Global Borders: Power, Fragility, and 'a kind of fiction' (editorial introduction)

Borders. To what extent do they determine identity? Borders may be as solid and politicized as a wall between two neighboring nations, or as enchanting as the demarcation between a cultivated garden and a wild or commons, or as permeable as the barricade of a cell membrane to a virus. Borders signal sovereignty, territory, and property. But any attempt to use borders to shape the world into an orderly, comprehensible grid of identities and affiliations is premised on a fiction of containment. With the gentlest wafting of pollen from a summer breeze or a bee’s wing, the fixed categories borders inscribe can blossom into hybridities.