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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” dthat the sovereign state’s loci of bordering practices can no longer be isolated to the lines of a political map of statesdhas 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?

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw substantial growth and diffusion of scholarly work in border studies in geography and beyond. This can be seen as partly a reaction to naïve, post-Cold War “borderless” world discourses and partly a response to clarion calls of the late 1990s for more attention to borders as the sum of social, cultural, and political processes, rather than simply as fixed lines (for a recent review of this body of literature, see Parker et al., 2009). Some of the emergent work continued long-standing interest in the role of international political borders in the stilldominant territorial order of the sovereign state system (O’Dowd, 2010). This work drew inspiration from the disjuncture between the notion of a borderless world through globalization and the …