ABSTRACT
The location and crossing of borders, and the associated rules and regulations as to how, when and whose movement across these will take place, are the very stuff of geopolitics as both a practical series of encounters, and the academic field that critically engages these. Borders cleave and bind. They express both a Cartesian promise as to where voluminous national territories and their contents begin and end, and a topological potentiality as to how things and people can be brought into propinquity. They are where sovereign reach and access are confirmed, thwarted, negotiated and practised, where processes of identification and documentation are intensified, and emotions and affects pertaining to belonging and expulsion are mobilised. Thus the body of the ‘traveller,’ for example, makes visible a series of geopolitical apparatus,’ from the ‘securing’ of those volumes of space claimed by nation-states, and the protections and obligations granted by these, to the carving out of legal and illegal passages of transit (the flight-space, the tunnel, the diplomat’s bag and so on) and the possibilities and constraints upon a corporeal mobility that emerge in their traversal. The posted package does similar work: here, transport geographies composed of logistics and carriers, export/import agreements, wrapping, tracking and guarantees, both allow for and mark the passage of a thing from one place to another.
