Introduction

Borders have become one of the most divisive issues of our time. Furedi argues that animosity towards borders – physical and symbolic – has become the commanding cultural outlook of Western society. He claims that Western culture’s unease with borders is not confined to ones that separate one nation from another. Nor are they a simple response to the emergence of mass migration. Western culture has also become estranged from the symbolic boundaries that have historically offered guidance and meaning to people. Hence the conventional boundaries separating the private from the public sphere, man and woman, adults and children, human and animal or health and illness have all become a focus for contestation and debate. Paradoxically, society’s estrangement with conventional borders coexists with an impulse to construct new boundaries to protect the self.