Hegde, S. (2025). Testing the limits of statism: concluding reflections on migrations and Borderlands. Asian Ethnicity, 26(4), 800–816.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2025.2524539
ABSTRACT
My effort is to come to terms with the double logic implicating the dynamics of the phenomena of migrations and borderlands, both as framed by the ethnographies collected herein and the larger rubric of borderland studies. In addressing this logic as an interplay between ‘containment’ and ‘movement,’ the paper argues that it is necessary to articulate this ground by invoking a ‘statism’ within and beyond the state, in the process devolving on Foucault’s construct of ‘governmentality.’ It works towards a more complex fabric of state-society relations that must configure the study of migrations and borderlands. In focus, overall, is an approach to borderlands, as much as a site where strains of nationality and statehood have sought to uphold or query their foundations, as a theatre in which the very structure and edifice of statism can be staged as questions. Our argument remains largely conceptual and methodological, rather than demonstrably historical.
KEYWORDS:
Statism, sovereignty, governmentality, containment, movement, analytic of state-society relations
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