ABSTRACT
While political borders have proven their endurance and appeal, their contemporary role has become increasingly contested. This is precisely because there are various actors involved in the border-making processes, and bordering processes can be interpreted from different perspectives. For this reason, analysing borders only from a single privileged vantage point obscures more than it illuminates. This illustrates the fact that, borders are multifaceted sociocultural constructions depicting various processes of encounter and contest. This calls for a nuanced and critical re-reading of borders both as challenges and as resources in terms of, among other things, the exercise of power, regional integration, development and planning, identity construction, cross-border cooperation, circulation and mobility, networking and the everyday forms of transnationalism and negotiation of borders. With this in mind, this introductory chapter discusses not only what borders are, but how they are perceived, understood, experienced and exploited by actors and agents at various levels and scales. The chapter seeks to put forth a more polyvalent perspective of borders as multiperspectival and dynamic entities that have different symbolic and material forms, functions and locations, which results in dynamic encounters and contestation at micro and macro levels. The chapter, therefore, provides a general framework for the more specific case study-based empirical chapters that ensue in the volume.
