A traveler, unlike the tourist, goes beyond the confines of boundaries. These boundaries can be actual or metaphorical, or more or less man-made constructs— some geopolitical, some social, and some psychological. Hence, the very act of traveling or crossing borders and traversing boundaries is often related to meaningmaking. It becomes a site where multiple semantic possibilities are produced, giving access to various ways of thinking and interpretation. The idea of crossing boundaries and borders, for that matter, can have several inferences—from visiting, learning to relocating to challenging its stifling and limiting sociopolitical agendas and agencies. As Culbert (2019: 346) puts it, travel reflects “both powerful vested interests and myriad alternative possibilities of resistance and contestation.” Social scientists and geographers (cultural and political) are of the view that borders since they also create differences, are more like processes because they help us to understand how the differences, thus created, are established and renegotiated. In his essay, “Boundaries, Inequalities, and Legitimacies: A Conceptual Framework for Border Studies Collaboration,” Bernd Bucher (2018: 12) sees, “borders and boundaries as a process, rather than as any kind of static entities, they are never ontologically implicated, that is, they do not begin by merely ‘existing’ as entities, rather, they are continuously drawn and redrawn: in a constant state of becoming over time, they in fact precede nation states.” Andrew Abbott (2001: 263) further elaborates this idea by pertinently commenting, “These points us towards boundaries and borders as processes (rather than stable and natural things) that constitute and relate ‘things’ as functions of their performance: ‘Social entities […] come into existence when social actors tie social boundaries together in certain ways. Boundaries come first, then entities’.” It will be useful, at this juncture, to first understand the difference between the two terms,

Introduction

Two political borders are remarkably significant for the history of nonviolent resistance:

• 1. The border between Mexico and the USA, which shifted by annexations and wars, resulting in the expansion of the exploitation system of slavery to the newly conquered territories. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) opposed slavery and war: by public speeches and civil disobedience through tax resistance.

• 2. The border between Natal and Transvaal in South Africa, which Indian nonviolent resisters crossed as an act of civil disobedience during the Epic March in November 1913, organized by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) and Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945), the owner of Tolstoy Farm (1910–1913).

Both Thoreau and Gandhi, contributed to the emancipation struggle against slavery and war by example: Thoreau's resistance was individual civil disobedience, and Gandhi's border crossing was a collective act of defiance against degrading and oppressive legislation—after he had introduced the notion Satyagraha in the year 1908, emphasizing not only “firmness in Truth” (satyāgraha), but awareness, heart and spirit: courage, equanimity, fearlessness, humility, persistence, righteousness—soul-force. Or in the words of American abolitionist, friend of the New England Transcendentalists, and poet James Russell Lowell (1819–1891):

We comprehend the transcending of borders as an overarching motto for all those who strove for the abolition of slavery, aimed at establishing cooperative settlements to find alternatives to private property, and denounced racist discrimination, human rights violations, violence, and war. Thus, we demonstrate that the evolution of nonviolent resistance itself is deeply entrenched within the history of human emancipation and pacifist ethics—from the American abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), Adin Ballou (1803–1890), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) to the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910).

The Age of the Coronavirus unleashed a new normal on the world in 2020–2023. Within the borders imposed by the disease and its variants, we witnessed locked-down humans, massive casualties, and clearer evidence of natural habitat destruction. Rapidly moving to center stage at the same time in the consciousness of sophisticated planners, whether civilian, governmental, or military, are an array of clear environmental threats that cross borders. Complex, destructive, and extractive global networks highlight the disregard and depredations of humans toward the environment and have resulted in catastrophic losses along and within borders political, ecological, and social.

“The pandemic is a portal” as Arundhati Roy has shared with us (2020), and portals are the borderlands of emergent new worlds. What we had previously thought of as a world headed inexorably toward globalization, borderlessness, and a “habitus of homogeneity” (Befu, 2001) is once again disrupted by innovation and newness as intrusions, extractions, and catastrophes challenge and pressure us for transformation. Debordering is taking place in some places and rebordering in others, particularly when invasions and war dominate the headlines.

