Borders in Globalization Research Proect 95

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'Precarity of the Territorialized State: Individuals Reshaping and Redrawing the Imagined Borders

Ugur YildizCarlton University

Borders in Globalization _________________________________Research Pro ect 95

Uğur Yıldız, Re-drawing Borders

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Uğur Yıldız Carleton University PhD. Political Science

'Precarity' of the Territorialized State: Individuals Re-Shaping and Re-Drawing the Imagined Borders

Abstract

Borders have been geographically and topographically marked by the sovereign power as the

conflict preventer and served as the agents of a state’s security and sovereignty and physical

indicator of a state’s past and present relations with its neighbors. The very aim of the border has

helped to crystallize and discipline the distinction between politics of inside and outside through

signifying its real, concrete nature as a space of barrier against the unwanted components of the

movements. However, today, there is also commonly held truth regarding the phenomenon of

border which underlines its contingent, spongy and/or porous, fluid, and permeable nature due to

the escalation of the cross-border activities of goods and people. This porous, contingent and

fluid aspect of a given border marks this concretized phenomenon's another side which is its

imagined-ness through permeability; its transiency via overcoming. It is within this context that

the aim of this article is, firstly, to theoretically and empirically explore the border phenomenon

from the perspective of migrants through bringing their experiences and acts of transgression at

the border. Secondly, it aims to combine empirical case with the theoretical approach on borders

as spaces of heterotopia following Foucault (1986), as spaces of liminality (Turner 1977), and as

representational spaces (Lefebvre 1991). To do so, through focusing on the way of (re-)mapping

and re-drawing of borders by the agency of the Other, i.e., asylum seekers, I conducted semi-

structured interviews in Turkey with asylum seekers; and some of respondents were resettled to

Canada. The paper, furthermore, aims to emphasize the permeability and contingency of borders


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through visualizing phenomenological experience of individuals on the route and at the borders

within these territorial landscapes.


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Introduction: Border Project of the State Any narrative on borders at the outset tends to begin with the Westphalian inclusionary and

exclusionary system of nation-state through oftentimes highlighting the constructed nature of the

mapping and drawing territorially defined landscapes. Borders have been geographically and

topographically seen and marked by the sovereign power as the conflict preventer and borders

serve as the agents of a state’s security and sovereignty and physical indicator of a state’s past

and present relations with its neighbors (Wilson and Donnan 1998). The state's sovereignty has

been intertwined with the territory and territoriality of the nation-state. Thereupon, the territorial

immunity of a state has been protected through the international arrangements. Territorial

inviolability of nation-state has been contested through several ways including circulations and

flows of people, images, and capital. Salter articulates that 'the border is a primary institution of

the contemporary state, the construction of a geopolitical world of multiple states, and the

primary ethico-political division between the possibility of politics inside the state and the

necessity of anarchy outside the state' (Salter 2011: 66). It is to say that 'the world is cognitively

territorialized so that on the datum of physical geographic knowledge' (Shields 1991: 264). For

Shields, 'the resulting formation –half topology, half metaphor – is inscribed as an emotive

ordering or coded geography' (Shields 1991: 265). Agnew and et al. (2007: 2). conceptualize

political geography as 'how barriers between people and their political communities are put up

and come down; how world orders based on different geographic organizing principles arise and

collapse; and how material processes and political movements are re-making how we inhabit and

imagine the "world political map."'

Based on half topology, half metaphor nature of borders, this paper is about the space and the

spatiality of border and my intention is not solely to focus on marginality at this theatrical space,


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but also acts of resistance and transgression of migrants against the constructed state border. The

very aim of this paper is two-folded – firstly, to suggest how borders have functioned to

crystallize and discipline the distinction between politics of inside and outside through governing

individuals as 'dividuals' by implying 'techniques, identities, practices, and power relations'

(Walters 2006a). In this way borders have served to the crucial task of sovereign in which they

have become the very mark and reminder of the extremities of state power against the

constructed dichotomy of us versus them. Thus, in a conventional sense, borders as spaces of

barries against the unwanted and alien components of the mobility and flow signify their real,

concrete nature. Secondly and more importantly, the main focus of the paper is to explore the

phenomenon of border, which underlines its contingent, spongy and/or porous, fluid, and

permeable nature due to the escalation of the cross-border and trans-national activities of goods

and people. This porous, contingent and fluid aspect of a given border marks this concretized

phenomenon's another side which is its imagined-ness through permeability; its transiency via

overcoming. It is to say '(re)bordering as a contingent social practice' as well as an ongoing

process (Walters 2006b). Through focusing on migrants' mapping and (re)bordering of these

non-real and non-utopian heterotopian spaces via semi-structured interviews conducted in

