ST Borders K

***1NC Shell***
Policy focus on reforming the way the border is policed normalizes the border as a
space enactment and trades off with our ability to engage with it at a representational
and ontological level.
Shapiro 97—Professor of Political Science @ University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (Michael J., 1997, “Violent
Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War,” pp. 29-31, rmf)
The most important result, from the point of view of narratives of warfare, is that whereas the
distinction between internal and external politics previously had been unclear, it became more distinct
in terms of both power and representation. The state's domination of both coercion and its
representation resulted in a discourse on war that trivializes what is "inside," representing within-state
violence in terms of law enforcement, the maintenance of domestic security, and so on. By ignoring
various forms of disorder within the national imaginary—that is, perpetuating the fantasy of an
untroubled and unitary order—practices of violence maintain their ontological function. They operate
to protect boundaries between the "American people" and a dangerous world "outside," while the
inside is depluralized as a unitary citizen body. War and Ontology As I have noted, political science
discourses on war for the most part are dominated by a statecentric, strategic orientation. Indeed, so
persistent has been the statecentric, geopolitical cartography that security analysts often end up
reasserting it at the same time that they recognize its limitations. This is evident, for example, in Samuel
Huntington's recent attempt to refigure global political geography. Speaking of the "cultural fault lines"
separating different "civilizations," he asserts that they are displacing state boundaries as the
geographic framing of political identity. His next move, however, is to reconstruct a nation-state map in
which civilizational affiliations have a more determining effect on international alliances (that is, nation-
state political coalitions) than the old cold war configuration." Huntington's conceptual recidivism is
telling. Apart from his underestimation of the influence of secular bourgeois classes in maintaining the
strength of states against alternative forms of solidarity,100 he redraws the geopolitical map to make
the new affiliations he sees conform to a state-oriented set of antagonisms. For such strategic thinkers,
the prevailing discourse on global power is so closely tied to the traditional state model of space that the
geopolitical map is retrieved in the midst of a discussion aimed at departing from it. Clearly the
persistence of the strategic view is owed to more than reasons of state. Identity-related territorial
commitments and the cartographic imaginaries they produce at the level of representation are tied to
ontological structures of self-recognition. The nation-state and its related world of Others persists in
policy discourses because of ontological impulses that are dissimulated in strategic policy talk,
articulations in which spatial predicates are unproblematic. To foreground the significance of ontology in
warring violence and to heed the cartographic predicates of self-Other interpretations, space must be
treated explicitly as a matter of practice. Rather than naturalizing spaces of enactment by focusing on
the actions by which boundaries are policed, defended, and transgressed—the familiar focus of war
and security studies—the emphasis must be on the practices, discursive and otherwise, for
constructing space and identity, on the ways that the self-alterity relationships are historically framed
and played out. This emphasis requires an anthropological rather than a strategic approach to war, or,
more specifically, ethnographic inquiries into how war is located among contending forces at social and
cultural levels rather than strategic inquiries into how war is conducted logistically.
The border is an ontological division of the inside and outside that enables the
creation of the nation’s identity. It is an artificial imposition onto the world that fuels
nationalism.
Agnew 08—Department of Geography @ UCLA (John, 2008, Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp.
175-191“Borders on the mind: re-framing border thinking,” rmf)
A third connection with political identity is made by those who emphasize the idea of ‘the exception’ in
relation to border control. From this viewpoint, associated most closely with the conservative argument
of Carl Schmitt about the suspension of law to protect the essence of the state and the radical argument
of Giorgio Agamben to the effect that the sovereignty of the state puts the very life of people in doubt
depending on their biopolitical classification, borders are absolutely central to the definition of the
state.30 They function to decide who is inside and who is outside in an essential opposition between
the ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ (or Romans and barbarians) into whom the world is divided for these
theorists. The ‘idiom’ of the exception has recently become extremely popular in trying to understand
various facets of the so-called War on Terror, such as the US prison at Guanta´namo Bay, Cuba, and the
‘rendition’ of terrorist suspects between states to avoid writs of habeus corpus and to facilitate the use
of torture to extract information and exact confessions.31 But to Agamben, in particular, this signals the
onset of something much more dramatic: the exception is everywhere becoming the rule. Citizens are
now also inmates or detainees in giant ‘camps’ rather than purposeful agents. As one sympathetic
interpreter puts the argument, ‘The state maintains order not through law but through obedience’.32
The analogy of the camp (most notably, Auschwitz) can be made to border containment the world over.
Unfortunately, in departing from much by way of any empirical analysis, this approach neither explains
the specific political structures associated with a Guanta´namo Bay33 nor how much the notion of the
extra-legal exception adds to the understanding of military interventions, international law, or border
controls.34 Agamben’s putative radical politics of avoidance may well point beyond actual borders as
such, but his analysis of the existing world remains trapped within them.35 In this perspective,
therefore, borders are obviously key moments in the mechanics of a worldwide and thus generic
territorialized political imagination, even when claiming to move beyond them. ‘DISABLING’ BORDERS To
many commentators on borders, however, they are explicitly deemed as arbitrary, contingent, or even
perverse. Most importantly, international borders are not just any old boundaries. To begin with,
worldwide, it is hard to find a single international boundary that has not been inspired by the example
and practices of an originally European statehood. Much of this was the direct result of the imposition
and subsequent breakup of European empires outside of Europe into state-like units, even if, as in Latin
America, there was rather more local inventiveness than there was at a later date in Asia and Africa. But
it has also been more broadly the result of the spread of a model of territorial statehood, a state-
centered political economy, and the association of democracy with territorial citizenship from Europe
into the rest of the world. At one and the same time, both a political ideal and set of socio-political
practices, the imagination of territorial statehood rests on imitation and diffusion of established political
models that define what is and what is not possible in the world at any particular time and in any
particular place. European (and, later, American) cultural hegemony has thus ‘written the script’ for the
growth and consolidation of a global nation-state system. The model of statehood has had as its central
geographical moment the imposition of sharp borders between one state unit (imagined as a nation-
state, however implausible that usually may be) and its neighbors. Previously in world history, a wide
range of types of polity co-existed without any one*empire, city-state, nomadic network, dynastic state,
or religious polity*serving as the singular model of ‘best political practice’. It is only with the rise of
Europe to global predominance that an idealized European territorial state became the global
archetype. Part of the political tragedy of the contemporary Middle East and Africa, for example, lies in
the attempted reconciliation of the EuroAmerican style territorial state of sharp borders with ethnic and
religious identities distributed geographically in ways that do not lend themselves to it.36 Lurking
behind bordering everywhere is the effect of that nationalism which has come along with the
territorial nation-state: that being perpetually in question, national identity has to be constantly re-
invented through the mobilization of national populations (or significant segments thereof). Borders,
because they are at the edge of the national-state territory, provide the essential focus for this collective
uncertainty.37 Even as defined strictly, therefore, but also by remaining in perpetual question, state
borders provide the center of attention for more generalized elite, and sometimes popular, anxiety
about what still remains to be achieved by the state for the nation.38 The everyday nationalism in which
borders are implicated as central moments, then, is not a project that simply takes place at the border
or simply between adjacent states.39 Indeed, it is only secondarily territorial in that its origins often lie
in distant centers and in scattered Diasporas where elites and activists engage in the task of defining and
defending what they understand as the nationstate’s borders, the better to imagine the shape or geo-
body of their nation. Consider, for example, the histories of Irish nationalism and Zionism with their
origins in scattered Diasporas. State borders are not, therefore, simply just another example of, albeit
more clearly marked, boundaries. They are qualitatively different in their capacity to both redefine
other boundaries and to override more locally-based distinctions.40 They also have a specific historical
and geographical origin. If social boundaries are universal and transcendental, if varying in their
incidence and precise significance, state borders, in the sense of definitive borderlines, certainly are not.
