Affective Materiality of Border Governance

Contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on affective and emotional governance of borders, this paper explores recently emerging strands of affective border governance literature to contextualize Middle Eastern borders. This contextualization highlights areas where Middle Eastern border studies are developed and where they remain underdeveloped in relation to the affective governance of borders. The paper asks: how is materiality critical to understanding border governance? How do agentic capacities of inanimate objects shape the dynamics of border governance? How does the affective materiality of borderlands underscore the potentialities and constraints of state power to control its borders? The paper finds that affect is central to the governance of borders; paying attention to the material processes within the everyday of borders and their affective dimensions exposes the limits of state power to govern its borders; affective materiality offers a productive lens for scrutinizing the limits of the state’s sovereignty to control its borders.