Contextualizing Borders in East Asia: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

There have been discussions on the validity of theorising border studies since the beginning of this century. The nature of borderlands encompassing borders may be understood from a generalised perspective, but this special section argues the importance of contextualising borders from an appropriate theoretical framework built on preceding works. From such a viewpoint, this special section investigates various aspects of East Asia’s borders and borderlands and contextualises them in the region’s dynamic geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts. The selected four articles focus mainly on border issues in China, North Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan and Hong Kong, showing that East Asia, particularly the East China Sea region, consists of non-conventional borders and that deviations from the Westphalian sovereign territory characterise East Asian borderlands. These articles persuasively illustrate how the ‘contextual theorisation’ of borders in East Asia becomes possible by identifying the common aspects shared by their cases. I conclude that bringing in a regional or trans-border/local framework for border studies can deepen our understanding of borders and borderlands and guide us in a better direction of research and practice.

Background

There have been discussions on the validity of theorising border studies since the beginning of this century. Processes of bordering can include some generalisable aspects. The functionality of borders, in general, can be categorised into separating, filtering, connecting, othering, ordering or a combination of these, depending on the nature of (mainly state) powers exercised through borders. Therefore, the nature of borderlands encompassing borders may also be understood from a generalised perspective. However, this special section argues the importance of contextualising borders from an appropriate theoretical framework built on preceding works. From such a viewpoint, this special section investigates various aspects of East Asia’s borders and borderlands and contextualises them in the region’s dynamic geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts.

Let us first clarify where East Asia is. It commonly includes countries and regions in the northeastern side of the Eurasian landmass, such as China (People’s Republic of China), Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), South Korea (Republic of Korea) and Taiwan (Republic of China). More importantly, the region contains a continent, peninsulas, islands and seas. The four articles selected for this special section focus on border issues in China, North Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan and Hong Kong. They do not necessarily discuss state borders but show that East Asia, particularly the East China Sea region, includes non-conventional borders. The articles were initially presented at the 4^th EARCAG-GPE Workshop at Osaka City University (currently Osaka Metropolitan University, hereafter the Osaka Workshop) in November 2019. The Osaka Workshop had a specific emphasis on border issues in East Asia.

The EARCAG stands for the East Asian Regional Conference in Alternative Geography. It is a conference body to promote an international network among alternative geographers in East Asia and to explore critical perspectives on local geographical issues in East Asia. Its website states, ‘Instead of merely translating spatial theories developed in the Western context into local languages, East Asian alternative geographers [need] to reconsider in their own context in order to enrich alternative geography’ (EARCAG undated). The GPE, or the Geopolitical Economy Research Unit, is a loosely structured network formed in the EARCAG and has organised workshops and joint projects to explore historical and present geographies of East Asian development. The term ‘geopolitical economy’ summarises the general interests of researchers in the network and their common grounds bridging geopolitics and geoeconomics.

The international joint research project of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science funded the Osaka Workshop. This project also aimed at constructing trans-border geopolitics of East China Sea islands ‘connected’ to Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea. By ‘trans-border geopolitics’, this project signified a kind of ‘alter-geopolitics’ (Koopman 2011) that attempts to transcend classical geopolitics premised upon the territorial sovereign state bounded and separated by distinctive borders. It may be true that maritime border islands in the East China Sea have been sites of territorial disputes, political conflicts and militarisation stemming from state territoriality (Wirth 2012, 2016), but they have also been spaces of connection, interaction and hybridity (Matsuda 2019; Wang’s article in this special section). Although their peripheral location has long made these islands suffer from socio-economic predicaments, their potential as interfaces for trans-border interactions is emerging in this globalising world (Lee and Lee’s article in this special section). By organising international conferences such as the Osaka Workshop, this project attempted to reveal new aspects of trans-border interactions over the East China Sea and propose a new framework to promote local initiatives and public actions that lower political tensions and facilitate peaceful exchanges beyond maritime borders, as Baldacchino (2017) and Okada (2022) advocate.

