Border studies und global history. Grenzen als Gegenstand einer transnationalen Untersuchung

Within the wide and heterogeneous literature about borders developed in recent years, political borders have raised a growing interest in the light of the centrality which, even though in the globalization era, they still hold in the contemporary world. Specific object of research for border studies, political borders have been however little investigated in their historical dimension, as this distinctly interdisciplinary field of research has a clearly smaller historical component. Through the analysis of recent developments of border studies, particularly in anthropological and geographical field, this essay aims at highlighting the potentialities, for an historical analysis of the borders, of a desirable dialogue between border studies themselves and some trends of contemporary historiographical reflection. In particular, this article proposes an intertwining between some analytical categories developed by border studies, especially by their anthropological and geographical components, on the one hand, and the rethinking of spatiality beyond the traditional nation-state framework, that has marked particularly – even though not exclusively – global history, on the other hand. The essay’s proposal is then to see in the border studies one of the most innovative way to do “global history”, conceived in line with the most recent and stimulating debates about it.