Dartmouth Events

Anssi Paasi, the director of the RELATE (Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalisation) program at the University of Oulu, is one of the most influential scholars working on the problem of how geographic categories are being remade in a world of interconnection and interdependence. In this talk, he will explore the intellectual history of regions and borders, and how these systems for organizing the spaces of power, politics, and citizenship have become scrambled by the forces of globalization, leading to a supposedly “borderless world.” Yet, “in spite of the predictions suggesting its demise,” Paasi writes, “the region has stubbornly maintained its position in geography, IR and applied fields (e.g. planning, regional development, governance).” His goal is to “problematize, in general and contextual-geohistorical terms, the significance of these two spatial categories.”