The Osaka Workshop invited prominent scholars such as Anssi Paasi, James Sidaway and Chih-ming Wang to explore how border issues in East Asia can be situated and characterised in the growing scholarship of border studies worldwide. From these perspectives, the following four conference themes were selected: 1) Shifting state-territoriality and the reconstruction of the geopolitical economy in East Asia, 2) De/Re(b)ordering processes for a post-Westphalian stage? 3) Inter-island liminality as a new aspect of trans-local/border interactions and 4) The reconceptualisation and transformation of East Asia in the context of China’s rise. According to these themes, more than thirty papers were presented at the workshop. Four of them were selected for this special section.

In the following sections, this article will show possible perspectives on border issues in East Asia, discuss how those issues can broaden the scope of border studies, which tend to focus on the Western world, and introduce and situate the selected articles in East Asian geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts.

Perspectives on Border Issues in East Asia

The first theme of the Osaka Workshop concerns the relationship between state territorial politics and globalizing economy. Ongoing de/reterritorialization and re-scaling under globalisation and neoliberalism represent a constant shift in state-territoriality that exercises differentiated control over various inter-state processes as a manifestation of spatial fix in the capitalist world economy. Geopolitical economy, or the intersection between geopolitics and geoeconomics, conceptualises such dynamic political-economic processes (Cowen and Smith 2009; Kurecic 2015). Their shift can be seen not only at the national level but also at the inter- and intra-national levels. This is mainly because various effects of the capitalist world economy have penetrated our daily lives. The geopolitical economy thus (re)constructed in East Asia inevitably has multi-scalar effects on the region’s political, economic, social and environmental affairs, and such effects need to be explored from various geographical and comparative perspectives. EARCAG-GPE Workshops have traditionally focused on this theme and developed an idea of the geopolitical economy of East Asian developmentalism. The idea characterises the connection between geopolitics and geoeconomics as (state-)developmentalist, meaning that the state exercises its territoriality (i.e., spatio-territorial control) over global economic flows. This theme is closely related to the fourth theme on China’s rise discussed below.

The second theme asks if de/re(b)ordering processes are symptoms of a post-Westphalian stage. This theme was specifically selected for the Osaka Workshop. The so-called New World Order, which was expected at the end of the Cold War, has not yet emerged. Instead, we have seen a series of geopolitical fluctuations, such as ethnic conflicts, nationalist resurgences, separatist movements and fundamentalist violence. While globalising forces facilitate de-territorialising or de-bordering processes, there has been an increasing demand for securing the existing socio-political (b)orders, such as national identity, territorial sovereignty and the interstate system. Moreover, the recent events in Hong Kong and Ukraine indicate hegemonic re-territorialising and re-bordering processes by China and Russia at work (see Scanlon’s article in this special section). This, however, does not mean that such (b)orders have been intact or fixed but that they have been continuously made and remade to cope with ongoing structural changes in the geopolitical economy of the region and the world (see Chu and Hsu’s article in this special section). Whether such de/re(b)ordering processes show any symptom of a post-Westphalian stage needs to be carefully examined (Jacobsen, Sampford, and Thakur 2008). The answer may be negative for the early 2020s in an empirical sense, but this can also be a theoretical question. The COVID-19 pandemic since the end of 2019 clearly shows that state border control over human flows for public health (i.e., territorial biopolitics) can contradict and undermine the state economy based on globalisation. It can thus be said that territorial states cannot survive without de-territorialising forces. In other words, state territoriality no longer creates a fixed space of sovereignty but produces flexibly bordered space over which various socio-economic flows unfold and intersect.