More importantly for the long run, climate-induced catastrophes are now very real, appearing literally at our doorsteps every day, crossing borders with impunity. Nearly every indicator of climate change that was predicted appears to have been deeply underestimated. The consequences of not planning and not acting when faced with these “wicked problems” are simply unfathomable (Satterwhite, Miller, & Sheridan, 2015). The historical roots and routes of what has happened are deeply intertwined with who we are in the world and how we cross these borders: metaphoric, symbolic, literal, and spiritual.

What we discover, especially now as the Coronavirus has upended many traditional notions of structure and agency around borders, is a reimagining of the human condition that extends to the rest of our environment. We thus face a stark, existential question at the borderlands of our survival: Can societies encourage sufficient changes in human lifestyles to avert ecological collapse?

The crossing or even overcoming of state borders does not depend solely on the efforts of affected individuals or groups. Borders are, as the history of Europe shows, established by institutions such as the state and can also be dismantled through intergovernmental cooperation. Both presuppose that people have something in common within the respective borders and also across borders. If this is not the case, states can dissolve, on the one hand, because their populations cannot be held together even under the greatest duress. Examples of this are historical nationality states such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union or many present-day African states with their fluid borders. On the other hand, traditional state borders can be made more permeable or almost invisible, as is the case with many borders in Western Europe today. However, this in turn presupposes that the respective populations can see advantages in this or are able to build on the same values, cultures, belief systems, etc. on both sides of the borders. Where this is not the case, border crossings that involve more than classic push and pull effects such as labor migration or trade are not easy to manage.

In this respect, the article deals with the difficult attempt to make borders more permeable and to systematically establish transnational cooperation in an area characterized by strong segmentation. For in Southeast Asia, culture, language, economy, and society differ dramatically from country to country, indeed from population group to population group. The article presents this problem, first characterizes the situation in Southeast Asia as a whole and then focuses its attention on the Greater Mekong Subregion. The contribution is based on the results of a scientific congress in 2018 and a recent publication by the author.

I. The Concept of South East Asia and the Diversity of the Area

Let us start with a geographical definition of the region of Southeast Asia which is a part of the Asian continent and includes the countries located east of India and south of China. In the first millennium, the entire region was subject to strong influence from India; this has been largely replaced by a Chinese one since the eighteenth century at the latest. Individual states, such as Vietnam, Thailand, today's Malaysia, and especially Singapore, are strongly sinicized.

Life is a journey with and beyond borders. Ideas germinate and travel with and beyond space and time and become part of a symphony of thinking. In November 2009, one of us, Ananta Kumar Giri, took part in a seminar on “The Politics of Boundary Maintenance,” organized at the Indian Institute of Advanced Shimla where he presented a paper on “Towards a New Art of Border Crossing.” He shared this as an opening invitation to interested friends to think with ideas in this paper further and now we have this humble gift with us, Toward a New Art of Border Crossing, to present the world as our Holi gift, a gift of colors, love, and light.

But the world has also much darkness and those who dare to challenge structures of oppression and control are cruelly treated and eliminated. We dedicate this volume to the living courage and creativity of Alexei Navalny, Fr. Stan Swamy and G.N. Saibaba. Alexei Navalny fought with courage, love, and life affirmative humor authoritarianism, corruption, and warmongering in Russia and paid this with his life in an arctic penal colony in Russia which for many is a state-sponsored murder.

Fr. Stan Swamy fought for the rights and dignity of Adivasis of India and was implicated in a sprawling case called Bhima Koregaon which many believed is a case of politically motivated arrest, and even as an 84-year-old prisoner was not given basic needed instruments such as a spoon. He collapsed in a courtroom in Mumbai on July 5, 2021. G.N Saibaba developed polio at a young age and as a result, lost his ability to walk. He had to crawl. With all the challenges of life, he got a PhD in English and taught at Ram Lal Anand College, New Delhi. He was picked up for his alleged association with the Naxalites and was imprisoned and subjected to inhuman treatment.

