ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. The book collects a sequence of essays sharing a concern with the politics of boundaries and, conversely, the bounding of modern forms of politics. Some essays are concerned with relations between boundaries enacted in spatial terms and those expressed in temporal terms. Some respond to spatiotemporal practices of partition, of various kinds. Some respond to interpretations of influential thinkers, some to the interpretive fallout from particular events. Above all, these essays are concerned to engage with and disrupt influential attempts to analyse contemporary political problems on the basis of dualistic assumptions affirming very sharp differences between here and there, now and then, us and them, and even cause and effect. Naturalizations of political boundaries are perhaps most pervasive in assumptions about the possibility of comparison across political orders: across the specific sites of citizenship that are supposed to add up to an all-encompassing and internationalized humanity.
