Revisiting Borders and Boundaries: Exploring Migrant Inclusion and Exclusion from Intersectional Perspectives

In recent years, scholarly interest in boundaries and boundary work, on the one hand, and borders
and bordering, on the other, has flourished across disciplines. Notwithstanding the close relationship
between the two concepts, “borders” and “boundaries” have largely been subject to separate
scholarly debates or sometimes treated as synonymous. These trends point to an important lack of
conceptual and analytical clarity as to what borders and boundaries are and are not, what distinguishes
them from each other and how they relate to each other. This Special Issue tackles this conceptual gap
by bringing the two fields of studies together: we argue that boundaries/boundary work and borders/
bordering should be treated as interrelated rather than distinct phenomena. Boundaries produce
similarities and differences that affect the enforcement, performance and materialisation of borders, which
themselves contribute to the reproduction of boundaries. Borders and boundaries are entangled, but they
promote different forms and experiences of inclusion and exclusion. In this introduction, we elaborate the
two concepts separately before examining possible ways to link them theoretically. Finally, we argue that
an intersectional perspective makes it possible to establish how the interplay of different social
categories affects the articulations and repercussions of borders and boundaries. The contributions in
this Special Issue address this issue from multiple perspectives that reflect a variety of disciplines and
theoretical backgrounds and are informed by different case studies in Europe and beyond.