Bordering practices that are seemingly at odds with the modern geopolitical imaginary, such as those explored in Chapter 1, demand a stocktake of what critical resources might be available for new ways of thinking about what borders are, where they come from, and what they do in contemporary political life. A first port of call for such an enquiry is the interdisciplinary subfield of border studies, known as ‘limology’, a tradition of thought encompassing the work of anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and political scientists. Especially over the past three decades or so, paradoxically at a time when pronouncements of globalised borderlessness have been at their loudest, there has been a remarkable growth in border studies. Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson attribute this dramatic increase to defining ‘border events’ of the period, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and the trajectory of European integration.

Any attempt at making generalised comments about a field or subfield of study is fragile and open to dispute. Nevertheless, many writers have commented that there has traditionally been a primarily empirical focus in border studies. Moreover, of the two to three hundred land borders between states recognised over the past century, certain sites have tended to attract most attention. These include: the British/Irish border; the United States/Mexico border; the post-World War I borders of central Europe; the borders of Africa; and more recently the borders of the European Union.