Recognising the Emerging Transnational Spaces and Subjectivities of Cross-border Cooperation: Towards a research agenda

Abstract

Recently proliferating practice- and people-centred accounts have offered useful insights on cross-border regionalism and cooperation in the European Union. However, the assumption of these studies concerning the dominantly national character of people’s ‘spatial socialisation’ and practices has produced a subtle but problematic bias towards nation-state (re)bordering and, relatedly, has implied a lack of recognition for the formation of transnational subjectivities and spaces. Inspired by fieldwork observations made in the Dutch-German-Belgian borderlands, the aim of this paper is to sketch a research agenda that comes to grips with the emerging transnational dimension of cross-border cooperation. Key to this agenda is the reconsideration of the notion of practice so as to acknowledge that cross-border cooperation entails simultaneous rebordering and debordering processes and is constituted through situated and embodied actions. The paper discusses discourse theory and practice theory as two useful perspectives for such a rethinking and outlines the key methodological implications for future research on cross-border cooperation.