border and bordering. Группа авторов

are perceived as having ties to another state, where they perhaps share common characteristics or even ancestral roots with a part of the state’s population, such as in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar (van Waas and De Chickera, 2017) and persons of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic (Walters, 2010). In other instances, the state uses the manipulation of nationality policy as a means of asserting or constructing a particular national identity to the exclusion of those who do not fit the mould, such as in the case of the Kurds in Syria in the 1960s (Bhabha, 2011) and the black population in Mauritania in the 1980s (Blitz, 2011). Nationality law may also be designed to restrict the access of certain groups to economic power, especially the right to own property, such as in Liberia or Sierra Leone, where only those who are of African descent may be citizens from birth (Bloom et al., 2017). In some instances, individuals or groups are targeted for their political beliefs, since nationality is the gateway to political rights and its withdrawal can be a means of silencing political opponents. Deprivation of nationality on security grounds can also be arbitrary if certain criteria—including due process standards—are not met. Other forms of discrimination in nationality policy can also create, perpetuate or prolong problems of statelessness (McInerney, 2014). For instance, where a woman does not enjoy the same right to transmit nationality to her child as a man, children are put at heightened risk of statelessness (Policek, 2016). A stateless, absent or unknown father, or one who cannot or does not want to take any steps that might be required to confer his nationality to the child, can spell statelessness because the mother is powerless to pass on her nationality. This form of gender discrimination is still present in more than 25 countries around the world and many more laws contain other elements of discrimination against women—or sometimes men—in the change, retention or transmission of nationality (Milbrandt, 2011).

      The sole prime cause of statelessness globally in any given year—in the absence of large-scale situations stemming from one of the above problems—is the inheritance of statelessness (Bhabha, 2011). Many contemporary situations of statelessness have their roots at a particular moment in history, such as state succession, the first registration of citizens or the adoption of a discriminatory nationality decree stripping a whole group of nationality, as outlined above. Yet these situations endure and even grow over time because the states concerned have not put any measures in place to stop statelessness being passed from parent to child—or do not implement existing measures to that effect. Furthermore, these situations migrate to new countries along with the (often forced) migration of stateless persons abroad, as in migratory contexts too, statelessness is allowed to continue into the next generations (Rigo, 2005). This means that most new cases of statelessness affect children, from birth, such that they may never know the protection of nationality. It also means that stateless groups suffer from intergenerational marginalisation and exclusion, which affects the social fabric of entire communities always longing to have borders.

      Longing to Have Borders

      Borders are not only spatial locations, but are also social, political and economic expressions of belonging and exclusion (Vaughan-Williams, 2012). They are more than just a line, a divide, a single and static territorial location. Rather than treating the concept of the border as a territorially fixed, therefore, the border encompasses a series of practices. Such “reading” entails a more political and actor-oriented stance on how divisions between entities appear or are produced and sustained. The shift in focus also brings a sense of the dynamism of borders and bordering practices, for both are increasingly mobile—just as are the goods, services and people that they seek to control (Varsanyi, 2008). van Houtum & Strüver (2002) draw attention to the ways that borders are performed into being and describe this as a shift toward considering the human practices that constitute and represent differences in space. They add that this can be thought of as a shift toward understanding the border as a verb in the sense of “bordering”. Vaughan-Williams (2012) echoes this analysis, arguing that it is crucial to consider the schisms that are produced by borders and to treat borders as active structures that rely on practices of bordering. To think of the border as a verb is to think of it as something that must be done in order to come into being, and that does not exist as a noun without this active, processual, doing of the border. Borders become not spaces marked on a map, or onto territory, but instead actions that must be performed by human beings in relation to one another (Brown, 2010).

      The shift toward thinking about how human practices construct borders, and about the processes that enact borders, marks a shift in the conception of borders that also makes it necessary to pay attention to the question of where borders are, but also what they are and what they do. Subsequently, this points to the need to articulate not to take for granted the concept of the border, but instead to ask what sort of concept it is. What sort of logic does a border both follow and impose? The question of what a border is, is not assumed to have a single ontological answer, but instead one that cannot be resolved without asking what borders do. Balibar (2002) addresses this interrogation with a caution: the question is absurd as he claims that a border has no essence. He explains that a border is different in each instance and in every experience of border-crossing, that to cross one border is not the same as to cross another, and that to cross with one passport is not the same as to cross with another (Balibar, 2004). With reference to the discussion proposed in this contribution, crossing a border without a passport, is even more complex for stateless children who are seeking to have borders in order to claim protection under nationality laws. This singularity of the border, or rather its differential existence, makes it nearly impossible to define the border, since there is no definition which would be capable of holding together these differences. To this caution, Balibar (2002) adds another warning: a border is the thing that defines a territory. It marks the limit of a territory; it defines the interior and exterior of a nation-state and in doing this, it inscribes identity.

      Any act of definition inevitably involves the tracing of a boundary and therefore the construction of a border. The definition of the border forms a recursive loop. To construct a border is to define, and to define is to construct a border. For this reason, any theory seeking to pin a definition to the border is at risk of going around and around in circles, identifying borders by constructing still more borders. However, to think of a border as that which defines is, of course, already to give a sort of definition, and to enter into the recursive cycle of borders. Therefore, the caution reads as at least partly disingenuous. Taking a cue from Balibar’s (2002) caution, it could be claimed that to ask what a border is denotes a problem because the borders of different nation-states are different at different moments of history and in relation to different people, stateless children in particular. For such reasons, a universalizing ontology of borders per se is unfeasible. Furthermore, attempts to answer such questions would unavoidably construct a border. In this way, to answer the question is to reduce the complexity of the experiences of borders and would also participate in constructing borders (Balibar, 2002). Instead of working from a definition, a suggestion could be to look at what borders do and at what particular borders do at particular historical moments. To paraphrase Balibar (2002), it is possible to refer to what he calls the “equivocal character” of borders. Here the term “equivocal” gives not only the sense of a border as not being quite what it appears or claims to be, but also the sense of multiple voices and multiple meanings—of more than one possible existence of a border (see also De Genova, 2013). This equivocal character of the border is both a border’s multiplicity and its duplicity. Even as a border might appear as a simple, singular phenomenon, this is an illusion. A border is not what it seems, and it is not to be trusted. The word “equivocal” also contains within it the notion of divergent voices (“equi–vocal”). If a border deceives, it does so through the presence of many voices and many experiences, all singular and all different.

      A border has many identities and many realities—those who live within the confinement of a border and those who long to have a border, as stateless children often do, experience a border differently. Borders therefore can be described as polysemic, meaning that borders do not have the same meaning for everyone, and indeed this differential meaning is essential to the function of the border. Borders are, nonetheless, sites of administrative control (De Genova et al., 2014). The selective controls that filter populations and control the movement of people are the function of the border (Anzaldúa, 1999). These controls are always concentrated along a geographic line that marks the territorial