The third theme on inter-island liminality as a new aspect of trans-local/border interactions partially answers the question posed above. The term ‘liminality’ originally meant a midpoint of transition between two positions and a temporary phase rather than a permanent place (Turner 1995). This concept has been applied to illustrate spaces people pass through or stay in for transit, such as borders, frontiers, no man’s lands and airports (Downey, Kinane, and Parker 2018; Fourny 2013; Matsuda 2019). Similar inter-island concepts have also developed as ‘our sea of islands’ (Hau‘ofa 1994), archipelagic thoughts (Imafuku 2017; Mountz 2015; Pugh 2013; Stratford et al. 2011) or ‘zones of indistinction and spaces of exception’ (Minca 2007). In the case of East Asia, in particular the East China Sea region, there are many chains of islands on the eastern fringe of the Eurasian landmass. These islands have connected and separated different cultures and societies while being colonised by and decolonised from imperial powers. Such geographical and geopolitical settings constitute the contexts of border issues in the region. Inter-island liminality emerging around borders has also become a cause of territorial disputes between neighbouring states (Kotani 2015). However, trans-local/border interactions between the islands (and the continent or metropolises) have provided opportunities for socio-economic development, such as border tourism, creating a new milieu for transnational connectivity. Articles selected in this special section look at inter-island liminality and trans-local/border interactions around the East China Sea. As discussed below, this section re-examines the theorisation of border studies developed in Europe and North America and contextualises border issues in East Asia to broaden the scope of border studies.

The final theme on the reconceptualization and transformation of East Asia in the context of China’s rise refers to an emerging geopolitical context of East Asia. Complex interactions among global and regional powers have (re)configured the political-economic profile of the region (Ross 1999). Since the end of the Cold War, East Asia has become one of the economic growth poles in the world, whose bases were prepared by leading developmentalist states in the region. East Asia consists of continental (littoral) and maritime states with complex historical backgrounds and interactions. Geopolitical and geoeconomic disparities within the region are also so significant that security instability continues to be an essential component of its regional dynamism. While the US and Russia have been influential in the region, China has become a crucial player competing with other regional powers such as Japan and South Korea (Chapman 2016; Shambaugh 2005). As China’s Belt and Road Initiative signifies, East Asia might be discursively reconceptualised and materially transformed, and such shifts need to be examined from geopolitical and geoeconomic viewpoints. Four years after the Osaka Workshop, we need to pay particular attention to China’s relation to Hong Kong and Taiwan, the US-China relations over these issues and the formation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) between Australia, India, Japan and the US. The QUAD, formed in 2007, is closely connected to a geostrategic register, ‘Indo-Pacific’. This explicitly oceanic register excludes China as a continental power, and the QUAD restrains China’s advancement towards the Western Pacific (Pan 2014). China and other East Asian powers have been situated in such conflictual geopolitical contexts since the beginning of this century.

These perspectives on East Asian border issues can include important theoretical and empirical questions and implications. By reviewing preceding discussions on the relationship between theoretical and empirical border studies, I next explore how borders have been theorised and contextualised and how the articles in this special section can contribute to the geographically balanced development of border studies.

Theorizing Borders

How have borders been theorised by border studies scholars? Reviewing all theoretical works in the ever-growing field is far beyond the scope of this article. In what follows, I trace some narrow lines of arguments on the theorisation of borders. Almost sixty years ago, a pioneer in this field, Prescott (2015 [Prescott 1965], 29) complained, ‘Geographers have spent too much time in devising classifications and generalizations about boundaries and frontiers which have led to little or no progress’. Prescott’s complaint notwithstanding, it seems that the classifications and generalisations of borders have been a goal of border studies, as Martínez (1994) exemplifies in his typology of borderlands. After reviewing the growing literature in border studies, Newman (2003, 134) concluded, ‘What is sorely lacking is a solid theoretical base that will allow us to understand the boundary phenomenon as it takes place within different social and spatial dimensions’.

