This research project advances a fundamental rethinking of the border that highlights the elasticity of borders with an exploration of Europe`s southern frontiers. In a world of nation-states, we usually imagine borders as static —a fixed line of demarcation between sovereign states, marking the boundary of their territory and the limit of their authority. While this perception has rarely captured historical complexities of the past, it is no longer viable in the 21st century. Processes of globalization, securitization, and digitalization continue to transform national borders all around the world, turning them into dynamic, technologically advanced, and highly securitized spaces that enable persons with valid passports and visas to move smoothly across borders while those without are filtered and sorted out. Borders can be expanded and retracted by the institutional or non-institutional actors enforcing them, and thus are turning into elastic devices of governmentality. Rethinking borders as elastic offers new avenues to understanding not only how state borders stretch, distend, and “snap back,” but also how they create fields of stress and violations in the very processes of extension and retraction. The central objective of this research is to develop an empirically grounded conceptual framework of elastic borders to account for the transformation of borders in the 21st century. Taking the case of the EU's external frontier, the project proposes a qualitative, interdisciplinary and multisited study that will explore the properties, means, and effects of the elastic border at the horizontal and vertical level in two research units. The horizontal analysis offers a broader, birds-eye view on the enactment of the elastic border while the vertical analysis focuses on three critical nodes inside the EU’s elastic border for an in-depth analysis of its socio-political impacts on the ground. This innovative combination of these two levels enables a comprehensive understanding of the governmentality of the elastic border. Methodologically, the project deploys a range of interdisciplinary methods such as expert interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, document survey, archival research, mapping, and visual analysis. The proposed research project on rethinking borders builds on my wider research program on states, migration, and transformation. Recently I concluded a research project on EU migration policies and bordering practices in the Mediterranean region (funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies) that forms the main base for this proposal. The insights from my ongoing research project on Affective Citizenship (funded by the Swiss National Science Fonds) which examines belonging, boundaries, and social transformation in the context of migration in Europe also has informed this proposal. Likewise, it builds on my earlier research on the politics of displacement in relation to border conflicts in the Middle East (funded by the MacArthur Foundation). Methodologically, my research practice is marked by interdisciplinarity, employing mostly qualitative methods but also mixed methods. My research ethos is guided by a commitment to scientific excellence and innovative, future-oriented research that offers critical inquiries into pressing issues of our times. One such issue is the vital question of the digitalizing and flexible border where the norms of security and human rights collide, especially when it comes to asylum and irregular migration. Given the expected increase of migration due to climate change, a thorough analysis of contemporary elastic borders and their impact is critical to understanding the present as well as the future.

For more information visit the Elastic Borders' webpage: https://elasticborders.uni-graz.at/en/