Introduction

In forestalling existing and potential suffering of regressive otherness in the host society, migrant and refugee parent generations often pursue dualistic linear transnational adaptations. They create sociocultural and political spaces under conditions of simultaneous linkages with countries of origin while simultaneously adapting to host societies. Parent generation also combines such endeavors with the task of caring for families. Struggling with such demanding challenges, the parent generations foster and raise the second and third generations—with the expectation of continuity. The youth, however, pursue favorable strategies and connections. While, for instance, witnessing the parent generation in overcoming otherness by sustaining host-homeland community associations, often resting on vanguard charismatic community members with traditional capabilities, the younger generation seeks alternative multi-linear and complex non-traditional adaptations. Though partially adapting aspects of the parent generation's social and cultural upbringing, the youth combine with educational and other sociocultural socialization impulses, mainly from the mainstream society. This makes the youth prefer alternative situational dynamic hybridity. They position themselves as engaging in multiple transformative and transferable fields- often aiming beyond host–homeland connections and community formations. Despite such aspirations, even with the younger generations, challenges regarding otherness persist. Though emerging creative platforms transitionally empower the youth, the shift creates gaps between the youth and parent generations.

Transnational communities generate multiple transformative processes enabling communities to confront prevailing stigma and exclusive otherness. Through diverse activities, members succeed in forming alternative social and political platforms thereby promoting cooperation and solidarities within the community as well as in relation to associated civic networks. Internally, communities remain diverse and heterogeneous resulting in disagreements on vision, ideas, and practical activities and priorities. Externally, communities confront networks and constituents opposing the presence of inhabitants with migrant and refugee backgrounds.

The younger generations differ both from the parent generations and from the wider society. With access to specific community platforms as well as engaging in diverse interactions with the wider society, younger generations navigate through conventions, traditions, and conflicting priorities. In maintaining a respectful position in society, the youth, therefore, assemble resources balancing the past with the present while remaining open for potentialities.

1. Preface

Until 1989, massive fortifications along the almost 1,400-kilometre-long inner-German border prevented the inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from visiting the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or leaving it permanently for the West. Officially, these fortifications did not include that part of the GDR's border with Berlin, which's western sectors within the city were sealed off from 1961 onwards by the so-called Berlin Wall. Nevertheless, all these border fortifications are generally considered in a common context. The main line of the border separating the Federal Republic and the GDR began in the south at the border triangle of FDR/GDR/ Czechoslovakia and ended at the Baltic Sea. During the Cold War, it was militarily and geopolitically a part of the Iron Curtain which separated the occupation zones of the three Western victorious powers (USA, Great Britain and France) including West Berlin from the occupation zone of the USSR and East-Berlin. Not unimportant for an overall assessment was the fact that the Iron Curtain divided Germany mainly in a west-east direction, i.e. contrary to the traditional economic, political, cultural and confessional disparities between northeast and southwest. The border fortifications also cut through the main west-eastern economic axis, which since the industrialisation of the nineteenth century stretched from the Ruhr area via Berlin and Saxony to Upper Silesia. Therefore, the walls cut through the traditional spatial structures of Germany, which initially made the consequences of the division difficult in every respect.

It is hardly surprising that the so-called inner-German border (apart from the Federal German legal concept, however, it had become a national border like any other according to international law in the early 1970s at the very latest) is more suitable than almost any other for studies on the topic of border crossings. However, this actual topic is preceded here, especially for a non-German readership, by a preoccupation with the origin of the border and the legal situation established by bilateral and multilateral agreements up to 1989.

2. The Establishment and Development of the Zonal Border (Zonengrenze)

After a series of war conferences from 1942 to 1945, the countries allied against the Nazi Reich had finally found consensus on the basic lines of a future policy towards ‘Germany’.

