Paasi on Boundaries as Processes

Paasi, Ansi. 1999. “Boundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows.” Geopolitics 3(1): 669-680.

Paasi attempts to think the changing strategies, meanings, and identities produced by boundaries (by which he mainly means national borders) in the context of a world of flows. Seeing boundaries as a process helps him show the indeterminancy of boundaries: both as they are produced via practices of all kinds and socio-cultural discursive formation as well as their changing and politically contingent historical configuration and meaning.

He claims, “Boundaries are therefore one specific form of institution. The major function of institutions is perhaps to establish stable structures for human interaction and thus to reduce uncertainty and increase ontological security, but they can vary greatly in nature” (75). Ideology, narratives, identities, meanings, images etc… all play into this institutional production of boundaries. Boundaries are never-finished, always up for redefinition, and reinscription. Paasi sees his approach to boundaries as “inevitably historical and non-essentialist: territoriality, boundaries and identities should not be understood as something primordial but rather situational and contextual” (79) .