Toward a New Art of Border Crossing: An Introduction and an Invitation

Summary

Our lives should be measured not by how many enemies we have conquered, but how many friends we have made. That is the secret to our survival.

—Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods (2020, p. 196).

Heretic emancipation from the burden of history is also a revolution in human consciousness.

—Ramin Jahanbegloo (2021, p. xiv).

Borders and border crossings are perennial challenges for self, society, and the world. Situated in a world where questions of citizenship and cosmopolitanism loom large, border crossers critically interrogate who is a citizen and who belongs to a larger planetary history. Many of the chapters that follow touch on these questions. Two of the first forms of border crossing, religion, and commerce, dominate much of the history of humanity into the twenty-first century. Globalization is not new, as William H. McNeill and others have pointed out, and the anticipations of the crossings of trade, conquest, conversion, and colonialism have meant that borders have always had a provocative position in human history.

But something unique is now happening and needs to be reported. The speed with which border crossing is taking place today would simply be unimaginable to humans of earlier eras, not least the electronic border crossing taking place every day for most of the world's population. This book is an attempt to cover at least some of this territory. We begin this dialogue on the new art of border crossing by noting the myriad forms of border crossings and their intersections with questions of mobility, refugees, persecution, and identity politics. Violence and state and substate conflict, especially in Ukraine, Palestine, and the Congo, have deeply problematized the questions of borders and control. These topics on a planetary scale require our attention, and at least some of them show up in the chapters that follow, our effort at a transdisciplinary collection of essays from around the globe. Chapter 1 of the book by Ananta Kumar Giri presents these challenges and Chapter 2 by David Blake Willis provides the latest theoretical discourses concerning border crossing and border crossers.