Drawing from discussions that pulled together child researchers working near the borders of Mexico, the United States and Canada, this book explores how material and metaphoric borders give way to young people's experimentations with cultural, social and political change. The contributors highlight the capacities of children to revolutionize thought and practice through creative re-imagining of the boundaries, borders, events, circumstances and familial relations that affect their everyday lives. The first section, in different ways, highlights borders and movements through them as a bricolage of images, symbols, tensions and joys. In the second section, the idea of a portable border is explored in three chapters that consider a migrants' lifecourse, citizenship and political activism respectively. The last section of the book brings together three chapters that uncover how youth resist, confront and transform the borders that envelop their lives. By weaving narratives pertaining to young people's creative stories, transnational migrations, personal identities, pen-pal programs, masculinites, inter-generational change, border crossings, political activism and addictions, the contributors in toto raise the idea of young people taking bounded and embodied events, places and institutions and moving them towards something emancipatory sin fronteras - without borders. This book was published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

Spatial and identity research operates with differentiations and relations. These are particularly useful heuristic tools when examining border regions where social and geopolitical demarcations diverge. Applying this approach, the authors of this volume investigate spatial and identity constructions in cross-border contexts as they appear in everyday, institutional and media practices. The results are discussed with a keen eye for obliquely aligned spaces and identities and relinked to governmental issues of normalization and subjectivation. The studies base upon empirical surveys conducted in Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia, accompanied by the emergence of new borders, is paradigmatically highlighting the relevance of borders in processes of societal change, crisis and conflict. This is even more the case, if we consider the violent practices that evolved out of populist discourse of ethnically homogenous bounded space in this process that happened in the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990ies. Exploring the boundaries of Yugoslavia is not just relevant in the context of Balkan area studies, but the sketched phenomena acquire much wider importance, and can be helpful in order to better understand the dynamics of b/ordering societal space, that are so characteristic for our present situation.

This book focuses on interstitial spaces or in- between borders in the Middle East. Using various case studies, it raises the question how actors living in these regions perform their belonging despite the apparent constraints of history and politics. In recent years, the Middle East has seen States attempts to shape buffer zones or safe zones in border regions, for example, in Syria’s borderlands in the aftermath of the civil war. Typically studies on in- between borders refer to three interrelated aspects: space (territorial, symbolic), power (states or non-state actors) and identity (definition of the self/other). In this volume, the authors investigate these axes of research through the notions of sovereignty and belonging in order to assess how these concepts may highlight in-betweenness through a political dimension. Stemming from a perception of the borders as processes, these various studies aim to explore the theoretical potential of in- between border spaces to re-think sovereignty and identity belonging in such interstitial zones. While notions such as heterotopia, margins, liminality, borderlands, buffer zones, no man’s land or frontiers will be explored, each case study highlights how actors, territory and powers relate to each other in order to improve our understanding of historical and political process that are shaping identities under spatial constraints. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

This book examines the challenges posed to contemporary international law by the shifting role of the border, which has recently re-emerged as a central issue in international relations. It posits that borders do not merely correspond to States’ boundaries: indeed, while remaining a fundamental tool for asserting States’ power, they are in fact a collection of constantly changing spatial limits. Consequently, the book approaches borders as context-specific limits and revisits notions traditionally linked to them (jurisdiction, sovereignty, responsibility, individual rights), while also adopting the innovative approach of viewing borders as phenomena of both closedness and openness. Accordingly, the first part of the book addresses what happens “within” borders, investigating the root causes of the emergence of spatial limits and re-assessing apparent extra-territorial assertions of State power. In turn, the second part not only explores typical borderless spaces, but also more generally considers the exercise of States’ and international organisations’ powers and prerogatives across or “beyond” borders.

A dividing line, the border is usually perceived in terms of separation and rupture. It is a site of tension par excellence, at the origin of contestations, negotiations, and other conflicting patterns of inclusion/exclusion. This book takes us through an exploration of the border in the Caribbean region, both geographically fragmented and strongly tied through its history, culture and people. This collection of scholarly articles interrogates the border within the specificities of the Caribbean context, its socio-political dynamics and its literary and artistic representations. The transgression of borders and the consequent reconfiguring phenomena are thus applied to the Caribbean and its diasporas, through a transdisciplinary approach. The book combines a multiplicity of research fields, including Social Sciences, Cultural Geography, Geopolitics, Cultural and Literary Studies, hence it offers a global perspective on the topic and transcends disciplinary categories. The contents of the book also stretch beyond geographic and linguistic borders as the contributors come from diverse scholarly backgrounds, affiliations, linguistic areas, and research expertise.

Grounded in the borderlands and prompted by art, this book considers the connections between art, land, and people in a fraught binational region--Provided by publisher.

Globalization has encouraged worldwide mobility, intensified migration and supported growing interconnectedness through new technologies; it has therefore substantially contributed to the development of so-called transnational spaces. This volume focuses on transnational spaces which should not be understood as locations on a map or as sealed containers, but instead as relational social areas which are composed of various relationships. Transnationalization increases liberation and/or emancipation from place because social relations overcome physical space and local, regional and national boundaries. As a consequence, a reconfiguration of social, cultural, political and economic scopes of action occurs. This volume reveals that for people in general and for migration movements in particular, new borders have been established in many places all over the world. The biographies of global actors and migrants reference this alteration of space. Additionally this volume calls special attention to border regions and their social configurations. Borders appear as narratives which can have an enormous impact on social structures. This book further deals with different aspects and various tensions having to do with local and global change, interplay and interdependence. Globalization leads to development that often ignores regional needs, supports the continuation of post-colonial power and maintains hegemonic dominance.

This book critically examines how borders and boundaries, physical and symbolic, unfold in different geographies and spaces. It aims to understand why they exist and how they are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. The book explores why certain borders/boundaries persist while others are removed, and new ones are erected. It does not focus on one form of border, boundary or geographic location. It shifts its attention to different geographies, borders, and boundaries. It also focuses on intersections between them and how they complete each other. The book provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects, periods, and geographies. The chapters address classical subjects such as nation-states and tackle novel questions such as ownership against access, that is, of urban infrastructures, COVID-19 and lockdowns, and the divides within digital worlds. The book benefits from visual essays that complement the theoretical and empirical chapters, showing the complexity of the phenomenon in a simple and effective way. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students working in the fields of urban and rural studies, urban sociology, cities and communities, urban and regional planning, urban anthropology, political sciences and migration studies, human geography, cultural geography, urban anthropology, and visual arts.

Space matters. It situates our history, structures our daily lives, and often determines what we can and cannot do. Borders are central to this reality. Tools and symbols of separation, power, and identity, they bring people together as much as they set them apart. This book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity. It shows that pre-modern borders were nothing like the fuzzy lines they are typically made out to be, that border-making was rarely a top-down process and should instead be studied as an interactive endeavour, and that space was shaped by communities far more than states in this period. At its core, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy is the account of a frontier which would mark the Italian peninsula for centuries, that between the territories of the Duchy of Milan and those of the Republic of Venice. But it is also a study of how rulers and subjects alike defined spaces they could call their own. Luca Zenobi combines methods from several disciplines and applies them to a range of evidence from twenty different libraries and archives, including theoretical treatises and pragmatic records, written chronicles and cartographic visualisations, private documents and official correspondence. The cast of characters is equally eclectic, featuring influential thinkers and pragmatic statesmen, zealous factions and clumsy bureaucrats, hopeless beggars and ambitious princes. On the border, their stories intersect and reveal their part in a shared history.