Rethinking borders, violence, and conflict: From sovereign power to borderscapes as sites of struggles

摘要

This article advances the understanding of borders with respect to their epistemological, onto-logical, and empirical intersections with violence and conflict, which remain understudied within critical border studies. Specifically, the article explores the potential of recent interdisciplinary research on the border-migration nexus to find critical resources that might foster a better understanding of the complex relationships between borders, violence, and conflict. From this viewpoint, the border is not only a site of the founding violence of the sovereign power, but borders - reconceived as borderscapes - can also be regarded as a site of generative struggles where alternative subjectivities and agencies could be shaped. The article concludes with a call for an applied, committed, and engaged research capable of recovering its inherently political dimension moving towards a 'politics of hope' and beyond the simplistic yet dominant interpretations of the border-violence-conflict intersections, which are trapped in the 'politics of fear'.