Research profile of the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION

Borders aim to establish or maintain orders, be they specified in law, handed down through history, or expressed through symbols. Orders, in turn, cannot exist in the absence of border demarcations, whether in the form of lines on a map or as patterns for differentiation in people’s minds. The understanding that borders and orders must always be conceived of in dynamic interrelationships guides the work of the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION. As a key research institution of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), the Center initiates and bundles analyses concerning these interrelationships in the social, cultural, economic, and legal sciences.

We see borders as laboratories in which societal developments are concentrated. By focusing our research on borders, societal dynamics can be observed, analyzed, and anticipated especially well. At the same time, we assume that besides nation-state orders and their borders, transnational and non-state configurations of borders and orders are relevant as well. For this reason, we investigate the diverse practices of marking, transgressing, dissolving, and re-establishing borders and the stabilization or transformation of political-legal, social, cultural, and economic orders which that entails.

We are convinced that this is a highly relevant topic for society: in our globalized world, seemingly contradictory processes of drawing and transcending borders, creating and dissolving orders take place simultaneously. Whereas calls are becoming ever louder for nation-state orders and their borders to limit people’s mobility, these nation-state borders are less significant for flows of goods and capital, technologies and knowledge. However, migrants can invoke a human rights order in order to claim their rights within a nation-state. This makes clear that we find ourselves in various orders that overlap, but that can also conflict with each other. Therefore, the question arises when and under which conditions the borders of these orders become important, how they transform themselves, and under which conditions conflicts around borders and orders arise. On which orders are borders based, and to what extent do borders create new orders? What is the effect on orders when borders are set into motion, and what features of borders change when orders are transformed?

We researchers at the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION consider borders to be institutionalized forms of creating difference which structure our social world and our orientation in time and space in a fundamental way, thus achieving important accomplishments in creating order. We consider order to be a system which structures our actions and has normative validity, and which is based on drawing borders. Orders and borders are therefore inseparably intertwined – the term B/ORDERS, which we coined, encapsulates this notion. By no means do we consider borders and orders to be natural and given, but rather the result of social practice and the production of meaning, which is constantly becoming, in transformation, IN MOTION. Our multidimensional approach is oriented toward capturing configurations of borders and orders in their dynamics.

By not limiting our work to examining nation-state borders and orders, but also including social, cultural, legal, economic, and knowledge-based B/ORDERS, we expand on approaches from classical Border Studies. This also enables us to avoid methodological nationalism and to do justice to the complexity of phenomena of borders and orders which become significant on the basis of global configurations of technology, knowledge, policies, and economic systems.

The interdisciplinary nature of the research conducted at the Center is particularly significant for accessing the development of patterns of borders and orders in innovative ways – including in methodological and theoretical terms – and for appropriately grasping the complex relationship of borders and orders.

In doing so, the Center brings together internationally established research priorities of the Viadrina both in the field of enquiry „Borders and Boundaries“ and in the field of enquiry „Migration“.

The research conducted at the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION links up with the founding mission of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) and develops it further in thematic, methodological, and institutional respects. It simultaneously transfers it into current and future contexts of knowledge and society. Located in the midst of a European metropolitan region and on national borders, the European University represents, so to speak, how the simultaneity of an overlap of center and periphery, of nation-statehood and transnationality, of drawing and dissolving borders are translated into an institutional form. The research priority „B/ORDERS IN MOTION”, which is indicated on the map of institutional research priorities at universities in Germany issued by the German Rectors’ Conference, is one of the key leitmotifs for further enhancing the European University Viadrina.

The two fields of inquiry at the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION

The field of inquiry Borders and Boundaries, which is situated at the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION, is concerned with researching political-territorial borders, in particular nation-state borders, as well as the borders drawn between (business) organizations, social groups, ethnic groups, generations, and genders, and also knowledge and normative borders. In this context, we consider the merging of classical Border Studies – focusing on political-territorial borders – with sociocultural Boundary Studies particularly relevant, especially as international research has paid far too little attention to connecting these two lines of research.

Three key perspectives for research and analysis appear especially productive for examining the relationship between border and order:

a) Borders, notions of order, and constellations of borders

Firstly, it is a key perspective to take into account the ideas and systems of order behind the processes of drawing borders. This enables us to develop a deeper understanding of the borders and orders in question. Borders are not only functions of orders, but are also ordered in themselves. This also raises the question about the quality of the borders themselves, for example their durability and permeability.

