Borders and Border Studies

Abstract

There are more international borders in the world today than ever there were before. This is a signifi cant fact when one considers the impact of these many borders on the ways in which the billions of people encompassed by them live, work and travel. As important a development as this multiplication in international borders is, however, it alone is not the guiding imperative behind the origin and evolution of comparative border studies in scholarship worldwide. The proliferation of borders, and the many forces that have created and fostered their development, together have drawn scholars from all the humanities and social sciences to a mutual interest in what happens at, across and because of the borders to nations and states, and in extension to other geopolitical borders and boundaries, such as those of cities, regions and supranational polities. Their interest has been as much in what happens at specifi c borders, frontiers and borderlands as it has been in what borders help us to understand of major forces of change that seem to be sweeping the globe, forces often included as aspects of globalization, but which may also be seen as neoliberalism, neo - imperialism, late modern capitalism, and supranationalism. Within these interests and perspectives, border studies scholars enter into dialogue with all those who wish to understand new liberties, new movements, new mobilities, new identities, new citizenships and new forms of capital, labor and consumption. Border studies have become signifi cant themselves because scholars and policy - makers alike have recognized that most things that are important to the changing conditions of national and international political economy take place in borderlands – as they do in like measure almost everywhere else in each of our national states – but some of these things, for instance those related to migration, commerce, smuggling and security, may be found in borderlands in sharper relief. And some things of national importance can be most often and best found in borderlands. This book, a collection of essays that represent views both of where border studies have come from and where they are going, refl ects the current state of border