Conflitto, violenza e spazialità: valenza generativa della determinazione conflittuale del confine come sito di lotte

This article aims to explore the relationship – which has been theoretically underdeveloped and empirically understudied – between conflict, violence and spatiality. Specifically, the article reflects on the border as a particularly interesting site to advance an anthropological perspective on conflict and violence. Adopting the anthropological and multidisciplinary lens of critical border studies, the article fosters a complex understanding of the relationship between borders, conflict and violence. Accordingly, not only is the border the site of a pure epistemic and geopolitical founding violence where the violent origins of the foundation of authority and of the preservation of the law find their way, revealing a deep connection, which is both structural and historical, between borders, conflict and violence. Borders are also sites of struggle where forms of resistance are articulated, showing that the conflict-based determinacy of borders is not only destructive but also generative of new conditions of possibility for alternative political subjectivities and agencies. This double determinacy of the conflict-based nature of borders can be better understood by considering the borders-migration nexus where conflict and violence are interweaved with other relevant themes (crisis and emergency; security, terrorism and the war on terror; in/visibility and the spectacle of the borders; differential inclusion). The article concludes with a call for an applied and engaged anthropology, or, an anthropology able to recover its inherently political dimension to grasp the complex connection between the borders and migration on the one hand, and conflict and violence on the other hand.