Analyzing borders from a perspective of order reveals the multidimensional processes of ordering, categorizing, and delineating through which objects, persons, or periods of time are differentiated and often placed in a hierarchy. These processes are based on a complex interplay of practices, discourses, networks, and infrastructures. If the formation and (re-)creation of orders is to be made accessible to experience and analysis, it is useful to take processes of negotiation and transfer, even conflicts, into account and to ask how various actors are involved in guiding and experiencing them. A heterogeneous constellation of state, private, and corporate actors plays a role at nation-state borders, for example in the area of border security; this constellation constitutes the nation-state’s order of borders on the basis of various discourses on security as well as material and immaterial practices and infrastructures. In the field of conflict studies, the analysis of the limits of acceptability can shed light on the normative orders of conflicting parties, which become unbalanced or compromised in their core principles when these limitations are transgressed.

b) The interplay of various dynamics of bordering and ordering

Secondly, we are interested in the interplay of bordering and ordering, which can overlap, intensify, or also dissolve each other. Based on the insight that we refer to various orders and borders in our social world simultaneously – besides the national systems of order also the European and global ones, and besides political-territorial borders also legal, economic, and cultural ones – we pose the question as to the relationship between these various orders and their borders. For example, we can ask to what extent various orders meet at borders and are placed in a relationship – be it hierarchical or otherwise – to each other. It may be relevant whether a political-territorial border is coded in multiple ways. A border may not only define the territory of a nation-state, but may also establish the external border of the EU. In order to adopt new perspectives on the interaction between order and border/boundary negotiations, the interdisciplinary research situated at the Center also analyzes the situational collision of normative claims as well as the hierarchization of normative orders. In the field of labor research, for example, we inquire into the formation of order-creating boundaries and boundary-forming orders of private-sector enterprises and other organizations of gainful employment in ‘multi-level’ or legally pluralistic systems where private, state, ecclesiastical and/or international and supranational/European law intertwine.

c) The liminality of borders and the re-creation of orders

Thirdly, we are interested in the liminality of borders. As borders are created by various actors and institutions, it is noteworthy that they are not always unambiguous. Contradictions and conflicts can emerge if orders overlap or if borders are unclear – if, for example, the political-territorial border is not (unambiguously) identical to a language boundary or if globalized business relationships and transnational social interlinkages run counter to national rights and social orders. When systems of orders overlap, this may bring about borderlands or intermediate spaces or liminal spaces – at times unintentionally. They are ambivalent: on the one hand, they may engender insecurities, disempowerment, and precariousness. On the other, they are productive spaces of opportunity from which new orders – or also third orders, hybrid orders – may emerge. These processes of reordering, of (re-)shaping and creating orders can be analyzed employing a perspective of borders. Since new orders that emerge in liminal border zones can also become relevant for the centers, examining these zones makes it possible to anticipate developments of general importance.

The interdisciplinary research on migration at the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION explores the relationship, constituted by borders, between social orders and migration. The purpose is to gain a deeper understanding of the relevance of borders for regulating human mobility and for migrants’ agency, and the change of the social order resulting from it. We are interested in how borders are becoming a method for categorizing and classifying people – for example, in terms of their background, culture, ethnic group, gender, education, class, and utility to the labor market – in order to channel their mobility and to assign them specific spatial, social, and temporal positions within an order. In this way, state borders operate as semipermeable membranes that open up access and rights to some while refusing them to others.

In this context, borders are not to be understood solely in political-territorial terms. Instead, it is also about social and discursive borders as well as administrative or legal barriers that result in the inclusion and exclusion of migrants by the state and within society. Even if the function of controls on persons has ceased to exist within the EU and political-territorial borders seem to be less effective, migrants encounter multiple successive barriers even beyond the state borders.

Of particular interest to our approach is the question of how spatial, social, and temporal dimensions of borders intertwine and create liminal spaces or ‘gray zones’ here. For example, territorial borders can influence the speed of mobility in temporal terms and can mean that migrants have to wait. For political reasons, transit centers create different time-spaces for the various people housed there. Borders can also open up spaces of violence in which people are without rights for indeterminate periods. Other examples of borders that can be localized include urban and rural residential areas that differ in terms of their varying infrastructures or the social status of their residents.

For our research, it is also of interest how borders between various orders either overlap or conflict with each other and how this can impact migrants and their positions in systems of order. This is the case, for example, when nation-states’ sovereign claims collide with universal human rights.