The Mediterranean: international region and deadly border

Abstract

Anssi Paasi’s research has contributed significantly to how political geographers understand the interrelated concepts of region and border. Paasi argues that regions and borders are both territorial and relational in that they are based on material practices in the landscape but also are created, reproduced, and contested through narratives. This article applies these ideas to the Mediterranean, a region with a long history of connection but with a current discourse and practice of division as the European Union attempts to limit the movement of immigrants through the sea, to argue that the idea of regions and borders are produced through 1) the iterative process of material interactions with the landscape and other humans and 2) symbolic representations of these spaces and relationships.