Introduction

Abstract

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, was heralded by many authors (Ohmae 1995; Shapiro and Alker 1996 and others) as the beginning of a new borderless age. Impressed by the speed of economic globalization, the rapid spread of communication networks, and the increase of affordable international mass transportation, they assumed the end of the world as we knew it and the beginning of a global liberal era. However, despite the proliferation of international institutions and organizations as well as transnational networks of non-state actors, borders remain a prominent fixture of the post Cold War era. Borders have not disappeared, they are still a reality on maps and a physical experience at security checks and passport controls (Rumford 2006: 156), but they have become more diffuse, turning whole territories into borderlands (Balibar in Rumford 2006). While globalization might have seriously changed the consciousness of borders in the global North, where ‘borders are being both multiplied and reduced in their localization and their function, they are being thinned out and doubled’ (Ibid.: 156); in many parts of the South borders have always held a different meaning. In many regions state borders have reflected European powers’ attempts to transform and organize the world by exporting their own conceptions of state and borders. Balibar and Williams (v) speak of the construction of ‘another Europe’ which was never really achieved. Most of the territories that gained independence and became sovereign states, represented in the international arena, were hardly unified or homogeneous nation states (Balibar and Williams 2002: 75). In most cases the entities that gained independence were traditional units, created and constructed by their colonizers, some with scant regard to realities on the ground, often driving extended families and ethnicities apart. In many parts of the South, cross-border migration and movements are an everyday practice of people living in borderlands, reducing the meaning of borders to little more than demarcation lines on maps.