Turkey, the paper aims to re-draw and re-map the permeability and contingency of borders

through visualizing phenomenological experience of individuals on the route and at the borders

within the territorial landscapes. It is within this context that the aim of study is to explore the

way of re-mapping, re-drawing, and re-shaping of borders by the autonomy of the ‘Other’

through concentrating on the perception of migrants and asylum seekers in Turkey who are

waiting to be resettled to Canada. In doing so, the article uses case study based on qualitative

data collection and the fieldwork was conducted in Turkey where ten semi-structured interviews


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with asylum seekers, who were waiting to be resettled to Canada, were taken place. These semi-

structured interviews constituted both female and male refugees who are non-European

individuals, above eighteen years old, and from different countries of origin, i.e., Iran, Iraq, and

Ethiopia. At the end of each interviews, respondents were asked to draw a map based on their

journeys and experiences at the border or borders.

The State and its myth for drawing 'Border(s)' The commonsense regarding concretization of borders simultaneously brings the system of

nation-state which has fundamentally divided world into societies and states and has represented

the regime of border as historically natural. Weberian definition of the state which is 'a human

community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of the physical force within a given

territory' (Weber 1958: 78). Weberian definition highlights three crucial notions of legitimacy,

physical force, and given territory which is, for Weber, 'one of the characteristics of the state'

(Weber 1958: 78). Thus the modern state functions as the specific means of domination and it

'promotes and imposes itself the stable center of (national) societies and spaces…It neutralizes

whatever resists it by castration or crushing' (Lefebvre 1991: 23). This castration or crushing has

become the original act of the rationality of state and its techniques within its spatial organization

through the project of sedentarization, which is an effort to settle the mobile peoples inside its

spatial organization and to stop the mobile individuals at the border of its spatial entity (Scott

1998). The efforts of state sedentarization have aimed to 'make a society legible, to arrange the

population in ways that simplified the classic functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention

of rebellion' (Scott 1998: 2). The simplification and standardization through making a society

legible as a sedentarization project is a state-imposed normalization in which this state-imposed

normality has simultaneously made 'transgression inevitable' which is the transgression of both


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its subjects and outsiders against its so-called spatially arranged territorial unity (Lefebvre 1991).

History, for Deleuze and Guattari, 'is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the

name of a unitary state apparatus…What is lacking is nomadology, the opposite of a history'

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23). For the same reason, the state-imposed normality has

conceived and represented its history as a sedentary and stable through concretizing its territorial

space via borders and also represented the out of sight beyond the state territoriality and

spatiality, and therefore its history and existence. Although the space in general and the border

in particular, is not ontologically given, the state has (successfully!) constructed its spatial

arrangement and territorial border like the construction of a dam with high walls not only to stop

water but also to organize and manage the flow of water. However, it should be kept in mind

that the water has generally found a way to transgress, transcend, and overcome the constructed

wall. Walls as borders of a dam are more real, concrete than physical and geographical spatiality

of borders as the state apparatus.

The border as a geopolitical imaginary is an imagined and contingent as well as ongoing

phenomenon. The imagined construction of a given 'imagined community', as Anderson (1991)

articulated, has served the very rationality of state in order to standardize, normalize and regulate

its subjects and further to exclude or to include the Other. Roland Barthes claims that 'myth is a

type of speech', what Foucault calls as discourse, a system of representation (Barthes 1972: 107).

Myth, for Barthes, has a special function in which it creates and fabricates a thing to be

historically and morphologically conceived as natural. A myth or a matter has gained an identity

spatially, cognitively, and semantically through its conceptualization and theorization as well as

(de-)territorialization, therefore, through imagination and re-presentation.


