On March 1, 2020, Greece closed its borders, denying refugees the right to seek political asylum, a reaction to Turkey’s decision to strategically refuse its role as gatekeeper to the European Union. A few weeks later, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain closed their borders as the global COVID-19 pandemic spread. China had already closed its borders a few weeks earlier and other countries quickly followed suit. As planes were grounded, the stark reality of immobility was revealed to a global class accustomed to frictionless travel across the planet. On a more intimate scale, innumerable citizens, from New Zealand to Brazil, were confined to their homes, with some needing an official permit to simply go out for a walk or to buy food. Invisible boundaries proliferated in public space with the call to maintain a 1.5 meter distance between people to guard against the spread of the respiratory virus. As nationwide lockdowns became the norm, they revealed discrepancies between white-collar workers able to carry on working and earning from the comfort of their homes and frontline workers and laborers who were required to be present physically in their places of work. Such untenable aspects of lockdowns were perhaps more apparent in the global South, where most people rely on daily wages, as well as in those countries that chose to implement restrictions in specific neighborhoods and regions, producing internal divisions that rein-forced labor, class, and wealth disparities. [...]@en

The book you hold in your hands did not try to describe what borders are. As discussed in the introduction, our focus from the beginning was on the ways we can resist borders through spatial practices. We approached borders firstly from their political and social perspective—and the types of spatial relations they produced—and only then, if necessary, from their physical dimensionality. For us this is an epistemic position that emerged from our own interest in the topic but also from the personal involvement of many of this book’s contributors with the borders they describe. The majority of scholars in this book have lived the borders they study. They have experienced them at an intimate scale and they have felt their impact in their everyday lives, even before acquiring the skills to study them. For many, this engagement with borders is both situated and personal. We believe that such an approach, when it manages to overcome biases and political propagandas, can create new ways to negotiate borders: as places of meaningful adjacencies, where fruitful osmosis can over-turn their dividing role. […]@en