Eco-frontier in the mountainous borderlands of Central Europe

Areas along national borders can be peripheral from a socio-economic standpoint, but may contain valuable natural landscapes, bearing more limited signs of human influence.This article therefore examines the concept of the "eco-frontier" (Guyot 2011) in borderlands, focusing on the manner in which protected areas, especially National Parks, were established and have been operated to preserve certain aspects of the frontier dynamics of borderlands.Analysed to that end is the ecological territorial domination exercised by contemporary eco-conquerors who activate the conservation potential of the areas in question with a view to the emergence of new kinds of borderland being stimulated. 2The objective here is twofold: on the one hand, to illustrate the role of nature in borderlands, and on the other to highlight the interactions between national mobile border functions and the development of eco-frontiers in mountainous areas.