This essay begins with a discussion of religion and the inscriptional origins of the notion of a sacred-profane border (the lapis niger in pre-republican Rome) before turning to a particular image of the Egyptian Pharaoh Khafra (ca 2450 BCE) in which his political agenda is furthered by the interweaving of religion and art. Following, by way of brief descriptive references of five key works of art in the Greek, Roman, medieval, and renaissance worlds—the Anavysos Kouros, Polyklitos’ Doryphoros, the Augustus of Prima Porta, a thirteenth-century Byzantine Virgin and Child, and Raphael's Tempi Madonna—the discussion will turn to modernity, by way of the shifting concepts of sacred-profane, process-product, and Jewish-Christian boundaries in works like Monet's series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral and Barnett Newman's The Name II. The discussion will culminate with reference to the work of three contemporary artists, Mako Fujimura, Asim Abu-Shakra, and Siona Benjamin. Each of these painters transgresses religious and/or cultural and/or ethnic and/or political and visual borders simultaneously; the work of Benjamin, in particular, is intended to eradicate traditional borders with new art, literally, of re-imagined transnational, transcultural, interfaith realities with, as its purpose, the repair of a world very much fractured by its traditional sense of borders and boundaries that separate diverse groups of human beings from each other in their own self-conceptions.

Religion, art, politics, Egypt, Greece, Byzantine, Renaissance, Impressionism, Holocaust, Monet, Barnett Newman, Siona Benjamin, Krishna, Fixing the World, Japanese screens, triptych form.

I. Religio, sacer, and profanes

One might begin this narrative by considering the ultimate boundary within human understanding, that between divinity and humanity. Religion's purpose is to transgress this boundary under careful conditions. While English refers to the two realms separated by this boundary as “sacred” and “profane” we may understand boundary, realms, and religion more clearly by reference to the Latin antecedents of all three terms (sacer, profanus, and religio) and specifically, the inscription in which the term sacer first appears.

The root of the Latin word religio—“-lig-”—means a “binding.” Religio binds a community to (its sense of) divinity. More precisely, “re-” means “back” or “again,” so religion binds a community back again to that which created it. (The “-io suffix” indicates that the term is, grammatically speaking, a feminine noun.) That creative source is the sacer.

Introduction: The Curse of Borders

There is a tendency to demarcate Western philosophy from all other alleged pedigrees of the discipline of philosophy, where the borders are anything but porous or in smooth communicative dialogue. Comparative philosophy has always been suspected of stealth border-crossing; however, if that attempt is intrinsic to the methodology of the comparative or cross-cultural enterprise, without which the exercise would all but collapse, then why should there be this suspicion, almost bordering on accusation. (Pun unintended; henceforth, ‘comparative’ and ‘cross-cultural’ will be used interchangeably, unless otherwise specified, and sometimes aligned with World Philosophy.)

It is believed by the practitioners of ‘comparative philosophy’ that their endeavour consists in developing and realising a particular comparativist methodology in philosophical studies. A depiction of this approach using a metaphor of ‘removing borders’ was made by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber (2015: 1–2):

The objective of removing ‘borders’ is to enable the diversifying and pluralisation of philosophy, hitherto practiced in narrower cloisters, especially in Western (i.e., Anglo- American-European-Australasian) professionalized departments of philosophy, and aped some professional fraternities in India, Japan, Israel, UAE and Brazil. But what exactly is this strategy of ‘diversification’ or diversity and what does it entail? In responding to these questions, the chapter will focus on the ‘border-problems’ and certain encumbrances faced in the effort to achieve the strategic goal of diversity.

Creolization and Borders: A Theory of Emergence

One of the objectives of critical social science research is to provide a new kind of cultural critique. In development theory, there has been a focus, first, on the theory of convergence— we are all becoming alike, the implied model being American—and, more recently, on the theory of divergence—we are all very different and unique, the Japanese inspiring this idea in the 1980s. Yet the attempts to understand the process of multicultural relations in our world today have mostly been fraught with the limitations of a simplistic binary opposition that does not reflect the reality of a complex and rich association, a creolization.

