About the series

Crossing to the other side has many meanings, depending on what is crossing, where, when and why. Yet it always involves borders: there can be no other side without a marker between the sides, something that gives the sense of a difference between here and that other place. Equally, refusing to cross, or refusing to accept the crossers, also requires a marker between different sides.

Rethinking Borders focuses on what gives borders their qualities across time and space, as well as how such borders are experienced, built, managed, imagined and changed. This involves detailed and often richly ethnographic studies of all aspects of borders: finance and money, bureaucracy, trade, law, new technologies, materiality, infrastructure, gender and sexuality, even the philosophy of what counts as being ‘borderly,’ as well as the more familiar topics of migration, nationalism, politics, conflicts and security.

While there has been much discussion about globalization, transnationalism, networks and digital technologies, and how these have radically changed relations between people and places, the world is still full of efforts to cut through the flow, to create stops somewhere. This is both so as to control movement (not only of people, but also of goods, animals, plants, money, ideas, diseases) and so as to define somewhere as being different from somewhere else. The Rethinking Borders series is dedicated to scholarship which provides fresh ways to think about these continuing efforts to mark differences spatially, and to understand both the major and more localised ways in which that has been changing.

The series originated with the work of a COST research network, EastBordNet (www.eastbordnet.org). EastBordNet was dedicated to rethinking the concept of border in the eastern peripheries of Europe. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was clear that something radical was happening with borders in that region, but more collaborative work across multiple borders was needed to understand and rethink the process. The first few volumes of Rethinking Borders reflect the regional origins of the series, but we welcome manuscripts from any part of the world.

Forthcoming, Spring 2018:

‘The political materialities of borders’ edited by Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova

Professor Hastings Donnan, The Queen's University Belfast and Professor Sarah Green, Helsinki University