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The nation-state's attempt to delineate a given territorial construct is also part of what Barthes

calls as the myth, 'a type of speech' which is a speech of the sovereign through limiting its own

spatial territory. The myth or discourse of the state's act of border drawing has been produced

and reproduced in the name of 'security' against the so-called threats coming from both inside

and outside against the community inside. The state has, following Weber, benefited from

another abstract notion, which is legitimacy, to provide the security for itself and to protect its

chief internal supporters. Thus, the concept of legitimacy given by imagined mass majority has

consolidated the state organization as the provider and supplier of security. The state's desire to

provide security can be read from Deleuzean perspective. Accordingly, the desire is 'the lack of

the real object' in which desire 'produces an imaginary object that functions as a double reality'

(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25). The state's deliberate construction of the 'security' as a lack in

a given spatial territory has produced the border machine for its own subjects to differentiate

them from the constructed potential threats and to keep the constructed threats out of sight. If the

state's act of mapping and border drawing or (b)ordering is a certain form of Deleuzian paranoia,

the border crossing against the paranoia of the state is the Deleuzean schizophrenia (Deleuze and

Guattari 1983). Since the Oedipus, from schizoanalysis perspective, has been injected into the

unconscious which signifies border system as well as the nation-state-system as the natural order

of things. Through drawing borders, the nation-state 'constructs its own delirium' to signify the

difference through attributing the nation state system as a divine and spiritual conception

(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 10).

Border as the Space of Heterotopia Borders can be seen as the spaces of exception, the spaces of exclusion, the spaces of distinction,

the spaces of alternate social and political ordering, or the state of exception (Hetherington 1997;


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Agamben 1998; Lyon 2006; Crampton and Elden 2007). Foucault's term of heterotopia is one of

the useful terms to approach such border conceptualizations in which spaces of heterotopia

illustrate the extreme laboratory form of life in regard to territorially defined sovereign power

and control practices where objects and subjects are assembled and atomized into certain roles,

relations, and dispositions (Foucault 1986). Individuals in spaces of heterotopia face with the

non-habitual and extraordinary through excessive ordering, policing, monitoring, and

securitizing practices of the nation-state in the name of security. Following Foucault's notion of

heterotopia in relation with the other sites, borders can be regarded as neither utopian nor real

places in which the term refers 'in relation with other sites, but in such a way to suspect,

neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect'

(Foucault, 1986, p. 24). Foucault sees the 'of other spaces' as non-utopian and non-real space in

which for him, 'these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak

about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between

utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint

experience, which would be the mirror' (Foucault 1986: 24).

Based on Foucault's perspective on heterotopia, borders like spaces of heterotopia have been

found upon crises since the state keeps on utilizing and re-producing fear, anxiety, and insecurity

to create permanent neurosis among its subjects and potential outsiders. The invention of

passport and the constructed fear and anxiety with the concomitant rise of the technologies

regarding checks, controls, and management of the subject are historically one of the main

features for the metamorphosis of borders (Torpey 2000). This spatially representational,

marginal, and paradoxical no-place as many agrees is a construction drawn and mapped by the

political project and discourse of the sovereign for creating 'spaces of alternate ordering' to order,


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monitor, and discipline its socially and politically constructed nation-state system (Hetherington

1997).

Border as Liminal Space: Reproduction of Diverse Identities Besides the normative and concrete nature assigned by the sovereign, the construction of border

requires the very existence of the Other, who constitutes a potential threat to the immune system

of a state. The border as 'of other space' has been arbitrarily drawn by the sovereign through

limiting its own sovereignty, on the one hand, and by revealing its extremities against the Other

and its subjects, on the other hand. It is the border in which the sovereign nation-state labels the

body of human beings with different identities, statuses within the framework of

legality/illegality through transfiguring and transmuting the Other-body. It is within this context

that terms liminality and liminal space brought by Turner's anthropological study are useful to

signify the border phenomenon's task of creating and constructing 'in-between-ness' (Turner

1977). Before bringing Turner's argument on liminality, in his Marxist approach on how the

space is produced within a society, Lefebvre offers a triadic conception in which 'spatial

practice', 'representations of space', and 'representational space' have relations (Lefebvre 1991:

33). Through underlining the 'multitude intersections' of the space, Lefebvre points that the

spatial practice 'embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial

sets characteristic of each social formation (Lefebvre 1991: 33). Lefebvre's approach on spatial

practice is the relationship with the production and reproduction through social relations which

he associates with the capitalist production and reproduction. It is fair to extend Lefebvre's

Marxist interpretation on the spatial practice for the reproduction and production of identities and

interpellations at the border space. Michel de Certeau rightly sees space as a practiced space

which is not ontologically given and it is 'discursively mapped and corporeally practiced' (De


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Certeau 1984; Clifford 1997: 54). For the very same reason, the border is never ontologically

given and writing on borders, for Hicks (1991), 'allows us for a description of the meditations of

a logic of non-identity'. It reveals and highlights the binaries of inclusion and exclusion, insider

and outsider, security and insecurity. Further, it is a 'mode of operation rather than a definition'

to deterritorialize the spatial entity of this amorphous/morphological concept (Hicks 1991: xxiii).

