Stories of legal borders: on statecraft, law and violence

Tugba Basaran

Chapter 9 in Border Studies, 2025, pp 167-182 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The stories of law and its obsession with borders are anything but innocent. Legal techniques of knowledge and power evolved along with other techniques and practices of statecraft. This chapter will provide an introduction to legal borders through three stories. The first story engages with the project of drawing lines, borders as technical lines of separation between states, assigning to each their unique areas of territory and control, the search for the exact contours of territorial jurisdiction. The second story asks us to reconsider the who, where and when of legal borders, by moving away from territory to ‘abroad’, following loosely literature on jurisdiction and limits. The third story engages with legal violence at borders focusing on state practices of ‘not yet admitted to law’. These three stories contribute to an understanding of the characteristics of legal borders, why they are such important tools of statecraft, and how law conceptualizes borders. Law illustrates how borders are always in motion, enacted through a multiplicity of forces; how borders are never determinate and open to contestation; how legal borders are violent and how this legal violence is unequally distributed. Ultimately, across the different stories, law illuminates the ephemeral and violent nature of borders, even if their performance posts the illusion of peace, stasis and permanence.

Keywords: Legal borders; Law; Violence; Borders; Human rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781800375383
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