Geopolitics has published a significant number of theoretical and empirical articles on borders around the world. Several special issues/sections in the journal have also been devoted to border studies (e.g., Geopolitics 2005, 2011, 2017, 2018, 2019). Geopolitics (2005) featured border studies as a reaction to a growing number of studies on borders and borderlands. The feature section titled ‘Theorizing Borders’ reflected on classical works and proposed the theorisation of borders. Brunet-Jailly (2005) points out that growing concern and debate on the possibility of border models and theories parallels growing interest in the study of borders and borderlands. He states, ‘[M]any single explanations of boundaries, borders, borderlands and frontiers exist, but none is really satisfying’ (Brunet-Jailly 2005, 642). From an interdisciplinary perspective, he formulates a theory of borders to combine the analytical levels of structure and agency. He argues that such a synthetic model would make it possible to compare and categorise borders and borderlands.

In the same section, Kolossov (2005, 606) also states that leading scholars consider ‘it is time to create a theory overcoming narrow disciplinary confines, unifying various aspects of the world system of political and administrative boundaries, and explaining its evolution’. He chronologically classified various approaches to borders and showed staged development in the theory of border studies. He, however, points out various examples of transboundary (cooperative) interactions that go beyond seeing borders as barriers. Six years later, Brunet-Jailly organised a special section titled ‘Borders, Borderlands and Theory’ (Geopolitics 2011) and again presented his theoretical framework, seeing bounded territories and borderlands as ‘the outcome of the continual interactions and intersections between the actions of people (agency) within the constraints and limits placed by contextual and structural factors (structure)’ (Brunet-Jailly 2011, 3). In the same section, Konrad and Nicol (2011) employ and modify his theory (analytical lens) to explore how border culture works in the Canada-US border.

Various scholars have developed the theorisation trend. Among them, Diener and Hagen (2009) provide a rich and insightful review of border studies and summarise theoretical perspectives into world systems, structuration and post-modernism. However, they argue ‘[T]he highly variable nature of international borders makes it unlikely that a single approach exists applicable to all borders. Rather than focusing on positing some single ideal border situation, a variety of approaches to structuring cross-border interaction may prove more fruitful’ (Diener and Hagen 2009, 1208). They gave a comprehensive overview of newly emerging aspects of borders and introduced case studies across the world, including former colonies. This mode of explanation was inherited in their introductory book (Diener and Hagen 2012). Another example of dealing with theorisation in a Geopolitics special section is one organised by Beurskens and Miggelbrink (Geopolitics 2017). The section titled ‘Sovereignty Contested: Theory and Practice in Borderlands’ focuses not only on theoretical and conceptual debates on sovereignty but also on empirical cases of ‘practiced’ sovereignty in borderlands, illustrating how the actuality of sovereignty can be analysed.

Theorizing borders may be an ideal goal for border studies to attain status as a substantive academic discipline, but there are scholars sceptical about it. Paasi (2005) criticises a tendency towards theorisation in the same issue that features the special section mentioned above (Geopolitics 2005). Paasi (2005, 668–669) points out that scholars often argue for developing a general theory of borders and that this argument implies that ‘borders are separate objects of social research … that can be put into the form of a fixed theory’. He considers a general theory problematic because borders can be theorised ‘only as part of a broader effort towards a socio-cultural theory which should combine such questions as the production and reproduction of territoriality/territory, state power, human agency and experience’. For him, all these questions are contextual, and specific boundaries are produced from various social, cultural and political processes that need to be contextually theorised. His ‘contextual’ approach stresses the active creation of abstractions and conceptualisation in concrete research contexts. Paasi argues that we should ‘reflect and re-shape existing theoretical arguments contextually instead of merely repeating them in different contexts’. This approach can also be called ‘contextual theorising’ to balance the theoretical and the empirical.

Elsewhere, Paasi (2011) concludes that a general border theory would ‘seem, in many ways unattainable, and perhaps even undesirable … since individual state borders are deeply characterized by contextual features and societal power relations’. Paasi’s criticism of mere theoretical abstraction and proposal for contextual theorisation are insightful and inspiring for this special section. In the following section, I discuss two aspects of contextualising borders. One is related to the geographies of knowledge; the other concerns the regionalisation of borders to bridge the theoretical and the empirical.

