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Why is it important to discuss the work of Michel Foucher on African borders in JBS in 2019/20? The brief answer is that in our globalizing world, faced with many nationalisms, the cultural borders...

This is a special issue of Journal of Borderland Studies focused on the theme: "Rarely Studied Borderlands." The idea for this theme emerged during the organization of the last Border Region in Transition (BRIT IX) conference, held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, United States, in January 2008. The organizing committee, co-chaired by the editors of this special issue, Don Alper and Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, had intentionally widened the call for papers to include countries outside of Europe and North America; that is, to South America, Asia, and Africa. As a result, the over 150 participants of the BRIT hailed from 18 different countries. The wide range and diversity of the participants and research presented highlighted the importance of moving borderlands research away from its usual European and North American focus and expanding its theoretical and empirical contributions to include research on borderlands from across the world. This special issue takes up the challenge of pulling together research on these rarely studied borderlands: the Russian/Chinese border, the "Caprivi Strip" (Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe), the border region of North Santander (Colombia) and Tachira (Venezuela), the Euregion Karelia on the Finish/Russian border, the internal borders of the European Union, and the Indigenous peoples' "non-borders" in North America.

This paper addresses two questions. First, does free trade, and particularly economic integration, lead to a process of functional interdependency and to cross‐border linkages in North America? Second, do politics and institutions mediate this process? Specifically, how does the intergovernmental network linking local, regional, provincial/state, and federal institutions mediate this process and impact local level initiatives? To investigate these questions, this work focuses on cross‐border relations in three metropolitan border areas: the Canadian‐American border regions of Niagara‐Niagara, Windsor‐Detroit, and Vancouver‐Seattle. This study takes a Canadian perspective and thus primarily focuses on Canada, Ontario, and British Columbia, and on Niagara, Windsor, and Vancouver and their border regions. The findings presented in this paper suggest that economic integration may lead to cross‐border institution building when borderland communities also share the same value system.

Did the traumatic act of September 11, 2001, lead European and North American governments to reconsider their security regimes and their border security policies in particular? Canada and the United States brokered the Smart Border Agreement while the European Union member‐states elected to work together to build an area of freedom, security and justice. As both of these free trade regimes increasingly integrated, security costs also increased. The European Union abolished borders between member‐states in order to concentrate resources on external borders and co‐operate on security issues. In North America, each state reinvested in border security and increased co‐operation. Functionalists and neo‐functionalists would suggest that supranational institutions permit states to establish an effective border security perimeter strategy. However, issues of sovereignty may frustrate such views, and realist or multilevel governance approaches might predict more accurately how states reorganize their bord...

Did the traumatic event of September 11, 2001 lead the central governments of Canada and the United States to “re‐center policy” because their executive roles had to be reaffirmed in matter of security? Or, did free trade and economic integration, in particular, frame the process of functional interdependency to determine the current security regime spanning the Canadian‐American border? Despite the security threat, functionalist theories imply that cross‐border co‐operation stems from economic integration. In contrast, the urban political economy literature suggests that intra‐regional competition is the key factor, but the security agenda may transform this functional nature of the Canadian‐American border. Neo‐functionalists might qualify the general functionalist argument by pointing to the importance of supranational institutions and policy spillover suggesting that federal governments would increase co‐operation and expand the role of supranational security agencies. The intergovernmentalis...