Daniel Meierlecturer at Sciences Po Grenoble, associate researcher at UMR Pacte

From time immemorial, buffer zones have been territorial devices to interrupt fighting and separate belligerents. Since the invention of modern states, they have also been a means of managing border disputes by introducing interstitial spaces, as if lodged between two national sovereignties, with multiple designations, from "line" to "safe zone", which can sometimes be "no man's land". In modern conflicts, buffer zones are also used, for security reasons, to justify the occupation of a neighboring state's territory. Contemporary examples include Turkey in northern Syria and Russia in eastern Ukraine.

In the Middle East, it has to be admitted that little research research on this type of object, even though the region is full of examples - from border disputes to military occupations - all of which are put to various political uses. It is worth noting, however, the recent development of research on contemporary border issues in the Middle East. At the at the crossroads of political geography, political science and anthropology, a number of works on border regions and their issues have enriched a debate on the contribution made by border studies to the to the conceptualization ofborder phenomena. border phenomena.

Exploring a literature, identifying an object

The questioning that drives all the articles published in this book postulates the existence of varied arrangements between three concepts - space, power and identity - which define three types of questions: what are the conditions for the appearance of interstitial spaces at borders, and with what spatial effects? What kind of political order is at play here, and who are the main players, with what interests? How do belongings adapt or reconfigure in such an environment?

In addition to these questions, a common conception of the border runs through the work, that of a changing and processual entity, a system of signs and symbols, producing meaning and concrete effects on actors. In the French language, the term "frontiérisation"(bordering) has thus found its way into the literature, as a result of the import of the conceptualization specific to the field of borderstudies. In tune with the literature of this field, the contributors also draw on the idea of an interdependence between this process of bordering and that ofordering andothering.

In order to the object of study in a flexible and open-ended way, we first attempt to evaluate the relevance of a series of existing concepts from various disciplines (buffer zone, liminality, margin, borderscapes, frontier, network borders, border regions, no-man's-land) based on the three aforementioned axes of entry space, power and identity, which are considered to be consubstantial consubstantial with the border object. Beyond their strengths and weaknesses, these concepts enable us to understand interstitial spaces in a way that is far from stato-centric thinking, leaving a significant place in their very definition to the social actors who populate or organize these liminal territories. liminal territories.

Various case studies and conceptual uses

Various case studies are then presented. In her research on the Bedouins of Sinai, politician Evrim Gürmüs (MEF University, Istanbul) shows the political background of their territorial marginalization, in the aftermath of the Camp David David Agreement in 1979. Transformed into a buffer zone, Sinai ipso facto marginalized its Bedouin population border territory into a space of resistance, fuelling the dynamics of transnational the dynamics of transnational violence. Zinovia Foka (Urban Studies Urban Studies, University of Weimar) has shown, with the case of the Green Line which divides and polarizes the island of Cyprus, that both Greeks and Turks have in prolonging the conflict, with the line serving as a political resource resource for nationalists on both sides. The emergence of a civil society has challenged this narrative, calling for a process of de-frontization de-bordering, using the interstitial space using the interstitial space of the green line as a place to renegotiate renegotiation of identity and politics.

For her part Rosita Di Peri (University of Turin) uses the concept of interstitiality to think the concept of interstitiality to think differently about the confessional community and Maronites in Lebanon. She proposes to read the contestation as the creation of newfrontiers in the interstices of the Lebanese community game. Lebanese community game. Conversely, Daniel Meier (Sciences Po Grenoble) proposes an analysis of the disputed territories in Iraq between the and the Kurds. Introducing the concept of "frontiering he attempts to show a process of territorial fragmentation and identity due to the absence of a state in these liminal zones and the reign of militia order, particularly since the traumatic episode of the Islamic State (2014).

Stéphanie Latte-Abdallah (CERI-Sciences Po Paris)'s study of travel restrictions for Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian space shows that interstitiality can be a tool of domination and control. The process of fragmentation is therefore deliberate, and further blurs Palestinian identity along what she calls "an endlessborder".

In his conclusion, the great geographer and precursor of frontier studies in the Middle East, Richard Schofield (King's College), argues for greater research attention to the liminal spaces where what he callsfrontierization is played out, and which deserves more multidisciplinary academic attention.