Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on borders as research sites, encompassing the very specific friction, the liminal sites of globalisation: it offers the possibility of exploring this with its contradictions. Sites showing capital investment and social agency embedded in new mobilities.

Paper long abstract:

The borders to Southern Europe were to be exemplified by two selected cities, Tangier en Morocco and Durrës in Albania, where financial movements, capital investment and transnational companies were highlighted, as well as through the actors´ social agency (the expressed creativity against the closed doors). This means looking at how household members generate alternative production and consumption patterns to ensure survival in the time of closed borders; it is through them that we learn how barriers are circumvented. It is a way of showing how the repression of border control encourages, paradoxically, the reconstruction and the strengthening of reciprocity networks, but where networks are normally articulated through hierarchical solidarities.

The interest in the narratives on borders responded to a particular focus on grey zones or fuzzy borders, in which the national is being transgressed. This is what happens in border zones, cities and spaces where North meets South, an open floor where borderlife is put in the contradiction between border processes and state ideology, which create the conditions of crossing. This is often a pattern characterized by migration, twin plants, pollution and urban growth, which explains why the US-Mexico border region has become one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions in the world. Whereas in European border zones, these issues put forward many questions regarding national spaces especially on the type of police-state or welfare state, or on the role of the Europeanization process, which means strengthening the role of Nation-States towards migration meanwhile

I focus here on borderlands as research sites, encompassing the very specific friction, the liminal sites of globalization processes. These sites offer the possibility of exploring the globalization process in great detail, within a bounded setting and with its contradictory features. Simply put, global economic activities such as the mobility peculiar to the export processing zones, can be also very embedded in place. It is where global processes become structured by the local constraints of border cities (especially those which restrict mobilites to some nationals by the states and their policing powers) as well as by their own characteristics that define the heterogeneous forces. However, it is important to recognize that borderlands are not the rule for all socio-economic processes in the countries under study. Globalization tendencies such as the development of export industries are not to be seen for the whole of the country (in the whole of Albania or in the whole of Morocco) but it becomes clearer when one selects those cities, which are the nodes of the privatization processes in those countries.