Abstract
The paper looks at contemporary debates – developed across disciplines, notably Political Philosophy/International Political Theory and International Relations – around borders, states’ power and citizens’ shifting levels of obedience to authority in borderlands, failed states, refugee camps or exile situations. The analysis focuses on two attempts at conceptualising political subjectivities for a “Vanished Westphalian World” (Buchanan 2000) as helpful heuristic resources to investigate bordering dynamics and their effects on liberal understandings of international politics. On the one hand, Rosi Braidotti’s challenge to methodological nationalism and her theorisation of nomadic subjects has offered a Deleuzian perspective to shed light on the aporias of liberal politics requiring denizens (i.e., non-citizens) to obey while denying them the opportunity to enjoy citizenship rights. On the other hand, from Chris Rumford’s re-interpretation of borders as cosmopolitan workshops – areas where the nexus between globalisation and cosmopolitanism emerges out of human relationships along the four dimensions of vernacularization, multiperspectivalism, fixity/unfixity, and connectivity – derives an idea of citizens and denizens as co-creators of new political bonds and loyalties. The paper presents and discusses these conceptualisations of political subjectivities and argues that they call into question liberal nationalist and internationalist readings of borders as sites of states’ power, pointing them out as spaces of political agency and relational imagination that can lead to their re-signification and transcendence.