aims to define trends within these geographical studies in terms of the EU integration process and discover commonalities of themes and methods within them. Three approaches are identified (flow, cross‐border cooperation, and people), geographical studies of borders and border regions are categorized within them, and the approaches are compared to one another in an attempt to better understand the trends in geographical research on European borders and border regions.

The Mediterranean Sea has long been a Mare Nostrum but since the decolonisation in the twentieth century it has become a sharp divide between Europe and Africa. In the past decade, the closure of that border has become symbolized by the desperate attempts of migrants from the ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of ...

Over the last few years, the global face of the EU has been changing. The EU is spinning a global border web with regard to the battle against irregular migration. At the borders of the EU, a powerful and security-obsessed distinction between travellers is increasingly being constructed between the travellers who ‘belong to’ the EU and those who do not, based on the fate of birth. To this end, the EU has composed a so-called ‘white and black’ Schengen list, recently relabelled a ‘positive and negative’ list, which is used as a criterion for visa applications. What is striking is that on the negative list a significantly high number of Muslim and developing states are listed. Hence, there is an implicit, strong inclination to use this list not only as a tool to guarantee security in physical terms or in terms of ‘Western’ identity protection but also as a means of keeping the world’s poorest out. Such global apartheid geopolitics—loaded with rhetoric on selective access, burden, and masses—provokes the dehumanisation and illegalisation of the travel of those who were born in what the EU has defined as the ‘wrong country’, the wastable and deportable lives from countries on the negative list. Such unauthorised travelling is increasingly dangerous as the high death toll suggests. It has led to a new and yet all too familiar geopolitical landscape in Europe, a scene many of us hope to never see again in postwar Europe, a landscape of barbed wire surveillance and camps. And hence, the EU—which started out as a means to produce a zone of peace and comfort ruled by law and order—has now in its self-proclaimed war on illegal migrants created a border industry that coconstructs more, not less, ‘illegality’, xenophobia, and fear: the EU as a global border machine.

The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was presented as the EU's strategic response in order to deal with the new situation following the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. According to the EU, these changing circumstances have led to new rationales: 1) coping with its new external borders and neighbours and 2), finding a solution for a further enlargement problem. Both rationales are drawn out of strategic interest avoiding potentially damaging consequences on stability and development. Moreover, new inducements for multilevel cooperation were seen as necessary in order to ‘include’ the neighbouring states and create a prosperous and stable ‘Ring of friends’. The ENP has the objective to contribute to internal transformation and to further the process of ‘Europeanisation’. Europeanisation is explained by the EU as a normative process of sharing European values made concrete through policies of conditionality and socialisation of neighbouring states. This process of expanding ‘Europeanisation’ beyond the EU borders is inspired by an ambiguous and conflicting geopolitics that the EU applies as a strategic instrument. Most notably, this is emphasised by the fact that the ENP on the one hand creates an image of an inferior neighbour that urgently needs to move towards European standards and on the other hand produces a speech politics of mutuality and dialogue.Through the study of EU speeches, communications and documents, we will argue that the rationales behind the ENP suggest a closure of the European Union and allow for neo-colonial interpretations by which pre-defined policies are to be accepted and pre-defined European values are seen as superior to neighbouring local values. This development is both undesirable and harmful. Europe is increasingly re-created as a bounded political entity institutionalised through hierarchical treaties and acts with friends, special friends, and reluctant, unwilling neighbours. In doing so, the EU faces a significant chance of alienating its neighbours and damaging cultures and societies by asymmetrical imperial power-policies based on self-created values. Paradoxically then, ENP that was set up to create good neighbours, risks producing what it wishes to protect from, angry neighbours.

It is almost a truism to say that people increasingly dwell in a transnational context, that is, in-between societal systems and together with multiple nationalities. Increasingly, people are living in a different nation in which they were born. The nation-states people dwell in cannot be equated with territorial container-boxes anymore, if this ever could. The uniform and straight lines in the sand, that borders once were thought to be, are now better understood as a complex choreography of border lines in multiplied lived spaces. This article zooms in on a specific kind of dwelling with multiple borders. It tries to get a conceptual hold of contemporary dwelling places of short-distance migrants across a EU inner border, in this case the Dutch-German border. In recent years, much facilitated by EU cross-border cohesion policies, a substantial number of Dutch people have bought or built a house just across the border in Germany. This has created an interesting new phenomenon of cross-border dwelling, in which the new location of the house is just across the border and the living largely still goes on in the country of origin. This living in two nations at the same time at such a short distance is what we wish to understand better conceptually in this article. We argue that two fundamentally opposed philosophical dwelling conceptualisations could be distinguished. On the one hand one could distinguish a philosophical view in which dwelling is a form of a Heideggerian nest, where people open a space of being, an intimate and secure bordered place, sheltering themselves for the outside world. On the other hand then, a philosophical view could be distinguished in which dwelling is driven by a Deleuzian need to free oneself from a binding b/order of home, through a constant be-coming and estrangement, hence by constantly othering oneself. We argue that in order to understand the borderscape dwellings of Dutch migrants in German borderlands, there is a need to relate these two ends of the dwelling continuum. The argument that we bring forward is that a borderline necessarily moves between total (self-)imprisonment and total escapist openness, making borders in an ontological sense intrinsicially and unavoidably always a shifting line in the sand. In our view, Peter Sloterdijk's imaginative Sphären (Spheres) trilogy could help as a conceptual stimulus to create that much needed bridge between the bordering efforts of nesting and the debordering desire to escape from it. Using Sloterdijk's spherical concepts, the dwelling can be seen as a place which is constantly changing from a secure bubble-like place into a multidimensional foam-like place and back again. With this spherical understanding of the house we argue that this conceptual ‘spheric’ stimulus could help to rethink the complex and ambivalent character of cross-border dwelling places in an increasingly transnational world.

Chapter 1 Prologue: A Border is Not a Border. Writing and Reading Borders in Space Eiki Berg and Henk van Houtum The Lens of the Border Since the last decade of the 20th century there has been a growing interest in borders, border regions, and cross-border studies. Partly ...

CRITICAL SECURITY SERIES ASHGATE Routing Borders Between Territories, Discourses and Practices ... ROUTING BORDERS BETWEEN TERRITORIES, DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES Thls One KRB5-BHW-HXW2 ... Critical Security Series Series Editors: Neil Renwick and ...

Henk van Houtum en Leo Lucassen, twee vooraanstaande migratie-experts, ontvouwen een baanbrekende visie op het Europese migratiebeleid. Er is een Fort Europa ontstaan, met desastreuze gevolgen. De mensensmokkel floreert, er worden dubieuze deals gesloten met autocratische regimes en er vallen duizenden doden. De EU verliest steeds meer grip op haar eigen beleid.

Van Houtum en Lucassen plaatsen de migratie naar Europa in een breder historisch en geografisch perspectief en leggen de tegenstrijdigheden en averechtse effecten van het huidige systeem bloot. In een tienpuntenplan presenteren ze concrete alternatieven voor een duurzaam en rechtvaardig migratiebeleid, voorbij Fort Europa.