As unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied African minors requested asylum in Europe in 2015, Annika Lems witnessed a peculiar dynamic: despite inclusionary language in official policy and broader society, these children faced a deluge of exclusionary practices in the classroom and beyond. Frontiers of Belonging traces the educational paths of refugee youth arriving in Switzerland amid the shifting sociopolitical terrain of the refugee crisis and the underlying hierarchies of deservingness. Lems reveals how these minors sought protection and support, especially in educational settings, but were instead treated as threats to the economic and cultural integrity of Switzerland. Each chapter highlights a specific child's story—Jamila, Meron, Samuel, and more—as they found themselves left out, while on paper being allowed "in." The result is a highly ambiguous social reality for young refugees, resulting in stressful, existential balancing acts. A captivating ethnography, Frontiers of Belonging allows readers into the Swiss classrooms where unspoken distinctions between self and other, guest and host, refugee and resident, were formed, policed, and challenged.

In this remarkable work, bestselling author Capra and Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk renown for making fresh sense of Christian faith, share insights into how science and relgion seek to make us at home in the universe. A remarkably compatible view of the universe.

Focusing in particular on the European borders, this volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of academics to consider questions of immigration and the free movement of people, linking control within the state to the role of the police and internal security. The contributors all take as the point of departure the significance of European governmentality within the Foucauldian meaning as opposed to the European governance perspective which is already well represented in the literature. They discuss the relation between control of borders, introduction of biometrics and freedom. The book makes available in English an analysis of an important and politically highly charged field from a major French critical perspective. It draws on different disciplines including law, politics, international relations and philosophy.

Irregular migrants complicate the boundaries of citizenship and stretch the parameters of political belonging. Comprised of refugees, asylum seekers, "illegal" labor migrants, and stateless persons, this group of migrants occupies new sovereign spaces that generate new subjectivities. Investigating the role of irregular migrants in the transformation of citizenship, Anne McNevin argues that irregular status is an immanent (rather than aberrant) condition of global capitalism, formed by the fast-tracked processes of globalization. McNevin casts irregular migrants as more than mere victims of sovereign power, shuttled from one location to the next. Incorporating examples from the United States, Australia, and France, she shows how migrants reject their position as "illegal" outsiders and make claims on the communities in which they live and work. For these migrants, outsider status operates as both a mode of subjectification and as a site of active resistance, forcing observers to rethink the enactment of citizenship. McNevin connects irregular migrant activism to the complex rescaling of the neoliberal state. States increasingly prioritize transnational market relations that disrupt the spatial context for citizenship. At the same time, states police their borders in ways that reinvigorate territorial identities. Mapping the broad dynamics of political belonging in a neoliberal era, McNevin provides invaluable insight into the social and spatial transformation of citizenship, sovereignty, and power.

Frontiers are "wild." The frontier is a zone of interaction between distinct polities, peoples, languages, ecosystems and economies, but how do these frontier spaces develop? If the frontier is shaped by the policing of borders by the modern-nation state, then what kind of zones, regions or cultural areas are created around borders? This book provides 16 different case studies of frontiers in Asia and Latin America by interdisciplinary scholars, charting the first steps toward a transnational and transcontinental history of social development in the borderlands of two continents. Transnationalism provides a shared focus for the contributions, drawing upon diverse theoretical perspectives to examine the place-making projects of nation states. Through the lenses of different scales and time frames, the contributors examine the social processes of frontier life, and how the frontiers have been created through the exertions of nation-states to control marginal or borderland peoples. The most significant cases of industrialization, resource extraction and colonization projects in Asia and Latin America are examined in this book reveal the incompleteness of frontiers as modernist spatial projects, but also their creativity - as sources of new social patterns, new human adaptations, and new cultural outlooks and ways of confronting power and privilege. The incompleteness of frontiers does not detract from their power to move ideas, peoples and practices across borders both territorial and conceptual. In bringing together Asian and Latin American cases of frontier-making, this book points toward a comparativist and cosmopolitan approach in the study of statecraft and modernity. For scholars of Latin America and/or Asia, it brings together historical themes and geographic foci, providing studies accessible to researchers in anthropology, geography, history, politics, cultural studies and other fields of the human sciences.

This collection of essays is an important contribution to the new literature on frontier studies and the historiography of Northeast India. Moving away from an exclusive dependence on colonial ethnographies, the authors build their arguments on a varied range of sources: from buranjis to revenue records, survey maps to explorers' diaries, and missionary papers to police files. They question the givennes of the categories through which the region is usually described, and contest the stereotypes by which the people of the region are primitivized. They explore the historical processes whereby the region was surveyed, mapped, understood, represented, politically governed, economically refigured, and historically constituted during the colonial period. Though focused on the experience of Northeast India, the volume also raises substantive questions about the idea of the frontier and the border, the primitive and the modern, and the tribal and the settled, the local and the trans-local.

