Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the national border and its role in the political order of the nation state. The particular borders discussed here are those of Albania, Greece and Macedonia, borders that meet over the waters of a large lake.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the national border and its role in the political order of the nation state: as exceptional space of perpetual violence, the border reiterates the law maintaining power of the nation state. The particular borders discussed here are those of Albania, Greece and Macedonia, borders that meet over the waters of a large Lake. Sites of spectacular manifestation of nation-state power, paradigmatic sites of past ethno-nationalist violence, borders form around them particular types of political subjects. The border subjects (illegal immigrants, ethnic minorities, displaced people, and refugees) are the bodies upon which the state (re)founds its claim to monopolize the political. Territorially specific as well as deterritorialized (e.g. in all international airports), the border is here theorized as the distance between the Nation and its subject, a no-man's land where both nation and subject, stripped bare, (re)institute each other anew.