The Politics of Bordering: From Geopolitics to Geo-politic

Borders are an essential element of the spatial alphabet. They were framed in modern times, when nature and culture were being opposed, this duality serving as the basis for a taxonomic rationality. As international divides, they have founded the system of international relations upon which contemporary power relationships are based and are therefore at the heart of geopolitics.

In times of profound environmental challenges linked to climate change, we are moving towards new ontologies where it becomes more and more difficult to understand the world according to this “great divide” (Descola, “Beyond nature and culture”, 2004). This is why I offer to take the earth and its dynamics into account to renew a prospective interpretative scheme of power relations in the world, therefore moving from a traditional (even if critical) geopolitics to a potential geo-politics. One of the implications of this shift in our representations being to move from a dominant inter-state perspective to a frame of understanding resting on multi-actors (including non-human stakeholders) interrelations.

A.-L. Amilhat Szary, Ph.D., full Professor at Grenoble-Alpes University, France and honorary member of the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’, former head of the CNRS Pacte research unit, a pluridisciplinary social sciences research center (https://www.pacte-grenoble.fr/en  ). Political geographer dedicated to border studies, her comparative analysis of the border dynamics in Latin America and in Europe, led her to formulate the notion of “mobile border. Her recent research concerns the interrelations between space and art, in and about contested places.

She is a founding member of the ‘antiAtlas of borders’ collective (http://www.antiatlas.net/en/  ), a science-art project where she was able to explore experimental methods in the social sciences, notably through the Crossing Maps workshop, and then within the Performance Lab, a project designed to advance the issues of practice-based research within the French university. In this context, an interdisciplinary lexicon devoted to the performative turn in research and research-creation the Performascope, was developed, with a bilingual website (https://performance.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/  ). This experience of working with migrants, but not on their behalf, has enabled her to question the elaboration of renewed forms of scientific results and their dissemination. She is now working to set up new exhibitions on the question of borders and migration, notably at Mexico City’s Museo de las Culturas del Mundo, while critically questioning the biases of the approach and analyzing the conditions of reception of such initiatives.

Co-editor of “Borderities. The Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders” (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). Last publications: “Border Culture. Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics”, with V. Konrad, 2022. https://www.routledge.com/Border-Culture-Theory-Imagination-Geopolitics/Konrad-Szary/p/book/9781032294117

“Géopolitique des frontières. Découper la terre, imposer une vision du monde”. 2020 http://www.lecavalierbleu.com/livre/geopolitique-des-frontieres

“Frontières”. Co-edited with G. Hamez. 2020 https://www.armand-colin.com/frontieres-capes-agregation-histoire-geographie-9782200629779

“Framing/Unframing Space: But Where Is the Frame? “Border Art” as a Vehicle to Think Inclusion”, Polysèmes. Revue d’études Intertextuelles et Intermédiales, nᵒ 28, https://doi.org/10.4000/polysemes.10369

“A new research agenda to move beyond (a)gendered regions”, Regions & Cohesion 10/3 2020 https://doi.org/10.3167/reco.2020.100304