Borders and difference : the politics of delineating Europe

• Main Author: Bliatka, Ira
• Other Authors: Edkins, Jennifer ; Shepherd, Alistair
• Published: Aberystwyth University 2016
• Subjects: 320.1
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.715167

This thesis is about the making of the European Union (EU) as a political actor through the delineation of borders and border spaces. It speaks to one of the key questions of an ongoing scholarly and policy debate, regarding the dialectic nature of the EU’s borders; internal and external, present and absent, murderous and humanitarian are only some of the binaries that have been deployed to speak of these paradoxical hybrid constructs, which, as literature has argued, have long stopped acting and looking like simple lines on maps. As such, the project lies at the intersection of EU studies, Border Studies and Political Geography, and engages themes that have been common in these fields; borders, biopolitics, and security logics of risk. The biopolitical border is found behind an ever-expanding range of border technologies that regulate global mobilities; biometric passports, databases, surveillance systems, and techniques of risk-profiling, outsourcing, and off-shoring the border.