material and fleshy bodies attracted less
attention. This gap has, however, started to
be filled: Longhurst (2001) implements
Grosz’s theory of the volatile materiality of
the body through ideas of body boundaries,
body fluids,abjectionand (im)pure spaces;
studies on illness, impairment anddisability
explore ‘body troubles’ in everyday coping
with the environment; and theories of
practiceandnon-representational theory
focus on moving bodies and the performative
and material nature of embodiment. The
latter also dissolves the distinction between
the human and non-human, the organic and
non-organic (see alsocyborg). ks
Suggested reading
Bell and Valentine (1995); Butler and Parr
(1999); Longhurst (2001); Nast and Pile (1998).
border A form ofboundaryassociated with
the rise of the modernnation-stateand the
establishment of an inter-stategeopolitical
order, founded – most famously with the
foundational myths of the 1648 Treaty of
Westphalia (Teschke, 2003) – on the political
norms of national states claiming and using
terror to controlterritory(as the etymology
is also sometimes interpreted: see Hindess,
2006). Both on maps and on the ground,
borders make spaces of nationalsovereignty,
and are thus key sites where the ‘inside versus
outside’ distinctions ofterritoriality and
modern international relations are at
once reproduced, reinforced, contested and
transcended (Walker, 1993; Agnew, 2003a).
Thus, as the French philosopher Etienne
Balibar suggests, borders are ‘overdetermined,
and in that sense, sanctioned, reduplicated
and relativized by other geopolitical divisions’
(Balibar, 2002, p. 79). It is for this same rea-
son that political geographers have increas-
ingly focused on what many call ‘re-(b)
ordering’ (Newman, 2002; Kolossov, 2005;
Van Houtum, 2005; Van Houtum, Kramsch
and Zierhofer, 2005).
Borders appear in geopolitical discourses
that at once reproduce and reinforce the
nation-state. In media ranging from the legal
and pedagogic to the prosaic and banal – from
court-case cartography, school maps and mu-
seums, to murals, cartoons and even weather
forecasts – imaginative geographiesscript
and thereby sanction the divisions of national
borders (Paasi, 2005a; Sparke, 2005; Ander-
son, 2006a; Painter, 2006). These cultural
geographies of border construction in turn
inform the actual enforcement of borders on
the ground through both social practices
and state practices of border control (Nevins,
2002; Coleman, 2005). Many border-but-
tressing social practices are xenophobic, and
remain animated today in many parts of the
world by provincial, racist and/or masculinist
fantasies about foreign ‘floods’ overwhelming
homeland defenses (see Theweleit, 1987;
Darian-Smith, 1999; Wright, 1999b; Price,
2004). However, while such social reinfor-
cement continues to reduplicate twentieth-
century divisions produced by liberal regimes
of ethno-racial and sexualgovernmentality,
contemporary state practices of border
control are simultaneously being shaped by
the newclassdivisions and related but con-
text-contingent recombination of neo-liberal
governmentality with neo-liberalgovernance.
It is in this way that the borders inside and
around various free trade regions are being
both softened and hardened simultaneously.
Within the EU (Sparke, 2000a; Walters,
2002), the NAFTA region (Bhandar, 2004;
Coleman, 2005; Gilbert, 2007), and diverse,
smaller scale cross-border free market
development zones (for which the Malaysia–
Indonesia–Singapore growth triangle is the
prototype; see Sparke, Sidaway, Bunnell
and Grundy-Warr, 2004), governments are
attempting to bifurcate border management:
facilitating fast crossing for business travellers
and increasing punitive policing of working
class ‘others’ deemed dangerous to the neo-
liberal free market order.
The neo-liberal class-divided relativization
of borders is not happening in the same way
everywhere. Within the NAFTA zone there
remain all sorts of informal cross-border
economies (see Staudt, 1998), and in Europe,
while the old Cold War East German/West
German border has turned into an Ossie/
Wessie social class divide (Berdhal, 1999),
the Iron Curtain border of thecold war
past has not been bifurcated but, rather, sub-
sumed into an EU growth and integration
zone (Scott, 2002; Smith, 2002a). And these
kinds of complexities seem minor in contrast
to the ways in which the new border between
Israeli-occupied enclaves and Palestinian-
controlled parts of the West Bank reduplicates
the geopolitics of religious and ethnic divi-
sions with a vengeance, all the while relativiz-
ing the old Green Line and hopes of a ‘good
border’ by imposing a monumental and mili-
tarized class divide with the new concrete
curtain of the colonial present (Gregory,
2004b; Newman, 2005; see also Falah and
Newman, 1995).Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_B Final Proof page 52 31.3.2009 11:01amBORDER