Borders around the world are undergoing significant transformation, turning into dynamic, technologically advanced and highly securitized spaces where persons with valid documents can move smoothly across borders, while those without are filtered and sorted out, often under dehumanizing and violent conditions. Governments allocate substantial resources to policy and research aimed at enhancing border security, focusing on the control, prevention, and the deterrence of migration flows, while human rights and dignified protection are increasingly subordinated to border security. The looming effects of climate change, coupled with widening economic and political disparities, are poised to further intensify the tensions between border security, the freedom of movement, and human rights. In light of these developments, it is ever more important to comprehensively understand the contemporary borders of the 21st century.
The research project Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century, generously funded by the NOMIS foundation, proposes a new conceptualization of the border building on the concept of elasticity in physics. Thinking of borders as elastic offers new avenues to understanding not only how state borders stretch and retract, but also how they create fields of stress and violations in the processes of extension and retraction. Borders become elastic when they are extended either beyond or behind the territorial confines of a state.
Taking the case of the EU’s external frontier, the project carries out a qualitative, interdisciplinary and multi-sited study that will explore the properties, means and sociopolitical effects of the elastic border. An interdisciplinary team of six researchers explores the legal and technological enactment of the elastic border, as well as conducting in-depth field work in three critical nodes of the elastic border in Greece, Spain and Tunisia. The project aims to offer a comprehensive understanding of the transformation of the EU’s elastic border over a time span of ten years (2015-2025).
Research Units
Our research proceeds along a horizontal and vertical axis: the horizontal analysis (Research Unit 1) takes a broader, bird's-eye view of the legislative and technological framework enacting the elastic border, while the vertical analysis (Research Unit 2) conducts ethnographies of three critical nodes of the elastic border in Greece (Samos island), Tunisia (Medenine province), and Spain (Tenerife, Canary Islands).