They have not been around for time immemorial.41 Attempts to claim that bordering is historic in the
sense of unequivocal and definite delimitation, or to take bordering as a given of state formation are,
therefore, empirically problematic. What is evident has been the need to give borders a deep-seated
historical genealogy even when this is a fictive exercise.42 There is, then, nothing at all
‘natural’*physically or socially*to borders. They are literally impositions on the world. This is not to say
that borders are somehow simply metaphorical or textual, without materiality; lines on a map rather
than a set of objects and practices in space.43 It is more that borders are never transcendental objects
that systematically secure spaces in which identities and interests can go unquestioned. We may today
also be living in a time when they will begin to lose their grip because they no longer match the
emerging spatial ontology of a world increasingly transnational and globalized.44 In the first place, as
impositions, borders frequently transgress rather than celebrate or enable cultural and political
difference. For example, the US-Mexican border cuts through historic migration fields and flows of
everyday life,45 perhaps around 40 million people have US-Mexico crossborder family relations;46 the
Israel-Gaza border is a prison perimeter premised on collective punishment of a population for electing
rocket-firing adherents to Hamas; and most borders in the Middle East and Africa make no national or
cultural sense whatsoever (e.g. the Somalia-Ethiopia border with more than 4 million Somalis within
Ethiopia or the Israel-Palestine border that is constantly in mutation as Israeli settlers encroach on what
had been widely agreed was ‘Palestinian’ territory). But in every one of these cases, borders play a
crucial role in focusing the aspirations of the groups on either side. The perpetual instability of the
border is precisely what gives it such symbolic power in the mind’s eye of the nationalists who
favor/challenge it.

Racism is a manifestation of nationalist sentiment

Balibar 91 (Étienne Balibar, French philosopher and a Distinguished Professor of French & Italian and
Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, “Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities,”
pgs 37-38, http://rebels-library.org/files/ambig_ident.pdf)
Racist organizations most often refuse to be designated as such, laying claim instead to the title of
nationalist and claiming that the two notions cannot be equated. Is this merely a tactical ploy or the symptom of a fear
of words inherent in the racist attitude? In fact the discourses of race and nation are never very far apart, if only in
the form of disavowal: thus the presence of 'immigrants' on French soil is referred to as the cause of an
'anti-French racism'. The oscillation of the vocabulary itself suggests to us then that, at least in already
constituted national states, the organization of nationalism into individual political movements
inevitably has racism underlying it. At least one section of historians has used this to argue that racism as theoretical
discourse and as mass phenonemon - develops 'within the field of nationalism', which is ubiquitous in the modern
era.' In this view, nationalism would be, if not the sole cause of racism, the at least the determining condition
of its production. Or, it is also argued, the 'economic' explanations (in terms of the effects of crises) or 'psychological' explanations (in
terms of the ambivalence of the sense of personal identity and collective belonging) are pertinent in that they cast light upon presuppositions
or subsidiary effects of nationalism. Such a thesis confirms, without doubt, that racism has nothing to do with the existence of objective
biological 'races',2 It shows that racism is a historical or cultural - product, while avoiding the equivocal position of
'culturalist' explanations which, from another angle, also tend to make racism into a sort of invariant of human nature. It has the advantage of
breaking the circle which traces the psychology of racism back to explanations which are themselves purely psychological. Lastly, it performs a
critical function in relation to the euphemistic strategies of other historians who are very careful to place racism outside the field of nationalism
as such, as if it were possible to define the latter without including the racist movements in it, and therefore without going back to the social
relations which give rise to such movements and are indissociable from contemporary nationalism (in particular, imperialism).'
a

Vote negative to reject the geographic imaginary of the border. We must move
outside the remit of the geopolitical map—only our approach provides a truly ethical
encounter with the Other.
Shapiro 97—Professor of Political Science @ University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (Michael J., 1997, “Violent
Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War,” pp. 174-177, rmf)
Michel Foucault was calling for such intervention when he noted that the purpose of critical analysis is
to question, not deepen, existing structures of intelligibility. Intelligibility results from aggressive,
institutionalized practices that, in producing a given intelligible world, exclude alternative worlds. "We
must," Foucault said, "make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its
necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces."7 Like Foucault, Derrida
claimed that a recognition of practices of exclusion is a necessary condition for evoking an ethical
sensibility. His insights into the instability and contentiousness of the context of an utterance, in his
critique of Austin, provides access to what is effectively the protoethics of ethical discourse, the various
contextual commitments that determine the normative implications of statements. To heed this
observation, it is necessary to analyze two particular kinds of contextual commitments that have been
silent and often unreflective predicates of ethical discourses. And it is important to do so in situations in
which contending parties have something at stake—that is, by focusing on the ethics of encounter.
