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

Abstract

This article advances the understanding of borders with respect to their epistemological, ontological, 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’.