ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the methodological approach employed in this book as a whole as well as the socio-cultural context in which recent discourses of borders in the USA have been constructed. The chosen methodology is the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) which is ideal for analysing the role of borders in discourses of the nation. The chapter then analyses the political and historical context of the notion of borders as a necessary institutional and cultural element of the nation and in its discourses: it analyses how borders in discourse are used to formulate certain parameters of inclusion into, or exclusion from, the nation. The last section of the chapter discusses the way the notion of borders seems to be dominated by the social, political and economic tension between a borderless and a bordered world. Borderlessness seemed to be a prevailing model for international relations in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001. The notion of a (newly) bordered world has gradually risen to prominence after 9/11 and even more so in 2016, the year of the victory of Leave in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential elections.
