ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits some discussions, debates and inferences that have taken place across the broad interdisciplinary field of contemporary ‘border studies’, namely the ability/difficulty/desirability/value and so on of studying borders from an abstract or universal analytical vantage point. Contemporary border research has always acknowledged the difficulty of theorising borders, due to the constantly changing and pervasive multiplicity of border forms, functions and characteristics. The chapter discusses conceptual developments that detailed general frameworks struggle to take into account. It examines how contemporary borders have been broadly theorised and discusses what is at stake when theorising borders. The chapter provides two illustrative examples of theories that serve as open conceptual toolboxes, with the idea of borders as status functions offered as an example of a theory that can be thickens in a case-by-case basis.