Contextualizing Borders

Geographies of Knowledge

Regarding geographies of knowledge of world politics, Agnew (2007) points out that the knowledge of world politics unevenly develops, disperses and circulates across the world and that intellectual or political hegemony has been imposed from some places on others. Such intellectual hegemony is also reflected in the dominance of English international academic journals and related academic capitalism as forms of ‘the geopolitics of knowledge’ (Paasi 2015). Border studies are to be sensitive to voices from relative (not absolute) margins. While Wilson and Donnan (2012) is a comprehensive and useful handbook on border studies, it exemplifies that a large amount of literature on border studies has focused on Europe and North America and has been published in English. Major works frequently cited in the field (e.g., Diener and Hagen 2010, 2012; Jones 2016; Martínez 1994; Wilson and Donnan 2012) focus mostly on borders in Europe and North America, although some include case studies in the non-Western world.

In contrast to this academic mainstream, Horstmann, Saxer, and Rippa (2018) offer a valuable collection of theoretical and empirical works on Asian borderlands that illustrate their transformations in the post-Cold War world. Among the contributions, Jones (2018) situates Asian borders within the global trend towards hardened and violent borders compared to the US and European counterparts (see also Gohain 2015). Dean (2018) points out the persistent concentration of research, organisations, journals and conferences in Western Europe and North America, although some of the most geopolitically challenged borders exist in Asia. Unlike an ideal type of modern statehood developed in Western Europe, Dean (2018, 63) argues, ‘The framing of various spatio-political developments in the non-Western world thus becomes that of limited statehood, ineffective state apparatuses, failed states, weak states, and state evasions’. From the point of ‘geographies of knowledge’, long-term academic disparities between the Western and non-Western worlds have prevented ‘the scanty research in Asia before the 2000s’ from penetrating mainstream scholarship (Dean 2018, 67).

As Sack (1986) and Winichakul (1997) show in their insightful works, a significant part of borders in the non-Western world were products of Western imperialism and colonisation. Studies on non-Western borders could shed light back on the nature of Western statehood and bordering. It would thus be desirable for border study scholars in the non-Western world to attempt to balance the intellectual bias, or uneven geographies, of the current border studies towards a broader world.

Regionalizing Borders

Paasi’s call for contextualisation (Paasi 2005, 668) is still relevant and constitutes the aims of this special section. However, I prefer using the term ‘regionalization’ to contextualisation to emphasise more geographical or material contextuality without being trapped in environmental determinism or classical geopolitical thoughts (Clark 2013; Grundy-Warr, Sithirith, and Yong 2015; Steinberg and Peters 2019). There are three reasons for this. First, as mentioned in the previous section, the geographically uneven production of border studies needs to be corrected. Rather than simply increasing the number of case studies in the non-Western world, we should refine our conceptual and theoretical understanding of borders using them in some common regional framework (such as East Asia or the East China Sea region). This regionalisation approach also makes possible a kind of contextual theorisation (Paasi 2011).

Second, contextualising border studies does not mean indulging in individual case studies but treating borders as a manifestation of sovereign/governing power in broader geopolitical, geoeconomic and geohistorical contexts. Compared to the western side of the Eurasian landmass, its eastern side has been situated in a more complex geopolitical, geoeconomic and geohistorical context. The designation ‘Asia-Pacific’, coined in the 1980s, represents the region’s growing political and economic significance, consisting of various states and regions with different cultural, historical and ideological backgrounds (Rumley et al. 1996). Due to China’s rise and rivalry with the US, however, the designation seems to have been replaced by a more geostrategic ‘Indo-Pacific’, representing an important shift in the geopolitical context of East Asia. Not only empirically but also theoretically, it is necessary to employ a regionalised perspective to illuminate how borders work in East Asia.