Power relations through inclusion and exclusion are situated in the very existence of border via

performed spatial relations which are not homogeneous, but multiple and contested. The

spatiality of border, in this sense, 'occurs as the effects produced by the operations that orient it,

situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or

contractual promixites' (De Certeau 1984: 117).

In this sense, how can we see the border space as the liminal space? In his anthropological work

on the ritual process, Turner cites Arnold van Gennep (1909) who defines '"liminal phase" of

rites de passage'; accordingly, it refers to 'rites which accompany every change of place, state,

social position and age' (Turner 1977: 94). Following Turner, 'rites de passage or transition' has

three state of phases at which the first phase is the phase of 'separation'; the second phase as 'the

intervening "liminal" period refers to 'characteristics of the ritual subject (the "passenger"); and

the final, the third phase is the 'reaggregation or reincorporation' in which 'the passage is

consummated' (Turner 1977: 94-95). It is the border naturalizes the inside and outside, here and

there. 'Liminal entities', for Turner, 'are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the

positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial' (Turner 1977: 95).

Not only the border organizes the spatial and territorial inclusion and exclusion, here and there;

but also the transfiguration of body in its passage of journey through reproducing new

statuses/identities/interpellations. The liminality throughout the journey of body and


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status/identity can be exemplified in the case of Mexico-U.S. border, which itself produces a

certain form of discourse which brings new identities and interpellations such as 'pollo (the

border crosser), the migra (the U.S. immigration officer), the coyote (the person bringing the

pollo across the border), the turista (the North American visitor to Mexico), and the cholo (the

young bicultural inhabitant of the border regions)' in case of the Mexico-US border (Hicks 1991:

xxiii). The reproduction of a certain language and flowing/transient identities in the border

crossing activity from home country to Turkey and from Turkey to Canada carries similar

discursive features in which the flowing identities and interpellations such as guest, irregular

migrant, potential asylum seeker and applicant, regular migrant, or the tourist have been

attributed to the human beings at the border based on the performative act of human beings

within the framework of law and il/legality. Border crossers as the border subjects or liminal

subjects are 'bodies with organs' which function through deterritorializing the border within its

own system of reterritorialization (Hicks 1991). What is crucial is that the border crossing

performativity of individuals who are criminalized by the state system constitutes a 'contested

contact zone' (Gilroy 1993: 6). The construction of liminality with the construction of border

serves the desire of sovereign to create docile and passive beings, in which the sovereign in this

contested zone forces the body into liminality. The border performativity, which 'is a spatial as

well as social set of repetitive practices', creates and also reproduces 'multi-angular structure' and

multi-identities as opposed to the conventional linear structure and identity construction (Kaiser

2012: 523; Baubock and Faist 2010). Furthermore, an individual at the border is categorized

based on his/her intention for being inside of the border during her /his so-called transgressive

act; namely, if s/he wants to arrive to Turkey without valid documents, this person will be called

as irregular, undocumented, or illegal migrant. If this person's intention is to arrive to Canada or


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Europe via Turkey, now s/he will be labelled as both undocumented/illegal/ irregular and transit

migrant. The interpellation goes on: if this person aims to seek asylum in Turkey, the label will

be the asylum seeker who is waiting to be granted with refugee status; and if s/he is non-

European asylum seeker, s/he will be waiting for the resettlement into a third country such as

Canada, the United States or Australia.

In this sense, spatial relations reproduced at the border produce diverse identities and

interpellations through the criminalization and illegalization of the border crossing activity of the

unwanted individuals. Althusser's (1971) 'the ideology of interpellation' thus not only creates the

liminality for individuals in motion, but also brings 'lowliness and sacredness' in which

'liminality', for Turner, 'implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed' (Turner

1977: 97). In this sense, the sovereign as the bearer of right to include and exclude attributes

sacredness to the inside of the border and therefore the institution of citizenship. The low is the

body who performs the transgression at the border and the lowliness is marked through labels

such as irregular, undocumented, or illegal migrants. The exclusionary power the state endowed

has historically functioned to determine and decide what a legal and/or illegal action is and who

a citizen and stranger/non-citizen is (Engsbersen and Broeders 2009). This exclusionary power

privilege of the nation-state brings us to the regime of citizenship, which is sine qua non in the

contemporary world order to be included into the 'natural order of things', i.e., the nation-state

(Malkki 1995). The concept of citizenship within this functioning system of exclusion/inclusion

has legitimated the discourse of political, legal, social, economic acts of individuals, but also the

discourse of interpellation and differentiation at the border, inside, and outside the polity.

