Space and Territoriality
| Author | Bikash Sarma |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020881716654386 |
| Published date | 01 January 2013 |
| Date | 01 January 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Space and Territoriality:
Borderscapes and
Borderlanders of the
Chars
Bikash Sarma1
Abstract
Territorial modernity signifies the transformation of the space of fluidity into
territories or geometric grids of permanence. Border in International Relations
with its constructed disciplinary gaze performs the role of a spatial unit and
a decidable between a set of mutually reinforcing dualisms. In mainstream IR
theory encrusted within the Western hegemonic discourse, transformations that
exemplify the process of territorialization supplements the grammar of territo-
rial epistemology. However, the ontology of the modern bounded ‘political’ mar-
ginalizes and makes invisible alternative mode of being. In post-colonial practices
of South Asia, the dispositif of territorial modernity as a universal discourse and
the ‘international’ is suggestive of resistance and contestations articulated via
certain categories of bodies. This is prominent at the periphery of the post-colo-
nial nation-states, as the actions of certain recalcitrant bodies often problematize
the reified international. By taking the case study of the chars or river islands
that often shift their location along India–Bangladesh riverine border, the paper
also seeks to understand the political in these zones of indistinction and its (dis)
association with the normative space that territoriality enacted in the first place.
Keywords
Border, borderlanders, chars, modernity, space, territoriality, territorial trap,
Bangladesh, India
Introduction: Space, Territorial Borders and
International Relations
Modern nation-states in their urge for national identity and utopic unity privi-
leges certain ‘spatial units’ that include borders, a national space for identity,
Article
1 Doctoral Candidate, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, India.
Corresponding author:
Bikash Sarma, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi 110067, India.
E-mail: bsarma7@gmail.com
International Studies
50(1&2) 92–108
2016 Jawahalal Nehru University
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0020881716654386
http://isq.sagepub.com
Sarma 93
etc. A border, in that sense, is presumed to be a lifeless spatial unit and a decid-
able between mutually reinforcing dualisms of inside/outside, self/other, secu-
rity/insecurity, citizen /migrants,1 domestic/foreign, norm/exception which is
objectified and generalized as a decidable to the entirety of history. In interna-
tional relations (IR) discourse, its lifelessness is represented as a reality,
assigning it an illusionary inertia and stasis. Mainstream IR theory has given a
border the privilege of being an intelligible frame that implicitly produces an
aesthetic effect of a modern nation-state as a territorialized compartment and
as a space of homogenized identity. Space in that sense is understood as terri-
torial or as labyrinth of boundaries where other scales are often disregarded
(Agnew, 1995).
However, in recent scholarship on critical geography, border studies and eve-
ryday life, this static and neutral view of border is profoundly challenged with a
renewed emphasis on practices that creates and subvert the notions of identity and
difference in space (Baud & Van Schendel, 1997; Moisio & Passi, 2013; Passi,
2007; Houtum, 2005). Thus, a border is no longer viewed from the perspective of
the state but from the perspective of the dwellers and articulated through their
lived experiences. This view underlines border and space as the outcome of social
practices and processes rather than a passive and abstract arena where things are
ordered or where things happen. The main emphasis of the article is not only on
the demarcation of national space and construction of certain subjectivities asso-
ciated with it but also to look at the way dwellers negotiate with this construction.
Thus, far from being an inert container of action and objective representation,
space is an arena of becoming where the inhabitants co-construct it with their
lived experiences and assign symbolic meaning to it. If space is not inert and a
realm of stasis then, how is the relation between space and society to be concep-
tualized? It is not only space that is socially constructed but social is spatially
constructed too (Massey, 1993).
Unlike contemporary literature, a border in traditional scholarship is equated
with the disciplinary gaze of a ‘panopticonism’2 to deter any violations to its sanc-
tity. To reinterpret Hobbes, a border overlooks an ordered city of wo(men) by
insulating norm from an international ‘state of nature’. In the Nietzschean sense,
a border disciplines ambiguity and conditions ‘a simple illusion created out of
modern desperation to have a well grounded identity’ (as cited in Best & Kellner,
2003, p. 289). Modernity thus requires to discipline ambiguity and develop ‘intol-
erance to multiple and layered notions of identity or sovereignty’ (Krishna, 1994,
p. 508). The constitution as presence of a well-grounded identity by disciplining
or expelling difference became the founding moment of the norm integrated with
the identity of the modern self. The construction, whether voluntary or imposed,
of an identity of the self required this foundation to be guarded against the other
and most importantly from ‘deconstruction’ of the originary act that simultane-
ously deduced complexity in the notion of the modern self. A border in that sense
presumed to delink the ‘nature of the self’ from the ‘suppositions of the other’. In
the play of this dualism, ‘sovereignty signifies a centre of decision presiding over
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