Sophie Pinkham
A Once Familiar Place
Sophie Pinkham
In 2011, a Ukrainian friend drove me past the Kharkiv marriage palace. To get hitched, he said, you went through the grand pillared entrance. To get divorced, you used an unobtrusive back door. We laughed. I wasn’t getting married or divorced that day, but I was on my way to Belgorod, across the Russian border, where a friend would pick me up. I had applied for a visa in Kyiv,...
A Failure of Imagination | On Borders and the Nation-State
Sophie Pinkham
In 1990, there were fifteen international border walls, according to the political geographer Reece Jones. Today, that figure has more than quintupled — and it doesn’t account for the vast surveillance apparatuses that track and criminalize migration even in the absence of brick-and-mortar (and chain-link, and steel) barriers. By 2025, the global border-security market is expected to generate more than $65 billion in revenue. These structures and systems haven’t stopped...
