ABSTRACT

Epistemologically postmodern, the currently dominating imagination of the world becoming borderless premises on the view that the world space has so far been divided up by borders – the free flows of people, goods and information become challenges only if the state is regarded as a fixed territorial unit. The rhetoric of increasing flows of people, goods and information challenging the states and their borders emanates from the elites at the position of power who construct and disseminate discourses – and declare the world borderless just as they did when constructing the past (modernist) images of a bordered and compartmentalized world. Connected by information superhighways today, this tightly-knit community imagines that electronic propinquity and other fast communication are making the world increasingly smaller and borderless by shrinking distances and wiping out borders. The catch-terms in a large volume of academic (and popular) literature of late twentieth century are ‘flows,’ ‘permeability,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘porous,’ ‘conflation,’ ‘fragmentation,’ various ‘-scape’ and ‘trans-’ words, to which cultural anthropology adds ‘hybridization,’ ‘creolization,’ ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘transversal solidarities’ and ‘intercultural reflexivity’ (Bloul 1999). Political geography has used the notion of ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew and Corbridge 1995) in a critical reference to the state – which has also been attributed various ‘leakages’ (Taylor 1995), including the leaking away of sovereignty (Marden 2000, 66-7).