Citizenship has, in this sense, has become a mechanism of systematic surveillance over the

individuals in which the concept, from Foucauldian perspective, refers to the 'technologies of


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government' and set of 'policies, programs, codes, and practices that attempt to instill in citizen

subjects particular values' (Ong 2003: 6). It is within this context that a given spatial border

functions not only to limit the state, but also to reproduce 'different forms of subjectivity or

personhood' within the domestic and international political order for the construction of citizen-

subjects and non-citizen-subjects/objects (Vaughan-Williams 2009: 3).

Virtual Border between Canada and Turkey: Journey via Asylum The term via spatially refers to three connotations during the process of journey: first, referring

to the mobility from location A to B via C, second, the ‘means of transformation’ during the

journey; and thirdly, in Latin, literally connoting the road or way (Walters 2014). Thus the term

as it is conceptualized as viapolitics serves a new opening for the politics of the vehicle, road,

and journey in the mobility and migration studies (Walters 2014). Asylum seeking highlights the

image of journey and the ‘image of ship as a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in

motion' for the motility of individuals (Gilroy 1993: 4). Following Walters’s viapolitics, the act

of asylum offers a legal, documented vehicle, route, road, and map to individuals who will be

and have already been resettled into Canada.

The statistical data on refugees and asylum seekers demonstrate that Canada as the third biggest

resettlement country follows the United States and Australia in the refugee resettlement into its

territorial landscape. The Canadian Refugee Resettlement Programme is operated under the

administration of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada via the cooperation and

assistance of UNHCR, IOM and the country of asylum since the late 1970s (UNHCR

Resettlement Handbook Canada 2013). Based on the quota system, around ten thousand

refugees are resettled to Canada. The resettlement program implemented by Canada and the


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geographical limitation imposed over non-European asylum seekers by Turkey have created a

corridor and a virtual border and border crossing act between two countries.

Accordingly, the potential asylum seekers arrive in Turkey from North African countries such as

Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, from its neighboring countries mainly Iran, Iraq, and

Syria, are resettled into a third country particularly the United States, Australia, and Canada.

Based on interviews and observations during the fieldwork, especially Iranians are aware of the

fact that once one seeks asylum in Turkey, if the case is admitted by the UN High Commissioner

for Refugees (UNHCR), the next step is to resettle into Canada after spending around two years

in Turkey. For Iraqi asylum seekers, they are aware of the fact that they will be most likely

resettled into the United States after spending around a year in Turkey. For African migrants, the

border crossing activity is a more complex, multi-dimensional, and ambiguous phenomenon.

Mapping through journey, as part of my intention, is significant and intriguing since the act of

mapping ‘engages the whole of the senses in bending time and space into new kinaesthetic

shapes, taps into the long and variegated history of the unleashing of performance, leads us to

understand movement as a potential, challenges the privileging of meaning’ (Thrift 2008: 14). It

is within this context that the Canadian case therefore offers a concurrence and synchroneity of

possibility/potentiality and virtuality/imaginary in the very actualization of the mapping due to

the non-phenomenological knowledge and experience of informants on the Canadian geopolitical

imaginaries. The potentiality is, according to interviews, the Aristotelian distinction of zoē,

which refers to ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)’

and bios, which describes ‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’

(Agamben 1998: 1). Furthermore, this non-phenomenology or the unexperienced-ness of border

by individuals decommodifies the Canadian border due to its absence from experiences during


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the journey via asylum and the body’s perspectival and non-trivial mapping of the modern

political imaginaries. To put it simply, the body’s experience at the border, which witnessed

soldiers and security forces, border controlling practices and patrolling, and technologies related

to the border phenomena is rather missing for the geopolitical imaginary and imagination of

Canadian spatial borders. Instead, as interviews illustrate, the body articulates the potentiality

and possibility of what the Canadian experience is going to be through the diffusion of

knowledge by refugees who have been settled to Canada. The diffusion of knowledge and

information on Canada ontologically signifies the space and spatial practices as ‘something lived

in and through in the most mundane of ways’ (Thrift 2008: 17).

