Geographies of Descent: Building Effective and Trusted Border Institutions Across the Himalayan Valleys
Borders are critical political institutions that structure the flows of goods and individuals across nation-states. However, borders are often characterised by violence, smuggling and conflicts, highlighting the importance of building effective, trusted and secure border institutions to promote economic trades and cultural exchanges. Nepal’s northern border with Tibet stretches across the Himalayan valleys, which are key corridors for trades and migration, overseeing centuries of economic, cultural and diplomatic ties. Through theorising border institutions as borderscapes, this project materialises the development of border institutions in three aspects: border inhabitants, border crossings and border settlements. Based on ethnographic studies on everyday geopolitics, this research first discusses the development and geopolitics of building efficient and robust border institutions.
Yet, the Himalayan borderscapes distinguish themselves for their mountainous terrain as they exhibit an unparalleled degree of descending slopes, with altitudes dropping from 5000 to 1000 metres within 50 kilometres. The materiality, gravity and energy of the slopes are central to the institutional development of borders in multi-dimensional spaces. The processes of descent are active actors embedded in the wider material and transnational networks over the flows of water and resources in different angles and gradients. Finally, I aim to explore how descending slopes in altitudinal terms envision new ways of thinking about border institutions, development and geopolitics.
This research illustrates the relations between development, geopolitics and building border institutions, advances the material politics of mountainous terrain and bridges the human-physical divide in geography by considering borderscapes through the geomorphological concepts of slope and descent.