Viewing culture as a static, monolithic, and homogeneous whole simply makes no sense when seen from the perspective of creolization. Creole cultures accent variation, historical roots, and transitions. Cultural continuity is thus seen as trans-systemic, with the focus being on the interactions and activities of multiple cultures operating on the same stage, rather than on describing the rules and order of some mechanistic conception of a singular culture. Indeed, cultures are sustained and nurtured by this activity of creolization. This creolization is the grammar of shared cultural values. It enables us to understand multicultural relations and border crossings more deeply. As Takeshi Matsuda has called it, this is a new theory of emergence and emerging Creolized cultures (2001). Joined later by adrienne maree brown and her emergent strategy (2017), this is a cultural critique with power and complexity. Emergent cultures have shared values that reveal cultural commonalities that have been subconsciously nurtured during long periods of close association between two or more very different societies (such as the United States and Japan, in the case of my research).

A key concept in understanding these new worldviews and borderlands before us, creolization can be seen as a continuous process whereby distinctive “packages” of cultural signification are braided into new forms (Hannerz 1992, 1996, 2000, 2011; Gundaker, 1998; Eriksen, 1999; Cohen & Toninato, 2010; Cohen & Sheringham, 2016; and others). In the making of Creolized transcultural societies, the creation of shared values and narratives of experiences occur in concrete day-to-day settings. Creolization places us in a process of relationality when crossing borders and creating and negotiating New Worlds.

Africa has been at the receiving end of international politics since the start of the AD era. The muslim invasion and conquest of North Africa in the seventh century (642 AD–648 AD) changed traditional and budding Christian cultures to Islam (Speel II, 2009 Brett, 2008; Gearon, 2011; Nmah, 2018; Cartwright, 2019; Wilkin, 2022; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2023). The growth of the trans-Saharan trade 650 AD–1500 AD fortified these (sometimes repressive) changes (Wright, 2007; Harich et al, 2010; Kanu, 2013), along with the Trans-Atlantic slave trades (Lovejoy, 1989; M’baye, 2007, then the later part that ushered colonialism and its neo-colonial spin-off (Onebunne, 2017; Chowdhury & Sundaram, 2022). All these point to the fact that for close to two thousand years, other races, cultures and ideologies took charge of African affairs such that the continent had no voice of its own, could not decide for itself and had no choice other than to actualise the interest of other regions, races and interests. It was as though, the continent lacked a goal, an agenda of its own. Scholarship in Africa has not been spared this deficit as the majority of discourses tow the dominant narratives. Chimamanda Adichie (2009) termed this phenomenon the dangers of a single story where Africans see the world and tell the continent's story from these dominant western perspectives. This research was based on this ‘Single Story thesis’ hence it X-rayed the sociopolitical deficits created by the dominant narratives on the continent and advocates that indigenous perspectives should be at the fore and more widespread, and local approaches should be developed to address these problems. Supporting this position, Ezekiel (2022) contends that, the narratives of Africa can be changed, not to forget history, but to reflect, learn lessons and develop local strategies to overcome re-occurrence in any form. This book was written to address one of many such single stories on the continent, and no place has such a story been more explicit than in Somalia.

Somalia has witnessed close to forty years of conflict of which its fractional colonial experience and failure of governance have been responsible. The adoption of traditional forms of governance brought the northern regions out of this chaos.

What I would like to do in this paper is to look at an analysis of the concept of “overcoming boundaries.” What do we mean when we see that we are overcoming boundaries? Is overcoming boundaries the same as crossing boundaries? And what actually are boundaries? We can look at the issue at various levels, but in this paper, I will tend to focus more on the abstract level of the meaning of the term “boundary” itself, both in the context of physical objects and, more interestingly, a social entity such as a social or an ethnic group. The latter obviously depends on the former for their metaphysical analysis. A boundary is what separates one thing from another. There is a boundary, and it is supposed to divide one thing, one entity, from another. However, as we are focusing on overcoming a boundary, this implies a further analysis of the concept of “a thing” or in other words its identity. I would like to introduce the notion of fluid identity as a corollary to the notion of boundary. If the identity of a thing is fluid, then a possibility exists for a boundary to be overcome. An implication of this is that “boundary” is always a pragmatic concept. There is no way to separate out one thing from another objectively; instead, it depends on us who do the separating and creating a boundary. Afterward, I will discuss this metaphysical analysis in the context of social identity and social boundaries. Then, toward the end of the paper, I will discuss what this pragmatic consideration means for the more practical acts of crossing or overcoming the existing cultural, social, political, and other forms of boundaries.