Third, unlike Europe and North America, maritime borders surrounding littoral and archipelagic states in East Asia have played an essential role in shaping international relations and people’s daily lives (Hung and Lien 2022; Iwashita 2012). Japanese border scholars often point out the limitations of land-based border theories developed in Europe and North America when considering Japan’s maritime borders (Furukawa 2017; Iwashita 2019). Such differences in ‘geographical’ settings need to be considered to understand borders and territories in East Asia (see Chen 2005). Given that there is a growing but still limited number of works on border islands (e.g., Baldacchino 2008; Mountz 2015; Sidaway 2010; Steinberg 2005) and maritime borders (e.g., Grundy-Warr and Schofield 2005; Hung and Lien 2022; Wirth 2012, 2016), exploring trans-local/border interactions between islands (and their ‘mainland’) would open a new venue for border studies. East Asian borderlands investigated in this special issue would give readers such an opportunity.

East Asian Borderlands

This special section is not just a collection of individual case studies. Each article is an empirical response to a keynote paper given by Anssi Paasi (Paasi 2019) at the Osaka Workshop. Although this special section does not include his paper, it was considered a starting point for discussion at the workshop. He outlines a genealogical approach to analyse the long-term progress of border studies and identifies four diverging strata that have characterised border research. The strata are labelled as the ‘consolidating territorial borders’, ‘internationalization of borders’, ‘globalization and cross-border spaces’ and ‘border(ing)s and motion’. He argues that the major transformation in this evolution had been the change from fixed borders mobilised in the consolidation of state territories to the increasingly close connection between relational borders and human mobilities. Each article in this special section deals with relational borders in East Asia’s geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts. In other words, Paasi’s paper acted as a reference point for contextualising East Asian borders.

The selected articles introduced below shed light on various new aspects of border issues in the East China Sea region, where states and regions such as China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been interacting with each other in peaceful and conflictual ways. Kyungsoo Lee and Seung-Ook Lee conducted valuable empirical research in the Sino-North Korean border region. They explore local dynamics in the region based on their intensive fieldwork on the Chinese side. Contrary to the conventional understanding of North Korean borders as classic barriers that block infiltration of outside influences, they argue that the Sino-North Korean border region has undergone considerable transformations, especially at the local level. While North Korea’s relationship with South Korea across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the Northern Limit Line (NLL) on the Yellow Sea has long been halted due to military tensions (see McCormack 2011), North Korea has opened borders towards China and created a unique peninsula-continent geoeconomic relationship. Lee and Lee highlight the importance of trans-border interactions between local governments and economic actors. Although this type of interaction is possible between similar authoritarian state regimes, whether it can develop between the two peninsula states (North and South Korea) remains to be seen.

Chih-ming Wang looks at a ‘liminal island chain’ that links Okinawa, Taiwan and Hong Kong as a frontier of democracy in the rise of a new Cold War. A geostrategic perception of the archipelago (i.e., the First Island Chain) has often been invoked in the regional contexts of the Cold War and China’s rise. Wang attempts to challenge this geostrategic idea with an indigenous settler colonial perspective and to approach democracy as a political rhetoric recently deployed in Taiwan’s and Hong Kong’s anti-China protests. Wang pays particular attention to the Protect Diaoyutai (Baodiao) Movement of the early 1970s that linked Okinawa with Taiwan and Hong Kong as a critical conjuncture of the Cold War bordering and extends the case to analyse the unfolding of the new Cold War in the East China Sea region. Scrutinizing the historical development of the border island (territorial) dispute, Wang illuminates how the dispute has not only emerged as an expression of Westphalian territorial sovereignty but also provides us with an alternative vision to go beyond the nation-state frame and ‘think about radical democracy in a trans-local setting’. In other words, the island chain in East Asia contains post-colonial trans-local spaces and liminal socio-political entities that cannot be divided neatly into sovereign state territories.

