Living in in-between spaces: A structure-agency analysis of the India–China and India–Bangladesh borderlands

Research on borderlands in recent years has emphasized the variation in how boundaries and borders operate for different groups of people and institutions in the era of globalization. Capital, goods, and people with resources inhabit an almost “borderless world.” In contrast, people in the less developed regions tend to experience borders more as barriers. Borders create different lived experience for people who reside in particular borderlands as distinctive in-between spaces. This paper contends to understand the formation of borderlands and their meanings in the current context of globalization, especially those created as part of colonization or the legacies thereof. We need to carefully analyze the embedded experience of inhabitants’ informal and fluid lived experiences that straddle national geopolitical disputes, local conflicts and negotiations, and in-between urban spaces characterized by what we call “relative urbanity”. We offer supporting evidence for this argument via a grounded analysis of the links and interactions between people living in and across two borderlands along China’s and Bangladesh’s boundaries with Eastern India—that were a creation of British colonial rule in India and have evolved with and beyond this colonial legacy.

► Structure-agency analysis of daily lives in India–Bangladesh and India–China borders. ► Exploring global and local influences on the lived experiences in two borderlands. ► Peripheral borderlands having smaller cities create conditions of relative urbanity. ► Intersected extra-local and local forces render borders in-between spaces. ► Borders become and are viewed as barrier and as irrelevant divide for border residents.