States define who their citizens are and exert control over their life and movements. But how does such power persist in a global world where people, ideas, and products constantly cross the borders of what the states see as their sovereign territory? This groundbreaking work sets to examine and interprets such challenges to offer a new way of thinking about citizenship. Abandoning the sovereignty principle, it develops a new image of citizenship using the connectedness principle. To do so, it interprets acts of citizenship by following "activist citizens" across the world through case studies, from Wikileaks and the Gaza flotilla to China's virtual world and Darfur. Written by a leader in the field, this accessible and original work imagines citizens without frontiers as a politics without community and belonging, inclusion without exclusion, where the frontier becomes a form of otherness that citizens erase or create. This unique work brings forth a new and creative way to approach citizenship beyond boundaries that will appeal to anyone studying citizenship, social movements, and migration.

James Ron uses controversial comparisons between Serbia and Israel to present a novel theory of state violence. Formerly a research consultant to Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, Ron witnessed remarkably different patterns of state coercion. Frontiers and Ghettos presents an institutional approach to state violence, drawing on Ron's field research in the Middle East, Balkans, Chechnya, Turkey, and Africa, as well as dozens of rare interviews with military veterans, officials, and political activists on all sides. Studying violence from the ground up, the book develops an exciting new framework for analyzing today's nationalist wars.

A “lucid” analysis of the territorial formation of Spain and Portugal in both Europe and the Americas (Publishers Weekly). Frontiers of Possession asks how territorial borders were established in Europe and the Americas during the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are largely determined by military conflicts and treaties. Focusing on Spanish and Portuguese claims in the New and Old Worlds, Tamar Herzog reconstructs the different ways land rights were negotiated and enforced, sometimes violently, among people who remembered old possessions or envisioned new ones: farmers and nobles, clergymen and missionaries, settlers and indigenous peoples. Questioning the habitual narrative that sees the Americas as a logical extension of the Old World, Herzog portrays Spain and Portugal on both sides of the Atlantic as one unified imperial space. She begins in the Americas, where Iberian conquerors had to decide who could settle the land, who could harvest fruit and cut timber, and who had river rights for travel and trade. The presence of indigenous peoples as enemies to vanquish or allies to befriend, along with the vastness of the land, complicated the picture, as did the promise of unlimited wealth. In Europe, meanwhile, the formation and re-formation of boundaries could last centuries, as ancient entitlements clashed with evolving economic conditions and changing political views and juridical doctrines regarding how land could be acquired and maintained. Herzog demonstrates that the same fundamental questions had to be addressed in Europe and in the Americas. Territorial control was always subject to negotiation, as neighbors and outsiders, in their quotidian interactions, carved out and defended new frontiers of possession. Praise for Frontiers of Possession “Herzog succeeds in her aim of moving beyond the usually separate histories of Spain and Portugal—and of Europe and the Americas—to complicate the accepted understanding of national and imperial boundaries as immutable facts rather than as ongoing sites of contestation.” —William O’Connor, The Daily Beast “This book is about as thorough a research work as this reviewer has ever encountered . . . This is a truly innovative and well-documented interpretation of this topic.” —D. L. Tengwall, Choice “The best account we now have of the long legal and political rivalry between the world’s first modern imperial powers.” —Anthony Pagden, author of The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters

Originally published in 1994, this book considers one of the enduring themes of social science. How is a national identity forged and sustained? How does it change over time? Who is included in the body politic and who is socially excluded? How do the established population, opinion-makers and politicians react to more marginal people, including long-spurned minorities and recent migrants? This original analysis shows how the British as a people are constantly defined and redefined through their interactions with several ‘frontiers of identity’, namely Celts, expatriates, Americans, Europeans, citizens of the Commonwealth and more crucially with ‘aliens’. The alien-British relationship is particularly loaded with uneasiness, aversion and hostility. ‘Aliens’ a category created by what the author calls ‘the frontier guards’ of British identity, are frequently deported or detained. Their sanctuaries are invaded, their legal and humanitarian claims for asylum minutely examined and often denied. This searching exploration of these processes shows how the meaning of who one is depends crucially on who one rejects. Drawing on a wealth of historical scholarship, research compiled at the time of the original publication and contemporary social theory and now reissued with a new Preface this book exposes the unstated assumptions and hidden meanings in the relationship between the ‘British’ and ‘the others'. It uncovers how the British and their rulers seek to reshape their national identity in a difficult period of post-imperial adjustment, relative economic decline and the European integration of the 1990s. The book will be of use to students of sociology, politics, history and European studies.