The division of the world into sovereign political communities is taken as a given in most representations and interpretations of "inter-national" politics. John Agnew (1994) has referred to the erasure of historical disputes inherent to the creation and maintenance of States as sovereign spaces as an element of a "territorial trap". Besides defining the boundaries between the domestic and the international, these sovereign spaces became containers of "society". As Ó Tuathail (1996) reminds us, the way territories are mapped, organized, categorized and invited into the political imaginary is the result of power-knowledge relations.
This panel is an invitation to remap international politics or to represent it otherwise. It is an effort to expose the power-knowledge nexus in ongoing and often decentralized practices of "geo-graphing", or in other words, of inscribing meaning on the global geopolitical map. This panel seeks to shed some light on the structures operating in the demarcation and hierarquization of socio-political life and in the various forms of violent exclusion by practices of "bordering". The panelists are encouraged to challenge traditional geographical / cartographic imaginaries. By challenging borders as defining the conditions and spaces for political agency, for knowledge, and for relations or movements that have been authorized (or condemned) in global politics, this conversation should potentially lead to the articulation of alternative spatio-temporal imaginaries, freeing up the space for the intelligibility of different movements and trajectories, what could hopefully result in the recognition of some of the subjectivities in its multiple spatialities and temporalities that have been wiped out of our maps.
