This article offers a multidimensional analytical framework for the concept of the 'red line' in geopolitics. Drawing on critical border studies, coercive diplomacy theory, radical cartography, and discourse analysis, it argues that the red line is not a strict or definitive limit but a malleable border: It is a space that is both conceptual and physical, deliberately open to interpretation, and derives its effectiveness precisely from its ambiguous nature. The article identifies three ontologically entangled dimensions of the red line: as a cartographic practice producing finality; as a discursive act of coercive diplomacy; and as a performative border-making process. It argues that red lines function both as a tool for conflict management and as a manifestation of the fragmented landscape of global governance. This article offers a theoretical analysis of the red line, conceptualised as a liminal space that encompasses not only what is drawn and visible but also what is implied, invisible, and imagined.
This special issue advances a feminist geopolitics of bordering by examining how migration, displacement, and resettlement are governed through the intertwined regulation of bodies and time, and contested through everyday forms of counter-geopolitical agency. Against a backdrop of persistent global displacement, restrictive asylum regimes, and humanitarian contraction, the collection brings together case studies from Turkey, the Thailand-Myanmar border, Mexico, Colombia, Nordic countries, and the United States. Moving beyond dominant Euro-Mediterranean frameworks, the articles show how bordering extends far beyond territorial edges through dispersed practices of categorisation, waiting, care, surveillance, labour, and belonging. The collection demonstrates how embodied experiences and temporal discipline are mutually constitutive mechanisms of border power, while displaced people generate alternative political geographies through practices of solidarity, strategic (in)visibility, re-existencia, and world-making. Through feminist collaborative and methodologically plural research, the issue illuminates how refugees experience, interpret, contest, and transform contemporary bordering regimes.