Accordingly, in what follows, my approach to "the ethical" locates ethics in a respect for an-Other's
identity performances with special attention to both the temporal or narrative dimension and the
spatial dimension of those performances. Moreover, to produce a critical political approach to the
ethics of the present, it is necessary to oppose the dominant stories of modernity and the
institutionalized, geopolitical versions of space, which support existing forms of global proprietary
control, for both participate unreflectively in a violence of representation. The ethical sensibility offered
in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas provides an important contribution to the ethics-as-nonviolent-
encounter thematized in my analysis. Levinas regarded war, the ultimate form of violence, as the
suspension of morality; "it renders morality derisory," he said. Moreover, Levinas's thought fits the more
general antiClausewitzian/antirationalist approach to war thematized in prior chapters, for Levinas
regarded a strategically oriented politics—"the art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means,"
which is "enjoined as the very essence of reason"—as "opposed to morality."8 In order to oppose war
and promote peace, Levinas enacted a linguistic war on the governing assumptions of Western
philosophy. He argued that philosophy from Plato through Heidegger constructed persons and peoples
within totalizing conceptions of humanity. The ethical regard, he insisted, is one that resists
encompassing the Other as part of the same, that resists recognizing the Other solely within the already
spoken codes of a universalizing vision of humankind. However problematic Levinas's notion of infinite
respect for an alterity that always evades complete comprehension may be (an issue I discuss later), it
nevertheless makes possible a concern with the violence of representation, with discursive control over
narratives of space and identity, which is central to my analysis. Edward Said emphasized the
ethicopolitical significance of systems of discursive control, locating the violence of imperialism in the
control over stories: "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is
very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between
them."9 Indeed, contemporary neoimperialism resides in part in the dominance of a spatial story that
inhibits the recognition of alternatives. A geopolitical imaginary, the map of nation-states, dominates
ethical discourse at a global level. Despite an increasing instability in the geopolitical map of states, the
more general discourses of "international affairs" and "international relations" continue to dominate
both ethical and political problematics. Accordingly, analyses of global violence are most often
constructed within a statecentric, geostrategic cartography, which organizes the interpretation of
enmities on the basis of an individual and collective national subject and on cross-boundary
antagonisms. And ethical theories aimed at a normative inhibition of these antagonisms continue to
presume this same geopolitical cartography.10 To resist this discursive/representational monopoly, we
must challenge the geopolitical map. Although the interpretation of maps is usually subsumed within a
scientific imagination, it is nevertheless the case that "the cartographer's categories," as J. B. Harley has
put it, "are the basis of the morality of the map."11 "Morality" here emerges most significantly from
the boundary and naming practices that construct the map. The nominations and territorialities that
maps endorse constitute, among other things, a "topographical amnesia."12 Effacements of older maps
in contemporary namings and configurations amount to a nonrecognition of older, often violently
displaced practices of identity and space. Among the consequences of this neglected dimension of
cartography, which include a morality-delegating spatial unconscious and a historical amnesia with
respect to alternatives, has been a radical circumspection of the kinds of persons and groups
recognized as worthy subjects of moral solicitude. State citizenship has tended to remain the primary
basis for the identities recognized in discourses such as the "ethics of international affairs."13 The
dominance and persistence of this discursive genre, an "ethics" predicated on absolute state
sovereignty, is evident in a recent analysis that has attempted to be both critical of the ethical
limitations of the sovereignty system and aware that "conflict has increasingly moved away from
interstate territorial disputes."14 Despite these acknowledged sensitivities, the analysis proceeds within
a discourse that reinstalls the dominance of geopolitical thinking, for it remains within its cartography
and conceptual legacy. Arguing for a humanitarianism that avoids interstate partisanship, the writers go
on to reproduce the geopolitical discourse on war, which grants recognition only to state subjects. Even
as they criticize the language of "intervention" as a reaffirmation of a sovereignty discourse, they refer
to the "Persian Gulf War" on the one hand and "insurgencies" on the other. As I noted in chapter i,
Bernard Nietschmann has shown that the map of global warfare changes dramatically when one departs
from the language of sovereignty. Challenging the state-oriented language of war and unmapping the
geostrategic cartography of "international relations," Nietschmann refers to the "Third World War,"
which is "hidden from view because the fighting is against peoples and countries that are often not even
on the map"—a war in which "only one side of the fighting has a name." Focusing on struggles involving
indigenous peoples, Nietschmann proceeds to map 120 armed struggles as part of the "war." In his
mapping, only 4 of the struggles involve confrontations between states, while 77 involve states against
nations.15 In order to think beyond the confines of the state sovereignty orientation, it is therefore
necessary to turn to ethical orientations that challenge the spatial predicates of traditional moral
thinking and thereby grant recognition outside of modernity's dominant political identities. This must
necessarily also take us outside the primary approach that contemporary philosophy has lent to (Anglo-
American) ethical theory. As applied at any level of human interaction, the familiar neo-Kantian ethical
injunction is to seek transcendent values. Applied to the interstate or sovereignty model of global space
more specifically, this approach seeks to achieve a set of universal moral imperatives based on shared
values and regulative norms
***2NC Materials***
 Turns Case
Turns case—the aff uses the US-Mexico border as a basis for politics which recreates
the ontological divide that has allowed border violence to persist in the first place.
Only the alternative can destabilize this understanding of the border as a static
function of the law.
