(Geopolitics) The existing academic literature is replete with discussions about complex interconnections between borders and identities (Kuusisto-Arponen and Gilmartin 2015; Makarychev 2017). Borders are viewed as producers of texts and discourses, and are discussed as social constructs that always include and exclude (Blake 2014), as well as securitize and de-securitize, centralize and marginalize. To underline dynamic nature of borders, critical scholars prefer to speak about ordering, or “border practices” (Dell’Agnese and Amilhat-Szary 2015, 8), and their roles in “suturing” and knitting adjacent spaces.
Yet the borders-identities nexus is always contextual and depends on many circumstances. This special section explores various geopolitical contexts in which the 2015 refugee crisis affected the debate on borders and identities. More specifically, we are interested to find out how the crisis re-actualized and re- shaped interconnections between borders and identities, and how these connec-tions can be interpreted geopolitically, that is to say from the viewpoint of various impacts of group identities upon political, cultural and human geographies in Europe. The four contributions explain why we should care about geopolitical categories of space, borders and identities (territorial, ethnic, national and cosmo-politan), when speaking about the current immigration debate in Europe and what the refugee crisis can tell us about the ongoing reconfigurations and trans-formations within Europe an normative, institutional and security orders. […]
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