Borders, distance, politics

Main author: Novak, Paolo
Format: Book Chapters           
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id eprints-30360
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
description The ‘borderless world’ narrative was, perhaps, nothing more than that: a narrative associated with a specific, and specifically neoliberal, project – that of globalization in the 1990s. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, the idea that state borders were becoming less significant in a globalized world was widely shared across the academic field. Classic texts of the globalization debate deploy a similarly de-territorialized understanding of the transformations associated with neoliberalism. Whether concerned with networked societies, global cities, transnationalism, or, more broadly, with theorizing ‘new’ spatialities of globalization (Amin, 2002), these contributions privileged connections, horizontality, and circulation, over territorial boundedness, verticality, and immobility/immobilization, as explanatory tools for global transformations. In capturing and condensing into a soundbite these complex set of processes, however, Kenichi Ohmae’s (1990) book title became the strawman for those who wanted to contrast the ‘flat world’ depicted by these accounts and to re-emphasize its bordered, unequal and difference-inflected nature.
author_additional Paasi, Anssi
author_additionalStr Paasi, Anssi
format Book Chapters
author Novak, Paolo
author_facet Novak, Paolo
authorStr Novak, Paolo
author_letter Novak, Paolo
title Borders, distance, politics
publisher Routledge
publishDate 2018
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/30360/