The force of events: the ‘Brexit interval’ and popular aspirations for Gibraltarian diplomacy

Abstract

This article highlights both over-reliance on legal perspectives in the study of paradiplomacy at the expense of more dynamic understandings of agency, and also the affective force of waiting and other temporal states on political subject formation.Empirically, we report the results of a longitudinal study on Gibraltarians' concerns over the Gibraltar-Spain frontier. By comparing data from two identical surveys conducted a year apart during the period between the Brexit referendum and the (as yet incomplete) legal withdrawal, we trace the force of the incomplete event on political subjectivities.Conceptualising our findings through assemblage theory and paradiplomacy, we highlight that the intensity of the event has heightened Gibraltarians' dissatisfaction with their constitutional reliance on the UK to resolve Brexit in a way advantageous for Gibraltar. A minor shift occurred in the year studied towards more agentic proscriptions of what the Government of Gibraltar ought to do to resolve Brexit. Quantitative analysis reveals that younger respondents tend to emphasise this more agentic view, while older respondentsThe force of events: the 'Brexit interval' and popular aspirations for Gibraltarian diplomacy 2 tend to advocate further lobbying of the UK or feel Gibraltar has a complete lack of agency.Qualitative analysis of the respondents' policy proscriptions reveals a complex set of views within each perspective on agency.

Bottom-up Geopolitics and Everyday Brexits at the Gibraltar-Spain Border

“…Among others, the (post-)Brexit borders discussion has rejuvenated the previously existing claim that more attention should be given to non-statecentric approaches in border studies by looking into everyday realities and geopolitics involved in (cross-)border social and economic life (Anderson and Wilson 2018;Dittmer et al 2020;Rumford 2012). In this period of turbulent geopolitical relations, more studies should be done on the way everyday border-crossings negotiate, challenge, but also contribute to border geopolitics, from the bottom up (see e.g.…”