The expectations of European planners for the gradual disappearance of national borders, and the corresponding prognoses of social scientists, have turned out to be over-optimistic. Borders have not disappeared not even in a unified and predominantly peaceful Europe but rather they have changed, become more varied and, in a certain sense, mobile, taking on an important role in the everyday lives of more people than ever before. Furthermore, it is now widely accepted that borders do not just hinder communication and the formation of relationships, but also channel and prefigure them in a...

Frontiers are "wild." The frontier is a zone of interaction between distinct polities, peoples, languages, ecosystems and economies, but how do these frontier spaces develop? If the frontier is shaped by the policing of borders by the modern-nation state, then what kind of zones, regions or cultural areas are created around borders?

This book provides 14 different case studies of frontiers in Asia and Latin America by interdisciplinary scholars, charting the first steps toward a transnational and transcontinental history of social development in the borderlands of two...

Analyzing neighbourly relations in multicultural societies, this book develops a concept of good neighbourhood and argues that cultural capital in various forms is the determining variable in building good-neighbourly relations. This work breaks new ground by offering a conceptual integration of different, mutually interdependent forms of capital: intercultural capital, cross- cultural social capital and multicultural capital. These forms of capital are linked to different educational and cultural policies of the state as well as to civil society involvement at different levels of...

For whom and why are borders drawn? What are the symbolic projections of these physical realities? And what are the symbolic projections of these physical realities? Constituted by experience and memory, borders shape a "border imagination" in the minds and social memory of people beyond the lines of the state. In the case of the Turkey-Georgia border, the imagination of the border has often been constructed as an economic reality that creates "conditional permeabilities" rather than political emphases. This book puts forward the argument that participation in this economic life reshapes...