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This chapter offers a brief history of the U.S.-Mexico border taking into account how the very notion of border has changed and remains contested in academic and mainstream discourses. It offers an overview of the development of border studies as academic and political projects in order to place the contributions of the volume within the academic field. Finally, it offers brief descriptions of each of the chapters, drawing content and theoretical relationships between them.

This chapter provides a brief but detailed overview of the study of borders in IR, critical geopolitics and the interdisciplinary subfield of border studies. It offers an impression of the current ‘state of the art’ of existing literature that deals in various ways with the concept of the border of the state. To this end, the primary purpose of the survey is to accumulate, in a positive fashion, different insights and perspectives from a range of writings that can be mobilised to assist in conceptualising emerging practices. The chapter argues that it is possible to detect the beginnings of a shift in border studies from a geopolitical to a biopolitical horizon of analysis.

This chapter discusses the benefits of combining border studies and social movement theoretical and conceptual frameworks for generating more nuanced understandings of border politics. It demonstrates how a feminist, intersectional approach directs attention to the embeddedness of movements in particular sites of political struggle as well as the ways in which unequal power relations shape the local and extralocal terrain on which movements develop and operate. Bringing to bear theoretical conceptualizations of borders and boundaries on social movement analysis also emphasizes the interrelatedness among various aspects of social movements—cultural meanings, collective identities, activist strategies, political practices, and socioeconomic and political environments—to generate an intersectional, explanatory framework for movement dynamics in an age of globalization.

This chapter discusses the new American Studies. It introduces the “border studies” of the interactions and intersections of the different cultures of the United States and takes note of the criticisms of “American Exceptionalism”. It looks at the fundamental reconsiderations of what constitutes “American Studies” as a field—or fields—of study. It discusses the anti-theoretical bias in American Studies and identifies the “post-nationalist” challenges to the study of the Americas. The chapter also covers the problems that surround the new American Studies and introduces the American Studies Association.

Bioarchaeology is a powerful tool that brings invaluable empirical data on health and trauma, as well as interpretation to frontier and border studies. The studies included in the volume offer a view of border and frontier existence from the ground up—how ordinary people ascribe, deny, or assume cultural differences, and how they actively enact and modify their notions of belonging and identity within specific temporal-spatial contexts. The frontier type varies based on what each author is exploring and on the specific aspect the researchers chose to investigate in each chapter. Therefore, the aim of this volume is to examine the multitude of meanings and definitions borders and frontiers can have, while the theme of complexity, in one form or another, permeates throughout all the essays in this volume.

This chapter examines contemporary border theories. What do borders divide? An important account holds that borders’ main function is to exclude and separate: borders divide peoples or geographical areas. However, critical border scholars have argued that borders do not in fact divide; they are not “lines in the sand.” Rather than separations, borders are zones and practices that extend within and beyond territorial limits: they are everywhere. This chapter rejects both these accounts, which rely on sovereignty and determine the unity of the state in contrast with the outside: aliens, foreign countries, and exceptional legal decisions. The chapter maintains that borders do not divide peoples, geographical spaces, or flows: insofar as they divide, they divide jurisdictions. This distinction matters theoretically, because unlike sovereign territories, jurisdictions make legal spaces through practice; they do not make claims about the people’s identity, territorial integrity, or the legitimacy of rule.

This chapter introduces the literature of border studies and describes the new methodology of “critical limology” that will be developed throughout the book. All borders share something in common. “The border” is the name given in the book to this commonality. The border is “a process of social division.” What all borders share in common, following this definition, is that they introduce a division or bifurcation of some sort into the world. The definition proposed has four important consequences for a theory of the border that is further developed throughout this book. Thus the introduction begins by elaborating each of these four consequences and outlines a methodology for their general application to the study of borders, or limology. The four consequences are that The Border is in Between, The Border is in Motion, The Border is a Process of Circulation, and The Border is not Reducible to Space.

Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England argues that the Welsh borderlands formed a culturally distinctive region during the Anglo-Saxon period. The book begins with a close examination of a late Old English legal text known as the Dunsæte agreement, which governs procedure for the recovery of stolen cattle taken across the river which ran between the Welsh and English banks of the Dunsæte territory. This text reflects Anglo-Welsh equality, community, and cooperation, providing a window into the lived reality of the borderlands: it was a region where two peoples lived together for hundreds of years, not simply a space of endless warfare as it is often understood in scholarship on early medieval Britain. The introduction contextualizes this book within recent work in postcolonial studies, border/frontier studies, and the history of Anglo/Welsh relations, laying out a case for why the Welsh borderlands should be understood as a distinctive region during the Anglo-Saxon period.

Border Studies scholars have increasingly focused attention on borders as sites of investigation. Borders are particularly significant in the case of Israel/Palestine, as many of these boundaries are contested. The mapping of Israel’s borders are where top-down mappings by colonial powers or clueless politicians intersect with complex regional realities. The history of border-making between Israel and Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank all speak to what makes for “good” borders and better neighbors. The infamous Green Line exemplifies how a thoughtless delineation of the boundary by a bad map-reader with a thick pencil can reverberate across time and space for decades. Generally, delineations without regard for local conditions only fuel disputes over territory and can, in conjunction with ineffective national and bi-nation policies, negatively impact cross-border regions, economic development, and social interconnectivity across the border region. With many of Israel’s boundaries in flux over the years, the Survey of Israel tends to emphasize not only the temporary status of boundaries but also favors the representation of Israeli territorial claims. The stories of Israel’s many boundaries reveal that there is no technocratic solution to boundary-making. Instead, stable boundaries were based on delineating them with the local in mind, bi-national negotiations between policymakers and politicians, and bi-national teams of surveyors and experts for whom science could become a tool for establishing trust and engage in better diplomacy.

This chapter addresses the use of racist violence by whites in the Missouri Ozarks between 1894 and 1930 to control and expel blacks, to establish and maintain sundown towns, and to satisfy and regulate the need for cheap black labor in the larger cities. Building on an extensive secondary literature, it expands this story in three ways. First, it addresses the often studied most violent years from 1894 to 1906 and the years of consolidation over the next quarter century. Second, the chapter places this story into a larger geographical context by addressing the impact of this violence in the border areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Finally, it considers the implications of its findings for the historiography of racist violence and border studies.

This introductory chapter illustrates that there were multiple understandings of Germanness during the Weimar era, hence emphasizing how the triumph of Nazi ideology after 1918 was far from certain and pointing out how historical understandings of Nazism has overlooked the vital historical relationship between Germany and Austria. It examines the state of Germany in both the nineteenth century and the immediate postwar situation, from which the more contemporary contests that emerged between republicans and their opponents over the nature of German nationalism and politics that this book studies had emerged. The chapter contextualizes the shifting boundaries of Germanness against this backdrop, at the same time highlighting the long-neglected connections between Germany and Austria and the importance of exploring the exchange of people and ideas across the Austro-German boundary.

Pioneering a new methodology, this chapter shows that whites targeted particular black families for disproportionate racist violence, justifying it through a complicit press that circulated defamatory stories designed to create negative reputations about them and through a criminal justice system that hounded them. It challenges the contemporary white-authored narrative by demonstrating that whites targeted these families not because of their “bad character” but because of their refusal to submit to white supremacy. Investigating sources centered on Kansas and its border states over several decades, this study demonstrates that historians may unearth more credible stories about these families and their experiences. In the final section, the chapter assesses the significance of this methodology for the scholarship on black resistance and border studies.