Asylum seekers and refugees with whom I interviewed follow the route which made possible via

seeking asylum. Based on interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, Canada especially for

gay-lesbian individuals offers a safe haven since they informed me about the human rights,

equality, non-discrimination for the LGBTTs, security, multiculturalism, hospitality, health

system, better education and work opportunities and so on. It is within this context that journey

via asylum through multiple border crossings infirm Aristotle’s formula on the life of living

beings and will to live: ‘born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good

life’ (Agamben 1998: 2). Informants were somehow aware of the system in Canada since their

friends and/or family members had followed the asylum journey. As my informant asserted that

he was informed by the Georgian officials regarding the operation of the asylum system in

Georgia where he stayed around eight months in Tbilisi camp. Accordingly, they told him

UNHCR Georgia works different from the Malaysian and Turkish asylum systems and he

contacted with a human rights activist who lives in Toronto and told my informant to pass to

Turkey for resettlement to Canada. For instance, my informant’s one of aunts left Iran in 1980


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and she was resettled into Canada via Pakistan and again same informant’s another aunt is

currently living in the United States via the asylum. Further, her uncles and aunts were resettled

to Canada via Turkey twelve years ago. My informant therefore is not blind to the potentiality

and possibility of what Canada projects for herself. Another informant, who was resettled to

Canada on June 2014, had knowledge about Canada since her sister on March 2014 and her aunt

twelve years ago were resettled to Canada; and one of her cousins is currently in Turkey and

waiting for the resettlement to Canada.

Border as Representational Space: Re-drawing the Geopolitical Imaginary Border as the space of heterotopia and border as the liminal space have been already discussed

above. The next step is to bring the body's act at the border and its mapping of the border

phenomenon. The border as a contested zone of spatial relations signifies the border as a

'representational space', in which the concept 'embodies complex symbolisms, sometimes coded,

sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also art' (Lefebvre

1991: 33). Thus the symbolic representation of the border space reveals the act of resistance and

displays the space of resistance through transgression and overcoming. It is this within this

context that the significant point is to delineate how these individuals in motion in their journey,

constructed and treated as a potential danger to the inside and the institution of citizenship draw

and map their experiences at the border.


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Figure 1: An Ethiopian migrant mapping her journey from her home to Istanbul, Turkey

An African migrant in Istanbul, who is currently undocumented and more likely will be an

asylum seeker, draws her geopolitical imaginary of map as illustrated in Figure 1. She arrived to

Turkey via plane, and therefore, yet she has not experienced the journey of border as many other

African undocumented migrants experienced throughout their journeys. Therefore, her

bordering is limited with the African continent and Istanbul where her first hand experiences

realized; however, she has heard stories regarding passing to Greece from Turkey. The 'Green

Area' that she mapped in Figure 1 is the 'jungle' or 'forest' between Turkey and Greece where her

friends stayed and slept one night in the Turkish side of that 'jungle' and one or two nights in the

Greek side of that 'jungle' during their journeys at the border.

Figure 2: An Iranian refugee mapping his multi-routed journey


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Active mapping is a productive performativity and the meaning is given by individuals.

Thereupon, the space does not have a meaning in itself but individuals give meaning to it and

produce the relations within it. What the context determines is how things gain meanings. The

border's mobility 'is tied to human mobility' which simultaneously brings the governmental

techniques 'to meet, intercept, process, or exclude migrants en route' (Mountz and Hiemstra

2012: 455). An Iranian refugee drew the geopolitical imaginary and he started to re-border and

map Iran with red colour to illustrate the personal insecurity problems in Iran through associating

red color with danger (Figure 2). Then, he continued mapping with the red pen; the danger

comes from not only Iran and the Iranian border but also Turkish border due to the very nature of

exclusion and extremities at the border. Accordingly, his journey began with his decision to

arrive to Turkey where he sought asylum there in 2010. However, his application was rejected

by the UNHCR Turkey; then he turned back to Iran. His journey continued when he passed to


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Georgia from Iran; in Georgia, he sought asylum and stayed in a refugee camp in Tiflis around

eight months. When he was in Georgia, he contacted with a human right activist in Canada who

advised him to seek asylum in Turkey; and my informant was informed about asylum and

resettlement process by the human right activist. He realized via the diffusion and production of

knowledge about how difficult is to be resettled into a third country, Canada, from Georgia.

