The Dictionary of Human Geography

Contextual contingencies noted, the emer-
gence of a transnational business class with
increasingly globalrightsto ownproperty,
make contracts and move freely has clearly
been marked at and on borders the world
over. State border management is becoming
increasingly transnationalized in its global co-
ordination, with border-relativizing reliance
being placed on individualized biometric
codes rather than traditional national pass-
ports (Adey, 2004; Salter, 2007). Meanwhile,
as the US continues to wage its so-called war
on terror, the soft-cosmopolitanismof the
border-crossing kinetic elites seems set to be
accompanied by the creation of a carceral
cosmopolitanism for those border-crossers
deemed a threat to the free world (Sparke,
2006). Within these developments we can
see – to return to a term of Balibar’s – the
‘other scene’ of borders today: a scene in
which the sovereignty system supposedly
established at Westphalia is superseded by a
new kind of global ‘terrortory’, delinked from
the nation-state and its geographical borders
(cf. Kelly, 2005; Hindess, 2006). ms

borderlands A key term in two contempo-
rary literatures, the concept-metaphorof bor-
derlands is employed alternatively as either a
research re-focusing concept for scholars who
study cross-border regional development (e.g.
Pratt and Brown, 2000), or as a meaning re-
making metaphor designed to disrupt normal-
izing notions ofnationand thenation-state
(e.g. Anzaldu ́a, 1999). Both uses of the term
refer back to the geographicalregionssur-
rounding international borders, and both
also frequently involve attempts to describe
the lives and imaginative geographies of
people whose daily practices, economic activ-
ities and cultural connections cross the bor-
ders that define nation-states. But whereas
research on cross-border regional develop-
ment tries to draw analytical comparisons
between different models of borderlands
governance, work on the multiple meanings
of borderlands seeks to find antidotes to
nationalist chauvinism and attendant forms
of ethnic absolutism in the cross-cultural
intermixing of everyday borderland life. This
does not mean that the disruptive uses of
the term are always focused on just cultural
hybridity. There are some brilliant border-
lands studies that underline how everyday eco-
nomic, social and political ties across border
regions are just as disruptive of normative
assumptions about nation-states and related
forms of gendered, racialized and/or

ethnicized identity (Staudt, 1998; Berdahl,

1999; Darian-Smith, 1999, Price, 2004).

Likewise, there are also many usefully sober-

ing studies that show how, in all too many

cases, such disruptions still continue to be

exploited, controlled and/or destroyed

through various combinations of state- and

market-mediatedviolence (Wright, 1999b;

Nevins, 2002; Lindquist, 2004; Coleman,

2005).

Inspired in part by the studies that highlight

howpowerrelations become particularly evi-

dent in borderlands, and catalysed by an

emerging governmental interest in cross-

border regional planning, there has been a

recent explosion of articles and edited volumes

on border-region development that are in-

creasingly attuned to the ways in which such

regions make manifest diverse political geog-

raphies of reterritorialization (Eskelinen, Lii-

kanen and Oksa, 1999; Perkmann and Sum,

2002; Nicol and Townsend-Gault, 2005; van

Houtum, Kramsch and Ziefhofer, 2005).

While a few contributions to this literature

seek to emulate a corporatetransnational-

ism and promote branded borderlands for

capitalist development (e.g. Artibise, 2005),

other works critically chart the ways in which

such place promotionalism feeds into and out

of the cross-border regional entrenchment of

neo-liberalism(Perkmann, 2002; Nicol and

Townsend-Gault, 2005; Sparke, 2005).

But borderlands continue to be shaped by a

multitude of other forms of reterritorialization

too, and whether these take geographical shape

as geopolitics (see Scott, J.W., 2002, 2005b;

Brunn, Watkins, Fargo and Lepawsky, 2005;

Edwards, 2005), hybrid natures (Sletto, 2002;

Fall, 2005) or post-colonial sovereignties

(Mbembe, 2000; Kramsch, 2002; Sidaway,

2002; Sparke, Sidaway, Bunnell and Grundy-

Warr, 2004), borderlands provide usefully

prismatic lenses on to the changing geography

of power in the context ofglobalization. ms

Boserup thesis Classical political econo-

mists, and Malthus and Ricardo in particular,

developed in the early stages ofdemographic

transitionin Europe a macroeconomic the-

ory of the relations between population growth

and agriculture. Ricardo (1817) distinguished

between intensive and extensive agricultural

expansion:extensive expansionpresumed the

extension of cultivation into new lands that

were marginal and therefore subject to dimin-

ishing returns to labour and capital, whereas

intensive expansion enhanced the output of

existing lands through the application of better

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BOSERUP THESIS