The Politics of Temporality and the Ethos of Open Societies: Transfrontier Conservation Areas as Spatio-temporal Chokepoints

More-than-human approaches to borders unsettle the anthropocentric reading of borders and bordering practices. They call for radically different imaginings of shared vulnerabilities and co-existence on the border. What remains marginal in these discussions is the way in which more-than-human borders continue to neglect social differences and unequal power relations among different (human) individuals. The question is not simply about the hierarchy between human and non-human lives, but how the construction of such binaries continues to privilege the life of certain humans while exposing their pervasive violence on others. Using the case of the development of Trans Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa, we argue that limiting the voice of the human in our readings of the border to create space for non-humans could draw attention away from significant political analysis of mobility privileges and practices of ongoing colonisation in the construction of more-than-human spaces. By drawing on Henri Bergson's political philosophy of becoming and of open and closed societies, we suggest that more-than-human borders can be re-thought in terms of Bergson's reading of movement, qualitative multiplicity, and open societies - a language that resists any forms of closure and a linear understanding of progress and time. A close examination of TFCAs suggests that practices that seek to enable connectivity and mobility across time and space can turn borders into spatio-temporal chokepoints, which preserve the familiar logics of colonisation and exclusionary bordering.