Then he took a bus from Georgia to Turkey to seek asylum again.

The body, for Nelly Richard, is 'the physical agent of the structures of everyday experiences. It

is the producer of dreams, the transmitter and receiver of cultural messages…it is the site par

excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning or what social discursivity prescribes as

normality' (cited in Hicks 1991: 13). Border drawing and redrawing performed by the border

crossing individuals signifies the transgression of spatiality of power as opposed to state-imposed

normality. The paranoiac act of the state to control, to discipline, to divide and to exclude

through territorialisation is vulnerable and subjected to the schizophrenic border crossing

through de-territorialization and re-territorialization. This de and re-territorialization consists of

spatiality of resistance or what Lefebvre calls 'representational space' (Hetherington 1997;

Lefebvre 1991). If the state's act of mapping is a form of 'order', the redrawing through the cross

border activity can be seen as counter-order or disorder. This act of disordering is a

transgression from the state's perspective within its self-imposed normality.

The border crossing is, in this sense, an active operation 'against the Oedipal and oedipalized

territorialities'; it is Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, which 'seeks to discover the

deterritorialized flows of desire, the flows that have not been reduced to the Oedipal codes and

the neuroticized territorialities' (Seem 1983: introduction in Deleuze and Guattari). Following

Deleuze and Guattari (1983), the sovereign state is aware of the fact that the schizo cannot be


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oedipalizable because the schizo as the agent of border crossing activity is beyond the

territoriality of the sovereign. The border crossing as a 'spatial movement' as opposed to the

imposed 'spatial order of things', is 'a rhythm' which can be 'itself understood as a migration, an

endless becoming, a constant flux of connections' (van Houtum 2012: 413; Sert and Yildiz

forthcoming 2014).

Figure 3: Pazarkule Border Gate, the Turkish-Greek Border

Based on interviews conducted in Turkey with asylum seekers and undocumented migrants,

mapping of borders involves multiplicities of processes of spatial practice/ relations including the

information before the journey which signifies the diffusion of knowledge regarding migratory

system and about borders to be transgressed and overcome, the country of origin, and

significantly the routes –whether sea, land or air – and the vehicles – whether bus, walking, boat,

or plane taken by migrants.


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Figure 4: The Tundzha (Tunca) River, as the significant tributary of the Evros River, between Turkish-Greek Border

The River Tunca (Tundzha), which is the most significant tributary of the River Evros (Maritsa

or Meric) forms a natural border between Greece and Turkey and between Bulgaria and Turkey

as opposed to the constructed border illustrated via the Figure 3. Evros River as well as Tunca

has become one of the gates for migrants to pass Europe via Turkey. Migrants' re-bordering and

mapping further involve the diffusion and production of knowledge about not only borders but

also migrants' experiences and difficulties that they face in a given state. This diffusion of

knowledge through its production among border crossers is an effort and attempt to overcome

and transgress the territorialized borders of states although the conventional bordering does 'still

not overcome the Euclidean geometry of maps' (van Houtum 2012). The Eritrean asylum seeker

has never experienced the Greek-Turkish Border; however, she is aware of the fact that the

possible way to pass to Greece is to sail with a small boat. She was informed by her friends who


22 | P a g e

had experienced that journey and therefore she decided not to go to Greece; rather, decided to

stay in Turkey and seek asylum.

Figure 5: A refugee from Eritrea in Turkey mapping her journey

The narrative, she told, is that in the beginning, she wanted to go to Greece before her journey to

Turkey had begun. Throughout her journey, she lived in Saudi Arabia and then she passed from

Saudi Arabia to Syria where she spent five years. She arrived to Syria via human smugglers in a

small truck with other thirty 'unwanted' and 'undocumented' individuals. She then decided to go

to Europe but when she arrived to Istanbul, her money was not enough to pass to Greece and she

was, at the same time, afraid of going to Greece as she informed me about how difficult is to

arrive in Greece due to the 'ocean' between Turkey and Greece. The 'ocean', she mapped, is the

Evros River and its tributary Tundzha River (Figure 4), which is an ocean for a migrant, who

sails with a small boat overcrowded with migrant bodies. And then, she mapped an alternative

route to arrive in Germany or London, from Turkey to Bulgaria that is, for her, safer than the

Turkish-Greek border. Re-drawing borders through migrants is akin to Benjaminian dialectical


23 | P a g e

images, which 'are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters

them is language' (Benjamin 1999: 462). It is this dialectical image as 'an image that emerges

suddenly in a flash' and which 'comes about through action and is action'; further it functions

both word and image, both as a figure of writing and a model of reality' (Benjamin 1999: 462

and 473).

