Bordering the Balkans: Concepts and imaginaries
Bordering the Balkans: Concepts and imaginaries

Summary/Abstract: If borders did not exist, spaces and lines would have had to invent them. I paraphrase Sartre’s paradox of the invention of the Jew by anti-Semitism in order to emphasize the construction of a large theoretical field with intense production of interferential concepts. The theoretical, cultural, and artistic sensibility for spaces and lines looks for reifications of the spatial imaginaries, and the border is an excellent candidate, since it is meaning-making and meaning-carrying (H. Donnan and T. Wilson), a mixture of territory, power, symbols, identities, imaginaries. The de-bordization of states as an implication of globalization and new technologies is counterbalanced by a spectacular flowering and diversification of borders. Territoriality as a foundation for statehood does not seem to be losing its significance and is even growing stronger...

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