Turning to the Taiwan Strait, Ling-I Chu and Jinn-Yuh Hsu investigate how borders not only demarcate state territories but also differentiate state spaces in the case of Taiwan. By examining the border islands of Kinmen and Matsu (or Kinma in an abbreviated form) in the Taiwan Strait, they illuminate how the state relocated itself through border measures and how accidental border activities, in turn, reshaped the state. The authors argue that ‘a remote borderland is not necessarily the periphery, but can be used as a core component in state making’. As accidental or non-conventional borders, maritime borders demarcated around Kinma islands have had varying impacts on islanders’ daily lives and Taiwan’s (re)positioning during the Cold War and post-Cold War geopolitical dynamics. Along with Wang, Chu and Hsu exemplify that the formation of Westphalian state territories has not necessarily been the case in East Asia. Kinma islands may be understood as a ‘space of exception’ according to the Western norm but actually represent the working of territoriality different from the norm, leading to a kind of mismatch (i.e., liminality) between state bordering politics and the islanders’ daily socio-spatial practices.

The last article in this special section by Brian Scanlon examines the integrative connections between China and Hong Kong as China’s Special Administrative Region through the subnational (de)bordering, that is, the construction of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. Scanlon considers Hong Kong a ‘political-economic’ island that was colonised by the UK and ‘decolonized’ under the One Country, Two Systems agreements and is currently situated in the extensive Belt and Road Initiative. He argues that the infrastructural connectivity realised by the Bridge has geopolitical and biopolitical effects to ‘unmake’ Hong Kong’s islandness and local identity. This article illuminates how (de)bordering processes between mainland China and Hong Kong Island ‘normalize’ China’s territorial integrity. However, given the concerns expressed by Western powers, this normalisation based on the Westphalian norm does not look normal to them. The same can be said with regard to Taiwan. In other words, ‘aberrations from the idealized type of statehood’ (Dean 2018, 63) have characterised borders and borderings in East Asia.

Conclusion

The four articles selected for this special section were originally part of the papers submitted after the Osaka Workshop and survived the review process of this journal. However, these articles still share some common aspects of East Asian borderlands. This is not by accident.

Although trans-border cooperations in the Sino-North Korean borderland (Lee and Lee’s article) seem to fit in one of the borderland interaction models theorised by Martínez (1994), the DMZ and the NLL on the other side of North Korea are not state borders but the ceasefire line during the Cold War. Without considering the Korean Peninsula’s geopolitical contexts, the development of trans-border cooperation in the Sino-North Korean borderland cannot be fully understood. The ‘liminal island chain’ linking Okinawa, Taiwan and Hong Kong (Wang’s article) was a stage of imperial competition in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and has still been the geostrategic front as the First Island Chain (now between the US and China). Colonial and post-colonial borders within the chain have been drawn and re-drawn over time. Inter-island liminality emerged from such geopolitical contexts. The same can be said with respect to Taiwan and the Kinma islands, or ‘accidental’ maritime borders, in the Taiwan Strait (Chu and Hsu’s article). The deepening geoeconomic relationship between Taiwan and China ‘normalizes’ China’s sovereign territory, affecting the making of Taiwan as a semi-state. These non-conventional maritime borders typically characterise inter-island spaces in the East China Sea region. Hong Kong is also undergoing geopolitical and geoeconomic normalisation of China’s sovereign territory (Scanlon’s article). The state-led construction of the inter-regional bridge promotes such normalisation materially and ideationally. In light of the Westphalian norm, the normalisation process leads to reconstructing a territorial nation-state. However, in light of the liminal reality of East Asian borderlands, such a process can be a forcible imposition of the idealised statehood norm on the locals.

In sum, these four articles persuasively illustrate how the ‘contextual theorization’ (Paasi 2005) of borders in East Asia becomes possible by identifying the common aspects shared by their cases. It can be concluded from these that bringing in a regional or trans-border/local framework for border studies can deepen our understanding of borders and borderlands and guide us in a better direction of research and practice.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The international joint research project on which this article was based was made possible by the funding granted by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Project ID: 18KK0029).