Living in in-between spaces: A structure-agency analysis of the India–China and India–Bangladesh borderlands Pallavi Banerjee a,⇑ , Xiangming Chen b,c,1 a University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Sociology, 1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607-7140, USA b Trinity College, Center for Urban and Global Studies, Dean and Director, 300 Summit Street Hartford, CT 06106, USA c School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University, 200433 Shanghai, China article info Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: India–Bangladesh India–China Structure-agency analysis Borderlands as in-between spaces Relative urbanity abstract Research on borderlands in recent years has emphasized the variation in how boundaries and borders operate for different groups of people and institutions in the era of globalization. Capital, goods, and peo- ple with resources inhabit an almost ‘‘borderless world.’’ In contrast, people in the less developed regions tend to experience borders more as barriers. Borders create different lived experience for people who reside in particular borderlands as distinctive in-between spaces. This paper contends to understand the formation of borderlands and their meanings in the current context of globalization, especially those created as part of colonization or the legacies thereof. We need to carefully analyze the embedded expe- rience of inhabitants’ informal and fluid lived experiences that straddle national geopolitical disputes, local conflicts and negotiations, and in-between urban spaces. We offer supporting evidence for this argu- ment via a grounded analysis of the links and interactions between people living in and across two bor- derlands along China’s and Bangladesh’s boundaries with Eastern India—that were a creation of British colonial rule in India and have evolved with and beyond this colonial legacy. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction Minghi (1963, p. 407) argued that boundaries ‘are perhaps the most palpable political geographic phenomena’ because they mu- tate and evolve based on their history and natural and political re- sources. He argues that it is important to understand the context of boundaries, disputed or not, for explaining the ‘present-day situa- tions’ (p. 427). Over the years scholars of different disciplines have perceived borders and borderlands through different, albeit not mutually exclusive, lenses. Sociologists and political scientists view them as politically and socially constructed boundaries that are contested and negotiated by different actors or agents. Histori- ans treat them as a post-colonial phenomenon shaped by cumula- tive past events; whereas anthropologists define borders ‘‘as boundaries that separate social forms, peoples, and regions,’’ and a borderland as ‘‘a region and set of practices defined and deter- mined by the border that are characterized by conflict and contra- diction, material and ideational’’ (Alvarez, 1995, p. 448). With globalization, the conceptualization of borders has changed drasti- cally. Newman (2000) stated that with globalization, international boundaries have geopolitically taken on new connotations. While some globalization scholars (Caney, 2005; Ohmae, 1990) empha- sized the deterritorializing and homogenizing impact of globaliza- tion on nations and localities, other theorists have incorporated historical, post-colonial, political, and socio-cultural factors to understand borderland interactions at the global and local levels. Some other scholars have contested this theoretical binary in the literature (Coleman, 2007; Newman, 2003; Paasi, 1999; Sparke, 2006), arguing instead that globalization has resulted in an uneven effect on borders, which have become more porous for the flow of capital, goods, and people for some groups and nation-states, but remain barriers for groups that are labeled as undesirable. Borderland scholars such as Brunet-Jailly (2005) urged researchers to use multi-pronged analytical lens to study border- lands that involve examining global/structural processes such as market and trade flows and bilateral relationships, along with local processes/agent level process such as culture and politics of com- munities along the border. If we look at changing border regions as a mid-level, in-between dynamic between the global and local scales, we can identify a mix of factors that trigger and perpetuate a simultaneous process of de-bordering and re-bordering particu- larly in the context of informal trans-border (sub) regionalization on the Asia-Pacific Rim (Chen, 2000; Chen, 2009). An Asia-Pacific transborder subregion like the one comprising China’s Guangdong and Fujian provinces, Hong Kong, and Taiwan is a geographically expansive borderland, characterized by historical, political, and sociological conditions that create both barriers and opportunities 0264-2751/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2012.06.011 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 847 528 0386. E-mail addresses: pbaner3@uic.edu (P. Banerjee), Xiangming.Chen@trincoll.edu (X. Chen). 1 Tel.: +1 860 297 5170/5175; fax: +1 860 297 5172. Cities xxx (2012) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities Please cite this article in press as: Banerjee, P., & Chen, X. Living in in-between spaces: A structure-agency analysis of the India–China and India–Bangla- desh borderlands. J. Cities (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2012.06.011