2 - Border Authority and Zoning Technologies

Summary

Abstract

Mezzadra and Neilsons's term ‘border as a method’ is used to discuss the different disciplinary contributions this book makes. The chapter explains different debates on the role of borders: (1) the border as a method of investigation, (2) as a method of social control, and (3) as a method of spatial development. The chapter introduces different forms of ‘zoning technologies’. First, literal zone-making; the fragmented Chinese political system historically used experimental zones to test policies locally. This system has created Special Border Economic Zones that create a form of graduated sovereignty by giving leeway to local governments in policy implementation. Secondly, ‘zoning technologies’ are also part of China's neo-socialist governmentality that figuratively creates zones by differentiating rights between different groups of citizens and (im)migrants.

Keywords: border as a method, zoning, governmentality, zones, Territoriality

Border as a Method of Investigation

Borders have long been imagined as geopolitical frontiers. Under the Westphalian order, it has been taken for granted that sovereignty and national security require clear territorial boundaries as well as distinctions between national and foreign affairs, and that modern societies need to be bound in ‘geographical containers’ that fit their political and social processes (Paasi 2005: 21). Agnew (1994, 2003) has famously criticized this imaginary as an idealized myth that ignores historical contingencies. To Agnew (2003: 53) the territorial trap lies in the assumption that the modern state is bound by a spatially defined sphere of influence:

Three analytically distinct but invariably related assumptions underpin the territorial trap: thinking and acting as if the world were made up entirely of states exercising power over blocks of space that between them exhaust the politico-geographical form of world politics. The first, and most deeply rooted, is that modern state sovereignty requires clearly bounded territorial spaces. The modern state differs from all other types of organization by its claim to total sovereignty over its territory. Defending the security of its particular spatial sovereignty and the political life associated with it is the primary goal of the territorial state. Vested at one time in the person of the monarch, or other leader within a hierarchy of orders from the lowest peasant to the warriors, priests and nobles, sovereignty is now vested in territory.