Chapter 11 - Making Grey Zones at the European Peripheries

Summary

Introduction

Grey zones are ambiguous places, a spatial and conceptual expression of obscurity. The aspect that I will explore in this chapter is the relation between such a condition of ambiguity and the different types of work that borders do, particularly along the eastern peripheries of Europe. Formally, a key point of making marks on maps (and sometimes on the ground) and calling them borders is to remove ambiguity: to clearly establish, on paper at least, where one thing ends and another begins. In that sense borders are classification systems, as I have argued elsewhere (Green 2012): they order the world according to a particular epistemological logic, one that sets the rules for establishing the difference between ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else’. Marking borders on maps and in places is intended to deny greyness, to assert that there is no room for doubt about the difference between here and somewhere else. Of course, such assertions have variable levels of success, and they always exist in the company of other opinions, both about where exactly to locate the mark that will be called a border and about the logic, usually accompanied by a moral justification, used to assert that the border belongs here, rather than there. Moreover, many borders are crosscut by, or overlap, other borders that have been marked using different logics.

The fact that the current geographical locations of many borders are regularly contested, and that they exist in the company of other border regimes, are the key elements that tend to generate a sense of greyness. I will be arguing that it might be helpful to think of this process as involving three dimensions, rather than two: border regimes existing in layers that sometimes overlap, sometimes interact and sometimes slide past each other. Thinking of the process in these terms raises the obvious possibility that, in conditions where two different border regimes overlap, two different places will coexist within the same geographical space.