The Geopolitics of Borders – Cutting out the Earth, Imposing a Vision of the World

Center for French Culture and Francophone Studies at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Warsaw and Groupe d'études géopolitiques ENS Paris invite you to the “Geopolitical Tuesday” seminar entitled:

The Geopolitics of Borders – Cutting out the Earth, Imposing a Vision of the World

which will be held on Tuesday 22 of November 2022 at 3 pm (CET) with the participation of prof. Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary (Grenobles-Alpes University)

The seminar will be held in on-line form.

Inscription: seminarium.okf@uw.edu.pl

The seminar will be held in English.

Abstract:
Paradoxical geographical objects, borders have criss-crossed the world since modern times and form the basis of international relations, presupposing on the one hand the equality of law between the territories they delimit and on the other hand an exclusive distribution of sovereignty. But this concept is now unstable: beyond the binary limits of the inside/outside of the state, borders have indeed become mobile, like so many complex devices for sorting out the flows of globalisation.

If their linearity seems to be reinforced by the increase in the number of walls that close them, this is only a trompe-l’oeil because a large part of the border mechanisms is invisible. Through a geo-historical approach that shifts the European gaze and allows an economic as well as a political re-reading of borders, the lecture proposes an original dive into the implicit aspects of their construction. Now dislocated, operating on the basis of heterogeneous locations, contemporary borders are evolving in a way that profoundly transforms our relationship to identity.

Bio:
A.-L. Amilhat Szary, Ph.D., full Professor at Grenoble-Alpes University, France and member of the Institut Universitaire de France and former head of the CNRS Pacte research unit, a pluridisciplinary social sciences research center. Political geographer dedicated to border studies, and her comparative analysis of the border dynamics in Latin America and in Europe, led her to formulate the notion of “mobile border”. Her recent research concerns the interrelations between space and art, in and about contested places. She is a founding member of the ‘antiAtlas of borders’ collective (http://www.antiatlas.net/en/), a science-art project and has animated the Performance Lab (https://performance.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/) dedicated to structuring
Practise Based Research in France.

Author of : Après les frontières, avec la frontière (2006, co-edited with MC Fourny); Qu’est-ce qu’une frontière aujourd’hui ? (2015); Borderities, Politics of Mobile Borders (2015, co-edited with F Giraut); Histoires de frontières, une enquête sud-africaine (2017, collective); Géopolitique des frontières. Découper la terre, inventer une vision du monde (2020); Frontières (2020, co-edited with G. Hamez); Border Culture Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics (2022, co-authored with  V. Konrad).