Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies

The expansive understanding of borders and boundaries in recent scholarship has enriched border studies, but it has also obscured what a border is. This set of interventions is motivated by a need for a more sophisticated conceptualization of borders in light of the recent trajectories of border scholarship. In contrast to the much-feted “borderless world” of the early 1990s, the trend during the past decade has been to consider the exercise of state sovereignty at great distances from the border line itself as “bordering”. Indeed, Balibar’s (1998) notion that “borders are everywhere”—that the sovereign state’s loci of bordering practices can no longer be isolated to the lines of a political map of states—has gained tremendous currency but it is also quite a departure from traditional border studies. Thus the broad question posed to our contributors was: Where is the border in border studies