ABSTRACT
What are the bordering practices that inform our purportedly unbounded and global society and how should we interpret these practices in the light of a critically engaged geography? With this question we invited fellow geographers to contribute to the book that you now hold in your hands. Why the subject of borders? Are we not living in a brand new world, in global cybertimes for which such arbitrary lines in the sand no longer carry meaning or produce much impact? Are we not living in a mass consumer-based society, in which the production of knowledge, images, representations and simulacra are of greater significance than the hard edges of geopolitical boundaries? Our solid, rational, control-based and productionoriented society has indeed partially melted into the air. But this does not mean that we live in a borderless world, the result of a qualitatively new age or revolutionary time in which geography no longer matters (Ohmae, 1990; O'Brien, 1992; Castells 1996). Such imposing rhetorical claims are not of much help in analysing and contextualizing patterns of everyday practices - whether concretely performed or only imagined. At best, we live in evolutionary, albeit not necessarily progressive, times. Not everything, therefore, has become liquid, fluid and de-territorialized. Empowering practices themselves - both materially and mentally - have not lost their territorial ordering and bordering functions. On the contrary, notwithstanding the growth of global flows, the number of ordered and bordered (id)entities has not diminished. The multiple layers of possible identification have increased, not been replaced by globality. Local id/entities have become informed by globalizing economic, political, cultural and technological developments, but the various spatial b/orderings involved in identity-construction have certainly not become fully universalizable, either in their form or content.
