ABSTRACT
Mobility is one of the distinguishing characters of modern globalization, demonstrated in dramatically increased empirical flows of capital, information, and people. The border has become one of the dominant spatio-legal metaphors of contemporary politics, either in their purported disappearance, rearticulation, or surprising persistence. Michele Acuto says “borders have to be measured for their presence, or absence, and the role they play in constructing social relations” (Acuto 2008: 1). Manuel Castells, Zygmunt Bauman, and John Urry use metaphors of flow, liquidity or fluidity to describe the essence of globalization; the character of these movements is determined by the porosity of borders. In Castells' terms, borders can be understood the “hubs and nodes” that determine the speed, direction, and composition of the “space of flows” (Castells 2000: 443). Within this global network society, routing and identification become key vectors of control. Bauman cautions that mobility should not be over-estimated, arguing that 98 percent of all people are immobile. Borders must be examined in concert with mobility because, as Mimi Sheller and Urry argue, “the study of mobility also involves those immobile infrastructures that organise the intermittent flow of people, information, and image, as well as the borders or ‘gates’ that limit, channel, and regulate movement or anticipated movement” (Sheller and Urry 2006: 212). Even as mobility becomes one of the primary axes of global inequality, “the map image of the borders of the state still exercises a major influence on the territorial imagination of whose security is at stake, and who most threatens it” (Agnew 2007: 300). Globalization studies, not to mention sociology, and geography, political science, international relations, and anthropology, bring different perspectives to the study of borders.