A Metaphysical Analysis of Identity and Boundary: Hegel and Nāgārjuna

We begin by undertaking a metaphysical analysis of the concept of identity first. This is because identity is a counterpart concept of the boundary. There can be no boundary if there is no identity and vice versa. If all things completely dissolve into one another, then we can draw no boundaries between them. Furthermore, creating boundaries in an unspecified object in effect creates more objects whose identities are defined by those boundaries themselves.

The Idea of Border

Concerned with the mounting tension at international borders, where countries often deploy their troops in anticipation of a possible conflict, it is hard to think of an analysis of this phenomenon that is matched by decisiveness. Wars and the politics of conflicts in democracy and civil society ignore the sensitivity to social justice in general and people in particular. War, for a long time, used to be considered a feature of earlier history. Still, in the not-very recent past, the phases of global trends have brought more tough competition with various forces, leading to unexpected revivals of many conflict zones. Such situations often give vent to the feeling that we live in a world where people suffer within their boundaries and have no hope that anything or anyone can make a difference. Any analysis of war, at first, appears as an organized hostility against most of the people who are grouped into abstract categories; however, the intricate collaboration between people who suffer most and those who cause the suffering often becomes inventive, which does not bring any sense of relief to the already problematic situations leading to more conflict. It was the vision of statesmanship when the late Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee, in February 1999, took the historic Lahore Bus visit, crossing the border with the message of peace from India, which the people gratefully remembered of Pakistan in later years: “In Pakistan, it seems Vajpayee will be remembered for a Nixonian diplomatic gamble in 1999 when he undertook a historic bus trip to Pakistan's Lahore.” One might argue that one can cross borders anytime as they are deliberately created, as are the boundaries and the margins. These are constructs created often for convenience and are supposed to be widely held; while the reality might be that though these may not have popular legitimacy to support, they still have constitutional support, which is not enough to contain the eruptions of tension and disaffection. As can be seen in a report of a recent incident in August 2019 in Islington, London, journalist Owen Jones of the Guardian was brutally assaulted by, as he said, the far-right supporters for his left-oriented views on several issues.

Introduction

Extant literature is scant on data on the involvement of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the African Union (AU) in Somalia's conflict prior to 2007 (see Muyangwa & Vogt, 2000). Since its inception in 2002, the AU had been quite torpid in Somalia's affairs until after Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in 2006.. Efforts at resolving Somalia's crises diplomatically were championed by states or Regional Economic Communities (RECs) (Cocodia, 2021). The AU's involvement in Somalia's conflict really began with the operations of AMISOM. Adopting peace enforcement as the first course of action by an IGO in conflict resolution is unusual bearing in mind that diplomatic efforts that ought to preclude engagement were never undertaken by the AU. In discussions with an AU official in Addis Ababa on the conflict in Somalia in 2013, Al-Shabaab was referred to as ‘those terrorists bastards’. With such a view of the opposition within the corridors of the AU, it is easy to see why diplomacy was never considered an option. The approach of the AU to the crisis was well in consonance with the dominant narrative of Al-Shabaab being a terrorist group, so there was the need to flush them out for being so labelled. This approach of the AU indicates that it was partisan right from the start, rather than an objective intervener. Partisanship in conflict resolution never bodes well for mediation, arbitration or fostering the peace in whatever form. By virtue of this approach, the AU missed the opportunity of building on the stability won by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which was a golden chance for peace in Somalia.

Summary

From the AU's inception in 2002 to Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in 2006, the AU stayed quite inactive in Somalia's affairs. Efforts at resolving the crisis diplomatically were championed by states or RECs. The AU involvement came at the insistence of the UN and the United States in 2007 for the organisation to take over the role of ‘regime changer’ from Ethiopia. The AU's involvement thus legitimised Ethiopia's invasion. The dominant narrative of the AU as a ‘peace enforcer’ has added colour to this usurpation and masked the intervention for what it truly was.