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We tend to see border walls as stable concrete fortifications. This article seeks to offer an alternative understanding of walls by suggesting a shift in border studies from network thinking to meshwork thinking. Despite references to multiplicity, concepts of networks and assemblages in border studies continue to provide neat narratives of walls. This article reimagines the border beyond sovereign–disciplinary–biopolitical networks and assemblages. It argues that border walls are constituted by and constitutive of the ever-shifting transformative movements of lines: colonizing lines, crack lines and lines of flight. By tracing the lines of the Separation Wall in the West Bank, this article reveals that, on the border, all these lines coexist, entangle with one another, and in their entanglements, they alter each other to form a fluid meshwork. Meshwork thinking shows the constant mobility of the border and shifts our attention to the power of molecular movements beneath the state in creating, sustaining and disrupting power politics. By presenting a less state-centric, more complex picture of the Separation Wall, this article aims to highlight the movement of the lines that transform the border into a meshwork.

Violent borders are one of the most pressing ethical and political questions of our time. This article seeks to challenge the violent construction of borders through the concept of noise. Drawing on Michel Serres's philosophy of noise and Marie Thompson's emphasis on its affectiveness, the article shows the generative, disruptive, and affective power of noise at the border. I argue that noise creates a disruption in the system and, in doing so, calls for new encounters and relations that operate within and beyond existing power relations. I suggest that the figure of the noisy-subject creates, interrupts, and disturbs the border. The noisy-subject simultaneously prompts disorder and order on the border and transforms it into a third space that is neither simply captured by the sovereign nor fully emancipated from its power. The border as a third space constantly moves with the affective force of its noisy-subjects.

AbstractViolent borders are one of the most pressing ethical and political questions of our time. This article seeks to challenge the violent construction of borders through the concept of noise. Drawing on Michel Serres's philosophy of noise and Marie Thompson's emphasis on its affectiveness, the article shows the generative, disruptive, and affective power of noise at the border. I argue that noise creates a disruption in the system and, in doing so, calls for new encounters and relations that operate within and beyond existing power relations. I suggest that the figure of the noisy-subject creates, interrupts, and disturbs the border. The noisy-subject simultaneously prompts disorder and order on the border and transforms it into a third space that is neither simply captured by the sovereign nor fully emancipated from its power. The border as a third space constantly moves with the affective force of its noisy-subjects.

This thesis seeks to understand how borders operate and what subjectivities, spaces, narratives, relations, connections, conflicts and transformations they perform. It aims to unsettle critical readings of contemporary state borders as simply exclusive and violent biopolitical places which enact bare lives. It opens up the border into alternative imaginations by conceptualising it as a heterotopia. Drawing on a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology of becoming and Tim Ingold's notion of lines, it defines heterotopia as a fluid meshwork space constituted by and constitutive of ever-shifting transformative movements of three lines: molar lines, molecular lines, and lines of flight. The central argument is that, understood as a heterotopia, the border does not have a static structure; it is not a natural or a fixed entity with a stable identity. On the border all these lines co-exist, working in a continuum, and in their entanglements they alter one another. These three types of lines constantly mutate depending on the discursive and corporeal practices constituting them. It is the ever-shifting, contradictory and uncertain movements of these lines that transform a border into a heterotopia. Heterotopia is in constant transformation. The colonising structures and dominant moral codes of molar lines may temporarily capture this space, while molecular lines may destabilise the operation of established power structures offering the first signals of positive transformations, and thus alternative political imaginations. In this sense, the border does not exhibit a final structure, it is always at the state of uncertainty; it is always on the threshold. Nothing is stable on this space. The border moves in every direction in response to and in anticipation of the different lines that enable its construction, preservation, disruption and transformation. As such, the border never settles, it re-begins each time with the ever-shifting entangled movement of its multiple lines. This is where the positive force of border heterotopias ...

Since the end of the Cold War, the UN's collective security model has been questioned as to whether it has been well equipped to respond to the changing landscape of global security. By using the UN Security Council's response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, this paper traces the discursive contestations of the traditional understanding of the UN Charter-based collective security model. It examines what meanings the member states collectively attach to public health crises, how they frame the COVID-19 pandemic, and, finally how they consider the role of the Security Council in responding to non-military emergencies. An analysis of the debates by the Council members suggest that there is a slow normative change in the recognition of health security as an indivisible aspect of peace. We argue that the pandemic has created a normative environment for the Council's members to rethink 'broadening' and 'deepening' collective security beyond military conflicts to emphasize the Council's role in addressing health issues, structural inequalities, and other human security threats.

'Border hotels' have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about 'border hotels', closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of 'border hotels', this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the 'hotel geopolitics' agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

This collection of essays seeks to theorize the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in international relations (IR). The contributions are driven by questions such as: How can theorizing help us understand these unsettled times? What kind of crisis is this? What shapes its politics? What remains the same and what has been unsettled or unsettling? In addressing such questions, each of the participants considers what we may already know about the pandemic as well as what might be ignored or missed. Collectively, the forum pushes at the interdisciplinary boundaries of IR theorizing itself and, in so doing, the participants hope to engender meaningful understandings of a world in crisis and encourage expansive ways of thinking about the times that lie beyond.

Abstract Introduction: The concept of "event" offers a valuable lens to understand the discursive contestations in and around protests. Events create ruptures that disturb the logic of continuity and open up new way of thinking and talking about the past and the future. Drawing on this concept, this article analyzes the 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil. It investigates how the causes of these protests were framed and debated in each country and how these frames shifted over time by opening up new interpretations of the past and the future. Materials and Methods: Data is generated from four Facebook pages capturing the messages posted during the first 30 days of protests in each country. In the Brazilian case, we collected the posts of: (1) Passe Livre São Paulo (301,787 likes), the group that started the wave of protests; and (2) O Gigante Acordou (155,690 likes), a collective that emerged during the protests, representing nationalist perspectives. In total, 626 posts were collected from both pages. In the Turkish case, we analyzed posts that appeared on the pages of : (1) Taksim Dayanismasi (82,479 likes), an association that played a significant role in organizing and mobilizing Gezi Park protests; and (2) Recep Tayyip Erdogan (6,957,408 likes), a pro-government and inherently anti-protest page. We coded each post inductively focusing particularly on the way they framed the causes of the protests. We then identified the number of times each frame was mentioned during the first 30 days of the protests and explored whether and how frames changed over time. Results: Our analysis reveals a significant shift in the way the causes of the protests were framed over time in both countries, yet with different implications. While in Brazil, we observe a frame transformation undermining the initial rationale of the protests, in Turkey we see a frame extension and the emergence of broader issues as the real causes of protests, such as the authoritarian nature of the regime and the restriction of democratic rights in this country. Discussion: The article offers a way of analysing protests based on a conceptual lens of event. It sheds light on the role of social media as a platform for symbolic struggles over the protests. Furthermore, the article opens up a debate about the developments of democracy in both countries.