Vaughan-Williams 09—Professor of International Security @ the University of Warwick (Nick, 2009,
Edinburgh University Press, “BORDER POLITICS: The Limits of Sovereign Power,” pp. 53-55, rmf)
More specifically, Walker argues that the principle of state sovereignty ‘offers both a spatial and a
temporal resolution to questions about what political community can be, given the priority of citizenship
and particularity over universalist claims to a common human identity’.90 The principle of state
sovereignty gives a double resolution to the problem of universality and particularity. On the one hand,
the existence of an international sovereign states system permits cultural particularity (‘citizenship’)
within a broader framework of universal norms of interaction (‘common human identity’). On the other
hand, the generalisation of the sovereign state as a particular cultural form cuts across all cultures in
terms of human necessity. In other words the issue of one and many is resolved through the single
formula ‘one world many states’. Moreover, this resolution enables and depends upon a spatial
demarcation between inside and outside which, in the context of the Westphalian system and modern
geopolitical imaginary, can be read as the concept of the border of the state. Spatially, according to
Walker, the principle of state sovereignty ‘fixes a clear demarcation between life inside and outside a
centred political community’.91 This allows for the human aims of reason, justice, democracy and so
on to be aspired to inside the sovereign state against the backdrop of perpetual warfare and
barbarism outside in the sphere of the international. It also permits notions of here and there, us and
them, and affirms the presence of a political community. Temporally, these demarcations provide the
condition of possibility for notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ inside states as defined against what
happens outside them: ‘between states […] the lack of community can be taken to imply the
impossibility of history as progressive teleology, and thus the possibility of merely repetition and
recurrence’.92 As such, Walker argues it is precisely this spatial– temporal resolution provided by the
logic of ‘inside/outside’ that makes ‘international relations’ and its theories distinctive. Walker’s
diagnosis of the relationship between sovereignty and the inside/outside problématique adds an
important dimension to any attempt to examine the concept of the border of the state. Following his
argument, the many paradoxes and contradictions glossed over by the principle of state sovereignty can
be ‘read as points, lines, and planes, as monopolies of power and authority, borders and territories’.93
These points, lines and planes reflect the emergence in postRenaissance Europe of the link between the
principle of state sovereignty and ‘a sense of inviolable and sharply delimited space’.94 Such points,
lines and planes are often taken for granted as we have already seen, but Walker emphasises that ‘as
historical constructs, conceptions of space and time cannot be treated as some uniform background
noise, as abstract ontological conditions to be acknowledged and then ignored’.95 Indeed, the
problematisation of these conceptions raises the stakes as far as the importance of the concept of the
border of the state is concerned. The recognition that notions of inside and outside are merely
‘Cartesian coordinates that have allowed us to situate and naturalise a comfortable home for power
and authority’ calls into question the politics of global space more generally. As William E. Connolly
notes, once global space is reconsidered as ambiguous, contested and unstable, the function of
artificially imposed borders becomes highly dubious.97 Against views that read borders between states
act as ‘limits on violence’, it becomes easy to see how state borders are connected to violence in an
altogether different sense (a matter to which the analysis will return in Chapter 3). Historically, the
transition from a system of overlapping loyalties and allegiances in favour of sharp borders did not
happen peacefully. Hence, Walker comments, ‘One has to ask how have we so easily forgotten the
concrete struggles that have left their traces in the clean lines of political cartography and the
codifications of international law.’98 Instead of reading borders between states and the principle of
state sovereignty together as a form of ‘airbrushed achievement’ Walker thus challenges us to
reappraise this relationship as a ‘site of struggle’.99
 Impact
The idea that borders are a necessary social construct is based in racist and
nationalistic conceptions of what it means to have coherent culture
Whyte et al. ‘6 (Jessica, PhD candidate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
at Monash U., Australia, Carlos Fernandez, Doctor in Sociology and works as a precarious researcher @
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, Meredith Gill, PhD candidate in the Program in Comparative
Studies in Discourse and Society @ U. of Minnesota, Imre Szeman, Associate Professor of English and
Cultural Studies and an Adjunct Member of the Institute for American Studies @ Humboldt U. in Berlin,
“Erasing the Line, or, the Politics of the Border” ephemera 6(4), pgs. 474-477)
Does culture need borders? Is it defenceless without them? Millennia of cultural interactions, borrowings, and transmutations, and a globe
populated with hybrid forms whose real origins are likely impossible to map, suggest that culture is constantly on the move, always undergoing
changes and transformations, happiest when it finds itself twisted into new shapes and practices. It
is safe to say that culture
always already exceeds those borders in which some have hoped to confine it – whether these are national
borders or aesthetic ones (like the delimitations called ‘genre’). To talk about culture in reference to globalization – a time, we are constantly
told, when movements of cultural ideas, forms, and practices have become if not more common then more rapid and extensive – would thus
seem to require only the unlearning of the conceptual legacy of the past two centuries. It was during this time that ‘culture’ came of age as a
modern concept (Williams, 1985) and was also partitioned off into the discrete, definable entities with which we still associate it – primarily
into ‘national cultures’, but also into the spaces so diligently explored by anthropologists: the tribe, the village, the region, etc. “Every nation is
one people”, Herder writes, “having its own national form, as well as its own language” (Herder, 1800: 166). We know that such sentiments,
which continue to haunt our ideas about the proper space of culture, emerged less as a scholarly or taxonomic response to ‘real’ cultural
divisions and more out of the need to lend support to the emerging political techne of the modern state (no doubt in conjunction with the
limits on movements of peoples that we have been tracking thus far.) After all of the disasters wrought by the fictions of national belonging, we
global moderns are more likely to heed Adorno’s warning about the borders erected around culture: “The
formation of national
collectivities ... common in the detestable jargon of war that speaks of the Russian, the American, surely
also of the German, obeys a reifying consciousness that is no longer really capable of experience. It
confines itself within precisely those stereotypes that thinking should dissolve” (Adorno, 1998: 205). And yet:
even as new technologies (like the Internet) make it all but impossible to patrol the spaces of culture, the idea that culture needs borders has
been given new life. The
especially harsh and unforgiving climate of the global economy has created
conditions that seem to require that culture be sheltered if it is to survive at all. In the era of neo-liberalism, the
strain to make every dollar multiply has forced cultural practitioners to consider turning to the state for assistance – even if the state is well
past the point of believing in ‘art for art’s sake’, or in viewing the university ideal as one of ‘ideal curiosity’ as opposed to envisioning it as an
institution where knowledge is produced as a “merchantable commodity” (Ross, 2000: 3). Contrary to what one might expect at a time when
financial borders have all but disappeared, national
cultures and nationalisms are being taken out of the closet,
