Borderism

Imaginative Geographies and the Production of Modern Boundaries in Spain and Portugal, 1840-1870

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3775469
AutoresJacobo García-Álvarez (0000-0002-2492-7551, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, autor de correspondencia), Paloma Puente-Lozano (0000-0002-2534-6257, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)
Año2025
Volumen115
Número1
Páginas131-147
Fecha de publicación2025-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2024.2402030
OpenAlexW4403130337
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas31

This article aims to analyze the nature and main characteristics of the discourse on borderlands and border local communities during the process of delimiting the Spanish–Portuguese boundary that took place in the middle third of the nineteenth century. It examines how both local and state actors represented conflicts and violence in border areas and how these discourses played a crucial role not only in securing the involvement of central state agencies in local conflicts but also in legitimizing state intervention in border disputes. Beyond the case studied here, this research contributes to a comparative perspective across different geographical and historical contexts on how border regions and their inhabitants have been frequently represented as problematic spaces and societies. In this regard, the article provides a critical understanding of the border-delimitation process undertaken by the Spanish and Portuguese liberal states as part of a broader national and territorial building process that, among other objectives, sought to control, normalize, discipline and integrate peripheral regions and their populations. Drawing on some of the main concepts coined by Said’s Orientalism and the contributions of Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic as well, it proposes the term borderism to describe the imaginative geographies that legitimized this kind of border-delimitation processes, not only in the Iberian context but also in other similar cases

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