An Iranian refugee arrived to Turkey via first bus from Tehran to the Iranian-Turkish border and

then he walked from the Iranian border village to the Turkish border village (Figure 6). His

journey at the border lasted four days via walking and he was sure when he claimed that 'it was

supposed to be around thirty minutes drive'. He witnessed the border as replete with security

forces inside-outside and outside-inside of both sides of the border.

Figure 6: An Iranian refugee and his four days walking at the Iranian-Turkish Border

The mapping illustrated in Figure 6 demonstrates how a border functions as a 'modern

geopolitical imaginary' (Agnew 1994) which, for Agnew, 'constitutes a territorial trap' (Vaughan-

Williams 2009). As the informant experienced, thirty minutes distance lasted four days walking

from an Iranian border village to a Turkish border village with other migrants. Based on this


24 | P a g e

refugee's experience and mapping, this geopolitical imaginary can be seen as the liminal space

between death and life, i.e., between Iran and Turkey. The anthropological concept liminality

can be seen as a crucial to term for the act of border crossing of migrants. The concept of

liminality serves to the 'symbolic ordering' within a spatial site (Hetherington 1997) and the term

offers symbolic transition to one point to another as well as 'the distinctiveness and in-

betweenness of their non-identity' (Turner 1977; Hetherington 1997: 32). Following

anthropological concept liminality, throughout his journey from Tehran to Turkey as well as

from Turkey to Canada, my informant was an Iranian citizen until he arrived at the border village

with other 'illegal travellers' traveling with human smuggler (Figure 5 and Figure 6). Then his

identity became simply non-identity during his four days walk to the Turkish border village.

When he arrived to Turkey, he reached another passage in the process of crossing –

undocumented migrant until seeking refuge in Turkey; asylum seeker when his admission was

accepted by the UNHCR; permanent resident when he was resettled in Canada. The important

stage in case of my Iranian informant is to highlight in-between, betwixt, liminal spatiality of the

identity at the border.

Conclusion The Border as the modern geopolitical imaginary, as Agnew (1994) put it, involves dynamic

process of social, political, and economic ongoing. Commonly accepted function of the border

as a site of the sovereign's classical act of spatial inclusion and exclusion has been transgressed

by the actors of autonomous international migration. The state's classical function of bordering

for ordering has functioned as unnatural and non-neutral; and further, it has historically operated

as contingent, politically charged, dynamic as opposed to static phenomenon. While the

topographical mapping reminds us to re-draw the world as divided and to represent societies and


25 | P a g e

individuals as merely 'dividuals', transgressors, who are labeled with different interpellations – as

irregular, undocumented, or illegal migrants and asylum seekers – of this politically charged

construct, which serves the regime of inclusion and exclusion, have experienced not only the

imagined-ness of border spectacle but also re-mapped this geopolitical imaginary. Thinking

borders as heterotopic spaces helps conceive them as neither real nor utopian places through de-

territorializing them and therefore to rethink beyond the sovereign state. Not only the border as

the liminal space helps reveal the reproduction of identity and status through marking the

lowliness and sacredness; but also liminality illustrates the body's symbolic transition from one

identity/status to another as well as to non-identity at the border crossing ritual. Finally, the

border as the representational space displays the act of resistance and art of transgression at the

border space.

In this way, rethinking the phenomenon of border beyond the state reveals to be aware of the

agents of border crossing which signifies the precarity of the territorialized state sovereignty. In

this way, the act of mapping illustrates how bordering and mapping by irregularized migrants

and asylum seekers as transgressors of the so-called sacred territorial state border are dynamic

and ongoing process as opposed to the static construction of the sovereign state power.

Furthermore, the act of mapping through overcoming reveals how unwanted components are

able to map the border based on their both phenomenological and ontological experiences and

knowledge which has been produced by migrants and diffused among migrants. The mapping

and re-bordering through individual experiences provided to move beyond the archaic figure of

border as merely barrier to control and stop flows. Rather, it signifies not only contingency but

also porous, permeable, and transient as well as precarious nature of the territorialized state

border through de-territorializing it.


26 | P a g e

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