dusted off and once again worn about proudly and without embarrassment, either as a supposed shield against a
global neo-liberal cultural market that is assumed in advance only to produce cultural garbage, or, more recently, as a defence of the values of
Enlightenment civilization against the Islamic hordes threatening to engulf North America and Europe (best exemplified by Huntington’s
grotesque ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis.) Even in Germany, a nation that has developed an understandable wariness toward nationalisms of all
kinds, it has become possible to openly discuss Leitkultur (dominant or hegemonic culture) and the need to ensure that immigrants absorb the
ideas and ideals that (supposedly) define Germanic culture. Intellectual debates about globalization and cultural
belonging might focus on cosmopolitanisms or a global ‘multitude’, or look to the myriad ways in which forms of
alternative cultural productive have pushed the unlearning of the cultural borders we spoke of above. Everywhere else, it appears
that not only has the nation-state survived globalization, but so too has the idea of the nation
representing a people and a culture. And while such national-cultural-ethnic borders may not inhibit
physical movement, they are certainly meant to block ideas, to define the formation of subjectivities,
and to shape the identities and commitments of those contained by them. An essential political act is to
assert again and again and again that culture is and should remain unbounded. Cultural practices and
forms have no ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ spaces: the idea that they do is conceptually specious and, inevitability, politically
dangerous insofar as it plays a key role in enabling and legitimating the politics of inclusion and exclusion so central to operation of state
sovereignty. And yet (once again): though it might be easy to challenge the regressive character of ‘cultural’ tests of citizenship (Gumbrecht,
2006), or of right-wing demands that immigrants of necessity assimilate appropriate ‘cultural’ values and traits (of the kind circulating in France,
the Netherlands, Denmark, Hesse in Germany, and elsewhere), the idea that cultural expression needs protection and support in the age of
globalization can nevertheless be a tempting one. The same nation-states that are running scared about the threat posed by the immigrant
populations that they desperately need (for demographic and economic purposes) are also re-asserting the need for policies to foster and
support cultural expression within their borders. In October 2005, member states of UNESCO voted overwhelmingly to support the ‘Convention
on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions’. The convention allows states to exempt cultural products from
trade agreements and permits them “to maintain, adopt, and implement policies and measures that they deem appropriate for the protection
and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions on their territory” (UNESCO, 2005). The real intent of this convention is (to no one’s
surprise) to put a break on US dominance of the international trade in the products of the mass cultural industries (film and television in
particular). It also seeks to affirm the relative autonomy of ‘cultural expressions’ from the larger trade in goods, a separation that other US-led
trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, have actively sought to undo (Szeman, 1998). Can’t we affirm the
(apparently) productive impulses of the state to safeguard culture from the market, while rejecting and criticizing the uses to which national
culture and its politics of belonging are being put? Can’t we erect cultural borders in some places, while resolutely taking them down in others?
For those critical of the dominance of economic relations to the exclusion of all else in the world –
something which neo-liberal globalization has achieved par excellence – it is hard to resist the idea that cultural expression
and cultural autonomy need protection from the ravages of the market. And if not the state, then who? In the
context of our current neo-liberal governments, the idea of the beneficent Keynesian or social democratic state casts a long political shadow
out of whose darkness it has become difficult to move. But move out of it we must. There are numerous assumptions embedded in the idea of
state protection of culture – which is to say: the establishment of borders for culture – that need to be carefully disentangled and assessed.
Right off, the notion that the state that is intent on patrolling and maintaining existing forms of national culture should be charged with the task
of protecting and promoting ‘cultural diversity’ is, at a minimum, problematic. ‘Diversity’ is a slippery word. The
celebration of
diversity against encroaching Americanism or market culture is one thing; enabling diversity within
national borders quite another. The defense of Enlightenment values against outsiders and the protection of culture from the
market seamlessly fold over into one another: the diversity named here is, for the most part, that of already established forms of national ‘high’
culture – opera, classical music, museums, the fine arts – which have long had an essential role in legitimating the sovereignty of the state over
its borders. As both Roberto Schwarz (1992) and Malcolm Bull (2001) have shown in different ways, anxieties
about the protection
and promotion of forms of ‘authentic’ national culture are ones that emerge out of the interests of
ruling and intellectual elites, and not from the broad masses, who have little investment or interest in
safeguarding the link between culture and state sovereignty. Increasingly, even the impulse to support non-market
cultures is done with economic goals in mind: the support of an essential aspect of the affective labour market; the creation of conditions for
so-called ‘creative classes’ to flourish (Florida, 2004); and the establishment of cultural distinctiveness in order to fuel tourist economies
organized around encounters with managed difference. It is one thing to be critical and anxious about the impact of the market on culture; it is
quite another to see the state – the funding source for the so-called ‘public sector’ – as heroically intervening to enable non-market social and
cultural forms to flourish. The two impulses need to be disengaged. The dangers of giving states the moral authority to protect and promote
culture outweigh the potential benefits, which might include strategic use of state funds by arts, cultural institutions, and so on, to engage in
efforts to shatter cultural borders instead of assisting the state in reinforcing them. Documents such as the UNESCO Convention pretend to take
on what Guy Debord described as ‘the spectacle’: that haze of mediation which has placed representation and abstraction at the centre of
social life. In reality, they do nothing substantive to get at the heart of social drama of accumulation and ‘separation’ that Debord’s concept of
the spectacle is intended to capture. Remember: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people
that is mediated by images” (Debord, 1995: 12). To no one’s surprise, what
is at issue in contemporary anxieties about
cultural borders are political ones, whose real object is the maintenance of existing forms of power at all
costs. Culture has no borders, it never has. Why then respond to the threat of the market by giving into the fantasy of national-
cultural borders, a fantasy which, as Adorno writes, goes against the impulses of cultural practice to attack and dissolve the stereotypes that
contain us? Every
border erected for culture claims ‘diversity’ (from the market) or Enlightenment (against
the unbelievers). We must refuse to operate within these borders and the easy stereotypes they offer, and direct
ourselves to understanding and contesting the global political circumstances that continue to make such forms of reifying consciousness
politically viable. No borders for culture! Such a call doesn’t cause the threat of the neo- liberal market to culture to fade; it does, however,
push us away from the false solution of cultural borders and returns us to the task of culture: the
undoing of all borders, maybe
even especially that singular psychic border of commodity culture, which transforms creative labour into
dead things without origin.
