Preface

Borders are often regarded as the very basis for establishing a modern and territorial logic legitimating an essentialised view of the world as a mosaic of Nation-States. Transnationalism seems to challenge this long-standing logic by introducing a new inclination to think in terms of flows, mobility, and networks. By living in-between sending and receiving societies and maintaining strong ties to both, Migrants are shaping transnational spaces encompassing several countries in a process that challenges territorial separations and national borders. However, migration challenges borders, but is still regulated by borders. It may overcome some borders, but it does not in itself prevent the creation of other borders that recreate divisions along other lines. Accordingly, borders have not been disappearing but they are moving themselves everywhere. This dis-placement of borders can be conceived as a paradoxical movement from the ‘edge’ to the ‘centre’ of public space. Following this, what is worth exploring is how such b-ordering processes are in the very heart of European identity and citizenship that are defined in the complex interplay between moving, dis-located external borders and the multiplication of internal ones. Both external and internal borders point to a set of relevant issues: the former are related to (im)migration policies, diasporas as well as transnationalism; the latter focus instead on different forms of ethnicisation, old and new racisms, citizenship, as well as the idea of nation and the processes of social differentiation it implies. The attention to the complex relationship between internal and external borders, still largely ignored by social studies, is a relevant starting point for reconceptualising borders and their connections with transnational migration. Indeed, it has empirical reasons, due to the involvement of the same actors and of the same forms of power that are implied in both cases, and theoretical reasons, because the changes affecting both these kinds of borders reveal deep changes in the national space borders, in the forms of social identification, in the politics and in the practices concerning migrants.