From Lines to Zones: on the Political Dimensions of Borders

Borders define and separate, they set into relation. At the same time, as Étienne Balibar has noted, borders themselves remain invisible, indefinable. It is my purpose here to expand the notion of the border from a line to a zone. This is necessary to account for the mechanisms through which contemporary politics and power not merely exclude ‘the others’, but place them in a permanent border situation (e.g., migrants who are neither excluded nor included or workers in the gig economy who are neither employées nor employers). Border situations are defined by instability, uncertainty, undecidability; they are not definable by sets of rules, norms, codes belonging to a single political order and thus they destibilize the seemingly stable notion of identity through which contemporary politics is often analyzed. By expanding the notion of a boundary, it is possible to show that the exercise power in contemporary societies is much more dynamic and fluid than the putting into place of identities and drawing of strict boundaries between the included and the excluded (today exemplified by the urgent building of walls). As has been argued in contemporary border studies, borders have become mobile and have permeated the very fabric of everyday socio-political life. It must be asked, then: what and how do borders still define, do they still isolate and separate on the periphery, or have they become central to the socio-political existence of individuals? In order to analyze the theoretical problem of border situations, I will make use of and elaborate upon Giorgio Agamben’s notion ‘zone of indistinction’ and Michel Agier’s anthropology of border rituals.