 ***Links***
The positing of spatiality as a basis for politics results in cartographic violence—it
creates an ontological divide by which we demarcate the antagonistic Other.
Shapiro 97—Professor of Political Science @ University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (Michael J., 1997, “Violent
Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War,” pp. x-xi, rmf)
Exemplary of this preoccupation is a contemporary analysis of the importance of geography for
understanding war. The analysts concern themselves with the "mapping" of "spatial and geopolitical
contexts within which decision makers must calculate and make choices."1 But despite showing a
sensitivity to a subjective dimension of this mapping, recognizing that it has shifting meanings for
"decision makers," they treat the state configuration as the only spatial reality, failing to recognize that,
as Etienne Balibar has put it, the real—for example, the nation- state structure as a whole—is also an
imaginary; it is one way among others of organizing the significance of space.2 And most significantly,
space for such "security"-concerned analysts provides a perceived context for explaining decision
making related to violence; they produce a world whose focal points are the power centers of states. In
this investigation I also turn to geography, but not to provide an explanation of state-level decision
making. As I noted, I want less to understand war, in the traditional empirical/explanatory sense, than to
effect a political and ethical resistance to the enmities upon which it feeds. To do this I emphasize an
approach to maps that provides distance from the geopolitical frames of strategic thinkers and security
analysts. Geography is inextricably linked to the architecture of enmity. But rather than an exogenous
"explanatory variable," it is a primary part of the ontology of a collective. Along with various
ethnographic imaginaries—the ethnoscapes that are a part of geographic imaginations—it constitutes a
fantasy structure implicated in how territorially elaborated collectivities locate themselves in the
world and thus how they practice the meanings of self and Other that provide the conditions of
possibility for regarding others as threats or antagonists. Grammatically, then, it is appropriate for me
to recognize cartographic violence instead of speaking of the geographic causes of violence

Axiomatic acceptance of the border reinforces neorealist assumptions and ignores

historic violence
Vaughn-Williams 9 [Nick, IR MA @ university of Warwick IR PhD @ Aberystwyth, “Border Politics:
The Limits of Sovereign Power” pg 44-45]
The discipline of IR was born amid violent cartographic change following World War I and, since then,
there has been a tradition, especially among international historians and analysts of global security
practices, of the study of the defence and transgression of borders between states. 36 More generally, the
concept of the border of the state is central to IR in terms of permitting the very notion of inter -
national relations: it allows for the conceptualisation and analysis of relations between entities that are
taken to be separate from each other to begin with. Further still, as I have already noted, this concept not only
provides an important ontological, but also epistemological, framework within which some of the most
familiar understandings of core terms, such as territory, sovereignty, power and authority, make sense.
On this basis, it might be expected that the theoretical literature produced by the discipline of IR, perhaps even more so than other disciplines
in the humanities and social sciences, can provide critical resources for developing alternative ways of thinking about borders to the modern
geopolitical imaginary. While, as we shall see, such resources certainly do exist, however, it is notable that, for much of the earlier mainstream
literature in IR,
borders between states have often been assumed, and the work that the concept of the
border of the state does occupies something of a blind spot within those analyses. 37 Thomas Biersteker refers
to the way in which one of the prob - lematic features of neo-realist writings, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s in Anglo-
American IR, was the tendency to treat states as fundamentally similar units across time and space. 38 In this
context Biersteker cites Kenneth Waltz, for whom, in Theory of International Politics (1979), the anarchical structure of international politics
accounts for its history of;. 39 Indeed, as John Gerard Ruggie noted in his 1983 review of Waltzs book, the
assumption of the
idealised Westphalian system as a given rather than as a particular historically contingent articulation of
space; time relations meant that neo-realism offered few prospects for an account of change. 40 As a
feature of the Westphalian system, the concept of the border of the state is equally neglected in Waltz’s Theory despite his reliance upon it to
distinguish states as separate units positioned in relation to one another within the international system to begin with. Nevertheless, as
Biersteker also points out, these
problematical assumptions are not exclusive to Waltz but permeate the work
of other neo-realists, such as Robert Gilpin, and neo-liberals such as Robert Keohane. More promise for an appreciation of the
historically contingent nature of the international system, and especially the relationship between
borders, territory and sovereignty, can be found in the work of Hedley Bull. In The Anarchical Society (1977) Bull claims that the
starting point of international relations is the existence of states, or independent political communities each of which possesses a government
and asserts sovereignty in relation to a particular segment of the human population, Whilst Bull’s starting point seems similar to Waltz’s,
however, the former rejects the idea that the history of international politics is the history of striking sameness: Other forms of universal
political organization have existed in the past in the broad sweep of human history, indeed, the form of the states system has been the
exception rather than the rule

The border is an ontological divide that reinforces the self/Other dichotomy and is
premised upon radical exclusion.
