How do we mark the lines between one country and another? And how do those lines – those “borders” – actually get enforced?
Those have been important questions at the center of this election – but they’re also important questions in a general sense, when we think about how we define ourselves as a ‘people’ and how we as individuals relate to our government.
Two geography professors at UNC, Sara Smith and Banu Gökariksel, are making new contributions to the thinking surrounding these questions. Earlier this year, they collected a series of essays on the topic for the journal Area, together with former UNC grad student Nathan Swanson, in a symposium called “Territory, Bodies and Borders.”
Their theory: governments use bodies, our bodies, to define the territory they control. And governments exercise that control by setting limits on our bodies – what we’re allowed and not allowed to do with them; where we’re allowed and not allowed to go.
It’s “an intimate geopolitics,” they argue. We think of all the great world conflicts as playing out over vast spaces and territories, but in reality those conflicts get waged over individual bodies: the one person who’s not allowed to cross over a border or who gets detained or imprisoned for doing so; the one person who’s denied full citizenship because of her skin color; the one person who’s forced to move from his family home; the one person who’s detained in a refugee camp; the one person who’s not allowed to protest on a street corner; the one person who gets raped or abused by a group seeking political power.
But on the flip side, Smith and Gökariksel argue, individuals can also use this fact to subvert the government – by inserting our bodies where the state doesn’t want them. Gay and lesbian couples can challenge laws against homosexuality by holding hands in public; arrestees can shut down the judicial system by rejecting plea bargains and insisting on full jury trials; individuals can even topple regimes simply by massing in public squares (as in Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011).
Smith and Gökariksel discussed their research on WCHL with Aaron Keck.