Newman 06—Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (David, 2006, EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL
THEORY, “Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue,” rmf)
If tangible demarcation criteria characterized much of the traditionalist geographic border discourse, it
is the more abstract notions relating to difference and ‘othering’ that characterize much of the
contemporary border discourse (Van Houtum, 2002; Van Houtum and Van Naerssen, 2002). The
sociological categorization of borders is expressed through a series of binary distinctions which highlight
the border as constituting a sharp edge and a clear line of separation between two distinct entities, or
opposites. These have been expressed in a number of ways, such as: Here–There Us–Them Include–
Exclude Self–Other Inside–Outside all reflecting the idea that borders exist in almost every aspect of
society, categorizing humanity into those who belong to the group (compartment) and those who do
not. The border demarcation consists of precise criteria for determining on what side of the border you
are located. These are social categories and as such, bear no relation to territorial or spatial location,
although in many cases social class and economic distinctions are exacerbated through spatial patterns
of residential segregation. The territorial borders of urban neighbourhoods will never coincide totally
with the socio-economic categories, just as the borders of the so-called nation-state will never coincide
totally with the spatial distribution of the ‘homeland’ population, but there can be relatively high
degrees of congruence between the two. The managerialist thesis of urban sociologists has shown how
ethnic and socio-economic borders are maintained and perpetuated by housing agents and realtors as a
means of controlling the housing market for their own political and economic interests. This is based on
the fear of living with the ‘other’, of wanting the self to be here, and the other to be there, with a clear
border separating the activity and interaction spaces of the two. Such a border does not necessarily exist
in the form of a fence or a wall, but it can be as sealed as the strongest of inter-State borders separating
two belligerent countries from each other. At first glance, these binary distinctions contrast with the
globalization thesis which views borders as networks, experiencing contact movement, or fluidity. The
notion of world society, where common belonging transcends the notion of a world which is highly
compartmentalized and categorized is central to the social theory discourse of the past decade (Castells,
2000; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004). Networking of groups and of cities requires fluidity and continual
mobility, as contrasted with rigid categories and compartments. But even networked society requires
borders that determine just who is a member of the new categories thus constructed. Not everyone has
equal or free access to a cyber group – they require the necessary computer skills, the resources to
purchase and operate a computer, access to electricity and communication systems. Large areas of the
world do not possess these facilities and as such they are excluded from the networked group. The
concept of cross-border networking and almost free mobility is limited to certain societies and specific
places. Admittedly, these borders are more elastic than the highly rigid borders of the past and the
potential for an ‘outsider’ to cross the border, by virtue of him/her gaining the necessary skills, learning
the necessary jargon or hooking into a newly constructed electricity or telephone grid, is greater than in
the past. As such, networks reflect the elasticity of borders as well as the fact that they are no longer
location specific. Borders move continuously through society and space as part of the rebordering
process (Rumford, 2006). Society undergoes its own internal socio-economic changes, with a growing
number of people gaining access to the specific groups or networks from which they were previously
excluded. The ‘here–there’ and ‘us–them’ cut-off points are not always played out through the
construction of physical and visible walls and fences. They may be as invisible as they are tangible and,
equally, as perceived as they are real. I define you as belonging to a different social, ethnic, economic
or religious group and, as such, I have created a border separating the self from the other. The extent to
which I am prepared to overcome my feelings of exclusivity will determine the extent to which I am
prepared to permit you to cross the border and to interact with me. The reason for creating the border
may be simply that I don’t like anything which is different – I am comfortable with ‘my own type’.
Alternately, I may be prepared to interact with you but I feel threatened by your presence and therefore
I prefer to construct a wall, be it an imaginary wall or a concrete wall of separation such as has recently
been constructed between Israel and the West Bank, to ensure that we do not come into contact with
each other. Fear of the other, the desire to defend oneself from the threat (regardless of whether the
threat is real or perceived) is scale inclusive. It is as relevant to the individual who fears his/her
neighbour, to the social group who fears the ‘influx’ of those with different economic status or skin
colour, to the religious group which fears the influence of other religious beliefs, and to the State which
fears any threat to its territorial integrity or sovereignty. This is the true essence of borders, past and
present, territorial or aspatial.

Their appeal to a policy solution hides the political order’s complicity in border
violence and legitimizes the state’s authority.
Vaughan-Williams 09—Professor of International Security @ the University of Warwick (Nick, 2009,
Edinburgh University Press, “BORDER POLITICS: The Limits of Sovereign Power,” pp. 70-71, rmf)
Derrida’s engagement with Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ opens up a series of insights into the
connection between the borders, territory, law triad on the one hand, and violence on the other. ‘Force
of Law’ permits a reading of borders between states as spatial instantiations of the épokhè or moments
when the authority of a new law establishes itself. On this reading, borders between states can be said
to represent traces of the violent foundations of the juridical– political order they supposedly delimit:
scars in the territorial landscape that act as reminders of ‘the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures’ that
rarely fail to accompany the founding of states as distinct entities. To do as Walker suggests and treat
state borders as ‘sites of struggle’ is to politicise the way we think about them: not only as merely
‘socially constructed’ phenomena but the outcome of violent encounters. Moreover, to remember the
épokhè, the ‘anxiety-ridden moment of suspense [or] interval of spacing in which […] revolutions take
place’, is also to remember the ‘deconstructibility’ of the foundations upon which juridical–political
orders rest.29 In short, it is to remember Walker’s axiom that ‘once upon a time things were not as they
are now’.30 The memory of the épokhè is potentially revolutionary: state borders may serve to uphold
the status quo but, paradoxically, they are equally a reminder of the ability to challenge authority, enact
change, and act politically. After all, following the Benjamin–Derrida line of argument, the border of the
state can be considered a product of the violent attempts to establish authority in the lack thereof.
Hence, there is a locus of possibility at the heart of the concept of the border of the state. To recognise
this locus of possibility is to remember the possibility of politics and therefore the potential for
alternative forms of political arrangements. Crucially, the authority of the state relies upon practices of
forgetting the memory of the épokhè which threatens to reveal the radical contingency of the juridical–
political order. As Michael J. Shapiro has highlighted, revelations of such contingency are obviously not
in the interests of the state.31 This is precisely because they provide grounds for challenging the status
quo. Hence, Derrida writes: What the state fears (the state being law in its greatest force) is not so much
crime or brigandage, even on the grand scale of the Mafia or heavy drug traffic […]. The state is afraid of
fundamental, founding violence, that is violence able to justify, to legitimate, or to transform the
relations of law.32 The mystique with which the state cloaks itself, readily displayed at royal or civic
ceremonies, is part and parcel of the discourse of retrospective self-legitimisation referred to earlier.
On this view, the state abdicates responsibility for the traumas of the structural violence underpinning
its juridical–political authority by forgetting that they ever existed.33 Benjamin and Derrida, on the
other hand, urge a teasing out of this structural violence so that it might be interrogated politically.

By merely accepting the boarder as a structure- the affirmative engages in the very
ideology it criticizes
DIKEÇ ‘12 (Mustafa, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Immigrants,
Banlieues, and Dangerous Things: Ideology as an Aesthetic Affair” Antipode, Early Release)
Hence the political import of an aesthetic approach: if sensus communis is postsensory, as suggested in these
definitions, and also the basis of practical judgment, then there are important political reasons for
paying attention to what is made available to the senses (and what is not). In his exploration of how political
identities emerge through judgment, Ferguson (2007:1) argues that “[j]udgments are the basis of political identities”; while
similar judgments may lead to political solidarity or at least affinity, dissimilar ones often lie at the
source of antagonistic identities. As Ranciere himself acknowledges (2000c, 2007) we are getting close here to the ` Kantian notion
of “a priori forms” that order our sensory perceptions. This may raise a few questions, so some clarification seems necessary. In his Critique of
Pure Reason (1998 [1781]) Kant famously defined space and time as a priori forms of intuition or sensibility. As a priori forms of sensibility,
space and time make objects possible and provide form to our sensory perceptions, and thus, to our experience of the world. According to
Kant, we receive a multitude of sensations, but this multitude is somehow organised into a whole—this is space, as an a priori form of
sensibility, providing a form for the objects presented to us, giving shape to our experience. To explain it differently, we encounter particular
objects in experience, and become aware of them as spatially (and temporally) ordered—that is, as exhibiting relations of simultaneity and
succession—and as having a form—that is, possessing spatial features such as shape and extension. According to Kant, this spatial (and
temporal) system of relations is a priori and has its source in our minds; namely, our faculty of spatial intuition, or our “outer sense”, as he also
refers to it. That it is a priori means, C 2012 The Author. Antipode C 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 38 Antipode however, that it is already
given to us, built in our minds, that it does not rely on experience, but merely gives a form to our awareness of things in space (and time). This, I
suspect, is where many geographers of a materialist persuasion would start to feel distinctly uneasy. Is spatial (or for that matter, temporal)
form already given to us, imposing itself on our perceptions, ordering our experience of the world? Ranciere does not go that far. Time and
space, for him, are “forms of configuration ` of our ‘place’ in society, forms of distribution of the
common and the private, and of assignation to everybody of his or her own part” (2005a:13). Whereas Kant dealt
with aesthetics as a priori forms that order what presents itself to sense experience, Ranciere deals with it as a “partition of the
sensible” ( ` le partage du sensible): as the form of what is presented to the senses, and actualised in particular
historical and geographical contexts. The word “partage” here is almost an oxymoron as it means both “partition” and “sharing”.
Ranciere uses it to refer to as what is “put ` in common” [mis en commun] and shared in the community, but also to what is separated and
excluded, such as the separation of the visible and the invisible, audible and inaudible, speech and noise, possible and impossible. Another
meaning of the word “partage”, as used in the phrase “en partage”, is an inheritance, something one is given, or, better yet, endowed with
(usually positive, such as talent). So another connotation of Ranciere’s “ ` partage du sensible” would be to be given certain ways of perceiving
and making sense of things.13 Therefore, Ranciere both alters and expands the notion of a priori forms. This is the ` first major difference from
a strictly Kantian interpretation. The second difference lies in the source of a priori forms; they are no longer in the mind—where Kant had
them—but in particular historical (and geographical, we could usefully add) contexts as products of specific conjunctures, conflicts and tensions
(2009:157). The partition of the sensible, therefore, is a contingent distribution of forms that structure
common—though not consensual—experience and ways of thinking, marked by tension and conflict. “A
partition of the sensible”, writes Ranciere, “is always a state ` of forces [etat des forces ´ ]” (2009:158). Understood in
this way, the ideological function of an aesthetic regime would be something close to what Deotte
(2004:81) refers to as the placing of “an interpretive ´ grid over any event” in a non-totalitarian way. In other words,
there is no claim that everyone will respond in the same way to a given event, though an event—even a
non-event—may surprisingly expose the workings of an aesthetic regime. In the summer of 2004, France was
shocked by a sensational news story. A young woman, travelling with her baby on a banlieue train (RER), was attacked and mugged by a group
of North African and black youth. Upon seeing the address on her identity card, the attackers deduced that she lived in a rich area, and must
therefore be Jewish. From that point on, the attack took on an anti-Semitic form, with the attackers drawing swastikas on her, cutting her hair,
and making marks on her face with a knife. No one on the train attempted to protect her or her baby; no one pulled the alarm. Public outrage
immediately followed the incident for the next couple of days, including many shocked remarks by politicians. The source of outrage was
neither what the youth did nor the Muslim–Jewish tension, but rather the passivity of the other passengers (although “expert” writing quickly
appeared in the newspapers C 2012 The Author. Antipode C 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Immigrants, Banlieues, and Dangerous Things 39
analysing the behaviour of the banlieue youth). We all knew the banlieue youth does that kind of thing. We all know about the tensions
between the followers of these two religions. But how to account for the conduct of the other passengers, who did not even come forward to
testify? In the midst of growing reactions to the incident, no one really thought about another possibility: perhaps
there was nothing
to do simply because nothing happened, perhaps “because the event did not take place” (Ranciere
2005b:191). ` This possibility was not raised because the story fit only too well with the stereotypical image
of and prejudices against the banlieues and their inhabitants. The significant point here is that it was this image of the
banlieue that motivated the comments and responses of the politicians and the media rather than the facts of the story, which, at the time, had
yet to be established. Two days later the young woman admitted to inventing the whole story. This non-event, I believe, is an example that
points to the effects of various sensible evidences that were put into place over decades and the workings of the standard chain of inference
that puts immigrants and banlieues in the category of dangerous things. As we have seen, the
construction of this chain of
inference has followed from a consolidation of what I called, following Ranciere, an aesthetic regime—
certain ` framings of times and spaces. I would argue that a critical engagement with ideology starts with
a questioning of the sensible evidences put in place within such a regime. Much as Lakoff’s example presented at
the outset of this article exposes how our everyday categorisations perhaps too easily rely on an assumption of commonality, the “Girl on the
RER” episode shows how understandings of banlieues are tainted by certain framings of space. To come back to the argument with which I
started, the so-called “securitarian ideology” does not consist in the deployment of more and tougher
measures and practices of repression, although these are its material manifestations. It consists in the
putting in place of sensible evidences that provide the conditions of possibility for the legitimate
deployment of such measures and the normalisation of such practices (such as random identity checks targeting
certain groups etc). Therefore, the most perverse consequence of this ideology (this putting in place of certain
sensible evidences) is not the increasing number and intensity of repressive measures, but the
consolidation of an aesthetic regime, the sensible givens of which made the consensual application of
such measures possible, legitimate, even necessary in order to protect the Republic from Cavafy’s
barbarians at the gate.